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Thor Projects LLC - Welcome
Thursday, July 31, 2008
During the course of my career I've run across a handful of truly amazing people. That's one of the definite perks of being a consultant, you meet lots of people so statistically speaking at some point you're going to find some really awesome people. One of those people for me is Rodger Smith. Rodger is perhaps the most creative guy that anyone will ever meet. Picking out his brilliance is as easy or as difficult as looking at the desktop on his Mac. The first time I saw it I was instantly in awe and confused at the same time. There was an insanely organized set of post it notes on his desktop. This was amazing because on the one hand we have unstructured information at its finest. Post it notes -- how many of them do you lose in a year? I think I'm single handedly responsible for killing a forest with the ones I've lost. On the other hand, there's an order and a symmetry to how they're setup. It's order woven through the chaos.
Why do I bring this up? Well, I got a note from Rodger today about an independent film he's producing. The film is My Name is Jerry. I won't pretend understand it other than what you can read for yourself -- however, I can tell you that if Rodger's involved it's worth checking out. (So go there now.)
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Personal
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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
I recently purchased a new laptop (Lenovo T61p) and as a part of that process I decided to finally take the leap to Vista. Since I don't know how to do things half way, I decided that I'd go to Vista x64 -- OK, that and I put 8GB of RAM in the system. I've been quite surprised with the experience. You see shortly after the launch I bought a laptop and tried to use it with Vista x64 -- that was a miserable failure. Mostly because the drivers just weren't present. I quite quickly reverted back to Windows XP and I've been running that ever since. However, the new machine created a new opportunity.
I've found that driver support has generally been pretty good with one very notable exception. I have a HP ColorJet 2840 integrated scanner, fax, and printer. It's hooked to my server and does a decent if not perfect job of meeting my needs. However, I've realized that I can't print in color to the 2840 from Vista 64 bit. Frankly, It's got me wondering if HP is intentionally trying to flush their printer business. If you consider that Vista has been released for 18 months now and HP can't get a set of printer drivers for the printer says one of two things: 1) The don't care enough, or 2) they're incompetent. I'll choose to pick the former. Other than publically shame HP I'm not sure what to do -- oh, well, I mean that and never buy another HP printer. The really tragic part of this is that the 2840 is still a current model printer that they're trying to sell to small and medium businesses -- oops.
So dealing with driver compatibility issues tops my list for the true cost of Vista. This isn't Microsoft's fault -- it can't be with 18 months in the market.
The other issue, is not quite as troubling but is pretty frustrating non-the-less. It seems like every application that I use has to have an update to work with Vista. Nero, Acrobat, QuickBooks, etc. OK, it isn't every application, but it's enough. Making things more interesting a few key features that I used don't work in Vista. Nero has a feature called ImageDrive that allows you to mount an ISO like a drive on your system -- and it doesn't work on Vista. What's the big deal? Well, because of my MSDN subscription I get most of my Microsoft software as an ISO. I don't want to burn CDs or DVDs for everything that I want to install. With Image Drive I mounted the disk virtually and installed the software. Because of this limitation I ended up needing to license an ISO extractor tool.
So the second true cost to Vista is the software cost -- not the cost of Vista itself but the cost of all of the software you have to relicense once you have Vista.
The final cost, and the only one in my list that Microsoft actually owns the whole problem for is the fact that I can't get Vista SP1 to install. Actually, the core update that is the problem is 935509 -- which is an update for BitLocker which is a prerequisite to SP1 installation. I also can't install 930627 which Adobe claims is why the computer sometimes locks up. When I run the update for 930627 it says that it doesn't apply to my system. So I do have a case open with Vista support. Support for issues installing SP1 are free. Of course the problem has been isolated (by me) to an issue with a manifest GUID conflict for the WinSXS (Windows Side-By-Side) component. Of course, what is causing the conflict or how to resolve it is beyond the folks I've been talking to.
So what's the real cost of Vista? There's a small software cost to it, most of which are the third party applications you use, but most of it is time. Time to get things reinstalled and working. Time to work on resolving your issues, and time to track down all of the things that you need to make it all work.
When you decide to take the plunge ... make sure you have time on your hands ... and a credit card.
