Joel Osteen considered

Dave Farquhar Christianity

Every once in a while somebody asks me about Joel Osteen. Osteen is the pastor of the largest of the megachurches, and the author of a runaway bestselling self-help book.

I’m not a student of Osteen. I haven’t read much of his book, nor have I seen him much on TV. I may have an incomplete view of what he teaches, but I have a problem with the things he does teach.The biggest problem is that Osteen teaches that if you’re a Christian, God rewards you materially. Even with the little things. Osteen says that it’s not just OK to want the best spot in a parking lot, or to be seated quickly at a busy restaurant, but to expect it.

Here’s the problem with that. What if somebody else genuinely needs that spot or that table more than I do? I don’t know what’s going on in everybody else’s day, but God does.

The Bible tells me to deny myself, pick up my cross and follow Jesus. It also tells me to love my neighbor as myself.

Sure, I’d like to have the best available parking spot. But if one of my coworkers has a blister on his foot or a sore knee and it hurts him to walk, and if God intervenes so that coworker arrives exactly 30 seconds before me and he gets the prime spot, I should be OK with that. Sometimes the next-closest spot really is half a mile away (the parking at my workplace is extremely messed up), but if me walking half a mile saves someone else some pain, I’m supposed to be OK with that.

And I’m not in a position to judge all of that. God is.

For that matter, maybe God making me walk that half mile and back is the bigger blessing. Maybe I need the exercise. God knows more about what I need than I do.

Sometimes we don’t recognize God’s blessing until much later, and Osteen’s teaching doesn’t leave a lot of room for that. I got married in 2005. It was a tough year. The marriage wasn’t the problem. The problem was that for the first time in my life, I couldn’t hold down a job. I worked for three different employers that year. (In my defense, I’m still working for that third employer.) I didn’t recognize it then, but that was a big blessing. The first job I lost that year was literally taking years off my life. The second job had much better pay and much better hours, but it was repetitive and boring. The third job never was my dream job by any stretch, but they pay me what the salary engines say I should make, and I’ve been able to solve some real problems and make myself and my coworkers more productive. We’ve had our differences in the past and we’ll have them again, but my boss is willing to tell the higher ups that it’s a better place for me being there.

But besides all that, I learned a lot in those weeks in between jobs, things that I will use for the rest of my life, and things that I probably wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Painful? Definitely. Blessing? Most definitely.

The danger is that if I’d been attending a church like Joel Osteen’s in 2005, it would have been very easy to come to the conclusion that God wasn’t blessing me, and something was wrong, even though I was doing all the things I was supposed to do. The danger there is walking away.

Indeed, it was when I was going through another one of life’s valleys, a little more than 10 years ago now, that I realized I needed to walk away from the church I was attending because they were saying a lot of these kinds of things. And there’s nothing wrong with that–but it’s really best that you go find someplace else that tells the truth. Otherwise there’s a great danger of walking away from God entirely.

There’s an acoustic duo called Lost and Found. They’ve been traveling the country for the last couple of decades, at least, singing mostly original Christian songs targeted at teenagers. There’s a lot to say for them, but the biggest compliment I can give them is that I’ve seen them reach people in ways nobody ever did before, and possibly nobody has done since.

In 1999, I went and saw them play at my old high school. I was one of the oldest people there but I didn’t care. About halfway through, they warned us that they were going to sing a couple of songs that were controversial. One was a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Used to Be,” complete with the line, “in a world where people gave a damn.” The other was a song one of them had written years earlier, after a breakup with a girlfriend.

After the concert, I talked to them about those two songs. They were used to that. But I thanked them for playing those songs, because they’re a reminder that being a Christian doesn’t mean everything’s going to go your way every time. That wasn’t the reaction they were used to getting–they were more used to saying what I said, not hearing someone else say it.

They stopped singing “Used to Be” soon afterward, because of the d-bomb. I wish they hadn’t. They could always sing “in a world where people gave a care” instead, and still get the point across. And if anything, the older that song gets, the more relevant it becomes.

The point that Lost and Found make, and that people like Joel Osteen would like to ignore, is that Christians can’t just have mountaintop experiences all the time. We spend time in the valleys too, because we’re flawed people living in a flawed world.

But God is great enough that He can turn even those times in the valley into blessings too, even though sometimes it takes us years to recognize it, and even then we may be reluctant to admit it (or maybe that’s just me). At best, ignoring it loses out on those blessings. At worst, it diminishes God and who He is. I don’t really want to do either of those two things.

