Hey, it’s like a coupon…Read this post and I’ll show you how to save $10. That is, if you were going to see “Click”.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a fan of Adam Sandler. I think Sandler has done a lot of funny movies (“Happy Gilmore”), and a couple good-even-though-they-didn’t-have-too-many-fart-jokes movies, such as “50 First Dates.” Now that I’ve told you up front that I’ve liked most Sandler movies, even the marginal ones, I can tell you that “Click” was by far one of the worst movies I have seen recently. Even Christopher Walken (one of my favorite actors) couldn’t pull this movie out of the toilet.

First comes the product placement. And this ain’t no ordinary product placement. This is hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-sledgehammer product placement. EAT TWINKIES!! LOOK, A WENDY’S!!! The first 30 minutes seemed to be nothing but Adam Sandler hocking one product after another. And look, there are the neighbors with every ridiculous toy known to mankind. (Does anyone ever wonder why other countries view Americans as gluttonous lardball consumers? It’s no wonder they do if they see movies like this.)

The movie’s atrocity is compounded by the complete lack of plot of any sort. There is no woman in this movie with an IQ over 80. Every woman in this movie is either a bimbo (including Sandler’s own daughter in the later part of the movie) or a stay-at-home mom with a one-sided “oh, honey, you forgot about your family again” mentality. The movie is degrading to any woman who is a stay-at-home mom. I pointed this out to S, who pointed out that there is no MAN in this movie who makes any sort of intelligent decisions either. Fair enough.

Okay, but at least it’s funny, right? Well… frankly…no. Look, I don’t hold huge hopes for Sandler movies. I like Sandler, but he’s at his best with “The price is WRONG, bitch!” The best I could have hoped for was a quotable quote from either Sandler or Walken. You know, something that we could have walked out of the movie theater laughing about. There were a few cute one-liners, but seriously, I laugh more during 1 24-minute Seinfeld episode than I did during this movie… and really, I’m not that big a fan of Seinfeld.

Even Walken couldn’t do anything in his role. He was given lines that fell flat (“It’s like Tivo… only it’s MEEvo!” Huh?) and left the audience bewildered. Worst of all, they tried to turn his role into a sort of “benevolent guardian angel.” No! Walken should be allowed to be his totally insane self! And that’s where the movie was really disappointing… it tried to teach us all a really cheeseball lesson: “Family first!” Instead of going completely nuts with the plot, it tried to lecture us about how working too much and abandoning your wife and kids on the Fourth of July is bad, because then in 20 years you’ll be the CEO, but weigh 400 pounds and die divorced and pathetic after having 3 heart attacks. (Yep. That was 45 minutes of the movie right there, and it’s just as depressing as it sounds to watch it.) This movie had a great premise… but where was the wacky, totally off the deep end follow-through to go with the original premise? Where were the kids stealing the remote control to raid the toy store? How about the wife stealing the remote to slow-mo intimate moments and make them last for hours? Instead, the writers tried to turn it into a lecture about overwork and how it hurts your family. Yawn.

Save your $10, hit up the microwave popcorn, and watch a couple Seinfeld reruns. You’ll have more fun… I promise.

I’m doing this post more for future reference for myself than anything else, but it might help those of you who use Trillian as your IM client. I’ve been using Trillian since version .6 and I registered my copy in August 2001, which makes me one of the first Trillian users to ever pay Scott Werndorfer money. 🙂 I’ve been a loyal every-single-day user since, and I’ve done a lot of things to customize the heck out of my install.

I started with Trillian Pro 3.1, which is the latest version. The default interface is (mostly) fine with me, but there are a few changes I always like to make. Here they are, listed in the order I performed them:

Get rid of ugly default emoticons
The default emoticons are hideous. Some people prefer to turn them off entirely, but I actually really like the latest MSN emoticons. To enable MSN emoticons, download the zip file listed in this thread and unzip it to [your Trillian install, like C:\Program Files\Trillian]\Stixe\Plugins directory. It will create a new MSN folder. Then go into Trillian preferences -> Skins -> Advanced and under Emoticons, pick the MSN set. (By the way, I found the animated wink creepy, so I found the non-animated version and saved it as \stixe\plugins\MSN\animated\wink_smile.gif. That took care of that.)

