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No, I will not sign your NDA

April 19, 2011 12 Comments

I’m the first point of contact for our small business. As such, I’m the one who reads all of the contact form submissions. Here is part of a form submission I received recently:

Before I talk to you about my project, I need you to sign an NDA.

What I think they really mean is: I don’t trust you.

The fact that you recently saw The Social Network and think every developer is going to steal your idea and turn it in to the next Facebook behind your back is not my problem.

I have a pretty standard response that I send to people who ask for an NDA. For my developer friends, I’m posting it here for you to use as you see fit:

No, I will not sign your NDA and here’s why; I don’t like signing anything that I don’t read and understand completely. Language in NDAs (and most contracts) love to throw in all sorts of legalese that just don’t give me a comfy feeling by signing without having somebody else take a look at it first. So this means that I’m 1-2 hours in, and maybe out of pocket if it turns out to be something I need to have a lawyer take a quick look at, and this is just to talk about YOUR project.

I have not looked at your NDA, but I give you my word that we are honest and trustworthy people and as programmers we are far too busy to be stealing any ideas to work on for ourselves.

I realize this doesn’t sit well with some people. If this is a show stopper and you need to find a different developer, we understand completely. However, I’d be more than happy to talk to you about your project with the understanding that any information you tell me IS held with the strictest confidence.

For any prospective clients who are turned off by this, I offer you this link. No hard feelings.

Twitter Comments

LookSharpDesign +2! RT @vegasgeek: Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA.
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nanderoo RT @vegasgeek: Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA.
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williamsba I usually sign, but I'm a glutton for punishment :P RT @vegasgeek: Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA
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caseysoftware RT @vegasgeek: Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA.
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ryancduff RT @vegasgeek: Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA.
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lewayotte +1 RT: @vegasgeek: Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA.
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sdenike RT @vegasgeek: Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA.
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ahockley RT @vegasgeek: Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA.
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vegasgeek Blog post (rant): http://vegasgeek.com/nda - No, I will not sign your NDA.
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Filed Under: Work Tagged With: , ,

The week the universe crapped all over me

May 8, 2009
bad-week

Ahh, Friday evening. The week is finally over. I’m usually happy for the week to end, but this week has been different. As the title so eloquently put it, this week has been less than great. Here’s a recap.

On Monday morning I headed out to the truck to take the kids to school and head to work. As I got in I noticed that the glove compartment was open. My son had already got in on that side of the truck so I asked, “Was that open when you got in?” He confirmed that it was. As I said, “That’s odd”, my eyes locked on the spot where my Sirius satellite radio used to be sitting. My mind does the quick 2+2 math and comes up with the correct result. Somebody broke in to my truck. I did a quick bit of inventory and found that they took nothing out of the glove box, but took my Sirius Satellite radio, a watch (relatively inexpensive, but will be tough to replace) and my sun glasses. What they missed was the $200 tripod sitting under the seat in the back and a paycheck stub that had all my personal information on it. Neither of which I normally keep in my truck, but happy as hell to see them both sitting there after the incident. No windows broken and no forced entry means only one thing, when I got home Sunday evening, I failed to lock the door. Thankfully they didn’t do any damage to the truck. I’ll chalk this up to my own stupidity. Though, I’ll likely get an alarm installed this weekend just in case.

When I got to work I made a call to Sirius to tell them to pause my account because my radio had been stolen and I didn’t want the thieves getting the satisfaction of using it. But, since I had purchased a lifetime subscription a few years back, they are unable to do so. But, they were nice enough to waive the $75 transfer fee once I get a new unit to transfer it to. So, at lunchtime I grabbed Todd and we headed out to Fry’s. I knew exactly where to go inside Fry’s because I had just purchased my now missing radio from them a few short weeks ago when I got the truck. When I got to the aisle, it seemed that the universe was actually smiling down on me for just a minute. The display sign holding the radios I was buying said “$20 mail-in rebate”. Sweet! I grab one and head to the checkout counter.

The nice lady rings up my sale and I hand her my card. She says, “Debit or Credit?” “Debit”, I say. 30 seconds later she says, “I’m sorry, it appears my debit system is down. Is Credit OK?” Not that it’s any big deal to me how they charge it, it still pointed to the fact that things are not going my way. She completes the transaction, I sign the receipt and she says, “Have a nice day.” I reply, “Thanks. Can I have my rebate form?” She says, “One didn’t print out. Let me check on it.” She returns a minute later to explain that there is no rebate on the item I purchased. I tell them their sign says there is. They, in turn, send somebody to take the sign down. I see no point in arguing at this point. I grab my purchase and head for the door realizing that the universe had to be laughing after setting me up and pulling the rug out from under me so swiftly.

Monday evening I tried accessing my website and it took 45 seconds for the front page to load. After a long slow decline in customer (that’s me) satisfaction, I decided it was time to leave my current hosting company. I had already set up an account with MediaTemple a few months back, so now it’s time to move the rest of my sites over. This is a big chore. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of things can go wrong. I moved two sites over fairly easily and got them up and running within an hour. After the great success, I decided it was safe to move over this site. Sure enough, I got the site moved over in about 30 minutes. Everything was working smoothly so I went ahead and updated the DNS to point to the new server. This can take anywhere from an hour to 48 hours to propagate. During that time, it’s not uncommon for some email to go to the new server and some to go to the old server. The following day the amount of mail going to the old server had been drastically reduced as expected. But there was one problem… no email was going to the new server. I check with MediaTemple and find out that they had an entire grid of servers go belly up causing mass outages. They were in the process of fixing things, but some people were still experiencing issues with email. Great timing for moving my site, huh?