Intel\’s Atom mini-ITX board has some interesting possibilities

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

A story on The Register tipped me off to a small motherboard using Intel’s new Atom CPU. A UK data center is using the chip to power servers, and The Reg asks if it’s madness or genius.

More on that in a minute.It’s an interesting minimalist board. It has a single PCI slot, one DIMM slot, PATA and 2 SATA connectors for storage, and the usual complement of I/O slots. The CPU runs at 1.6 GHz. Newegg sells it for about 75 bucks.

One could use this board to build a minimalist PC, but it would also work well as a cheap upgrade for an old PC. It can bolt into a case designed for an ATX or micro-ATX board. It’s made by Intel, so its quality is likely to be comparable to any board it replaces. And the board consumes about 25 watts of power.

Paired up with some sort of solid-state storage, be it a compact flash card in an adapter or a proper SATA SSD like the OCZ Core, it would be a very quiet, low-power system. Performance-wise, it wouldn’t be a barn burner, but it has more than enough horsepower for word processing, e-mail, web browsing, and other productivity apps. At 1.6 GHz, the Atom doesn’t outrun a Pentium M or even a modern Celeron at comparable clock speed, but it should outrun a sub-2 GHz P4.

I think this thing would be awesome in many business environments. Tasks that would bog it down are the kinds of things you don’t want going on in the office anyway–stuff like 3D gaming, ripping and re-encoding DVDs, stuff like that. The power it would save would be tremendous, especially when paired with an LCD monitor and an SSD.

But I even think it has a place in the server room. For example, my first employer used desktop PCs for domain controllers. The logic was simple: DCs don’t work all that hard most of the day, and by their very nature they are redundant, so if a DC were to fail, it’s not in the same league as your mail server failing. You can grab another desktop PC, stand it up as a domain controller, then start asking questions.

In 1997, when a server cost $4,000 and a desktop PC cost $1,000, this was an obvious place for a college with budget problems to save some money.

I think Intel Atoms would make great domain controllers. They have enough CPU power to do the job, but they sip power, which is increasingly important in datacenters. The PCI slot would limit the type of gigabit NIC you could install, but it should still be OK.

They’d make fine web servers too. They might get bogged down on high traffic sites, but they would have little trouble serving up most corporate intranets, and let’s face it, most people’s web sites aren’t nearly as busy as they would like to think they are. You could always use more than one and load balance them. Besides, it’s typically the database servers behind the web servers that do the heavy lifting. Serving up static web pages isn’t all that difficult of a task, and a 1.6 GHz CPU ought to be up to it.

None of these uses are what Intel had in mind when they designed the Atom–I really think their ultimate goal is to end up in cell phones and PDAs, which was why they sold off their ARM-based Xscale CPU.

But if some enterprising company (or struggling behemoth *cough* Dell *cough*) wanted to build business PCs around these, it would be an easy sell. For that matter, they could stuff two of these boards into a 1U rackmount chassis and sell it as an inexpensive, power-saving alternative to blade servers.

Call me crazy, but having actually administered blade servers, I’d much rather have a bunch of 1U systems with two computers inside the case. Besides costing a lot less money up front, they would be more reliable and consume less power while actually saving space–an HP blade enclosure gives you 16 servers in 10 Us, while my crazy scheme would give you 20 servers in the same space.

Maybe instead of posting this idea where anyone can see it and run with it, I ought to buy a couple of motherboards, take them into my basement and start bending some metal myself. Hmm…

I hate to admit it, but Intel’s NIC drivers are awfully nice

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

So we had some servers that were acting squirrelly on the network, refusing to talk to some servers but not others, dropping off entirely, etc. One of my coworkers noticed the servers acting badly were running different versions of the NIC driver than the ones that were behaving.

I found some other servers that had 10/100 cards in them that were using drivers that dated back to the Clinton administration.Here’s the nice thing. Intel keeps drivers available, and updates them on a pretty regular basis. Even those old 10/100 NICs had drivers available that were dated 2007. And they were Windows 2000 compatible, even!

Here’s the even nicer thing. We updated them hot, and they didn’t require a reboot. In a couple of cases, we even updated them remotely, via Terminal Services, and somehow didn’t lose our connection. (Don’t count on that always working.)

I always thought Intel NICs were overrated. Sure, given a choice between Intel and, say, D-Link, it’s no contest. But Intel vs. Broadcom or 3Com? The one guy qualified to comment on that (Linux NIC driver author Donald Becker) has no opinion. But I’ve never heard of being able to change a NIC driver in Windows and just keep on trucking along.

