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My accountant told me he had clients break down and cry
in his office this year. On one hand I totally understand. On the other, I'm
not sure I do. Did people actually think that money existed? What if everyone
had tried to sell their CSCO or Redback shares at the height of the
market? The price would have dropped. There would have been no
market for the market makers to manipulate.
Sorry, I just had to say that.
I sat in my truck on the morning of April 17th (I live in Mass, we have
ridiculous holidays here and taxes were delayed one day) and wrote checks
to the government. It was depressing but not unexpected.
I moved my office recently and actually managed to move my phone lines and
DSL line in 2 weeks. I found this amazing since the building I moved into
had no physical lines to it (they had been cut several years before and
the building was unoccupied).
Verizon (and I can't believe I'm saying this) did a really excellent job,
scheduling the work and getting the lines installed. My DSL provider
is Covad. They also did an excellent job following Verizon and scheduling
their install. There was a problem (the line they grabbed in the CO went
into someone's house instead of my office) but they corrected the mistake
overnight and got the line installed. I was very impressed.
Covad (and UUNet behind them) has been flawless for me for over a
year. I think there may actually be room for one company to provide
DSL after the incombent (in this case Verizon). While Verizon did a
great job on the phone lines and copper, I've heard nothing but bad
things about their DSL service. It's ashame, because they really seem
to be trying to provide good customer service on the phone side.
AT&T, on the other hand, seems to be trying to create new lows in customer
service with their 'local dial tone' service. I switched my business service
and had nothing but trouble. It took me seven (7) trouble tickets to get
my voice mail working. Worse, when I tried to switch back to Verizon it
took Verison 3 weeks to call me back and that was just to schedule an
interview with their "Wecome back" service. hah.
This is an amazing product. I love it. If you need to run Linux as your
native OS but also need to run Word and Excell this will do it for you for
only $50. It works great, does not eat a lot of memory and runs fast. I tried
VMWare, another great product but it was huge overkill for the causual Office
user. It was also (imho) too expensive. (aside: vmware is perfect if you
are a developer or q/a person and need to boot several o/s's and need that
level of control - it's a great product but more than I need).
Win4lin installed cleanly (well, ok, I had to patch my kernel but hey,
this is linux) and has been great. I am so happy that I can now boot Win98SE
and run Office. It has changed my computing life. http://www.win4lin.com.
I can't say enough good things about this.
I recently ungraded my home machine from Windows NT 4.0 Sp3 to Windoew 2000.
Everyone I talked to said they liked Win2k. I finally took the plunge because
the video editing software I wanted to try did not run on NT.
Well, the upgrade was a little rocky but it did work. First off I needed to
have 600MB free on my C: drive. hah! who has 600mb free on C:? Not me,
that's for sure. Then, after it installed and rebooted in Win2k (insuring
that I'd *never* be able to run WinNT again) I got a blue screen. Bummer
dude. Luckily I've been here before and held back the urge to convert the
drive to NTFS. I went to MS's web site and noticed some tech notes on
DirectCD crashing the Win2k setup. The note stated how to turn off the
services which DirectCD had installed. I was able to boot a DOS (remember dos?)
floppy and simply remove the bad .sys files. (I used to write NT services
so I know what to look for :-) This fixed the problem. I want to thank
my guardian angel for putting that web site entry together...
Anyway, it booted up and the setup worked. I actually like Win2k. It's
a bit of 'fresh and new' UI and seems to work well. All my old apps work
fine (so far). I'm now a 2000's kind-of-guy.