Slashdot ran a story about Knoppix yesterday and it piqued my interest. So I went ahead and downloaded the latest ISO and burned the CD.

I'm impressed at the automatic support of all my devices without any user input. It, as they say, "just works". All Linux installations ought to be this easy.

I have some gripes with the system, though.

The first is that Knoppix doesn't make it obvious how to complete the Linux installation. I understand that Knoppix is designed to be a distro on disk, but such a distribution is only a stepping stone to actually putting the OS on the disk for permanent installation. Why, then, doesn't Knoppix have an option under the Knoppix menu to prep and install the OS to the hard drive?

Another complaint is the lack of device control. Specifically I cannot figure out how to adjust the mouse sensitivity. The mouse pointer for my USB mouse flies across the screen at the slightest touch, and I can't figure out where the mouse applet lives. There doesn't seem to be any consolidated device control area, so I'm sure I just haven't hunted enough for the right applet. I would really like it if the device settings were all in a easily accessible and obvious place.

A very small thing I noticed and thought strange was that the KDE 'Start' button isn't activated by the Windows key.

I really don't like transparent system menus. I guess some people like it, so I don't begrudge them that. I just want to know how to turn it off. Where is this setting? It sure as hell isn't in the Desktop settings applet.

Why is the documentation so lacking? There seems to be a concerted effort to put the least amount of effort into writing the help documentation. I started Frozen Bubble, which I think is a game, and it hung when I selected the 1-player mode. So I clicked the 'X' and...nothing. So I right click Frozen Bubble in the task bar and select Close and...nothing. Now I'm stumped. It seems to me that the OS should realize that the application isn't terminating and do what it can to shut down the process, ideally it would prompt the user before it sent the final kill signal. There was simply no response from the application or any acknowledgement from the OS that the application was hanging.

Then I remembered, hey, this is Unix. There's got to be some manual way to kill processes. So I opened up bash and tried to figure out a way to kill the hanging process. The kill command needs a process number, so how do I get a process number? bash help doesn't help. This is where my documentation complaint really started to kick in. Why wouldn't the bash 'help kill' documentation have a pointer to whatever the command was to list running procs? I'm not asking for a hyperlinked set of docs, just a simple 'Also see: WHATEVER THE COMMAND IS TO GET THE PROC LIST'. Finally I found Kkill in the application menu (of all places) which proceeded to kill the game of Mahjongg I had to minimize to get to the hanging Frozen Bubble.

In general, I get the feeling of a very good OS from Knoppix, but it lacks the polish of Windows 2000/XP or MacOS. I'd like to get to know it more when I have more time. I really want to figure out what the attraction is to this OS. Windows has come such a long way since the nightmare days of Win98. Windows 2000 and XP are approaching the point of perfection from a user perspective and stability standpoint.

Is it my preconceived notions of how smoothly and comfortably an OS should work that turns me off every time I boot Linux?

I am watching CNN and a London-based reporter is spending a month with an Ethiopian village to document the life of a starving people. He is large in size, probably 250 pounds or so and taller than most of the Ethiopians he lives with.

He wants to discover for himself the reasons behind the famine and starvation.

On his first day he accompanies his host family to the 'church' which is nothing more than a small clearing with seats out in the open. Upon his arrival several of the congregation become possessed with fear. They spring out of their seats and shake all over, dancing around like people possessed in voodoo rituals. They scream and cry out at his large appearance. One old village leader sums up for me the primary problem of this village's starvation which isn't simply lack of food. He stands before the congregation and proclaims loudly that he "heard that the man eats other humans". The problem is lack of education and a culture based on superstition.

So everyone ought to know who won the Franchise Wars. You know, where Sylvester Stallone gets treated to dinner in San Angeles by the evil Dr. Cocteau.

Wrong. Not Taco Bell. Pizza Hut. It was the weirdest thing. I was watching the lips say Taco Bell, but the words were Pizza Hut. Even the sign outside the restaurant said Pizza Hut. In fact, every single Taco Bell artifact was relabeled with the Pizza Hut logo.

It seems Tricon has gone and changed the outcome of the Franchise Wars on us.

I expect that KFC wins the Franchise Wars a few years from now...

I think the time has finally come to admit that I need help.

Not in the "I'm insane" way (though some of my friends would argue that ;) but in the "This business has grown too big for my britches" sort of way. The fact is that I need one of you sysadmin/programmer gurus to take me, a marketing/sales person, under your wing and grind out all these nifty little things to help me run my business better.

