Companies Are Like Bad Marriages

Kathy Sierra hit the nail on the head again, this time talking about how so many companies are like bad marriages. Her visuals are funny, as usual, so check out the article.

I wonder why companies behave like that so much. Maybe when a company is big, they forget about what could make them great because so many people are used to the “bend over and take it” treatment. Her point about marketing literature vs. user manuals is a perfect example. Why do I get generic help files and black and white documentation with poorly translated directions and diagrams? Because companies LOVE to outsource support.

For every good support experience, I’ve have at least 10 bad ones. If anyone needs an example of good though, call up BFG Tech. I had to wait on hold a little longer than I would have liked, but once I was through to an operator, my issue was resolved within 5 minutes. In all fairness, I had an advantage of the typical user, I could identify my motherboard and everything else I had tried, but BFG was great about not flipping through the “helpdesk script of death” and making me check if there was power to the card. The guys knew what they were talking about, pointed me to some new chipset drivers and I was on my way to SLI.

Thinking about that experience, I have to say, it’s not always all on the company, just like it’s never all on one person in a bad relationship. Slightly more educated users can also help the tech support vs. marketing vs. consumer battle.

SLI Hell and Heaven

This one is for the gamers and techies out there.

Last night, my new $89 BFG Tech 7600GT arrived from Newegg. It’s actually my second card, for SLI. I bought my original card last March for about twice the price and it’s performed liked a champ. Before I bought the card, I knew that there were plenty of horror stories out there about mismatched BIOSs and general weirdness with SLI setups.  But, I figured, hey what the hell, it’ll work for me.  Thanks to my gaming buddy Anubis (”Yeah, keep talking smack before you have it, you’ll have SLI hell), I was also cursed with the SLI Setup From Hell.

So my 7600GT arrives and when I pull it out of the box I noticed one big potential problem. The board is shorter and blue, so it’s not an exact match to my original green, longer version. Uh-oh. I put it into the system, did all of the necessary motherboard changes to my ASUS A8N-SLI Premium and jumped into Windows. To my surprise, Windows booted up and looked to be working fine.  I reinstalled the nVidia graphics drivers and Enabled my SLI setup.

Then the problems began. I tried 3dMark06 and it bombed out.  Unreal Tournament froze on Exit, and Call of Duty 2 still only had 40 FPS in DirectX 9 mode. Hardly what I was looking for, right? It was time to track down how to “flash” the new card’s BIOS to the old card’s BIOS to match them up.  Maybe that would help? After a bit of searching I tracked down my boot disk, and slapped a copy of NVFlash on it.  Reboot. Backup the BIOS on the new card, and attempt to flash to the old card. No dice. NVFlash started yelling about the boards being different. Lovely.

So I jumped back into Windows and searched Google for my specific problem.  Low and behold I just had to add some switches (-4 -5 -6) and it would force the BIOS onto the old card. So I booted back to my boot up disk, ran NVFlash, and after various warnings and pleadings to not flash that BIOS onto a different board, I had two functional cards with matching BIOSs.

That should fix everything, right? Wrong.  It was a 50% improvement, but UT was still freezing the system and Call of Duty 2 was just jumping around like a mad man.  So I complained, whined and moaned.  I tried switching the cards around without any improvement.  I switched them back.  Nothing seemed to work.  So after a Yahoo Chat with Gump and Anubis, Anubis told me he had the answer to my solutions. His magical solution was for me to call BFG’s Tech Support at 1-866-BFGFIXX (1-866-234-3499). I said, “Yeah Right.” Anubis made a good point, “Um, you’re going to call in three days anyway after you’ve been bitching, why not try now?”

So, I called. I held on the phone for nearly 30 minutes and gave all of the good geeky info to tech support guy. His professional response to the blue card, “Hmm. Uh. Hmm. Well, weird I’ve never seen a blue 7600GT, but that should matter. You’re getting some weird errors. Who is your motherboard manufacturer?” So I told him it was ASUS and he directed me to find out what chipset I had running, which I already knew and told him it was the nForce4.