Get rid of “blobs” and use real icons next to people’s names
Due to trademark issues (or something like that), Trillian puts a colored “blob” next to the person’s name instead of the actual AIM/ICQ/etc. icons. I think this is ugly. Follow the instructions here to get rid of those blobs and get the real icons. (You’ll need to download the Customizer software linked in that thread to easily enable the icons, but it’s easy to download and works like a charm.)

Slightly more complicated: small toolbar icons as the default and making the chat windows bigger
I used this tweak to make the small toolbar icons appear as the default. Just download the main.xml file from that person’s post and put it in \stixe\interface\Default, then restart Trillian.

The chat boxes are too small for my biggish (1600×1024) monitor. I followed the instructions in this thread to make them larger. I set the default message input window size to 95 and set the type 2 boxes to be 600 width and 570 height. This works well for this monitor.

Drop the status icons to the bottom of the main window
Finally, I set View->Hide My Identity Panel to drop my status icons to the bottom of the main window and get rid of the (IMHO) useless icon/name display at the top of the main window.

YAY!!!!

I finally got my system working.

After I wrote that blog post, I used nLite to set up a slipstream of XP 32-bit with the correct nVidia SATA drivers. I then reformatted the system, partitioned as I really wanted (3 partitions: C: 30GB for program files and Windows; D: 174GB for music and movies; E: 30GB for personal files.) I partition this way so I can always reformat without having to back up all my music and personal files.

Anyway, I got Windows installed and then realized I had neglected to slipstream either the nVidia video driver or the Ethernet driver. Hmm. I grabbed the SD card out of my Treo and dropped it into my laptop, then grabbed the latest nVidia drivers from this link (which is what I was following to slipstream the drivers in the first place.) I downloaded to the card, put the card in my desktop (yeah, every computer I own has a SD card reader) and installed the drivers. Then I rebooted…and promptly freaked out.

The system wasn’t booting. It just sat there and blinky-cursored at me (after I ignored the prompt to boot from CD.) “Fuck…another reformat!” I thought to myself. I popped in the Windows CD. It booted into the setup options and I realized it was seeing my SD card as a potential destination for my Windows install. “I wonder if it’s trying to boot off the SD card,” I mused. I popped the card out, rebooted, and sure enough, Windows came back up. Stupid computer! (Side note: When I have my backup drive plugged in via USB, it tries to boot off that, too. Sigh.)

Anyway, after installing 51 Windows updates (please note I had slipstreamed SP2 onto my CD, so this is 51 updates after SP2), some more drivers, and rebooting a few more times, I had a working system. So far, so good. I’m now copying all my music files off my backup drive. I had all my CDs ripped into MP3, but they don’t all fit on my iPod, so I had them stored on the backup drive. It’s been 6 months since I’ve been able to easily access my backed-up MP3s. They’re copying over to this system now. It’s nice to have them back!

Also, iTunes works now, so either it was a corrupt download problem or it didn’t work under Windows x64 with my system.

All good for now. If the system has any more problems, I will post annother update.

I got in a bit over my head with my latest hardware purchase.

I bought a Shuttle SN26P barebones in January. It’s now June and the darn thing still isn’t working right. In this blog, I’ll explain my rationale behind this decision, what mistakes I’ve made, and what I’m going to do to finally get a working desktop system.

Background
In January, my desktop computer (a Pentium 4/3GHz) finally bit the dust. It had been having boot problems for a while — so much so that I made sure everything was backed up on a regular basis and ceased turning the darn thing off at night like I had been previously. One day, I needed to reboot because the system hung hard, and that was that… the system never worked again.

It wasn’t a huge deal for me, as all important data had been backed up on my laptop and I’d known this day was coming for quite a while now. Nonetheless, I wanted to get my desktop up and running again, so I hauled it in to Simpli and had Russ take a look at it.

After pulling out a spider web and a pile of cat hair, Russ decided that there were several problems that had caused my system to finally bite the dust. First of all, my ancient ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 video card had a fan that had died, which was probably what had been causing my (more and more frequent) system hangs. (Video card overheats… system dies. Sounds logical to me.) Since I didn’t really need a fancy video card — just one with DVI that supported 1600×1024 resolution, Russ offered to sell me his old one. “Great!” I said. He brought it in, plugged it in to my desktop, and lo and behold…nothing. Still dead.

