28. February 2009 by Terry.

So……..its tax return time…and to many that means that bills get paid, money gets saved, etc……….not so much with me.   Lets see over the last 3 years because of my tax returns I’ve bought my 46 inch wide-screen LCD Sanyo….my PS3……and some odds and ends.   However this year I decided that I would build myself a new tower, considering I had to use my P4 for my MAME Cabinet.   So I was faced with a decision to make.   I had a budget of about a thousand bucks to work with.   One thing I really wanted was a bigger monitor, so with that in mind I decided on a 22″ Wide-screen Acer.   Suckers huge compared to my old 17 inch Standard res.   Another thing I wanted was a system that I wouldn’t have to overhaul again in a year.   I’m not a DIE HARD PC gamer, so the option of SLI was there, but I decided against it for now.   Storage was also kind of second fiddle on this build as well.   Case wise I wanted to go with Cooler Master Cosmos case, but just couldn’t bring myself to spend the extra 200 bucks on it when I still had my perfectly good Cheiftec full size windowed just laying there.   So, taking that into consideration, here are my new specs.

Cheiftec Full Size tower case

AMD 7750X2 Black Edition (I decided to stay dual core because honestly, triple cores are useless and I don’t multitask or game enough to warrent a quad core of the same clock speed).

4gb ddr2 1066 OCZ 5-5-5-15

320gb Sata HD

Dual Layer SATA DVD Burner

Biostar TF8200 A2+ Motherboard (heat pipes on north and south bridge chips, as well as some pretty decent reviews, decent onboard video and optical audio with onboard HDMI, future board for the HTPC should I later upgrade to AM3)

Cooler Master v8 CPU Cooler (good lord this thing is fucking massive…lol)

OCZ Fatal1ty Modular 550watt SLI Rated Power Supply

XFX 9800GT 512mb ddr3 Video Card (I could of gone with a Gtx240 or so, but for a hundred bucks more it just didn’t seem worth it to me.)

Vista 32bit (Student copy, plus I don’t see myself using more than 4gb’s of ram for anything in the immediate future.)

Asus Wireless Card

Rosewill Media Card Reader

Logitech 5.1 speakers (Same speakers I’ve had for the last 5 and half years…………just cant killem…still work great.)

All in all I spent around 600 on the system itself, and then another 150 on just odd and end stuff I needed for around here.   Personally I think I came out on the right side of it.   I didn’t need anything extreme, and going AM3 was just too iffy, there’s only 3 or 4 boards on newegg that even fully support it and ddr3, and I refuse to buy intel.    Upgrade options later on are a faster quad core (when software is actually WRITTEN for quads), and more ram should the need arise which wont be anytime soon.   Build time took around an hour as I had to figure out how the v8 mounted onto the board, and it was a bit akward mounting the board with that hunk of stuff on there.   Overall though I’m very happy.   vista installed in about 10 minutes.   Didn’t have to install any drivers really, downloaded latest vid drivers, and installed the board drivers and I was pretty much good to go.    And might I say, I installed the demo version of DeskScapes from Stardock………that is some cool software, not sure if I wanna drop the 20 bucks on it, but its still really cool.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that it has the coolest red ambient glow from the PS and the Cooler……….looks devlish in a way….lol

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23. February 2009 by Terry.

So…I took a position over at my south store as the ISS.   For those of you that don’t know, that basically means that I deal directly with my installer customers on a daily basis.   That’s fine, nothing I haven’t done before.   The problem is that the guy I replaced knew these guy’s for a really long time…a good couple years, and got to joking with all of them on a fairly regular basis.   He got personally acquainted with all of them, and because of that he has a foot hold in my shops in trying to take their business from me.   I understand that, I realize that its an issue that comes along with the job.   The problem is, It seems as if I’m losing business.   The amount of sales I’m doing are just  getting lower and lower…and while one can definitely equate the low sales with the shitty economy…thats not what my boss’ see.

First and foremost…my business is supposed to be one of the few that is techincally recession proof.   Our business model is set up so that we’re 50 percent retail, 50 percent installer.   Therefore, if we lose business in installer, we usually see a rise in retail (customers fixing their stuff on their own instead of an installer).   To my boss’ though, the fact that were losing anything in installer is a bad sign.   That bad sign leads directly back to me.   I feel as if there is a huge amount of pressure to prove myself to these people…and I’m trying………but it doesn’t seem to be working.    Me and my outside sales rep went out south to the bulk of my customers the other day to see if anything was happening that we should know about, as well as to introduce me face to face for the first time, to personalize me more with my shops.   Some shops went incredibly well, we’ve got a great lead on some hydraulic business with KDOT Osage, as well as a bulk filter order.   Thats great, hydraulic fittings are a shit ton of money, as well as the other pieces of that such as hose, equipment, fluid, etc.   Other shops were so so, I don’t really know what to say to an account that is a body shop that I could technically try to get, but I myself am not allowed to sell product too.   My east store is responsible for all of my dupont business…problem is that when i left the east store, no one over there knows a fucking thing now…lol   Thats the reason I was in charge of paint and body, and thats the reason I was selling 45 to 50 thousand  dollars a month, approx. 50 percent of the sales.

