I've been a Dell guy for the last ten years. Over that time, I've had just one non-Dell machine and that's because it was purchased for me prior to starting a new job and the company was then standardized on IBM machines. That machine was a Thinkpad T series and it wasn't too bad a machine.

Otherwise, machines for home and business have been Dell boxes (one every couple of years at home and who knows how many business machines) and I've always suggested to friends and family that they go with Dell also. You get a machine that's ready to go out of the box and their prices usually compare well with other options-- assuming you don't want to go the build-your-own route. When it comes to my personal machine, I prefer a laptop so the DIY thing isn't really an option.

That allegiance is beginning to wane. About a year ago, I bought an Inspiron E1705 for my home/personal machine and it is pretty much loaded (at to the extent that an Inspiron configuration could be). Lots of RAM, fast disk, 1920x1200 17" display, DVD burner, NVidia graphics, and so on. Not a lower-end machine and not inexpensive either. It ran fine for the first few months but then the issues began.

It started at the end of last year when I noticed that it was running really hot. Areas on the bottom were nearly too hot to touch. Then early this year, it started randomly giving me the BSOD with a general hardware failure.

I had next-day warranty coverage, so I gave them a call... they decided it was the CPU burning out and sent another one out. This is when I learned that Dell's "next day" service really isn't "next day". What they mean is that they'll ship the part(s) out to some local contractor in your area and then the contractor should be out to fix it the "next day" after they get the part. So it's more like 3 days... whatever, I could get by with that and the CPU was replaced.

So far so good for a couple months... but then suddenly the screen would go black (as if the display shut off) when the machine was on AC power. On battery, it was fine. The machine was continuing to run and I could use Remote Desktop from another box to get into it even when it was on AC power. So another phone call... this time, they said they'd ship out a new "main system board". Three days later, a tech's out to replace it - but the problem isn't fixed.

So he calls Dell that day and they ship a new LCD panel out... another week goes by and then the screen gets replaced. Seems OK for a few days, but then...

The left edge of the screen begins to fade (see image to the left)... it's gotten more pronounced since that picture was taken, to the point that the fading now comes all the way into the middle of the screen. It also seems to get darker the longer the machine is on and, after 30 minutes or so, the left half of the screen is unusable. Another phone call... this time, they'll replace the LCD panel and the NVidia adapter ("just in case," says the tech).

All of this was frustrating, but now it's worse... because there's been no progress. After a few days, I don't hear from anyone. So I call to see what's up and am told the part is on backorder for a day or two and I'll get an email with a tracking number once it ships. Nothing for a couple days... so I email the tech, who emails a tracking number back to me and says the part(s) are on their way. However, Fedex doesn't recognize that number at all.

I emailed the tech again last week, along with the tech supervisor for the incident and the Dell Customer Advocate email alias... still no response.

I've got surgery scheduled for this week, but my wife will end up having to call them and nag again about getting this fixed.

I also have to wonder -- at what point does Dell declare this thing a lemon and replace it? This will be the FOURTH time in a few months that a tech has had to come out to replace parts on this machine. All these support calls, replacement parts, shipping, and paying contractors to come to the house -- that's gotta add up. I've got nearly the same machine at the office for business use, as do several of my colleagues,  and nobody has had any problems. Clearly this box has some problems.

In any case, their handling of this support problem may just be what changes me over to Lenovo... or HP. Or Toshiba. It's kinda ridiculous to think that, over the last few months,  my machine has been out of commission for weeks.

Technorati tags: dell, hardware, support, customer support, problems

Christopher Hawkins has a post from last Friday wherein he describes his "dream" software projects. The funny thing is that he refers to them as "silly", but they seem like pretty real and useful projects to me. The film production system, in particular, sounds like a fun project to work on.

While I wouldn't say that mine are quite "dream" projects, there are a couple of systems I've always thought would be a lot of fun to work on.

Poker Machines for Casinos -- Partially because I enjoy playing some poker myself and partly because I think there would be some interesting problems to solve. There have been a number of products announced that bring the "automated" world of online poker into casinos, bars, or other hangouts.

