My Geek Notes

I’ve always been a big fan of paper. I learned to make a crane as a young lad sitting in church. (Hey, gotta have something to do while the adults are all talking).

So when my friend Vitamin K sent me a link to some really cool paper models, I was impressed.

So, I’ve been playing around with blogging lately as a way to make money.

On my personal blog the other day, I decided to write an article about eliminating client phone calls and trimming time out of the day. The article included a review of a book I’ve read recently. “4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferris.

It’s a great book and I’ve had a ton of success applying its principles which I explain in detail on the post on my site.

As an expiriment, I signed up for an Amazon Associates account, and linked the image of the book and the title to the corresponding title page at Amazon.com. Embedded in the link was my associate id, so on the chance that someone clicked through and made a purchase, I’d get a small commission.

Well, the truth of the matter is that I didn’t expect to make a cent. My blog isn’t read by many people - it’s brand new and at the time only had three posts.

Imagine my surprise when, today, I logged into my Amazon account to create a new link for another product (”The Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde) and found out that I’d made some money.

It turned out that 32 different people had clicked through on the link I’d provided and a whopping 3 of them bought the dadgum book.

If I sell just 4 more books, my commission goes up from 4 to 6%, and, here’s the best part - I can choose to get paid in Amazon gift certificates!

Found this interesting map of Linux distributions today. I’m sure this doesn’t include them all, but it was interesting nonetheless.

I chopped out the funny part on this podcast where you can here the exercise ball exploding and Leo hitting the ground.

You can find the whole thing on The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte. I’ve listened to it a couple of times now and laugh every time. Enjoy!

I recently decided to limit my time spent fixing others’ computers to mine and my wife’s immediate family; still quite the handful of people, but they do favors for me all the time so it seems an even exchange. The problem now lies in how to handle everyone else (mostly neighbors and associates) who would love for me to fix their computers for free. Even just giving advice can be terribly time consuming. The following are methods I’ve started to use to ensure I don’t end up fixing others’ computers for free, and still save face.

1. Leave the ball in their court
I just used this one the other night when stopped by a neighbor as I walked past her house. She needed some sort of HTML template for a site she submits to regularly. What she needed didn’t sound too hard, but I wasn’t willing to become the “project lead” by any means so I told her to get it all on paper and swing it by my house. I still haven’t heard from her. Making the requester take the initiative cancels out many would-be projects.

2. Delay them for another time
Most times when people have approached me, they want me to look at something right then or the same day. Similar to number one you can put the ball in their court by saying, “you know I don’t have time today (or this week) - give me a call next week and we’ll coordinate something.” This way they now have to take initiative a week from now and you’re not left getting back to them.

3. Stop volunteering advise or to help
Back when I was a young geek I used to want to fix everyone’s computer problems because I “knew it all”. Now I don’t even like to tell people what I do for a living for fear they’ll want me to do something for them. This method is a great one because it actually forces the requester to ask for your help when, after telling you their story, you haven’t volunteered a solution. It’s great practice for being a good listener and offering the occasional, “wow, that sucks.”

4. Refer someone else to fix the problem
I used this one the other night with the same lady in method #1. She said that her second computer was no longer seeing the printer over the network. Well come to find out, the original setup was done by another guy in the neighborhood, a friend of mine. “Well, he’s the man to fix that problem then”, I said. It’s such a great feeling to refer someone else who is more “skilled” at something than you are.

5. Quick list solution
This method usually starts off with, “Now here’s what you need to do …” and ends with a list of programs, tweaks, or hardware that will fix their problem. Best case scenario, they understand and fix the problem. Worst case, they come back 10 minutes later not remembering one of the steps or with a new problem because they did something wrong. Only use this one on the simple stuff because it will take you seconds/minutes to explain and won’t be too hard for them to do themselves … you hope.

6. Offer a “discounted” rate
I got this idea from my brother-in-law who uses it quite often. The neighbor approaches with the problem. You state your regular rate of $150/hour but say, “hey, your my neighbor so I’ll only charge you half that amount.” And there you go - either the neighbor pays you for your time or walks away thinking, “what a great guy to offer such a discount, although I can’t afford it”.

7. Offer to exchange services
Same as the previous one and also from the brother-in-law. This time you turn the tables and ask a favor in return playing on the requester’s strengths. I’d advise you use a different method if the requester doesn’t do something beneficial to you like mechanics, landscaping, or dentistry.

8. Refuse to troubleshoot over the phone
I really, really hate trying to figure out what’s wrong with someone’s computer over the phone especially when you’re at the question level of “is the computer on?” or they ask, “what’s a desktop?”. Say, “you know it’s really hard to do this over the phone” and then work in a #1 or #2 and cross your fingers that they never take initiative.

9. If you really don’t know, tell them
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to do research myself to figure out someone else’s problem and then fix it. Saying, “you know, I really don’t know how to fix that” may make you look a little week in the geekhood, but when you’re a seasoned (and weathered) geek, do you really care anymore? I know my time is more important to me now than how much others think I know.

10. I’m sorry, I just don’t have the time
The end all, the failsafe, the honest answer. The best way to approach this one is to make them understand that you really, really wish you could help them, but you just don’t have the time. This one reminds of the episode of Cheers where Norm has to fire people as part of his job and ends up sobbing every time. Those being fired end up comforting Norm. Great show.

Let me know of any you have. Anything to save my time and face.