“Great, go download the newest chipset drivers from nVidia, that should clear you up.”

I said thanks, that I’d try it and hung up. I had to admit I was skeptical. But, SLI Heaven was a chipset update away. I reinstalled the graphics drivers again after the chipset and low and behold my SLI works at 99% stability now.

3dMark06 went from the low 3000s with one to 5500+ with SLI

Call of Duty 2 is getting 75 FPS in multiplayer DX9 full everything at 1680×1050 resolution.

Unreal Tournament Single Player with Highest everything and 1680×1050 averages over 200 FPS.

Thanks BFG Tech Support and Thanks Anubis!

New Tech Stuff

Two new updates for my techie side.

Wordpress just released version 2.1.  I’ll start playing with it soon enough for my ancillary sites.  ScalpEm.com will always be the last to upgrade since it needs to be stable. However, I’m going to get the old Groomlake site going again, so that ScalpEm.com will have it’s fun test best for templates and new versions before I go and break anything on the main site. I’m happy to hear that they are supporting 2.0.x branch until 2010, but I’m not sure that I like the Ubuntu method of major releases on a regular schedule.

In my other techie news, I picked up another BFG Tech 7600GT graphics card. My final plan for the computer is complete and it will be running SLI.  That should tide me over until the next major upgrade of the computer two or three years from now. The only reason for me to upgrade to Vista anytime soon would be for gaming, and since UT2k7 will be DX9 to start, there is no reason to rush to Vista and DX10 AND a new $500 graphics card.  The prices can come down on that.  By the way, NewEgg.com is running a special on those 7600GTs, for $89 after rebate.

Your Hard Drive Is Obsolete

So I read an article at MSNBC this morning. SanDisk has introduced 32 Gigabyte solid state drive (basically, a really big version of your USB memory key) and it’s nearly 100 times faster than current drives.

Crowds Are Stupid? You Don’t Say!

Who would have thought that the movie Men In Black is a source of great wisdom? As Tommy Lee Jones, Agent K, so eloquently put it to Will Smith, Agent J, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” For the same reason that it would be bad for everyone to know if aliens are living among us, techies need to make sure the focus isn’t on collaboration of one project, but the co-existence of many projects that spawn new ideas. Creating Passionate Users has a great article up about the difference between Collective Intelligence and the “Dumbness of Crowds.”

I won’t waste time repeating what Kathy Sierra has already said over there. In fact, if nothing else check out her explanation of the 20Q game and its relation to collective intelligence. That little 20Q ball is smarter than you, even if you think a dolphin is a fish, it still guesses correctly!

My thoughts about the Dumbness of Crowds is applied directly to the Open Source Community. I’m struggling with learning Linux right now for a couple of reasons. I’m not particularly great with online courses, but since they are the most cost effective, as a boss, I stick with them when I can. A good mentor would be a better situation, but I don’t have any of those around (for Linux). On top of that, I’ve played with Windows for years, so it just makes sense to me.

What does that have to do with Open Source? Well, Linux is one of their crown jewels, right? You’d think that after years of development with all of the brain power that’s been thrown into that operating system that it would be easy for me to understand it. Right? Wrong. First, the guys that have the knowledge tend to be uber-geeks, who know their stuff, but think I should do everything from a command line. I like my GUIs and I should be able to do almost anything from a GUI that I can do from the command line. If I can’t, to me, that’s a huge design error. Ultimately Linux still wants me to use programs from the command line combined with a laundry list of -a -x -whatever in order to be quickly done with a project. Throw in the fact that companies like Red Hat are looking for ways to make money on “open source” and I’m really not impressed.
My other issue is when the personalities in a crowd win out and you see an open source project die. That’s my biggest fear when looking at products. Would I love to replace Microsoft Office at work? Totally. Is it feasible? Perhaps, but what happens if development on OpenOffice suddenly died? I’m up a creek without a paddle. And on top of that, a ton of Open Source projects lack good documentation, so what was saved in costs up front, ends up being charged to an employee’s time.

