Something I never expected to occur did. The company I work for got a buyout ‘offer’ with no money being discussed, just so that I could work/manage with the second party involved with the computers. I’m not sure what transpired in such a short amount of time but I do know the following things.

I’m involved and I take the customer up to the hilt that they know, until they say ‘no more please’. Then, as a topping to all of it, I make sure they do understand that what I’m doing I fully understand, and I’ll take any length to explain it fully to them. I take ownership of the problem, and commit to fixing it no matter what it takes.

I’m professional, I don’t talk about religion, ethnic differences, nor politics when on site, but I sure engage on any level they are comfortable with. (I do consider myself very PC when it comes to what ‘not’ to say)
I use just every tool but snakeoil to get a job done on site, and I’m clever to a point to get the job done.

In my entire career, I only got upset and didn’t handle one customer good, when some data was lost that I figured I could save. It changed my life, and my ethics for how to inform the customer. The event was never repeated again.

In all, I learned one major important thing. Someone else was willing to throw down a lot of money just to let me keep my ethics. I appreciated that so much, they’ll never know. The other party refused and had no particular emotion either way about selling his store for enough money to live on for years. I’m sure the topic will come up again.

At the end of the day, purchase or not, I have my ethics. I didn’t cross any lines, neither did the party that offered to buy the company. I am still their #1 guy to work on the computers, I’ve shown it appears, I’m the best in this area there is. They want me to fix their problems like I did before, and they know I have the breadth, and the drive to do it.

When your motherboard fails, who is faster at replacing/repairing it? Intel? MSI? The supposed crap master Foxconn?

When I contacted Intel about a failed board, it took over 37 hours for the leader to get back to me about replacing the board. When the board was sent away, the replacement took 4 days to return.

MSI was asked to replace a board, taking a full 24 hours to generate an RMA # for return. Good so far, right?
Then, when the board was sent in, it took 15 days to get an email stating that a new board was in bound.

Now, on to the company some love, swear by, and others say is the worst board/company out there.
I emailed Foxconn to get an RMA number, and in 15 minutes I had an email requesting more information. I replied, and in 10 minutes I had an RMA form to fax in to a Bob Wang. After faxing Bob Wang (hold the laugh please), I had an RMA number within hours. I sent the Winfast board in and in 3 days, a new board with no problems reported since.

Anyone care to add some advice on why Foxconn is so fast? I’ve determined that since they OEM so many boards for companies out there, it’s streamlined. I’ve heard rumbles that Dell/HP/Compaq and others all buy Foxconn boards. I won’t deny that almost all plastic connectors on motherboards come from Foxconn, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Foxconn board. I do have the knowledge that Foxconn was a Connector company first.

I don’t want to hear anything about performance of alternative motherboard manufactors. Some may be clunky, due to old Winchip, K5 procs and the like from the early 90’s. It’s obvious from benchmarks that cheap motherboards are just that, not clunkers.

A company I work for is taking resumes, and having just put in a resume myself to see if I could get a great position at another place, the topic of number of pages came up. I did a great amount of research on this when I made my resume, and decided that while one page was fine there was no reason that I couldn’t attach 10 pages of skills that I had acquired throughout the years.

Besides asking people who go through hundreds of resumes, I highly suggest you go through this material before you take outdated advice that more than one page is taboo:

Debunking common myths

Resume Myths You must Avoid

The Top 7 Resume Myths

All of this advice was verified by multiple sources, that do current hiring. One place wouldn’t even look at the one pages, since they needed skills, education and references that couldn’t fit on one page.

All you potential job seekers, take heed:

If an ad says “must hand/snail/email” do it.
I’ve asked over 30 professional resume makers, agencies, and HR departments in response to a recent event where a job seeker ignored the requirement. In only 5 hours, the verdicts are in:

Only one said they’d still take the resume, 3 said (in response to my query) that there is no plausible reason to accept one, and 5 stated that job qualifications is not a requirement, but an edict on how to submit is, so do it.

I’ve got to admit, resume and HR departments are fast when it comes to describing their work. All the people I polled not personal friends with at least 5 years hiring practice were webmasters/writers or professional resume agencies that easily come up in the first 100 results of a google search for resume services. Several were local organizations that employ over 100 people, and saw it as not being able to follow a simple rule.

All polled said that if the requirement was to snail mail them, and they hand delivered it, they’d throw them away.

It’s official Maine has just passed a net neutrality bill that will make it illegal for broadband operators in their state to degrade or prioritize one service over another. It’s interesting that most net neutrality bills are not saying that you -can’t- degrade service, just that if the pipe isn’t full you can’t degrade it.

Some arguments firmly place P2P in the headlights of the net neutrality bills, but it’s a service, one that does have some legitimate purposes. I’ve always been one to suggest that since HTTP takes up over 30% of the network stream, it should be blocked since P2P is often compared as using 50% .