Chalk one up for Intel.

How I survived a weekend in July in the midwest without air conditioning

Dave Farquhar St. Louis ,

The air conditioner went out this week. Based on the local shop’s estimate, we’re probably looking at $3400 to fix it, which is more than the cost of a newer, better unit.

On Friday they bubble-gummed it together to get us through the weekend. It only got us through Friday night.

Here’s how we survived, and actually stayed halfway comfortable.I actually survived worse earlier in life. My high school wasn’t air conditioned, and unless temperatures reached 100 degrees, they didn’t call off school for heat. So on a day when the high was 87 or 89, I would have had to tough it out.

In college, I lived in a building without air conditioning that my uncle once derisively called "that old barn." School started in August, and temperatures often were still in the 90s, or worse, while I was there. Window air conditioners were banned, because the building’s decrepit wiring couldn’t handle more than a couple of units running at once.

So here’s what I did this weekend to keep things cooler, based on what I learned then and what I’ve learned since about saving energy.

First, any time it was cooler outside than inside, we opened the house up as much as possible and blasted fans as hard as possible to get as much cooler air circulating as we could. Besides running the central air conditioner’s blower (just the blower), we ran ceiling fans and portable fans. I wish we’d had more fans, in retrospect.

But once it started warming up, we actually did something controversial. We closed the house back up again, but that’s not all we did. I took a bunch of white foam-core board left over from a long-ago project and put those in any windows facing the sun. The white surface would reflect heat-causing light back out of the house. Then I pulled the shades down and closed them, and drew the curtains. Any place I could see a sunbeam, I would block it using any means possible. When I ran out of foam, I’d use anything else white.

I think my neighbors already think I’m nuts. Now I’m sure a couple of the busybodies down the street are talking about having me committed. It’s funny how little you care what other people think when you’re trying to keep cool.

Besides, I don’t care what they think because it worked. Today the high was 87 degrees, and the hottest it got in the house during the day was 80. Yesterday, without taking these measures, it reached 82 in the house. Two degrees makes a bigger difference than it sounds.

To determine if it was cooler inside or outside, I religiously checked the local newspaper’s web site and weather.com. A good thermometer would be even better, but I didn’t have one of those. And besides, now I need an air conditioner, so I need to save money.

The temperature is on its way down now, as I write, but some parts of the house are still getting punished by sunlight. We’ve opened the windows on the portions of the house that are receiving shade, and we’ve moved the fans to draw air through those areas. As shade conquered sunlight, we opened more windows. It hasn’t cooled off enough outside to make the temperature in the house come down yet, but getting more air moving made the house feel cooler.

To get relief, during the hottest parts of the day we would get out. Yesterday we went to Costco to stock up on necessities (we lingered in the walk-in produce fridge a lot longer than we needed to). This morning we went to church of course, and then after that we went and ate lunch at the mall food court and walked around the mall for a couple of hours.

Besides that, we also tried to avoid doing things that would cause heat. I kept as many lights off as possible, since light bulbs generate heat (even compact florescents). Unfortunately we had to run a load of laundry through the dryer, but we did that early in the day before things started heating up. When we cooked, we used the microwave. I also turned off anything else I could, since all watts of electricity used have to turn into heat one way or another.

We survived. Actually we did better than survive. I’ll daresay that for most of the day, we were actually comfortable.

I’ll add one other thing, and this is something that came to mind because we’ve been shopping for windows. If you have double-hung windows, you can open them from both the top and the bottom to get a chimney effect. Warmer air escapes through the upper window, drawing cooler air in through the bottom. In the days before air conditioning, this was how people cooled their houses. They fell out of fashion for many years, but now they’re back in fashion because you can open them just from the top, and a child can’t fall out of a window if it’s opened that way.

Today, the chimney effect is just secondary, but it can save you energy in the months when you just barely need A/C. We’ll be getting double-hung windows for that reason.

And as for the air conditioner itself? What we had was a cheap low-end unit, something often used by contractors and people who plan on selling a house quickly. Since we plan on staying in the same house for a good many years, we’re buying a high-end replacement. It will cost a lot more, but doing the math, it should pay for itself in about 10 years. Or, given the way the local electric company has the state government wrapped around its finger, probably a lot sooner.