I’m supposed to branch out and find new business and stuff like that but yet my one coworker who has been there for 10 years, has control over about 30 percent of the business they want me to get.   Why is that?…Simple.   She’s got boobs, she’ll use them, and she gets away with it.   Don’t get me wrong, she’s a good person.   But I don’t like the idea of my talent being second fiddle to some womans sexuality and ability to flirt.   I know that she is a good salesman because she uses her assets to her advantage, but it still sucks because when it comes to running a store, following the policies, and general mechanical knowledge, she can’t hold a candle to me.   So…the question I have is…what do I do?   Do I go after the business she has to try to gain some of their confidence in me?   Or do I try to focus on the business I have and try to personalize myself more with them?   Or do I break down and go back east and take over paint again?

The sad thing is…I feel as if I put a lot of work into the east store and the paint, and to sit there and watch what its become…..I hate it.   I wanna go over there and get back all the business I’ve worked so hard to get.   But I dont wanna bail on the south store.   I feel as if the east store was a better fit for me and my skills, but I definitely have more oppurtunities at the south store.   I can make a lot more money out south than I can back east…..So once again I’m at a cross roads.

I don’t really know what else to do except try to gain some more business from answering more phones up front and just trying to personalize myself more with my south customers.  It’s just really daunting and sometimes I wonder if I’m really made out for it…

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11. January 2009 by Terry.

So…there is all this hoopla over the windows 7 beta.   I personally was let down in a big way by vista.   I loved the look and the new graphic side of the interface, but the menu layouts and just the shear amount of changes they made all at once are seriously messing things up.   I used the vista beta when it was out and it left a positive impression on me…it was freakin sweet looking.   The new transparent window scape and things like that were awesome.   And XP is such an awesome OS in a lot of ways that Vista should of been just as good.   Well….I got my hands on a copy of Vista Business through my student network and yeah…it was cool once I got everything up and running.   The issue was…I sat there having to look for different drivers to work for my wireless card…which is a really common chipset by RaLink.   After about an hour of searching I finally found an xp driver that worked.   Now…to someone that knows what there doing that wasn’t much of a problem, but someone who doesn’t…..that would piss me off.   Think about it, just bought this brand new system and you get it home and for some reason the wireless wont work…so you go to the website of the manufacturer and look for the driver, only the maker of the tower hasn’t updated their drivers for vista yet, or if they have they’re “Experimental”.

Bugs and Incompatability galore.   The other big thing that literally has me telling people to stay away from Vista entirely is the hardware requirements.   When I installed Vista Business 32-bit on my tower I was running a modest system.   An old 939 board, athlon x2 4200, 2gb of ddr ram, and a cheap geforce 6600 pci-x card.   The system was stable, but man did it LAG.   I thought about that and looked at the minimum requirements and was like WTF?   I know how to optomize a windows system, but I was sufficiently above the requirements, did a clean install, but was sitting there like why is this so clunky?

So………when I heard that MS was going to release Windows 7 Fairly quickly after the Vista Fiasco, I wasn’t all that surprised.   Here is what I’m Surprised with though…..its good………its not great…….but its good.

So the new Desktop isn’t a HUGE step like going from XP to Vista was, but its a good step in the right direction.   The main changes are obviously that the taskbar has added some additions such as quick previews and the like.

The new Preview option borrows slightly from Mac OSX and other docks that are commonly found, such as my personal favorite Object Dock.

Something else that’s fairly cool is the new “hot lists”.   For example, they’ve added in the start menu now a quick access list to the most recent files you’ve created, used, etc. for each recently accessed program.   So if you like me used paint to prtscrn some screenshots really quick, it will present you with a quick access on the start menu for the paint program.    The same with Word, Outlook, etc.   This might not seem like much, but its a welcome addition.

