The Hawk Nelson Insanity Continues

I’ve written before about how people think I’m the Jason Dunn from Hawk Nelson, and how it’s a source of amusement for me. It’s one thing to be mistaken for someone else based on your name alone, but an email I recieved today brought this to a whole new level:

“i love jason dunn and hawk nelson! i would sooooooo love to contact him!!!!! if you can hook it up thanks!!!!!!!!!!”

She realizes that I’m not the Jason Dunn from Hawk Nelson, but is asking me to “hook up” a contact with him because I must know him since we have the same name? What kind of bizarre, twisted logic is that? Do all people having the same name belong to a secret club where the talk about their lives as the collective hive-mind of said name? If there is such a thing, I didn’t get the memo. Ah, to be young and illogical. 😆

Blogger Irony: Mock and Thou Shalt Be Mocked

Ah, the irony of it all. Yesterday I posted about the crazy eBay sale of bent and trashed CPUs. Over the weekend I assembled a new Shuttle, an SN25P, which was to be my photo/video editing workstation. I put in the AMD 64 X2 Dual-Core 4400+ CPU, a socket 939 chip that I paid around $550 for in 2006, which now sells for $215. I wanted to maximize performance, so I started to overclock it – the Shuttle allows for a fine degree of overclocking, including voltage bumps in one-half volt increments. I rarely do overclocking with voltage bumps, because I’m worried about damaging the CPU. So I did my normal bus-only overclocking. I got about 100 mhz out of the CPU, but I wanted more, so I bumped the CPU voltage up half a volt and juiced the bus speed a bit more. I got it up to around 2480 mhz or so (stock is 2200 mhz), but in testing it wasn’t very stable – it would lock up the system after a few hours. I let it run overnight on Friday night and Saturday morning I was staring at an ugly bluescreen (and this is running Vista Ultimate).

I played with it some more on Saturday, and it seemed to be more or less stable, but on Sunday it crashed again so I dropped the voltage back down to normal. I dropped the bus speed down to nearly normal, keeping around 50 mhz of extra speed. Everything seemed normal. Then late Sunday afternoon I went down to my office and tried to use the machine but the wireless mouse and keyboard wouldn’t work. I re-associated the mouse and keyboard, but it didn’t help. I pressed the power button on the machine and nothing happened. That’s when I realized that it was actually frozen (I should have looked at the system clock). I pressed the reset button and it rebooted, but wouldn’t post – the fans were stuck in high RPM mode, just like the Velocity Micro was doing when it had the CPU problems. My shoulders slumped when I realized that I likely destroyed the CPU with my overclocking attempts. I tried to remove the heat sink, but it wouldn’t budge despite my gentle wiggling, so I had to apply a bit more force than normal. It came free with a big sucking sound (how appropriate) and tore the CPU free of the socket without me releasing the socket lever (which was impossible to get at without first removing the CPU cooler). Almost a dozen pins were bent and maimed by the bad removal. I don’t know if I put on too much thermal paste, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.

I still had the 3500+ socket 939 CPU, so I put that into the Shuttle and it booted up perfectly. So it’s definitely the CPU, and between the pins being bent/broken and the fact that it wouldn’t boot, it’s a dead CPU. That was a rather expensive learning experience. 🙁 On the plus side, since I no longer have a socket 939 to power the Shuttle, I don’t need it any more – I returned it to Memory Express today. That means I can get a new Shuttle, with a new, modern CPU. 🙂 I’ve asked my Shuttle contact for an SD37P2 – fingers crossed…

Psst…Wanna’ Buy a “Unique” Pentium 4 CPU?

I was in the process of putting some items up for sale on eBay, and I was searching to see what 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 CPUs were going for. I came across this lot of CPUs, and I just had to post this picture – take a look at the maimed pins on this thing:

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For those that might not know, those small gold pins are supposed to be sticking straight up – even if a few are bent/broken, the processor is basically useless (though sometimes you can salvage the CPU if no pins are broken). The really crazy part? There are people bidding on this lot – they must be hoping the others are in better shape…only on eBay, the greatest online marketplace in the world!

Smokin’ Dell Deal

Sometimes it pays to be sitting in front of your computer when an email comes in. I received an email from Dell yesterday (they send one almost every day) but this time it was actually something special: a $160 discount on the first 200 machines sold using a coupon code. It might seem odd that I’d order a Dell computer after just having my Dell monitor go defective, but I need a new baseline computer for testing hardware and software – my previous system for this purpose is now the Windows Home Server test machine. I wanted a computer that I could test video cards, RAM, and add-in cards with. I upgraded the CPU to something decent – the AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+ will do nicely, and everything else can be upgraded fairly easily (though the power supply will undoubtedly be limited and stop me from testing any truly crazy video cards). Here are the specs for the machine:

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All that for $379 – not bad at all! I’d be hard-pressed to buy a decent motherboard and a case for $379, let alone a CPU, RAM, hard drive and DVD burner.