I digress. Back to the original point of the Dumbness of Crowds. I’ve seen it in action firsthand throughout my life. Just watch when a coach asks a team what they’d like to do. You get 20 different answers, none of which actually work. But when you allow a couple of older players pull aside their younger counterparts and transfer their knowledge, it’s Collective Intelligence at it’s finest. Come back a couple of seasons later and see how much more is transferred to the next generation.

Weird, maybe we should just look for the Autobot Matrix of Leadership?

My Wish: Joel’s Bionic Office

Yes, Joel’s post on the Bionic Office is over three years old, but it has had staying power in my mind since I first read it. On a daily basis, I live in a cube like many of us. On top of that, my cube is certainly no Dilbert Ultimate Cube. So if I was granted just one wish by the office genie, it would be that every office I ever work in from now until death has a setup similar to Joel’s Bionic Office. Joel believes that IT workers their own private offices to make a home where they can be most productive.

Think about it. Why do you like going home each day? Because it has your creature comforts and it’s a place where you want to be. Home is whatever you’d like it to be. Many of you out there spend more time at work than at home, so it needs to be comfortable. Not lay back and take a nap comfortable (although I really think naps would help a lot of workers), but the work environment should be customizable to the person and how they accomplish tasks.

After I read the article, I focused on two points. The Private Offices, which I’ve touched on already and Pair Programming. What’s pair programming? Exactly what it sounds like, two people sit at one terminal and program together. I used to program, and I’m around programmers now, along with the assortment of IT staff. I’ll go one step further than Joel and say that every station for ALL IT staff should have two monitors and plenty of leg room. Why? It makes collaboration a hell of a lot easier. Work areas that accommodate two workers are conducive to learning. A little bit of learning each day is far better than having to soak it all up at once at a training session. Judging from my 5+ years in the IT workforce, collaboration happens when it’s easy, and not so much when it’s not.

Why do you think everyone wants an Easy Button?

Bribes For Bloggers

I wandered over to JoelOnSoftware.com (as I have once in a while ever since his Bionic Office article, which I’ll talk about in a later post, as an IT admin I couldn’t agree more) and his article on companies that are “bribing” bloggers to get good reviews. He’s taking a stand against the companies and his fellow bloggers, because he feels that it’s unethical to take a “gift” from a company and then review that product. He points out that the most trusted name in reviewing, Consumer Reports (get yourself an online subscription, it’s $26 for the year) buys their products at retail stores, in order to get exactly what your or I would buy. CR can fairly judge the product and write about it accordingly.

Joel’s quick to point out that his hands aren’t clean. He has taken some freebies over the years, but then again, who hasn’t? Well, me, but that’s because I haven’t had the opportunity. Even with the small, but growing, success of ScalpEm.com, I was contacted to promote a Home Depot contest that involved the FSU / UF Rivalry game. I promoted it, freely, because I thought it was fun and it was local to Tallahassee. When the marketers came back wanting me to post about a contest where winners would go “Behind The Scenes With College Gameday” I declined. If they want that kind of advertising, they can buy an ad on the site. I don’t charge much!

What I don’t agree with is that disclosure doesn’t work. Maybe I’m just too brutally honest, or maybe I believe that I can be less biased on a freebie than most people, but if a review is upfront about where they got the product, then that’s enough. We can try, but blogging isn’t ever going to be as credible as the traditional media (their credibility is in question many times though) since you have 10 abandoned junk blogs for each readable one. Blog is a dirty word, it will continue to be a dirty word for the next 10 years until enough of the technology generation is running companies. The other fact that I think Joel is forgetting about is that not all of us have the luxury of going out there and purchasing a brand new laptop and reviewing Vista on it. It must be nice!

My main point in all of this is that we’re all tuned to the same radio station WIFM. What’s In it For Me? Money. Money. Money. It’s all about money. While I love writing about the Seminoles and my intention is to cover my hosting expenses with Google Ads, am I really going to complain if I ever make more than that? No. If Nike comes by and asks me to review a product that they are going to provide me, will I review it honestly? Yes, and I’ll disclose that Nike gave it to me, but I do believe readers are smart enough to figure out what is an honest review and what is not.