Plus, the high-end models come with better warranties, which suggests the manufacturers have more confidence in their longevity. Or, it could be that they just have higher profit margins so they can afford to back them with better warranties, but I’d rather pay for higher energy efficiency than for extended warranties.

Anyone up for a $239 SSD?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

The cost of a decent SSD skipped the $299 mark and zoomed all the way down below $249.

Super Talent’s MasterDrive MX is available in several capacities, but the most interesting one to people who want performance on the cheap is the 30 GB model, which Newegg is selling for $239.While $239 for 30 gigs of storage isn’t very interesting when an 80 GB drive using conventional technology sells for less than 50 bucks, SSDs have never been about the lowest cost per gig. But $239 for an SSD that gives enough capacity to be reasonably useful and reasonable speed is big news, considering many SSDs of similar capacity still cost closer to $500.

There’s a reasonably full review of the MasterDrive MX available at TweakTown. TweakTown reviewed the 60 GB model, which costs closer to $500.

But here’s the short of it. This inexpensive Super Talent drive costs $239 for the 30 GB model, gives consistent read performance of around 100 megabytes per second, gives slower write performance a shade under 40 megabytes per second, and seek times of 0.5 ms.

The read performance is very good. The write performance is less impressive, but for many uses is also a lot less important. The seek time isn’t as good as current high-end SSDs, which weigh in at around 0.2 ms, but 0.5 ms is still far better than a conventional hard drive. A modern high-end 15K SCSI drive offers seek times ranging from 3.3 to 4 ms.

I can see drives like the MasterDrive MX being a huge boon for productivity-oriented desktop and laptop computers. While its 30 GB capacity is small, it’s more than large enough to hold Windows XP, an office suite, and some other productivity software while leaving plenty of room for data files. The resulting system will run cooler and use less power (the Tom’s Hardware test claiming that SSDs don’t decrease power usage has pretty well been discredited because the benchmarks they were using caused the CPU to work a lot harder), which will cut electric bills. Plus the system will be a lot quieter, which is nice in business environments. The system will boot quickly and load applications lightning fast.

How fast? Some of the reviews on Newegg are saying Vista boots in 34 seconds (XP should be similar, and possibly a little faster) and Photoshop CS3, a notoriously slow loader, loads in 5 seconds.

Of course it would be nice to see write speeds higher than 40 megabytes per second, but I still remember when conventional hard drives finally got to the point of delivering read speeds greater than 33 megabytes per second and I’d like to think it wasn’t that long ago. The people who will notice the difference the most are those who are creating and editing large media files, and those are precisely the people who aren’t likely to be using a 30 GB drive because 30 gigs isn’t very much space for those uses.

So what’s the downside?

The thing that keeps me from buying one of these today is the number of reviews on Newegg reporting problems. I always take those reviews with a grain of salt, but nearly half the reviews report the same strange failures: Usually the drive works fine, but then after a number of days it starts reporting itself as a 4 GB drive and stops operating. If one person out of 20 reports the problem, I’m willing to blame that on a weird incompatibility, user error, or something else. But when half the respondents report nearly identical symptoms, there’s probably something to it. So I’m hesitant to be an early adopter of this drive, as much as I’d love to get one.

It’s probably a good time to wait anyway. OCZ just announced a new drive, which they’re calling Core. Directron is taking preorders on them, estimating they’ll be in stock next week. OCZ’s 32 GB model is selling for $220 and promising slightly faster read speeds, but more importantly, write speeds along the lines of 80 MB per second. If Directron has them next week, then I’m sure Newegg will have them too, and it’ll probably only be a few weeks before those reviews start pouring in too.

As much as I hate to wait, I still didn’t anticipate prices falling this far until December. This development makes it look like I may buy one sometime in August. Color me happy.

Paid in full.

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , , , , ,

This week, my wife and I drove to the bank and signed some papers initiating a wire transfer to our mortgage company.

Yesterday, I had the satisfaction of logging into the mortgage company’s web site, clicking on my account, and seeing the words “paid in full.”

I moved into this house in October 2002. Five years and eight months later, I own it outright. Between the house and our cars, my wife and I have paid off nearly $180,000 in debt in those five-plus years.We aren’t completely debt-free yet. We still have some student loans from my wife’s college education.

Some would argue we should have paid those before the house. I opted against it because one of the loans has a very low interest rate (lower than the house), and because the payments are small. If I walk into work tomorrow and find out I no longer have a job (that very thing happened to me not once but twice in 2005), I can easily make those student loan payments. Scraping together enough for a mortgage payment is harder.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Here’s how we did it.