Something else that’s new, is a little context menu in of all programs, PAINT.    Not everyone understands the differences between image file formats.   MS smartly recognizes this and added a context menu to the save as command, offering the most common image types and there most common uses.   For example, for the jpg format, the menu says that its meant for e-mail, web use, and uploading to photo sites.   Gif says its mainly a web format, BMP for higher quality, etc.   This is just a cool menu I found that shows that MS isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here, there going down to small details, which is something they didn’t do enough of in VISTA.

This post is a work in progress, as I test more and get more screen shots I’ll post them along with the rest of my impressions.

UPDATE: January 28, 2009

So I’ve been using the Win 7 beta for a while now, learning its advantages and shortcomings and I’ve come to a few more conclusions.   First off, it runs MUCH better on a low end system than Vista does.   For example, my test system is a ~4 year old Dell, P4 3.0ghz, 1gb of ddr3200.   I’m running it off an 80 gig 7200 rpm ide drive that’s about 3 years old.   Vista runs slow as a dog on this system when I tested it a while ago.   Win 7 however runs amazingly well.   In fact, the aero interface in Vista was darn near unusable in this setup, however the Win 7 beta runs the interface quite well.   Oh, and btw, this setup is running on an ANCIENT Nvidia geforce FX5200 AGP.

Sure, the tower may be fairly low powered compared to what I’m used to using.   But, I’m very much a techie who finds a use for  my old stuff.   For example, my very nice Nmedia HTPC case thats hooked up to my very nice Sanyo LCD 46″, is housing an old AMD board, a Sempron 2400 SOCKET A, 512mb of ddr2700, and a 40gb IDE for windows, and a 320gb SATA drive for media.   Can anyone use that system for their needs anymore?   Probably not, but just for running Media Portal it works extremely well at viewing my dvd rip collection on my lcd through a Geforce 6200 AGP with a dvi to HDMI adapter cable.   So what do I have in that system money wise?……maybe 100 bucks now days besides the case?

Just goes to show you that old hardware still has many uses to someone who can find a use.   I kept that in mind as I used Win 7 over the last couple weeks.   I can honestly say that one of its BIGGEST pro’s is that its much more lenient on  the hardware side.   Especially in a recession, its harder than many people think to get someone to upgrade there software, let alone put out another 500 or more for a new tower or laptop.

Another Pro is the adjustment of the UAC that i HATED in Vista, into something thats just bearable.   To me it works like an intelligent software firewall.   For example, it asks if you want to change the time and date when attempting to.   Now in Vista, it would ask……every…..time……Granted how often does someone change the time on there system but still, its the point.   You could remedy this by turning the UAC off…..completely off.   There was no middle ground.   At least in 7 they’ve set up the permissions so that the UAC only asks once for common tasks.

Now I do have some cons.

While I consider myself a power user, why did it take me more than 5 minutes to find the device manager?   I applauded MS for trying to make the control panel more user friendly in Vista, but you can’t go from one way of doing things for almost 10 years, change it for one release, and then completely change it again.    Menu driven interfaces are great for everyday users, however I still do believe that there should be an option to return the control panel back to an xp-era style.   To me at least it would make for an easier transission.   And i STILL couldn’t get my very common rt2500 chipset wireless card to work.   Swapped out for a marvell chipset and BAM, works like a charm.   Odd, as my rt2500 after a little finageling with the drivers worked fine in VISTA.

Now this really isn’t a con, as much as it is a suggestion; A request if you will.

As a power user, I’m used to using the administrative tools options to stop and start services on startup.   However, more times than not, I find myself using the same tried and true method of hitting up run, and msconfig.   I use this menu after building systems to stop certain software from starting, such as MSN Messenger, Lexmark one touch printer utilities, Java Update Scheduler, etc.   Anything that generally takes up system memory and doesn’t really do ….anything until you interact with it.    It really is amazing how many bs programs are running in the background on every system I work on.   It would be nice if there was some sort of a program or menu that an everyday user can use to do the same thing a more advanced user has done for god knows how long in msconfig.   A simple menu with the program name, and what it does would be fine.   Hell if you want you can even throw in a level of requirements, say 3 levels, needed at startup, not needed, or unsure.   Not saying that any system services should be included, but do I really need Google Earth to update everytime I start my damn system.

Okay, that is all for now.

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1. January 2009 by Terry.

So its a couple hours before the end of 2008.   I had a lot of good moments this year and a lot of pretty bad ones.   For any of you that know me should know about most of the things I’m talking about, But here comes the reflection anyways.

January 2008:   January wasn’t that bad.   I started out the year in bed with a really incredible girlfriend in Shelby.   We had just gotten back from Raymond’s new years shindig.   I couldn’t help but feel really optimistic at that point.