Further diagnostics ensued. Whoops… not only had the video card died, but the reason my system had utterly failed, as opposed to just hanging on a regular basis and not booting properly, was that my motherboard (an older Asus) was also dead. “Hey,” I said, “that explains all of the USB problems I’ve been having of late.” (I was having a lot of problems where I would plug in my Treo or iPod to sync and get a “USB device has malfunctioned” error in Windows.)

At this point, with a dead video card, a dead motherboard, an obsolete Socket 478 processor, and a CD-RW drive that needed an upgrade anyway, I decided it was time to build a new system. We parted the ol’ desktop out and Lawrence from Ymetro (who works upstairs from us) now has the case. The processor went who-knows-where (I think into a desktop at Simpli) and the memory and CD-RW drive were set aside to assist me in building a new system.

After doing some research, I decided on a Shuttle machine. I wanted a tiny desktop that didn’t take up much space, was deathly quiet, and ran like a dream. I also decided on a nice dual-DVI video card, paying a small fortune for it but deciding that it was worth it because I could have two DVI ports for my two SGI 1600SW monitors. I decided to go with my first non-Intel desktop and pick the 64-bit AMD processor with the Nforce4 chipset. Little did I know what I was about to get into.

At the risk of taking the rest of the day to summarize this, here is what has happened over the past 6 months. Keep in mind this system goes for $2700 retail. This is NOT a low-end desktop. This is a premium, cream-of-the-crop sort of desktop. The fact that it has taken so long to even get up and running is disappointing in its own right, but it gets better…

What Happened
I bought Windows XP x64 Edition. I figured it would be able to run 32-bit applications. After all, on Microsoft’s website, it says “Windows XP Professional x64 Edition gives you access to greater amounts of memory while continuing to support 32-bit applications.” WRONG! Or should I say… NOT EXACTLY! While some 32-bit applications will work, most won’t. And that “most” means I would have to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading every application I use to the latest and greatest bleeding-edge stuff to even have a prayer of it working. Let me give you some quick examples of what does not work: iTunes (even though Apple claims it does); any version of Photoshop older than CS2; older versions of Dreamweaver (I’m still on MX 2004!); PartitionMagic; most virus scanners; most backup applications; most anything that burns CDs… and on and on and on and on.

Taking a step backwards… before I even found out about this problem, I had to get Windows XP x64 installed. That turned out to be a nightmarish experience. I have installed XP approximately 25 times on this computer. First, the Nforce4 drivers that Nvidia provided with the Shuttle do not work properly on x64. I tossed those and got the latest version, which, by the way, have to be installed from a floppy disk during the Windows XP install. Gee, I don’t have a floppy disk drive! Okay, I’ll be ghetto and hang one off the side of the computer. There, that worked.

Now Windows is installed, but the first time it reboots after the install, it hangs, saying it can’t find ntldr.sys. There is no solution other than to reformat, because this error means Windows can’t see your hard drive. I got conflicting reports from forums. I tried slipstreaming the drivers onto the CD instead of loading them from the floppy. No change. I tried different drivers from Nvidia’s site. No change. I tried some drivers from some German site. No change. Finally, I stumbled upon the answer. It appears that when you load the drivers off the floppy, or slipstream them onto the disk, if they are not “Microsoft certified”, Windows replaces them with its own drivers upon first reboot. So Windows replaced the drivers for the Nvidia SATA chipset with “Generic IDE” drivers of its own, which, of course, do not work with my chipset, thus destroying the system before it even had a chance to activate Windows. Solution? Someone hacked the drivers to stop Windows from doing that. I deployed the hacked drivers and it worked. (UGH!!!!) This problem alone took me probably 15 hours of work to resolve.

One of the first things I downloaded onto my new (and finally working!) system was iTunes. Unfortunately, iTunes does not work with some 64-bit systems. But before I even had a chance to discover that, I noticed that anything that I downloaded larger than about 20MB was giving strange CRC errors on install. In fact, any file I downloaded was a few bytes off the size it was supposed to be. Back to the forums I went. Hmm, looks like a lot of people using Nforce4 chipsets have this problem. And the problem is… memory bandwidth. The Nforce4 chipset says it supports dual-channel DDR400 RAM, and sets itself up automatically for that in the BIOS, and then (for whatever reason) the system cannot “write” quickly enough to its SATA chipset from RAM (especially when you have RAID-1 enabled on the chipset…I do), and “misses” a few bytes. What I want to know is… how the fuck did this get past QA? I have a $2700 (retail; I didn’t pay that much) system and here you’re telling me that the RAM it’s supposed to support does not actually work in it. Great. But since I only had DDR333 RAM anyway (remember, I’m using the RAM that worked fine in my last computer, and I ran a thorough memtest86 to confirm that there were no issues with the RAM itself), I went ahead and set my BIOS to force the RAM to DDR333 speed. Problem fixed… I think.