The debt snowball
The trick is to make your minimum payments on all debts, but pick one debt to pay off first. Then scrape together some extra money to pay it off sooner.

In my case, I started with my car. The payment was about $300. I tried to pay at least $600 on it. Sometimes I paid $900. When I got my tax refund, I paid a whole lot more than that.

By mid-2005, I owned the car outright.

By then I was also married, so we turned our attention to my wife’s car. Her payment was also about $300. So we paid $300 plus $600, the amount I’d been paying on the other car. I had a better job that summer, and we had my wife’s income too, so it wasn’t all that long before I realized we had enough surplus piled up in the bank to pay that off too. So we did.

And that left the house. The mortgage payment was around $1,000. So we paid $1,900. When we started making more money, we increased that. In recent months, I’ve been paying $3,000 on the house since I now make quite a bit more than I made in 2005.

Last month, I noticed we were very close to having enough in the bank to pay the house off while still leaving a comfortable emergency fund. I called the mortgage company to find out exactly how much we’d need to do it, and to get payoff instructions. I figured out that every month we didn’t pay the house off was costing us more than $200. So scraping was worth it.

Finding extra money
I’ve always been a tightwad (just ask my family), but in my late 20s I fell into some bad habits. I didn’t rack up debt, but I definitely wasted more money on conveniences than I needed to. I saved a lot of money the last five years or so by packing a lunch and bringing my own coffee and breakfast to work.

Do the math. I used to spend $2 on coffee and breakfast, plus $5-$6 for lunch. Call it $8/day. Figure 240 working days a year, and that’s $1,920.

I figure I whittled my daily food bill down to about $3 per day, so I saved $1,200 per year. That’s $4,800 over the course of four years. That alone allowed me to pay the house off at least nine months early.

Don’t let other people spend your money
But this is the big one. Everyone has their own ideas what kind of car you should drive, what home improvements you should be making, and other status things that really don’t matter that much.

I drive a 2002 Honda Civic with more than 100,000 miles on it. I know some people look down on that. But the car is still in nice shape, still runs like new, and has never needed anything more than routine maintenance. Plus it consistently gets 35 MPG.

If I had traded that car in after driving it for three years like the marketers say you’re supposed to, it would have slowed down the house payoff by six months. Had we done the same with my wife’s car, we could make it a year.

Frankly I’d rather have the house. In fact, if I could turn back the clock to 2003, I wouldn’t buy the same Civic I bought then. I would have been better off buying an older one that I could pay off more quickly. I could have saved an extra $4,000 or even $6,000, and we would have had everything finished a couple of months sooner.

So what about the cars now? Well, what about them? Remember, I was used to paying $3,000 a month on the house, and that obligation is gone. A year from now, there’ll be enough cash piled up in the bank to buy two cars outright if necessary. Not that I expect to need that, since Civics are famous for going 200,000 miles and beyond. The last time I went to the dealer, they told me someone had traded in a Civic with 500,000 miles on it.

As for home improvements, yes, now it’s time to do some. But why do them sooner? The boob tube tells you to do it to increase the value of the house. But why would I want to do that? So I can pay more taxes? Without me doing a thing, the paper value of this house has risen nearly $40,000 since I bought it, at least according to the county assessor. That means I paid $400 more in taxes in 2007 than I did in 2003.

Unless I was planning to move, there’d be no reason whatsoever to be concerned about property value.

On the other hand, at this point in the life of the mortgage, I was paying more than $200 per month in interest. Now that I’m not paying interest, that’s like getting $2,400 per year for free. That’s enough to finance a modest home improvement project.

But then again, if there’s something else my wife and I want that costs $2,400, we’re entirely free to go after that instead.

In what order should you pay off loans?
This is the paralyzing question for some people. Mathematically speaking, you should pay them off in order of interest. If you have a credit card balance at 19%, a car loan at 7%, a mortgage at 5%, and a student loan at 3%, then you should pay them off in that order.

I’m not enough of a math genius to run the figures, but paying them off in the worst-possible order (reverse order), generally only slows you down by a month or two.

We paid ours off somewhat less than optimally because the student loan is less paralyzing than the mortgage. The minimum payment on the student loans is about 1/5 what the mortgage payment was. When I was out of work, the mortgage was a bit of a struggle to make during a couple of those months, whereas the loans are comparable in size to a utility bill.