Categories:
Professional
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Thursday, July 24, 2008
I can still remember the most astonishing and frightening moments in my son's development. My brother had gotten married the day before in St. Louis and rather than head of directly to a honeymoon with his bride, they stuck around and showed us the town. If you're in St. Louis it's some sort of rule that you have to go to the Gateway Arch. Upon exiting the arch itself we returned to the underground museum with showed what an old shipyard might have looked like. What I heard was frightening. My newly minted sister-in-law asked my son if he could swing on the ropes like Tarzan. My brain clicked into emergency mode as it evaluated the situation. The ropes were too high for my son to reach so I settled back into normal mode and then it came. My son, four at the time, responded "Tarzan doesn't swing on ropes, he swings on vines." As my neurons fired up again I was pleased and then very scared. I realized quickly that my son had taken in information in the form of a question, converted it into factual data, compared it against what he already knew, identified the data didn't match his understanding, validated that it was the wrong data and then communicated back this information to the person from whom the data came. I realized at that moment that I wasn't going to be able to keep the upper hand intellectually on my child. I've got a few years of experience to lean on but at some point I'm going to have to accept that my son will be smarter than I am.
What does this have to do with a book titled Brain Rules by John Medina, as it turns out, quite a bit. I got a little glimpse into how little brains work. In his book John points out 12 simple rules about how the brain works, how it was put together, and the factors that influence it. He encourages a set of alternative ideas at the end of each rule so that we can ponder what things might be like if we actually paid attention to what we know about how we think and how our brain works.
I'm intently interested in how our brains work -- mainly to figure out what's happening to mine when it misfires. Some folks are interested in every aspect of how a car works. (He's a spoiler, lots and lots of micro explosions). I'm interested in how PEOPLE work. Not just me but others as well. How is it that when I tell my wife something she hears something completely different? How can two people argue while saying the same thing?
John doesn't have the answer to every question -- however, I like the answers he does have to some fairly basic questions including how men and women's brains function differently.
It's worth reading Brain Rules -- that is if you feel like you want to know more about how your brain -- and the brains of those around you -- really work.
Categories:
Professional
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Wednesday, July 09, 2008
When I first released The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users I was asked about all sorts of things. One of those things was if there were any screen shots available. At that point, I wasn't able to say yes. But that's changing. I was able to work with my technical editor for the book and he's agreed to record the step-by-step instructions in the book into screen casts. The screen casts will have the same content as the book but available in a video format that some users prefer. We're about 20% of the way done with the preproduction files and expect to do the packaging of the individual files in the next few weeks. We're probably still more than 30 days out from having a complete screen cast offering set; however, it's something that I feel good about starting to offer customers. If you're interested in talking about pricing or learning more you can email my administrator for the project.
We're also nearly complete with the SharePoint site option for licensing the content. This option allows you to get the book as a wiki that users can comment upon and link to in their emails. The beauty here is that it includes a limited license to the commenter web part that we've been developing which allows you to restrict edits to the wiki pages themselves – but allows folks to comment on the pages. This way you can have the sort of limited editing experience that many organizations have been looking for. If you're interested in the wiki/site based license or purchasing the commenter web part for your own uses, email my administrator.
Categories:
Professional
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Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Shortly after recording the first two web casts of the series for MSSharePointDeveloper.com I was notified that the demos were unworkable because the recorded area of the screen was too small. Last week I rerecorded the web cast for Web Parts and the one for Data Lists so that the demos are now easier to see. They're available on the same URLs, so nothing has changed on that end. If you have problems with these please don't hesitate to let me know.
Categories:
Professional
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Saturday, July 05, 2008 I mentioned a few days ago that my books project listing was back online. We'll I'm pleased to announce that my article listing is almost completely back online as well.
Why almost? Well, there are still a few entries that I know are missing -- however, Most of them are available now. You can look at a raw list of the articles, one nested by publisher, or by publication date year and month.
One of the future projects will be to get them tagged by topic.
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Thursday, July 03, 2008 On my old web site (ASP-based) I had a listing of books that I had worked on. It was one of those things that seemed to be a curiosity for folks as I always seemed to get comments on it. Sometimes it was Netware being on the list, other times it was game programming. In any case, due to some help, the list is finally back online.
We're working on getting the article list put back together as well, maybe I'll be able to announce that it is complete soon.
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