Velocity Micro: Raised From the Dead

That’s right – technology miracles do happen! And, that’s right, I had a bizarre setup for that boot test. 😉 Acting on the suggestion of my contact at Velocity Micro, I took off that massive Zalman cooler and looked at the CPU – it was partially dislodged and some of the CPU pins were bent. I carefully bent the pins back (it’s microsurgery without the benefit of cameras or view magnification) and put the CPU back in, placing the Zalman cooler loosely on top. Much to my amazement, the damn thing booted up! It gave me a warning about a “degraded RAID configuration”, but thankfully it still booted into Windows Vista.

After finding some instructions on how to properly re-assemble the cooler on Zalman’s Web site, I put the computer back together and gave it a more proper setup. This machine will be used as a media center, so it will eventually end up in the corner of my office attached to my Dell 26″ LCD TV. Now that it’s actually up and running though – wow – it’s a screamer! Vista absolutely flies on this thing. Check out these Windows Experience Index scores:

This is the first Windows Vista computer I’ve seen where the CPU is the lowest part of the score. And when you consider that the CPU in question is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5000+, running at 2.6 Ghz, the CPU is by no means “slow”. It’s the most powerful CPU I have at my disposal now. I’m not sure if it’s the 65 nanometre or 90 nanometre version – I suspect the 65nm, but I’m waiting on a confirmation of that from Velocity Micro. Continue reading Velocity Micro: Raised From the Dead

Dell Still Putting Craplets on Vista Computers

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That’s a screenshot of the toolbar on a brand new Vista Home Premium laptop that my mother-in-law ordered (an Insprion 6400 to be exact). Look at all that stuff! Many of them are Windows icons, but I resent the fact that Dell pre-loaded the machine with an entire suite of Google software. Vista already has an excellent built-in search function. Why pre-install Google Desktop Search and have two indexing engines running on the laptop at the same time? The Google toolbar was also installed, along with who knows what else. The typical Norton “free trial” was there as well, along with a couple of other icons that I don’t recognize. It took me about 90 minutes last night to wipe the drive, re-install Vista, and get all the drivers off the CD installed. Dell definitely makes this process as easy as they can, though I’d really prefer not to have to do it at all. Why not have a perfectly clean install of Vista then, upon first boot, give the customer the option to install the suggested programs? Leave the power of the decision in the hands of the person who paid for the product. Yeah, I know Dell operates on thin business margins and they make some money from the companies whose software is on the machine, but that’s no excuse.

Can you imagine buying a brand new car and having bumper stickers from Subway, Coke, Cialis, and Jenny Craig on the back of it? “Oh, we put bumper stickers on there to subsidise the cost of the car” says the salesman. “You can just scrape those off”. We’d never accept that from a car dealership, yet it’s exactly what we get from the major OEMs like Dell and HP. I’d happily pay an extra $10 to Dell just to get a machine that had no software installed on it beyond their basic Dell support applications.

Velocity Micro: Round 3 K.O.

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That’s the guts of the third PC that Velocity Micro has sent me. I plugged it in (after finding my own power cable, they forgot to send me back the main accessories box), turned it on,  and just like last time, it didn’t boot up. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I wasn’t. Based on the track record so far from Velocity Micro, I was actually expecting it not to work. This time I decided to trouble shoot it a bit more: last night I swapped out the video card (no change) and I ran a 50 foot power extension cable to another socket in my house, on the off chance that it was a power issue (highly unlikely, but I was getting desperate). That didn’t help either. This morning I received an email from my contact at Velocity Micro who suggested that it might be a partially un-seated CPU. I’ll disassemble the huge Zalman cooler and see if that helps…but at this point I’m very close to just cannibalizing this thing for parts and building a new machine from scratch.

Messenger Live: Where’s the Download Link?

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It’s funny how marketing people think sometimes: they’ll focus on all sorts of minute details, but when it comes down to the most important one, they forget it. Windows Live Messenger alerted me today that there was an update out – version 8.1. I declined to do an auto-update, so I clicked on the “More Info” link to (I thought) get taken to a page where I could download the setup program for 8.1 and install it at my leisure. I was taken to this site, a promotional area for Windows Live Messenger. I was expecting to see a “Download Now” link somewhere on there…nothing. I thought maybe it was a Firefox thing, so I loaded up the page in IE. Same thing. I clicked around to various pages and not one had a download. Lots of promotional material telling me how great the product is? Check. A download link so I could see for myself? Nada. I saw a feedback link, so I thought I could at least submit some input that a download link would be helpful. Clicking the link simply took me to the top of the page. Lame. I ended up having to manually edit the URL to get to a page with a download link. Doesn’t anybody check these things before they put it out for the whole world to see?