Here's what I'm looking for:
Absolute Requirements

First of all, you must be located in or near San Jose, CA. Yes, I know that there are many qualified techies in other places than San Jose. However, the fact of the matter is that our servers are in San Jose, and these servers will be your babies to take care of, both hardware-wise and software-wise. That means you need to be able to run into the datacenter and fix them.

Secondly, you must be willing to carry a pager and get pages from people who need reboots, kernel recompiles, etc. The vast majority of our customers do not page, but when they do, we need to be there and jump on it within 10-15 minutes. Technically, you will be on-call 24/7, but you won't be awakened much in the middle of the night -- perhaps only once or twice a month. As you deploy more APC remote reboot ports and a console server for us, you'll empower our customers to fix their own problems and drop that number down to 0.

You need to be a UNIX guru, but you need not stick up your nose at Windows, either. Again, the vast majority of our customers are running Linux or FreeBSD, but we do have the odd Windows server here and there. You don't have to love Windows; you just have to not whine about having to administer it every once in a while. ;)

You must know PHP and be willing to spend a good part of your time programming systems in it. This is an absolute requirement.

So, in summary:
* You must be located in San Jose, be able to drive to the datacenter, and meet the following criteria:
* Be an excellent UNIX systems administrator. Be prepared to administer mostly Red Hat systems, with a few FreeBSD and Windows systems thrown in for good measure.
* We'll buy you a pager or pay your cell phone bill. In return, you agree that you will be on call. Yes, you may get awakened in the middle of the night a couple times a month. But it won't be that often, and with your help, we're going to drop that down to an absolute minimum.
* Know PHP, shell scripting, and Perl. PHP and BASH scripting are a must.
* Be interested in web hosting. We'll give you a free dedicated server or two for you to play with, or we'll colo your boxes for free. (Yay for job benefits!)
* Be prepared to take a leadership role within the company. As the owner of the company, I will be taking your suggestions on how to improve processes. You must be able to step up and say "Hey, this needs to be fixed," get my approval, and run with it. You will "be your own boss" as much as you can; with only one person to report to, it will be your decision that goes.

Salary is still to be determined. Please state what you're looking for; since we're a startup on a budget, please be reasonable. Your job benefits will include a free cell phone and free dedicated boxes or colo space. It will not include traditional benefits such as health care.

This is a part-time, contract opportunity. I expect 10-20 hours a week to start and I fully expect this to be a full-time position within 6-12 months. This position is ideal for someone looking to break into the industry who may not have tons of experience but who is willing to learn and enjoy the benefits of having only one person to report to.

Right now, you will be working from home. Again, in the next 12 months, I will be looking for office space. We have big plans to expand -- this is your chance to be the technical leader of this expansion.

Please send your resume and salary requirements (for a contract of 40-80 hours per month) to erica@simpli.biz. I will be interviewing in person over the next 2-3 weeks.

Thank you!

I can't imagine a worse wine.

Nah, that's a lie. I've had worse.

At 13% alcohol content, it really makes watching the MTV Music Awards bearable.

Justin Timberlake won Male Artist of the Year? Did I drink too much, die, and wake up in Hell?

Lots new since then.

Most obviously, I've had my account unbanned.

Good grief, it's been a month since I've written here? Wow. I've been really busy. :)

Snopes.com has an interesting article up about LA County banning the use of the terms "Master/Slave" by its vendors (most commonly denoting hard drive arrangements.) A pretty fascinating read on how far political correctness has gone.

I've submitted it to Slashdot. We'll see what happens. ;)

Update: My third accepted story! Yay. :)

The subject of electronic voting machines and ways to stop political parties from buying votes brings up several interesting questions.

What would you do in the following hypothetical situation?

-- As you're walking in to the polling place, a stranger pulls you aside. The stranger says, "I'll pay you $20 to vote for the Democrat candidate in this election."

What would you do if you had already planned on voting for the Democrat? Would you take the money anyway?

Another, similar one:

-- Let's say you had no interest in the election whatsoever, but you were registered to vote. A stranger knocks on your door and says "I'll pay you $20 to vote for the Democrat candidate in the next election."

Would this convince you to vote?
Would it convince you to vote for the Democratic candidate?