Blizzard has given notice that they’re going to be making a big announcement this Saturday in Korea. If I had to choose I’d probably want it to be Diablo III, or some new world (very unlikely), but my money is on “World of Starcraft”. Starcraft is huge in South Korea, so right off the bat it seems unlikely to be a non-starcraft game (another RTS, i.e. Starcraft 2, would be the other possibility). Blizzard is in a class by itself, so I’ll definitely be picking it up whatever it is, and I personally know a hundred people just like me, so whatever it is, it should be a success. Recently they seem to be announcing closer to the actual release, so my other hope would be that whatever it is, it’s coming soon.

I’m not very good at waiting

Late Edit: Further research revealed that the countdown to “question mark” front back of Blizzard.com is mirrored on the site starcraft2.com. Too bad of all the possible game announcements that’s the one I’m the least excited about…

I was browsing around the other day and found that Thunderbird 2 had been released. I’ve been casually checking the mozilla site ever since I noticed that Thunderbird 2 was in beta. My current version of Thunderbird had not yet detected the upgrade but I thought what the heck I’ll give it a try.

Some of the new features like improved searching, custom message tagging, and advanced folder views, are really nice. Since on occasion TB on WinXP crashes, I was also hopping for an overall stability improvement, as well.

After I installed the new version, which was painless by the way, I noticed a rather annoying issue. All new messages in my Inbox were already marked read even though I had not opened the Inbox and had not read any messages. I started to look a little closer and the messages appeared to come in as un-read but then change almost immediately. After searching Google and the Thunderbird forums I found a few posts where others had the same issue. The forum posts had attributed it to the filtering rules.

After messing with the rules, turning them off etc. I still had the issue. Then I noticed that every time the message alert pops up the messages that appeared in the alert were getting marked read. One of the new features in the 2 version is that when a new message is received an alert pops up and tells you about the new message then disappears. The new pop alerts contain more message information, including a message preview, than they did the past versions. Yep you guessed it the message preview was marking the message as read when the alert was fired off.

The fix turned out to be pretty simple, don’t show message preview text in the alerts. To disable this setting open Thunderbird, Click on the Tools menu in the menu bar then click on Options under Tools. In the Options window, select the General Tab and click the Customize button next to the Show an alert checkbox. In the Customize New Mail Alert window, un-check the Message Preview Text checkbox and click the OK button. Click the OK button to close the Options window. That’s it, now you’ll still get the message alerts minus the preview and the message will not be marked read until you read it or mark it read yourself.

This is an update to a post I made about how the themes are broken in phpMyAdmin 2.10.x.

While getting a new development environment setup I thought I would check to see if any progress had been made to update some of the themes I use for phpMyAdmin. I found that the following themes have been updated and the version it works with:

The one I use the most:
Very small PMA-Version 2.7 - 2.10

Others that I usually download:
Arctic Ocean PMA-Version 2.9 - 2.10
Grid PMA-Version 2.9 - 2.10
Silk PMA-Version 2.10
Paradice PMA-Version 2.10

The updated themes can be found here

So i was recently browsing the web to find some new wallpaper for my monitors at work (a weekly ritual to help liven up my work week), when I came across the really cool one shown here on Iconfactory’s website.

The wallpaper intrigued me so I decided to find out what the word “frenzic” at the bottom of the image stood for. After researching for a minute on Iconfactory I found out that the image came from a new game that ARITS Software had released earlier this year called Frenzic.

I downloaded the free trial from their site and gave it a go, not knowing what the game was about. After my first game I was hooked. The game is laid out with a main circle (where the new pieces show up) and six surrounding circles (where you place the pieces). There are three different color of pieces in the game and each circle is broken down into six wedges. A piece will show up in the center circle and you have to place it into the corrosponding spot in one of the three outer circles before the timer reaches full. You get points whenever you fill up an outer circle. But the most points come from filling up a circle with a pieces that all have the same color. This also gives you a bonus: 3 circles give an extra life and the other three give you a bonus action: slow speed; destroy all peices in outer circles; double points. The speed with which you have to place the peices increases the longer you are able to play so it gets harder and harder.

On the Frenzic website they have instructions, high score boards, forums and all sorts of of other stuff about the game. So if you have a Mac and are looking for a fun game that you can play for a few minutes (or a few hours) download the free trial from the homepage of their site and give it a try. And if you get addicted to the game you can buy it for $14.95, or pay $24.95 and get unlimited lifetime access to all of the online features available on their site.

My initial plan was to wait a while before seeing Spider-Man 3 (in fact I think I may have even mentioned that here), but one of my co-workers talked me into taking off early and going to see it at the IMAX. So I’m guessing you want to know what I thought. Well the last time I checked Rotten Tomatoes Spider Man 3 stood at 61%, just barely fresh (the cut off is 60% for some reason), which is a pretty fair assessment I think. Going in my big worry was that they had tried to do too much, for one thing three villains seemed excessive. On that count they did pretty good, which is not to say that three villains wasn’t excessive just that it went about as well as it could. So as you can see I went in with fairly low expectations, and as a result was probably overall pleasantly surprised.

Other good things: The final fight was quite good; the actors who have just joined the franchise were excellent. As usual J. Jonah Jameson was hilarious (though I think the funniest scene was Bruce Campbell’s obligatory cameo). I was once again reminded that James Franco would have been 10 times better than Hayden Christiansen as Anakin (IMHO). Some of the scenes with Peter and Mary Jane were painfully realistic. On the negative side, there’s a section in the middle after Spiderman gets the black suit (not spoiling anything I hope) that is… well awful. If you’re like me and you drank too much soda pop, when Peter changes his hair style, that’s your cue to make a break for the restroom. Which bring up another point, it’s long… nearly 2 hours 20 minutes as I recall.

Oh one last thing, I noticed that “Gilwell Park” was the featured article on Wikipedia today. That probably doesn’t mean anything to most of you, but trust me it’s cool.

Bear your weekend with longanimity