People Unclear on the Concept of Professional Networking Sites

Social networking sites such as MySpace have been perverted from their original purpose of connecting people – some of that still happens of course, but now it’s more of popularity contest where strangers add each other as “friends” in some bizarre game of one-upmanship. Everyone wants to have 100’s or 1000’s of “friends” even though they don’t actually know them. MySpace is a social tool, and I know people use it to meet other people, but I think the basic concept of what a “friends” list was supposed to mean has been stretched. But hey, it’s all for fun, so who cares. If people want to brag they have 500 “friends” on their list that they don’t actually know, so be it.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is aimed at the professional business market – your network is supposed to be people that you actually know, people that you do business with in some fashion or know on a professional or personal basis. I don’t used LinkedIn all that much, but I’ve registered and have a group of people on my list that I actually know. I’ve seen something happening lately that I can only call the “MySpace Friends Phenominon” where people who simply know of me are asking to be added to my professional business network. Random people who read my Web sites think that’s an appropriate relationship for me to vouch for them by adding them to my LinkedIn network.

Who are these people? Why do they think they because they know my name I’d want to add them to my network? It’s not a matter of arrogance on my part – it’s a matter of professional ethics. If I’m going to have someone in my network of known professional associates, it’s going to be because I know who they are and what they do. I’m a big believer in personal integrity, and if I don’t know the person at least on some basic level (I’ve exchanged a few email messages with them for instance) I’m not going to say that I “know” them.

You Know It’s Cold When…

I don’t want to turn this blog into one of those “Hey, check out this funny video!” blogs, but this video was just too crazy not to share – it’s not actually “frozen waves”, but it’s frozen snow and ice being pushed up by waves, and it looks unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.

Frozen Waves in Newfoundland

Frozen waves crush against the shore in this brutally cold clip from Newfoundland.

WordPress Spell Check: Does This Thing Work At All?

I find myself a bit baffled by WordPress 2.1 at the moment. The spell check functionality doesn’t work at all for me. Look at the spelling of the word defaults below – “defults” – and the spell checker says there’s no problem. I don’t think this is an instance of Canadian vs. American spelling either. 😉 I did a bit of searching but can’t find anything about how/why the WordPress spell check feature would not work. Anyone have any ideas?

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WARNING: Wealthstreet Investment Seminar

UPDATE OCTOBER 26th 2009: As of a couple of weeks ago, Wealthsteet’s phone number has been disconnected and the company is apparently out of business. I have no information about how to get in touch with Dave Jones, nor what this means for investments on the Wealthstreet Dragon Fund, a fund operated by Dave Jones. This blog entry has a comment that seems to indicate the Dragon Fund may still be intact, but I don’t know whom to contact to get further information. Some further updates on this can be found here.

UPDATE: This blog post was originally written in February of 2007. At the time I was quite impressed with WealthStreet and Concrete Equities. Now, as of May of 2009, I’m very concerned for my Concrete Equities investment after reading this forum thread. I certainly don’t believe everything I read online, but there are enough red flags to warrant significant concern. Most concerning of all to me is that Dave Jones has recently stepped into the role of CEO at Concrete Equities. How can I expect fair and impartial advice from Wealthstreet regarding my investment in Concrete Equities if the same man is running both? I can’t, and that’s very troubling to me. My “Wealth Coach” at Wealthstreet no longer works there, and no communication was sent out to his clients informing them that he was leaving. I had to call Wealthstreet and find this out when I asked for him and was informed he no longer works there. I would advise extreme caution regarding getting involved with Wealthstreet at this time.

UPDATE #2 (August 20th, 2009): The forum thread at Canadian Business I linked to above is no longer valid. It has been deleted, and my post in those forums asking why the thread was deleted, was itself deleted. This is called “a clean up” – someone is trying to erase all traces of this issue online. Lawyers and accusations of libel are involved. Thankfully, you can still get some of the discussion via Google’s cached version.

On Saturday, February the 3rd, I spent six hours in a investment seminar put on by Wealthstreet, a Calgary company that I’d been hearing about for years and meaning to get in touch with. I’m better than most with finances, but I have a firm belief that you should do what you’re good at and avoid what you’re not good at – and for me, that means seeking advice from people who do this for a living. I bought stocks all of one time in my life, and I lost money on it.

We’ve done some work with World Financial Group (WFG), but over the past year I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with them. Our consultants are the nicest guys in the world, but niceness does not a balanced portfolio make. The WFG plan had us sink 100% of our money into a single mutual fund, and after a few months I gave my head a shake and realized how exposed we were because we had almost no diversification (Enron stock holders unstand this now). I took some steps to correct that, but ultimately things still aren’t right – and that’s why I found this Wealthstreet seminar so fascinating. I’m indebted to my parents for inviting Ashley and I to attend this with them – it was a real eye-opener. After the first half was over I made an appointment to meet with a Wealthstreet advisor to re-work our portfolio (meagre though it may be).