These are just hypothetical questions. Answers, comments, flames, and wandering diatribes are welcomed, as always. :)

In the course of running a business, I've learned that one or two small mistakes can often ensure that your business doesn't do as well as it should (or could). It's amazing how much people talk on the Internet, and moreso than that, it's amazing how easy it is to be negative about things.

Slashdot has many great examples of this... just look at any TiVo article and you'll see three classic "disses" that are mentioned every time someone says "TiVo":

1) Who cares. I have a VCR. I don't see a need to pay a monthly subscription for a VCR, either.

2) Monthly subscriptions are the tool of the DEVIL!!! (Of course, I don't think paying monthly for Internet access is evil... just paying for TiVo monthly. And I've neglected to do my research and find out that you can pay for a lifetime subscription to negate all those oh-so-horrific monthly fees.)

3) Dude, I have like this 1337 setup that runs MythTV on Linux and it is so infinitely better than a TiVo. (Never mind that I have to have a keyboard and mouse by my TV and therefore I look like a complete geek... because see, this $500 PC here also runs MAME and therefore ALSO replaces a $99 Playstation!! OMG 1337!!!!11)

Riiiight.

99% of these types of respondents have never even used a TiVo, but they can't help being negative about it regardless. (Grr.)

Anyway, I'm getting offtopic. What this journal entry is about is a couple of mistakes Simpli has made and how they've helped to shape us as a company.

The first (and most major one) was a guy who leased a dedicated server from us, promptly moved all of his domains over without testing them, and broke everything. He emailed us from his Yahoo account stating that his server was broken and what-an-awful-server-we-had-given-him. Little did I realize that he had a reply-to set up on his emails that forwarded back to his main mail account... the one that was on his dedicated server, and, thus, was broken!

Well, after several hours of our non-responses (since they had gotten lost because of his reply-to settings), the guy writes a nasty message about Simpli on a message board. A customer of ours sees the message and points me to it, at which point my mouth promptly drops open because I realize that this guy hasn't gotten a single reply we had sent to him the entire day.

His mistake? Setting up the server without testing it. Sending us email from an account that had a reply-to that went back to the broken server (he didn't mention what domain names he tried to move over, so I didn't have any idea that that was broken, or that his reply-to was going back to the broken server.)

Our mistake? Not calling him.

What we learned: Now we promptly call all customers who are having problems with our services (which is surprisingly few people; we've never had someone who had the major issues this guy had). Since this guy left, we've beefed up support so nothing slips through the cracks. We're implementing a helpdesk system to better track requests, and we will be hiring again soon (more details on that later) because we need people to cover a few more hours so we have a true 24x7 support staff.

And we gave that guy a full refund.

Fast-forward to today. I was reading FortKnox's latest journal entry (by the way, the 2nd Slashdot Photo Contest is up again), and what do I see but a post from a guy who is unhappy that we haven't replied to his sales inquiry.

"Oh, sh*t", I think. "Here we go again." Sure enough, his hasn't been replied to. Sure, it was a bit offbeat and required some research on our end, but the fact was that I'd answered some doozies this month, and I'm not sure why that one slipped through the cracks.

What I learned (since I'm the one who responds to sales requests): I decided to get those sales inquiries out of my inbox and in to their own special little email folder, called (unsurprisingly) !sales inquiries. (I use the ! at the beginning to denote important email folders so they are placed first in the folder list.) I glance through them. We've received 17 sales inquiries through our contact form this month, and his is the only one I haven't replied to. Damn.

The good news is that with these filed safely away in their own folder, I can now easily glance at them and figure out who hasn't been replied to. Although we've probably lost him as a customer, the good news is that this probably won't happen again.

This has been an incredibly long journal entry, even by my standards! I guess I just needed to get that out there. Go forth and post comments... (oh, and vote in the Slashdot photo contest!)

Where's that "Winders" topic icon... ah, yes, there it is...

Does it f'in annoy anyone else that you can't rearrange the icons on the taskbar in Windows?

Speaking of compulsive behaviors, I must have Outlook first in my taskbar. I always open it first when I start my computer.

Invariably, Outlook crashes (IMAP has issues with Outlook) and I have to close it and open it again. But now it's at the end of my taskbar... after 15 other programs, all with unsaved work or multiple things open or... whatever. I don't want to close 15 programs just to get Outlook first again. Guh!