February - May 2008:   Okay…..this was kind of a train wreck.   Shelby had moved out of her dad and stepmoms, lived with her roomate……fought with her roomate…….and fought………..and fought………and fought….lol….eventually we realized it just wasn’t working out so she moved in with me, made j’s old room kaylee’s room.   Now….to be completely honest, Shelby was still having a little trouble adjusting to the whole being on her own thing.   I figured that living with someone like me who’s self sufficient would be a good thing, and it was to an extent.   I absolutely fell in love with kaylee while she was here…and I’m not gonna lie and say that I didn’t think about what it would be like if she were to be my daughter someday.   Long story short…Shelby freaked out because I was more committed to making future plans than she was…..and we broke up.   Me not being a complete asshole and her not having anywhere else to go, I told her she could stay with me until she could get on her feet.   That worked for ……………….maybe a month, and then it just went to shit.

June 2008:   This is when I had probably the most shocking thing in my life happen to me.   I was working at the east store…nothing really new that day.   I get a call from my sister……fro died.   My grandmother was and still is my best friend in a way.   She was always there to help me……….and to listen to me when I all I needed to do was vent and talk.   I just remember getting home and calling Shelby to take me to the hospital………….and I remember breaking down and just………bawling my eyes out………..and i got it together……..and that was it…….through the viewing…..funeral…………….I didn’t cry again………….some people may say that thats a bad thing…..that I didn’t get it out………….to all those people I say that people deal with greif in their own way………let me deal with it in mine.

July 2008:   One big ass argument with Shelby and I found myself with her and kaylee  moving out and back to arkansas at the end of the month.   Well……..I’m not the type to bash people so I’ll just say that it was for the best.   However…………I still really miss Kaylee.

August 2008:   I Finally took the plunge and went part time at the store and went out on my own with my own business.

September 2008:   I realized that I went out on my own at the WRONG time with the economy and the meltdown.

October - December 2008:   Went to working at the east store and south store 6 days a week to make ends meet, eventually getting lucky and taking a job at the south store with an awesome schedule and better pay than I had before I left.

So………all in all……….I’m in a better job than I was last year……..I learned some valuable life lessons with my business…….especially how much money I’d Have to invest directly to make it work.   And I learned just how much I want a family of my own……..Not nessecarily today….but sometime soon.   I just wish I knew what the new year was gonna bring.   It’s hard to believe that after all the stuff that happened to me this year that I’d be optimistic………..but I am.   I mean yeah, I don’t have a girlfriend, and I don’t know what my next step is in my career if I’m gonna stay with Oreilly or go out on my own again……….but it doesn’t matter to me right now…….because its a new year………and I’m gonna try to make the best of it.

Resolution?

To explore more of what makes me…………me.

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15. December 2008 by Terry.

So…I found some old stuff when I was cleaning out the closet. In particular some VERY old writing that I wrote a VERY long time ago. I’m talking about the time period when me and Katie were together, some even before that. It made me realize just how much my Life and outlook have changed since then. For those who don’t know, right after I got out of High School, around 16, I met my best friend Katie. At the time I was very depressed because of my home situation, and a lot of other personal things that I think a lot of teenagers go through, stuff they just have to get over on their own. I had a lot of anger in me because of the school situation and my sister. When I met Katie…talk about polar opposites. She was just getting out of High School, and was Perky…REALLY…Perky. No matter how much Sarcasm and FTW attitude I through at her she always came back with a good thought about how things would be getting better in time. Maybe she’d been through it herself and knew what it was like, maybe not. For whatever reason though, she stayed with me and helped me through a very rough time.

I wrote a lot back then, trying to get my thoughts out. Poetry, Song lyrics, the whole gauntlet. I kinda stopped after a while, not really sure why. Probably because I just got too busy. It was right about then that I was going from job to job just trying to get some cash together. I’m kinda bummed now that I stopped. So I figured I’d try again…so here we go.

For almost a decade you’ve been my friend,
a crack in the wall of the dark crevice of self,
letting the sunlight pierce through as if a sword through stone,
shimmering in its opposite light

For almost a decade you’ve been my friend,
the voice on the other end of the line,
soft and gentle in it’s magic,
making my cheeks turn upwards as if standing on my head

For almost a decade you’ve been my friend,
the face I’ve seen in front of me,
losing myself in your eyes of warmth,
feeling heaven’s grace on your lips

For almost a decade you’ve been my friend,
holding your small hand in my own,
knowing that deep down, without a shadow of doubt,
these are the hands of someone who will do something great

For almost a decade you’ve been my friend,
For almost a decade…Friend.

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