I’m publishing my seminar notes for two reasons: first, so that people searching for Wealthstreet can find this blog post and see my positive experience with their seminar. Secondly, even for those people reading this blog that live outside Calgary (which is most of you), I think you’ll find many of the basic financial concepts to be sound no matter where you are in the world. It’s certainly worth thinking about your financial future no matter how young you are, and simply shoving all your money into RRSPs (or 401K’s if you’re in the USA) isn’t a good long-term solution.

I’ll make one caveat about my notes: they might not be 100% accurate, so don’t take them as such. There was a great deal of information, and I may have gotten some of it wrong. Besides, what kind of a person takes financial advice from a blog? 😉

Dave Jones, Wealthstreet CEO

  • Family is important, the allocation of time should be focused 99% on everything else in your life, 1% on focusing on your investments
  • “You don’t get a mulligan when it comes to your retirement.”
  • You should have four to seven income streams in order to retire
  • 40% of Canadians have made an average of three withdrawls from their RRSPs
  • IBM sold to Lenovo because they couldn’t afford the pension for their own people
  • Pension Crisis is looming: too many people retiring, not enough growth in the funds to compensate for the amount of draw from pensioners
  • Bullet Proof 50% of your portfolio, Growth & Income 40% of your portfolio, 10% speculation
    If you speculate with 10% of your portfolio, and only 5% performs, it might out-perform the rest of your portfolio
  • Your house an as asset must be put to work – you can’t eat a doorknob
  • 1 in 7 Albertans will be the victim or attempted victim of mortgage fraud
  • House rich, cash poor: people who own a house worth a great deal, but they can’t afford the property taxes
  • Personal savings as a percentage of disposable personal income is -5%. Someone who earns 100K a year is spending 105K
  • 10% of the world owns 90% of the assets…Trump and Kiyosaki worry that 1% of the world will eventually own 99% of the assets Continue reading WARNING: Wealthstreet Investment Seminar

WordPress Auto Save Not Frequent Enough

You know, there’s nothing worse than working on a blog post, doing a lot of formatting on it, then losing your wireless connection a few moments before you click on the Save button – and thus losing the formatting you just did. WordPress has an auto-save feature, but it doesn’t kick in often enough for my liking. I can’t find any reference to how often it auto-saves, nor is there any option I can find that would allow me to change the frequency. Word has an auto-save function as well, but even in the 2007 version it defaults to 10 minutes. I don’t know about you, but I think most people can do a lot of typing in 10 minutes and if you lose your work after nine minutes, you’re going to wonder why it wasn’t doing it every three minutes (I usually go in and change the default in Word to three minutes). Since WordPress is software running on my server, using my resources, why can’t I set it to auto-save my post every 60 seconds if I wanted to? I’m really impressed with WordPress overall as a CMS, but I’m often baffled by certain aspects of it (such as not being able to change the thumbnail size, or making the default image insertion full size and no link).

Windows Mail, Vista, and Blind Carbon Copy (BCC)

Here’s another one of those posts that are simply search engine fodder: I’m using Windows Mail, the replacement for Outlook Express, on my small laptop for my personal email. I find it easier to fire up one program, configured just with my personal email, than to start up Outlook and have hundreds of messages flood in from my seven (!!!) different email accounts. What surprised me tonight though was how hard it was to find something seemingly very simple: I was sending an email from Windows Mail, and I wanted to include a BCC (blind carbon copy) recipient. I started looking in the menus for the email I was working on – I looked under View, expecting to see BCC there. It wasn’t. I searched through every menu in the message itself, and even in the Windows Mail options. There wasn’t a single mention of BCC. From my email, I selected Help > View Help and typed in the term “BCC”. Not a single result. What?? I then tried “blind carbon copy”, a term that most people will not understand (average users know it only as BCC) and found 30 results. The first five included help topics on eliminating duplicate files, copy and paste from a remote computer, rip music FAQ, copy a file or folder, and copy information between files. Absolutely nothing on BCC.

I then tried Google and after a bit of searching, found the solution: with an email message open, click on View then All Headers and the BCC field will magically appear. All Headers? That’s completely, totally, and utterly non-intuitive. Who the hell knows that headers relates to BCC other than SMTP geeks more hardcore than I? Not cool at all – Vista, you lose a point in my books for this. The Windows Mail team needs to give their head a shake and change that to “View BCC”.