Note that this is NOT video poker of the "Jacks or better" variety. In some cases, the game is still "regular" poker, but everyone around the table plays the hand via a touchscreen and there's no dealer. In other cases, it might be a small table where two people can play heads-up while they wait for a seat at a regular table or while hanging out at a bar and watching a game. There are enough differences between these "electronic tables" and regular online poker software to make it pretty interesting.

Elevator Control Systems (for high-rises) -- This is the one that usually gets a laugh when I tell people about it. But if you imagine a tall building with multiple tenant types (retail, offices, or residential apartments, etc), then there are some intriguing things to consider. How do you optimize the flow and availability of a car at any given time? If an car's at rest, do you send it to a certain floor to wait for a call? During the morning, you have one type of flow (from the ground floors up to the offices) and in the late afternoon it's the opposite. What about lunch hours? How do you handle things like redundancy or failover if a car has to be taken out of service for repair? What can you provide facilities and security with in the way of monitoring and management?

Both of these seem interesting to me as intellectual projects... but I think what intrigues me is that they both offer a lot of opportunity for data visualization and some infoporn. In both cases, you can imagine administrative/monitoring interfaces that provide all sorts of interesting views of data (historic poker hands) and state (elevator state).

I'm interested in reading what sort of "dream" projects others write about.

  Technorati: software, development, projects, dream

Ben Scheirman is running a themes design contest to get some new looks in the themes list for DasBlog. To encourage designers to submit their original designs, he and Scott Hanselman are putting up a $100 gift certificate for Amazon.com.

While I "know what I like" when it comes to design, I've got virtually no talent for creating a web theme from scratch... This could be a good opportunity for someone with talent, though, and a hundred bucks at Amazon.com? As I've said since we signed for Amazon Prime, "If I can't get it at Amazon using Prime, it's probably not worth buying..."

Speaking of DasBlog, the last ASP.NET 1.1 update went up a couple weeks ago. I'm running it on my local machine and it seems to be fine... so I'll update the server soon. On the other hand, an ASP.NET 2.0 version that supports Medium Trust is in the works. Maybe it's worth waiting... either way, I'm stoked to see all the renewed activity on the dev mailing list (where I've just lurked for a few months now).

  Technorati: dasblog, web design, themes, contest

My wife's computer (a Dell Latitude laptop) has been acting a little wonky and was overdue to be re-paved and re-configured. It was a hand-me-down from me to her over a year ago and it's been nearly three years since it was rebuilt. I usually like to pave once every 12-18 months.

Thankfully, I always divide a laptop drive into at least two partitions -- C: (for the OS and apps) and D: (for everything you might want to keep). Once you get some of the system folders like "My Documents" pointed to a location on D: (using the awesome TweakUI), it's very convenient. It also makes doing this re-pave pretty simple because I won't have to restore all the files she cares about later. I back that stuff up semi-regularly (probably not regularly enough), but the D: stuff doesn't get touched during this process. I'm just nuking the C: partition and doing a re-install.

So I'm installing XP (not enough horsepower for Vista) from a disc that has SP2 already applied... but even at that, the first Windows Update process has taken even longer than the actual install of the Operating System. There are 80 important/critical updates in this first pass (and more likely after the first 80 finish and it reboots).

It's good to be up to date and all, but man... that's a lot of updates.

One other thing that has the potential to really irritate people is that one of those 80 updates (number 65, to be exact) is the Windows Genuine Advantage update. This installs some utility on your machine that verifies that you're using a legit, licensed install of Windows. Fair enough... but this update opens a wizard that requires you to step through it.

That's right -- the 65th update in a list of 80 that need to be downloaded and installed stops the entire update so that you can click Next a few times. Worse, there's no need here for a Wizard as there are no options or configuration settings to be set!

Luckily, I've opted to let this run through the afternoon and I just go over and check it out every once in a while to move things along. So I saw it fairly quickly. But how many people doing this have seen those 80 updates in a list and decided to start the process and go to bed... only to find a wizard wants their attention in the morning?

That stinks.

  Technorati: windowsxp, annoyances, windowsupdate

I can't make it due to scheduling conflicts, but the Startup Weekend in Boulder begins tonight. The idea is for a group (a few dozen) to start with an idea this evening and work like mad until Sunday evening to turn that idea into a "thing".

