Author: way0utwest

I have been a fan of 37 Signals for some time, and I read their blog regularly. I think they go a great job of writing about how to run a business and not build an investment.
Rework is a summary of quite a bit of advice from their blog that has been rewritten and compiled. It’s a business book that give you advice on how to start your own business, how to hire people, how to get motivated in a real way.
This isn’t the book for someone that wants to start a company and sell it for a million dollars. It’s not a book that helps you get rich quick. It’s a book that tries to get you to think about how business actually works, build something that you are proud of, and something that succeeds.
The book is a series of chapters, each broken into short 1-2 pages snippets of information on a particular topic. Each section has an illustration from the 37 Signals artist, all of them quick sketches, and many of them humorous looks at the topic.
You could get all of this information from their blog, but it’s nicely summarized and edited in this book. It’s not a reprint of the blog, it’s a rewrite of the same information, but cleaned up. They talk about how their initial draft was twice as long, but then cut down the verbosity to get to the meat of the topics. That’s advice they give you for business as well. Don’t use more words than you need.
Something I need to learn.
This is a great business, book, in my opinion. One that’s worth reading if you are even thinking of starting your own business.

I saw this article on the improvements from E-ink that are coming. There are two videos, one of a better screen that can handle simple animations, likely getting into actual products you can by in about a year (early 2011).

The other was low power, but more durable. The guy in the second video smashes a fist into the screen.

Impressive.

I like the idea of e-ink, but after having a Kindle, and and  iPhone, the iPhone just works better.

My Windows Home Server died a month ago, just as I was getting ready to leave the country. I didn’t have time to deal with it, but since I was still in the process of moving data over to it, I felt fairly safe. When I got back to it a couple weeks ago, I found that a disk drive had died, and it must have been the boot drive as the BIOS reported a “disk read error” on startup.

Rather than panic, I searched around and found this thread on the Microsoft site that noted how to copy data off disks. That’s an easy one, basically drop the disk in another machine, show hidden folders, look for the “data” folder. I copied all the pictures, music, and video off the drive. Backups were gone, but I was OK with that for now.

The next step was to get new drives. I isolated the broken one, RMA’d it to Western Digital, which went well, and then went out and bought a new drive. I got another 2TB drive, and an external enclosure from NewEgg. Those allow me to easily add more space since the inside of my old Dell E521 is crowded.

While waiting for new drives, I reinstalled my 1TB, 2TB, and a slightly older 320GB drive into the machine and re-ran setup for Home Server. That’s easy and I was back up. I used the same password and machine name, but I found something interesting.

My client machines could connect to the shared folders, but I couldn’t setup a backup. Must be some signature/encryption link. However if you rerun setup for the Connector software, it takes a few minutes, and then it rebuilds everything as it was.

That’s done, I’ve copied music, video, and pictures back to the Home Server for sharing, and reset backups on 2 machines. My wife needs to do hers and we’ll be protected again.

At least internally. I need to get something going offsite, at least for the photos.

I was listening to the announcement of SQL Server 2008 R2 yesterday on a call from Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing, downloadable on May 3. While listening and making notes, I wandered over to the Microsoft SQL site and was surprised to find a video montage of the Tweet-up I attended in Bellevue a couple of weeks ago.

It was an interesting event and I’d like to do it again.  I almost didn’t go after a crazy month of March for travel, but I was curious what was worth Microsoft flying 8 of us to Bellevue for a day.

It turned out to be a fun event. A wine tasting mixed with an R2 briefing and discussion of the product. Donald Farmer and Dan Jones led the briefing, while we tended to joke and make fun of them, but also talked about the product. We were tweeting like mad while this was happening, in between sips of wine, of course, and it was fun.

But it was too late in the day. Starting at 5pm PST, most of the East coast had gone home, so we had very little interaction from outside the room. We heard a few things later on from others, but the spontaneous nature of the event was lost a bit.

I think it was an interesting idea, and I would like to do it again, perhaps even at something like the PASS Summit or TechEd.