Well That Just Ruined my Day: a Dead Pixel on my Dell 2407WFP Monitor

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See that blue dot? That’s a dead pixel. And that’s a dead pixel on one of my three new Dell 24″ LCD 2407WFP monitors. The same monitors that I declared were perfect after my long struggle with trying to get three proper monitors. For the record, I’ve ordered 11 monitors, spent $8465.16, and waited five months to finish the seemingly simple task of getting three Dell LCD monitors that didn’t have dead or stuck pixels. A few weeks ago I thought the Sisyphian task was completed, but today upon seeing that stuck pixel I knew I wasn’t. I’m about a week over my 30 day return policy with Dell, so I can’t take the route I took previously of returning the monitor and ordering another one. I am going to give up and accept the stuck pixel? Absolutely not. I remain convinced that if a Dell customer such as myself is willing to spend $2300+ on monitors, they shouldn’t have to accept flaws products – and a monitor that developers a stuck pixel after being active for less than a week (I just set up two of the monitors last weekend) is indeed a flawed product.

You Put The Peanut Butter Into the Cookie Jar…

I have a vague memory of  a Sesame Street skit with Bert and Ernie, where Ernie put the peanut butter into the cookie jar, and the cookies in the sugar jar, then the suger into the fish bowl, and the fish into the…whatever. You get the idea – swapping things around to make space, but you always end up with something that needs to go someplace else.

Last weekend I spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday working on the PCs in my office. I’ll write up a different post about the Velocity Micro PC (yes, it’s finally working), but it was the piece of the puzzle that was missing (like a cookie jar). I couldn’t do anything with my machines until it was working properly – oh, and that XFX 7600GS video card that I was waiting for as well. Once I started tearing down my PCs to put Vista on them, I also decided to swap parts around to get the best performance where I needed it the most. That meant taking the XFX 7600GS video card (passively cooled, totally silent) and 2 GB of Kingston RAM from my main workstation (a Shuttle SD11G5) and putting them into the Velocity Micro machine, taking the 2 GB of high-performance RAM and high-performance ATI Radeon 1950 from the Velocity Micro and putting them in the Shuttle SD11G5. Why? Well, the Velocity Micro PC is going to be serving as my TV recording/music storage PC, so it didn’t need either the high-performance RAM or video card – it’s hooked up to a Dell 26″ LCD TV that is no good for gaming. Swap one complete.

Then I had a medium-sized tower PC that I was using to test Vista on, recently wiping the hard drive to install the Windows Home Server beta on it. This PC had a 3.2 Ghz Celeron CPU in it (overclocked to 3.4 Ghz if memory serves), 1 GB of RAM, a 120 GB hard drive, and a Radeon 9600 GPU. Fine for testing Vista with (even with Aero Glass), but overkill for Windows Home Server. Then I had a Shuttle SN95G5 machine that I had been using as my Windows Media Center 2005 PC for the past couple of years. Great machine, and with the Velocity Micro now taking over that role, I was going to use it as a dedicated photo/video/audio editing workstation (my 17″ Fujitsu laptop just wasn’t cutting it). One of the three Dell 24″ LCD monitors I purchased was also going to be dedicated to this task. Unfortunately when I started to install Vista on the SN95G5, I was seeing it hang at boot. I poked around in the BIOS, but couldn’t solve the problem, so I dropped Shuttle tech support a line. Turns out the AMD 64 X2 4400+ CPU I had put in there last year wasn’t fully compatible with the motherboard – it would work fine in Windows (it had been working great) but the system would have trouble booting with it in (well that explains a few things). Continue reading You Put The Peanut Butter Into the Cookie Jar…

Barracuda Spam Filter Outlook Plug-in: Who Coded This Thing?

Poorly-written software ticks me off. Big time. There’s nothing worse than using a piece of software that performs poorly, or worse, bring instability to your whole computer system. Barracuda Networks has a server-side spam-blocking solution that works quite well and has been implemented by my hosted Exchange provider – but only once it’s been trained with 200 good (ham) and bad (spam) email messages. That’s 400 messages in total. How do you train it the fastest? By installing an Outlook plugin that gives you a little green check-mark icon and a red “x” icon. You select the messages you want to train, click the button…and watch Outlook 2003 completely lock up for several minutes. When an email comes in, Outlook 2003 and my entire PC also lock up for 10-30 seconds. Every. Single. Time. It drives me nuts. The other day I decided to try and get in touch with someone from Barracuda Networks to find out if they had a new plug-in coming out, perhaps one that would work with Outlook 2007 and suck less. Here’s the transcript from the online chat tool they offer for communication with customers.

Jason Dunn: When will there be an updated Outlook plugin released?

You are now speaking with Ann of sales.

Ann: Hi, Is this for your Spam Firewall?