Hey Microsoft! *thwack* Give me a little drag-and-drop thing so I can put my precious Outlook first again! Yes, I am compulsive... but I know there are many of you out there whom this affects. Speak out now and unleash your wrath! :)

Oh, and I got shot down in the election today. I voted NO on the recall. But hey, that's okay. I am okay with Arnold. I believe he'll come around to his true Democratic traits soon... and then I'll be able to laugh at all those damned conservatives who voted for him over the true right-winger, Mr. Tom "I Have Extremely Creepy Eyes" McClintock.

Not that I'm vindictive. Not at all. :D

Alright... here's an interesting one. I want to hear what you think, especially in light of Cringely's latest article.

One of my high-school friends runs a very informal mailing list that reaches out to graduates of that high school. He uses it to send out notices about the school, party invitations, and more. There are about 120 people currently on the list.

Here's where it starts to get interesting. He sent out an email today regarding a website he really liked and asked for us to go check it out. I replied, agreeing that it was a great website, and I mentioned that Simpli would be advertising there next month. I figured it was a great tie-in -- after all, not only do I like the website, but I like it so much that we've signed an ad deal there for next month. I also said, "...if any of you are on the lookout for web hosting, you can jump in on our exclusive [website] deals starting next week."

I get two replies back asking me to stop making "product offers" on the list. These people consider my one-sentence plug to my high school classmates spam!

Now let me ask you this: Has our society become so inundated by advertising that we can't even stand a semblance of advertising from someone we know?

I run a mailing list for a website. We have about 10,000 people that we send out a monthly newsletter to. These people have all opted-in or double-opted in (double-opt-in means we send them a confirmation email and they have to click on a link to subscribe.) Every single month, we get complaints from people (often using profanity) that scream "TAKE ME OFF YOUR #@^*ing MAILING LIST!!" Now, this newsletter isn't exactly in the realm of penis enlargements or breast enhancers; it's a home improvement newsletter that you have to explicitly sign up for and that contains an obvious "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom. (Yes, I know all of the recipients are opt-in or double-opt-in, because I wrote the mailing list software that runs on their website. Thus, I know that the people getting this email have explicitly asked for it.)

Has the world become such that we are unable to distinguish between targeted and untargeted email? Have we become so engrossed in anti-spam campaigns that we ask to be "taken off the mailing list" when a fellow high school alumnus who runs a business sends us a single email about a website advertising deal?

Most importantly, where do you draw the line between "spam" and "not spam"?

In one of my previous journal entries, Liora made a comment that I've been meaning to reply to for a while. She said, "The interest rates pretty much mandate it such that renting is just dumb. Rent is throwing money away."

This is absolutely true for most of the country. It's absolutely NOT true for the Bay Area (hence the alternate title.)

Before we go on, I should mention a few things:
1) I rent;
2) I believe that housing prices in the Bay Area will drop about 10% (or perhaps more) in the next 3-5 years.

Why? Read on.

I just signed a 1-year lease for a 2BR/1.5BA condo for $1475 a month. This is the reason why I leased.

That is a link to a similar condo in Pacifica... a 2BR/1.5 bath, just like I have, and of the same vintage (built in 1972). They are asking $342,500 for it. This means that with a $68,500 down payment, I'd have to pay $1675 a month to own it.

Stop and think about this for a minute. Supposedly, the whole point of owning is that you aren't "throwing your money away" (i.e. a mortgage payment should be cheaper than renting the equivalent property), but I could put $70,000 down on this condo and have nothing to show for it except a larger mortgage payment than I would pay in rent. A housing price devaluation of 10% or more could completely wipe out any equity that I would have in the house after only a year or so of owning it. As many people learned with the stock market, it's extremely dangerous to always count on your investments to go up (like many people assumed both now with housing and in 1998-1999 with the stock market.) A lot of wealth was completely wiped out in 2000-2001 with the stock market devaluation. Imagine what any housing price devaluation will do to people who have saved up $50,000 or more to make a down payment, only to watch their equity disappear as housing prices face the same adjustment the stock market did.

Why will housing prices drop? To put it bluntly, they have to. Renting cannot forever be cheaper than owning, or people who buy investment properties will be out of work. People cannot afford to keep bleeding cash on investment properties like they are now. Plus, once interest rates go back up, those first-time home buyers who have been saturating the home-buying market right now will no longer be interested in buying. Thus, housing demand will drop, supply will keep going up (as builders keep building new houses and condos), and prices on houses will start to fall. And they will fall more than most people will expect. I'm forecasting an overall drop of 10%. It could be more, or it could take 5 years to hit 10%. But it will happen. This will wipe out a lot of equity for a LOT of people.