We’ll get back to the email saga in a minute… I need to jump backwards to Saturday evening. I think that’s when the actual week of universal crappage started. Somebody sent me a link to a youtube video. When I clicked it, I was able to watch the video, but no sound was coming from my speakers. I messed with it for a few minutes, but had to put it off until Sunday to dig in and find the issue. On Sunday I unhooked all the plugs for the speakers, sub-woofer, etc… Nothing seems wrong, there’s just no sound. To this point, I still haven’t been able to solve it.

Another big load of universal excrement landed on me today at work. It would be too hard to explain the details without turning this in to a novel (too late, I know). But, imagine that you have had a project stop and start several times over a few months. Then, one day after you have completed the project, something changes and you have to put the, now completed, project on hold.

OK, back to the email issues…

When I got home from work on Wednesday and I STILL didn’t have any email in my new account, it was time to contact MediaTemple. I sent them off a support ticket late Wednesday evening and headed to bed. When I woke Thursday morning, there was a response to my ticket. Turns out, my issue had nothing to do with their server outage. As a matter of fact, none of my sites are on any of the services that were affected. My problem was something they like to call “user error.” When I first set up the site on their control panel, it was still pointing to the old server. Because of that, they deactivate email so that if any sites on their servers try to send email to me, they won’t get caught in email limbo. Once I moved my site over, the final step should have been to re-enable email services. I activated the services and 5 short minutes later my email from the week started trickling in.

I will only take partial blame for the email issue. While I understand the reasoning behind the way MediaTemple handles their email services, it wasn’t exactly obvious to the end user (me). Now, it is my fault that I didn’t send them a support ticket on Tuesday and instead waited an extra 24 hours, but, I was actually trying to be nice. They were still in the midst of fixing their server issues and I was trying not to bother them. Sometimes, nice guys do in fact finish last… -sigh-

So, yeah, I’m happy to see this week end. Next week WILL be better.

Filed Under: Ranting Tagged With: ,

I'm in serious need of an office

November 20, 2008

Without trying to make this sound like an excuse, I’ve been noticing lately that I am in serious need of a home office. Currently my desk is in our loft. Also in the loft are my Son and Daughter’s Computer desks. That’s a total of 4 computers (I have 2) plus 3 people in the loft most of the time. When the kids go to bed at 9, that’s when I can usually sit down and get a bunch of work done. But, my wife, a light sleeper if ever there was one, is usually sleeping down the hall at this point. So, the idea of creating video blog posts or recording a podcast are typically out the window.

We have a guestroom downstairs. Currently it’s being occupied by my brother-in-law and his wife as they are waiting for escrow to close on their new house. Don’t get me wrong, they have been absolutely NO trouble at all. But, as soon as they go, I’m taking over that room pronto. We’ve been without it’s services for the past couple months while they’ve been staying in there, so I don’t see how me taking it over full time can be that big a deal. Plus, it will give me a place to store all my camera equipment. I could set up a mini-recording studio and hopefully I can use it to produce the weekly podcast show I’ve been pondering for way to long now.

By this time next month if I have not posted at least 1 podcast and/or 1 video blog post, please proceed to give me a ton of crap for it. Thanks.

Filed Under: Ranting Tagged With: , ,

Why do you make us wait?

October 23, 2008

Have you ever used UPS or Fed/Ex to have a package delivered? Of course you have. It’s almost impossible not to. Buy something online and 9 times out of 10 you are going to have it delivered by one of these two companies. 99% of the time your shipment is going to arrive on time, undamaged and everything is going to be peachy. I’m not even going to complain about that 1% of the time where something goes wrong. Sometimes shit is just going to hit the fan and that’s all there is to it. When that happens, I’m pretty easy going and don’t get too bent out of shape. However, there is one thing that both of these companies do that irks me to no end. If you are having something shipped to your house by one of these two companies, be prepared to wait.

Recently I purchased something online from amazon.com and due to it’s price, amazon requires that somebody be at the house to sign for the package rather than allowing the driver to leave it in a semi-safe spot on the front porch. Since I’d hate to have anything happen to my purchase, I’m totally fine with this. I made arrangements to have somebody at the house all day to accept the package when it arrived. Just after leaving for work my wife calls to tell me we received an automated call from UPS stating that our package was out for delivery and that an adult needed to be on hand to accept it. I thought it was very cool that they had the automated system make that call. Very efficient. Now, we just need to wait for it to arrive.

Lunch time came and went, still no package. I called home before leaving the office at 4:30 and still no package. I got home around 5, still not there. We started cooking dinner and at 5:45 the doorbell rings and there’s my delivery. While I’m stoked to have the package arrive and arrive safely, even though I was at work, we still had somebody sitting at the house from 8 am until 5:45 PM waiting to accept the package. That is a fairly hefty delivery window and I was certainly not pleased.

I got to thinking and came up with an idea that I thing would be pretty cool. As your item gets scanned while it’s being loaded on the final delivery truck, that should update the online tracking site with the truck number. Then, when you are looking online at your delivery status, you could see on a map the location of the truck carrying your package. It doesn’t have to be real time. Updates every 5-10 minutes would be fine. This way if you need to run a quick errand, like getting food at lunch time, you could look and see if the truck is anywhere near your house yet. If not, you know it’s safe to leave the house without worrying that you are missing your delivery.

Yes, I realize there are safety issues with letting people see where the truck is. I get it. I’m just saying, for a company that does nothing but deliver packages all day every day, you’d think they could at least give you a delivery window of 1-2 hours rather than 10 hours. It’s called good customer service. You should try it some time.

The other solution I have for this problem is to have your packages delivered to your office. This is going to be my preferred location for all deliveries from now on. Because waiting all day sucks!

Filed Under: Ranting Tagged With: , , , ,