If nothing changes between now and then, we can have those loans wiped out in another year. If the economy tanks and I lose my job and my income drops to nearly zero, I can nurse those loans along almost indefinitely, since I have numerous options for making the $1,000 per month it would take to cover utilities, groceries, and those loans.

What about retirement?
Some people argue you should give retirement planning priority over your debts, while others say the reverse. My wife and I haven’t done much for our retirement since we got married in 2005. Frankly I can see the arguments both ways. But we’re still in our early 30s, and now we’re in position to contribute the legal limit into Roth IRAs from now until the government starts making us collect. There’s still time for both of us to pile up enough to retire.

The counter argument is that it’s foolish to invest when paying down debt gives you a guaranteed return. In this economy, given the choice between investing or paying down debt at 6 percent, what’s safer?

While there’s room for criticism if you go either way, either way is preferable to doing nothing. Unfortunately there are all too many people who have lots of debt and little or nothing saved for retirement.

Don’t refinance!
This is another big one. I refinanced in 2004. I got a lower interest rate, and I switched from a 30-year mortgage to 15. The interest rate dropped, but I got nailed for a $2,000 closing cost.

I saved $500 in interest the first year, but I didn’t have the loan long enough to recoup the closing costs.

If your mortgage is the last thing you’re going to pay off and if you can drop the rate, or if refinancing will allow you to consolidate some higher-interest debt, it might make sense to do it, but factor in that closing cost. If you can pay off the mortgage in less than five years, it makes more sense to just pay it off rather than go to the expense and hassle of refinancing.

In my case, if I hadn’t refinanced, I may have owned the house a month sooner.

What about the tax deduction?
Short answer: Forget about the tax deduction. The tax deductions for mortgages are more overrated than Derek Jeter.

Let’s say you’re in the 25 percent tax bracket. I’d have to ask my accountant if such an animal exists this year, but the numbers are convenient. If I’m in the 25 percent tax bracket and I paid $1,200 in interest this calendar year, then that means in return for me paying my bank $1,200, the government is giving me back $300.

Every other time you spend $1,200 and get $300 back, it’s called losing $900.

For the past five years, I’ve been paying a lot more in interest than I ever got back as a tax refund. Eliminating the mortgage won’t completely eliminate my tax refund, but it did eliminate that interest. In effect, by paying off the house, I gave myself a $1,200 raise this year.

So there’s no sense in keeping a mortgage solely for tax purposes. If you need tax deductions, take your tax return to a good accountant. The accountant’s fee is tax deductible, and the accountant will probably find you additional deductions you didn’t think of.

If you’re in a higher or lower tax bracket, it can make a little more or a little less sense, but you’re still trading dollars for small change in any case.

In conclusion?
There are any number of things we could have done differently. But the important thing is we now own our home and two cars outright. It’s possible that doing a few more things might have made it happen a month or two sooner. But if I’d done everything the traditional way, I wouldn’t own the house outright until age 58 (if I’d kept the original 30-year mortgage) or 44 (since I refinanced to a 15-year mortgage). Compared to 11 additional years of paying interest, what’s an extra month or two if I get a couple of details wrong?

Why men have difficulty with fashion

Dave Farquhar Personal

My wife keeps telling me I need to untuck my shirt. I usually comply, but under protest. You see, when I was in school, we used to get in trouble for not tucking our shirts in.

I’m pretty good at following rules. That’s part of the reason I have the job I have. The problem is when rules change all the time.I remember going to the doctor once, soon after I got out of college. It was painfully obvious that his clothes were at least 20 years old. They were in fine condition, but hopelessly dated. Standing near him, I looked like I’d jumped out of a fashion magazine.

But I understand now. He didn’t care about looking hip. He was a doctor. He had bigger concerns on his mind. I’m guessing his criteria for picking out clothes in the morning went something like mine do now:

1. Is it clean?
2. Is it free of holes?
3. Are the holes visible?

As long as the answer to #1 is yes, and either the answer to #2 is yes or #3 is no, I’ll wear it.

I’m not a doctor, but I have lots of things on my mind these days too. Like what patches Microsoft released this month, and how I’m going to navigate a tangled bureaucracy, get them loaded onto 240 servers (including some with no connection to an outside world, half of which are separated from me by a network connection that makes a 56K modem look fast), and do all of this in two weeks without making my boss mad.

I’ve actually managed to pull off this trick about 22 times now, but I’m always trying to think of ways to improve the process. Any improvement to this exceedingly difficult process makes my life easier and my cranky bosses happier. My boss doesn’t care whether I look like I stepped out of the pages of a magazine or like something a bum wouldn’t want to be seen with, as long as I get my work done.