Jason Dunn: No, for the Outlook client that the customer (me) uses

Jason Dunn: To tag messages as spam/not spam

Jason Dunn: It’s really a horrible piece of software under Outlook 2003, and I’m afraid to even install it on Outlook 007

Ann: Let me transfer you to our Helpdesk and they will further assist you. Pls. hold

Please hold while being transferred to kamaal of Support.

Jason Dunn: Very well.

Your party has left this session.

Jason Dunn: Hello?

Jason Dunn: Wow. This is sure some impressive customer service.

<disconnect>

I kid you not, that was the “conversation”. A bump to another department, then the customer service agent dumps the chat. It might have been a technical glitch, but that doesn’t say much for the chat software they’re using. Maybe their Outlook plug-in team designed the chat software…

The New Cardboard Cut-Out?

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That’s something called a “Fathead“, which I’d never heard of before today. Great name for a company, stupid name for a product. They’re vinyl images that stick to your wall, can be removed and re-applied easily, and they have Star Wars images. Cool.  I stumbled into the site through one of those random click-fests that one sometimes finds oneself in while “smurfing the interweeb”. The Darth Vadar model sells for $119 USD,  or you can buy two for $144. They also have a Chewbaca version, a Yoda version and a few others. Or you can just deny your inner geek and get a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader instead. What I want to know is when are they going to get UFC Fatheads? Too bad we covered our walls in the TV room last year in new posters…I gots no room for a Fathead!

Flexible Software Licensing Plans

I want to give a shout-out to the people at ActiveWords, a product that I rely on every single day. I read about their licensing plan today:

“People who adopt ActiveWords want it available all the time, saving them time and making their computing more spontaneous, relevant, and enjoyable. We want to make sure our customers know they are free to take their ActiveWords with them, to use on any computer, anywhere, for the price of a single license. The ActiveWords PLUS Personal Version License gives our customers the unrestricted right to install and use the purchased version on any computer. As a customer you can unlock any ActiveWords PLUS installation for your exclusive use. This means you can use it on any computer, anywhere, anytime. This applies to the version of ActiveWords PLUS you purchase so long as it operates with a compatible Windows operating system.”

This is the way all software should work: it’s delusional how some companies think that every computer should have a unique license for their software, even if it’s the same person using it on each computer. Wouldn’t it be great if all companies were that flexible and friendly with their licensing? I’m far more inclined to purchase software that I know won’t give me a hassle when I install it on any or all of my five main PCs. Companies that treat me like a valued customer, instead of a software pirate, will always get my money first.

Now I just wish it wasn’t so confusing to unlock their software once you have the registration key…

The Value of Online Communities

The following is a quote from Sean O’Driscoll’s blog. Sean is the General Manager of Microsoft’s MVP program, of which I am a 10 year vetran (a third of my life…scary!). Since I run online communities for a living, community is something that’s always on my mind. Sometimes people have a hard time grasping what online communities are, how they come into being, and why for many companies they can create massive opportunities – but also many challenges. Sean’s take on community was particularly interesting as he used an example from his own life:

“One of my hobbies (obsessions according to my wife) is BBQing. I won’t get into the passions that surround debate on this subject here, but be assured they are as strong and deep as any topic I’ve ever seen. So, here’s the story – and yes, it is 100% true (these must be for it to work). A few years ago, my wife bought me a BBQ for Christmas, technically a smoker (www.cookshack.com). One of the first things I did was go online to register the product. I immediately discovered an online community hosted at the site. By the end of the day, I was reading post after post from a guy named “smokin’ okie.” I was lurking like crazy all the time (and slowly starting to post). As the months went by, I didn’t really give this a lot of thought relative to my day job on communities at Microsoft. But, one day it hit me. I was using this BBQ WAY more frequently than the average person uses a BBQ. I was buying accessories for it. I was recommending it to others (I can name 5 people I recommended it to who now own one). I was using it in non-standard ways – things you won’t read in the manual (by the way, this really builds loyalty as you’re not sure you could do it with a competitor.)

It also dawned on me that my motivations for being in that community were very diverse. I sought recipes, trouble shooting, tips and tricks, product recommendations, social connections, and on and on – I was really forming relationships. Since then, that cookshack has become a center piece of a full outdoor kitchen I had built to extend my addiction to bbqing. So, how did this relate to Microsoft for me? Well, let me tell you, software and computers are not a lot different than BBQing. What does every company want? They want you to use their products more. They want you to use a richer set of its features and capabilities. They want you to add onto it. They want you to recommend it and they want it to become a focal point in your life. It’s really the dream scenario – if communities could do that for me with BBQ, couldn’t we do the same with software – another topic with massive passions!! Now, don’t use BBQing (unless it’s true for you), but do figure out what your “bbq story” is. What you are trying to do is create a vivid story that helps others discover their own story – then you’ve got them.”

That’s what online communities are all about: people with a shared interest coming together to trade information about their passion.