The article stated above makes a very valid point by critiquing this statement from a vendor of a traffic shaping system:

“On commercial ISP networks peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing traffic can account for over half of all network bandwidth usage. Often, the transfers include large, copyrighted multimedia files such as videos and music, with a large proportion being sexually explicit in nature. “For municipal governments deploying public wireless networks, this traffic is problematic for a number of reasons. First, a single P2P user downloading a movie can ‘crowd out’ and slow down legitimate traffic such as email or web browsing. Secondly, municipalities must invest administrative resources to meet their legal responsibilities as a network service provider under Federal copyright law, including identifying and notifying users who are infringing copyrights. Lastly, the use of government-funded networks for the transfer of sexually explicit materials, some being illegal content such as child pornography, is especially problematic from a policy and public relations point of view.”

I’m shocked that while you wouldn’t want to ‘talk yourself out of a sale’, am I wrong to suggest that this list of open source movies is not a valid Internet browse? What if I wanted to download Elephants Dream and all the mirrors were no longer available?

One could suggest even, that if YouTube went P2P like I heard Joost was supposed to go,  local cable, dsl and wireless companies could rejoice: no Internet bandwidth is being used, only Intra net bandwidth. But then again, someone would say that’s a finite resource as well. I do agree it’s finite, but consumer’s patience for an ISP that doesn’t jerk the rug out from under them isn’t.

It’s not over yet, and Maine has just made the right choice in what will be a long line of states to hopefully follow.

Lots of people have never seen how that ‘motherboard’ in your computer is made. It doesn’t matter if you have an octa core, dual core, or just a lonely single core, they all have to be put together at some point.

It’s not so simple, but since lots of people think there is a major quality problem with all the vendors out there without hard numbers, here’s a link to how Giga-byte makes their motherboards.

I’ve come up with a new quote.

Comparing animals to kids:
“Kids have much better tricks, they even teach themselves new ones.”

I’ve learned several valuable things to remember, things that I repeat to myself, and it stops the intricate wiring that lets me think about multiple topics at the same time. I lost a good friend as a co-worker today, and it pained me greatly. I did come out better in the end, which I always do.

Something I just learned today from a good friend is simple:
“Nothing else matters but the #1 reason”

I get caught up so many times in a list of 30 things that I have analyzed throughout the day, and while for some jobs it works out very well, it doesn’t bode good when you are trying to get a point across. Against my thinking, it seems, he has won at getting his point across.

For me on the other hand, I suffered a loss, which was him getting around to the second and third reason for quitting. I digress, that his reasoning makes the most sense, and I respect that. In the end, that #2 and #3 never saw the light of day because they were of no direct correlation to the resignation of his post.

In all my selfishness, I hoped that another hand would come up and say: “I see it too, so he’s not crazy”. I can see that to push that point was not to the benefit of the person in this case, who only wanted to exit gracefully off the boat, into the sea of where we live.

I’ve heard different bits of how business owners handle a local, small town store.

I got some insight from a local couple who have been in the local hardware, and lawn machine repair for probably going on 20+ years now. This totally contrasts advice that I received from the minority, and makes some food for thought.

This couple owns a hardware store that is so ‘not corporate’ it’s crazy. They live above their store, and did so when they had a stark idea that they were the business, not always just the parts they sold.

They’ve managed to outlive the Kmart, Hecks, Ames, Walmart and Thomas Do-it center for years. I’m sure varied ideas exist about why they survived all these giants coming into their market place, but they sure know why.

There has been two trains of thought I’ve heard through the years:

1. You leave your work at work.
2. Your work is what feeds you, if it follows you home, lead it back to work.

So, this couple decided early on that it was crazy to have a home separate from the store, since, even at very early hours in the morning, customers would call them! They apparently did for a short period of time resist the idea of this ‘local big corporation’ that is off the radar after hours.
After all, they have families, dogs, cats, homes to clean and personal lives.

Now, many years later, they gladly open their doors, when so many other small stores have closed them forever because they didn’t realize business can happen at anytime, and that’s how you build loyalty.

I’ve found that most doctors in my hometown will gladly see anyone, if they are good patients, at their office during odd hours. (It’s not even a policy to do that.)

I’ve seen that even though the hours of operation of a heating and cooling company is 9-5, and they don’t mention they man the phones, it rings to their homes. I’ve asked electricians why they forward their phones as well, and service is just that… service.

Boyd Pickens, rest his soul,  answered that question for me a long time ago, and that’s why, Heaven Forbid, when a customer knocked on my parent’s front door at 1pm on a Sunday and needed a lawn raked, I never complained. He taught me that if a customer comes to see you, you had better do the job, they went out of their way to find you.

I’m always soliciting for feedback, lately, my google rank has became so good that I do get it. If a Wendy’s manager says that he’d never open his doors, that’s fine. It’s a service to do food, but you can buy a loaf of bread and deli meat 24 hours a day. When your electric, computer, water, heating, cooling, or truck breaks down you can’t just buy a load of bread and beat the engine until it works: you need a professional.

Photosynth: or; how to use up your 80 core desktop computer.

I must admit, I’m left wondering at times what we’ll think of next to do with over 80 cores. This is one of them.

There is no chance that the math involved is easy, and can be done on a 486.