Today
I am typing this on my “new” system. It works, but it’s louder than I would have liked. XP x64 does not meet my needs, so I will likely go back to regular Windows XP. And I’m still concerned about the overall reliability of my system. My P4/3GHz worked great for 2 1/2 years before it finally started having problems. This system had problems out of the box, and while most problems can be fixed with new hardware, this looks like a buggy SATA chipset or RAM problem from Shuttle/nVidia that cannot be fixed simply by upgrading. It’s unfortunate that such a high-end system would run in to so many problems. I’m going to reformat to Windows XP (32-bit) soon, and will try to remember to post an update once I get that up and running. For now, my vote, for what it is worth, is to completely avoid nVidia’s Nforce4 chipset and to stick with Intel wherever you can (dual Opteron servers excluded.)

Update: I finally got it working. Complete details here.

I’m about to send out an email to all of our customers detailing our two new hires: Ben Haga and Daniel Ballenger. Ben will be working full-time in a support role at Simpli, and Daniel is our summer intern for 2006. Daniel replaces Mooneer Salem, who was a valuable part-time employee of Simpli for 2 years before leaving this summer to move on to an internship in software development. Russ is also leaving us at some as-yet-undetermined point in the future to go after a different job tack. Once Russ leaves, I will be the only Simpli employee left who was not hired in 2006.

I’m often asked by customers and friends how I handle employee turnover. In particular, it’s tough for business owners like myself who hire almost exclusively entry-level employees. (My only two non-entry-level employees were in the COO position, which was held by C last year, and which is held by S this year.) Hiring and managing employees is easily the toughest job of any business owner. You want employees who have passion for what you do, but it’s hard to motivate without giving away equity or large salaries (neither of which is my company planning on doing in the near future.) You learn that most job seekers have unrealistic salary expectations and/or few qualifications. You receive resumes with broken English (my favorite was the one that started with “Myself [first name] [last name]”, which was a running joke at Simpli for a few weeks!) And, of course, you have the inevitable heartbreaks both ways — employees that you want to hire who suddenly find another job during the interview process, and employees you do hire who turn out to be disappointments.

But in the meantime, you also find incredible people who are willing to pour their heart into projects, work until they’re exhausted, but come away with smiles on their faces. (Personal favorite: when one of my employees resigned in order to take on a job in the security industry, which was his true passion, he turned to me and said “This was the best job I have ever had. Thank you.” He said it with such seriousness and sincerity that I almost cried!) You find those who believe in your vision and who love interacting with both servers and customers.

We do have a lot of turnover. Is that bad? No, I think it’s typical for a company that hires at the entry level. Our employees ramp quickly, gain job experience, and then in 8-12 months, move on for greener pastures in a field they love. I have learned to not only accept that, but embrace it. And many of them keep in touch and regale me with stories of their new adventures. (Once passionate about work at Simpli — always passionate about work they love, and always willing to send customer referrals our way!) I don’t hesitate to give out good reviews when former employees deserve them — and the vast majority of the time, they do.

Hiring isn’t easy. It is always hard to find the right person — one who fits in with your organization and who loves tech as well as people. And, for me, one who accepts that “support tech” is an entry-level position that probably won’t finance a new house here in the Valley, but will give them a ton of real-world, on-the-job experience. I now hire mostly from referrals from friends; I don’t use job sites much. There is a time and a place for job sites; for entry-level support techs, they don’t seem to work as well as friends and customers who send us their kids, their friends’ kids, or their young friends who need resume boosters.

Right now, I’m very excited about the future that is in store for Simpli. Our new employees mean support tickets will be answered and resolved even more quickly. They also mean we can finally get started on some projects (*cough*VPS*cough*) that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while, but haven’t had the time to research. We are growing quickly, but not so quickly that we’re dropping things on the floor. New employees bring fresh ideas, and fresh ideas are welcome here. The next few months should bring quite a lot of change!