Renting vs. owning is a huge sticking point for me. I would love to own property. I could probably afford to own property in the Midwest. And I probably would own at this point if I lived in the Midwest. But in the Bay Area, it's not justifiable to own when you look at the numbers.

I'd rather take $68,500 and invest it into my company... that way, whatever return I get on it is directly influenced by me and how well I do sales. I know I can take that $68,500, put it into Simpli, and turn it into a revenue generator of $10,000 a month or more. There is no way I could do the same thing with a house. And that is why I rent.

Well, I've had this rant about MySQL and the GPL bottled up for a long time. I hoped to have it modded up so more people could understand and hopefully enlighten me further about this issue, but it's been modded down as Flamebait (it stands at 1 currently.)

Basically, the crux of the matter is that any application that uses MySQL client libraries (past version 4.1 of MySQL) either has to be GPL, or you have to pay $220 PER SERVER to MySQL to license their software. It's absurd, and as a developer of a semi-open-source, non-GPL application that uses MySQL, I'm pretty pissed about it.

I suppose I shouldn't have expected much sympathy on Slashdot (where open source is 31337!!!!!1) However, this affects a lot of people in the open-source community. What are programs like vBulletin, which is probably one of the most well-known MySQL-based applications, going to do? Raise their prices, of course, because MySQL has decided it wants a piece of their pie. Or only support old versions of MySQL. Or move to Postgres.

This might be the best thing that's ever happened to PostgreSQL, but it's certainly one of the worst in the MySQL development community. It's classic bait-and-switch, and I, for one, am pissed.

So I was in the car the other day, sitting in traffic, and I pondered what I was going to write about next. Should I wax philosophical about going to college vs. not, since it's back to school time? Should I ponder the deeper issues of using open-source software in a business? Should I talk about the GPL license vs. the BSD license and the merits of each, plus some ideas I've had about putting both to good use?

And then FortKnox got online on AIM and messaged me with "You still haven't written that journal entry about meeting me at the mall!" Because, you see, I had promised him that I would. And while I've put it off for 10 days, I can no longer resist...

So I met FortKnox.
At the mall.
In Cincinnati.
And, um, his kid was cute. Ran around the store like a mad terror, that kid did!

Tonight I went to the movies and I saw this woman holding a baby... and she couldn't have been any older than I was. In fact, I think she was younger than I was. The kid was probably a couple months old at most. Still, it scared the bejeezus out of me. Am I going to be one of those married-with-tons-of-kids people?!

And some voice inside my head says, "But FortKnox seems really happy to be married with a kid. He gets a total kick out of having that kid run wild around the mall. And it's totally cute the way he obviously adores his son."

It scares me to death. You! People! Stop getting married! We're still YOUNG, for chrissakes! We're too young to have kids! We're still having fun! Partying! Going to movies! Being single! Dating!

Right? Right?!

One day, I stopped in the middle of a bunch of work.

I had been on the phone with clients and potential clients all day. I'd just signed a huge web design contract, I had a fair amount of money in the bank, and I'd finished setting up a new reseller server so Simpli could offer reseller hosting plans.

I'd just finished setting up our last dedicated RaQ 550.

I OKed a lease on a new condo (I'll be moving next month.)

I used the last of our initial capital and began preparing a cash-flow statement so we could get more.

And I was busy writing a proposal for a new web design customer.

Somehow, in the middle of all that, I stopped. I looked up. And I realized that my company -- the company I've been pouring my heart and soul into for over a year now -- was finally successful. In that moment, I knew that from here, there was no place to go but up. Keep hiring. Find an office. Start the big advertising. Secure additional capital, because we are PROFITABLE. And keep our clients happy, because they've been referring new clients like mad.

For my entire life, I have been building companies... and now I've built one that has its own legs and is running on its own. This is a magical moment -- that one moment when you look out the window and you realize that this is what your entire life until now has been preparing you for. It's an indescribable feeling, but one that is extremely special.

I made it.

I will remember this for a long time to come... the first moment I realized that it really was all going to work out. I built this company from the ground up, and it has become more than I ever thought possible. All I can think is "I did that." And I am amazed.

:)