My wife says I need to dress like my friend Jon. I’ve known Jon about nine years. We go to the same church and usually sit near each other. Jon’s a mechanical engineer. A couple of years ago he designed machinery that turns sheet metal into body panels for Acuras.

I’ve never asked Jon, but I’m guessing when Jon looks at an article of clothing, two questions go through his mind.

1. Will that keep me warm (or cool) enough today?
2. How would I go about designing a machine that makes those buttons?

My biggest gripe is that clothes aren’t something you learn just once. When I was in school, by the time I learned what you were and weren’t supposed to wear, the rules changed. I’d re-learn it, but then they’d just change again.

In college, I learned that I could neatly sidestep the issue entirely by wearing all (or mostly) black. Sure, it made me look like someone who listened to The Cure too much, but as a matter of fact, I did listen to The Cure too much. I didn’t have to think about what matched, or if the particular shade was in or out. People didn’t look at me and try to figure out how old the clothes were, who made them, or where I bought them. They’d just look at me and conclude that the radio station I listened to didn’t have a letter Z or Q in its call letters.

But in 1998 I got a job with a dress code, and my all-black trick no longer would cut it. So I bought a couple of pairs of khaki pants and five button-up shirts and figured I was set. This shopping spree set me back almost $200.

The pants wore out, but I still have the shirts and they still fit, so I see no problem with continuing to wear them. After all, they don’t infringe on my current employer’s dress code and when I bought them, they cost me about a day’s pay. And furthermore, shouldn’t my wife be happy that I’m still the same size around that I was when I was 23?

I think my wife would counter that it’s nice that I wear the same size shirts as then, but they don’t have to be the same shirts.

I’m pretty sure Jon would tell me that some battles just aren’t worth fighting and the best thing to do is just wear whatever clothes your wife says you should wear.

I say this because I know Jon’s wife told my wife that it took her years to get Jon to dress the way he dresses now.

The next time I see Jon, I need to ask him how many years. But I probably won’t. Sometime in the next 72 hours, my boss will come to me with a line in a configuration file that needs to be changed in all 240 servers and, naturally, we’ll have about 20 minutes to do it. I’ll get it done the same way I always get it done, and then I’ll move on to solving the next problem, and I’m guessing that by mid-Wednesday at the very latest, I won’t even remember having said or written a thing about clothes on Sunday.

Frankly I’m more concerned about how I tell my boss that we have a lot of servers with system drives formatted with 512-byte clusters and they’d probably perform a lot better with 4K clusters.

Knowing things like that usually doesn’t get me raises but it gets me job security. The clothes I wear don’t get me either. So that’s why I’d rather let someone else worry about clothes.

Why Firefox will probably always have mixed acceptance in corporate environments

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , , ,

I saw an article in Information Week today about Firefox in the enterprise.

The fanboys on both sides took offense, of course.

I’m a longtime Firefox user and an IT professional, but yet I agree with the premise that Firefox will always have trouble in that environment.The biggest reason is inside the firewall, in the corporate intranet. Some commenters complained about lazy in-house design, but that’s not the whole story. Many web-based enterprise applications are designed for Internet Explorer and only Internet Explorer. One app that I support takes it a step further, and only works with IE 5.5 or IE 6. That’s going to be a problem when the order comes down to deploy IE 7. The product is discontinued, so at that point we’ll have to either migrate to something else, or have people connect to a terminal server so they can run IE 6.

I have another web-based application I support (but if I ever change jobs I’ll deny ever hearing about it) that works with IE 7, but if and only if an administrator logs on and manually registers some ActiveX controls. That product is called Microsoft Project Server 2003 Web Access.

Yes, you read that right. Even Microsoft can’t properly support its own web browsers.

Any corporate web-based app that uses ActiveX will never run on Firefox. Those that check for a specific IE version might run on a hacked version of Firefox, but if you ever have any problems, you’re on your own. Corporate suits don’t like that.

And since computers and applications tend to live almost forever once they’re deployed, IE’s stranglehold on those environments may not be measured in years. We may be talking a decade, or even more.

I’ll submit the refrigerator-sized VAX systems I walk past nearly every day in the server room as evidence of the longevity of some systems. The computers themselves may not be quite 20 years old, but the applications they’re running are at least that old.

Firefox also tends to go against corporate culture in other ways. One of the first questions a corporate suit will ask is who they can sue if it breaks. Never mind that if a Microsoft product breaks, they probably waived all legal rights as part of the EULA. The guys in corner offices who wear ties know more about that than anyone who works on computers. A wave of the hand makes that problem go away.

Yeah, right. But don’t bother trying to tell them that.

A second problem is that many IT decisions are made, or approved, by people who admire Bill Gates’ wealth. Since Bill Gates became the world’s richest man by selling computer software, his computer software must be the best, period, end of story.

Many of the books decision-makers read perpetuate this belief. One example is the highly popular and influential book Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan. In many circles, this book is a must-read. I have to admit I’m getting as much out of this $11 book than I got out of my college economics class, if not more. But Wheelan trots Gates out again and again as a master visionary, a master programmer, and lots of other things that he clearly isn’t. The examples serve to make Wheelan’s point, which is the most important thing, but they also perpetuate the myth that Bill Gates is the greatest computer scientist and visionary of all time, when the fact is he’s an astute and ruthless businessman who happened to find himself in the computer industry. His track record as a programmer and visionary isn’t all that great.

But because of this myth, spread largely outside of the computer industry proper, many influential people will insist on using the Microsoft product any time there’s a choice. They’re not interested in Wordperfect or Quicken or Dreamweaver or Firefox any other product not made by Microsoft, as long as Microsoft makes something that competes with it.

The Millionaire Mind by Thomas Stanley explains this mentality somewhat. When a person’s job is to make money, they don’t want to do product research and they don’t want to take chances. When they buy tires, a dishwasher, or a refrigerator, they walk into the store and buy the most expensive one, because the most expensive one must be the best. They don’t want to spend time doing market research because they could spend that time making money. And they want something they believe won’t break, because time spent dealing with broken stuff is time they can’t spend making money.

Basically, any time spent discussing or researching a purchase is time that can’t be spent making money. So in the mind of a bean-counter or an executive type, it’s much cheaper in the long run to just choose the Microsoft product and forget about it.

The logic is completely faulty–it’s an excellent example of a red herring logical fallacy, as Bill Gates’ wealth has nothing to do with the quality of his competitors’ products–but arguing that point isn’t likely to get you anywhere. Even if the decision maker is wrong, the time spent arguing about it is probably worth more than the potential savings by going with a different product.

At home, none of this matters. And at home, I’ll keep using Firefox. I’ve been using Firefox since 2002 when it was an obscure project called Phoenix, so I think you can call me a longtime fan.

Firefox made remarkable progress from 2002 to now, while IE has gone from IE 6 to IE 7 in the same timeframe.

But in the corporate world, very little of that matters. Incumbency has its advantages. Some companies will embrace it because of its many advantages. In other companies, users will sneak it in the door, the same way they snuck in PCs in the 1980s and 1990s while the mainframe-centric IT staff wasn’t looking. But in the majority of companies, it’s likely to stay shut out, perhaps because something important requires IE, but if not, the mere absence of Microsoft’s name on the product will be enough to keep it out of some doors.

I don’t expect to ever have Firefox on my PC at my current job. It’s my employer’s loss, but it’s not my decision.

Firefox 3 is out

Dave Farquhar Software ,

I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 today. I didn’t try any of the release candidates, so today is the first I’ve seen it.

So far, I like it.Appearance-wise, it looks a little more slick and polished. I can’t exactly quantify it. Looking good isn’t as important as running well, but appearance is the first thing you notice.

Installation is lightning fast, especially off flash media. If you have multiple computers, put the installer on a USB flash drive and install from there.

It imported everything, and I mean everything, from my old 2.x configuration.

The "Awesome bar" is the most touted feature. Given that it imported my (extensive) browser history, its guesses where I want to go aren’t exactly awesome yet. But I like how I can start typing the title of a page I viewed and its URL will appear. As it learns more about my browsing habits and I learn more about it, I’ll like it.

Overall it does seem faster than its predecessor. It renders my blog considerably faster. We’ll see how it fares on Friday when I throw 20-30 addresses at Google Maps for my Saturday ritual. Firefox 2.x really bogged down when I did that.

Memory usage right now is a reasonable 72 megs, which is probably about where Firefox 2 would be after an hour. I’ve kept Firefox sessions open for weeks, so we’ll see how 3.0 looks in a month. The session I’m using right now will probably still be open, knowing me.

These are all just first impressions, but so far I like it. It’s familiar, but some of the improvements are obvious pretty early.