I'd bet on some red and bleary eyes come Sunday night and Monday, but it should be a lot of fun and a great experience regardless of the business/product outcome.

Good luck, gang!

Technorati tags: startup weekend, boulder, colorado

As I mentioned earlier, I find all the breathlessness around the iPhone to be entertaining. It's a sexy-looking device, to be sure, but it's a phone. And a $500-600 phone at that! Multi-touch sounds interesting, but it's not as though there's much else here's that innovative -- email, messaging, web-browsing. With no developer platform -- but wait, "there's the web" (and the Apple fans fall all over themselves to declare it some sort of ground-breaking genius move -- "bold"? "forward-thinking"? Yeah, you're objective).

In any case, it's obviously been a very successful launch for Apple, even with the too-many-to-be-a-fluke activation problems. Wildly successful. Down the road, I may even stand in line (for 5 minutes) pick one up for myself. You know, once it has decent download speeds and there are some compelling applications (I kid, I kid!).  In the meantime, it is nice to see mobile devices getting a lot of attention like this and spurring on the competition for features is a good thing.

What had me chucking this morning was a TechCrunch post that declares $200 million in profit for Apple in their opening weekend. How did they get at this number? First, the quote:

"Based on the cost of manufacturing an iPhone..., Apple would have made a profit of between $200million and $266 million in 3 days (not including marketing costs), on sales somewhere between $350million and $420million, significantly more than earlier estimates of Apple having a $300million weekend."

The original quote referenced a BusinessWeek article from Monday that estimates the parts cost for an iPhone to be $200-$220US. This is from a non-Apple estimate by a firm that took apart a production iPhone and came up with an estimated cost for the individual components. The $20 difference is based on the 4GB versus 8GB unit.

So using the most basic possible math, TechCrunch clearly took this route:

Voila, between $200 and $266 million. The TechCrunch article does point out that Apple "would have" made this profit by "not including marketing costs".

I'm not sure why marketing would be the only cost called out separately here because the true figure for expenses on the iPhone are clearly much higher. So while Apple will never tell us what that number really is, the most basic analysis would also have to include:

• R&D -- A team at Apple worked hard to decide what to build, which features to include, how it might be engineered, what the tradeoffs were for cost, features, battery life, and size. Multi-touch doesn't grow on trees, right? Nor do screens that don't scratch easily.
  
• Design -- A team worked to come up with that cool look and all that sex appeal.
  
• Development -- Somebody wrote that software, right? Sure, I know it's "based on" OSX, but it's certainly not a matter of OSX developers choosing "File -> Save As iPhone" in their development environment.
  
• Production -- The BusinessWeek article referenced above states that the $200/220 cost for the iPhone is just the parts. Those parts have to be assembled. By people. And big machines. In factories.
  
• Testing -- Use the phone internally. Find a problem. Fix it. Use the new phone internally. Request a feature. Add it. Repeat.
  
• Fulfillment -- Those phones have to be packaged (something Apple clearly spends a lot of time and money on -- they single-handedly created "gadget porn") and shipped out to stores.
  
• Marketing -- This is the one that TechCrunch opted to include and it's obviously a huge cost. There were iPhone commercials all over prime time in the weeks leading up to its launch. Posters, brochures, billboards, t-shirts, television spots, magazine ads, and so on.

Finally, there are other costs not specific to the iPhone that must be carried. All those jobs above people to sell it (sales and retail labor). Those jobs also include people who need places to work (facilities), recruitment and benefits (HR), paychecks and expenses (finance), and tools with which to communicate (IT). Overhead.

We'll never know exactly what those other costs do to the iPhone's bottom line. But we can safely say that they add up to some fairly non-trivial numbers.

Do I think Apple LOST money on the iPhone's opening weekend? I doubt it. But it's certainly not accurate to say they made anywhere near $200 million in profit. iPhone #1 was very expensive for Apple to put into a customer's hands... it's iPhone #5,000,000 and beyond that will let us know what sort of long-term value has been created for Apple's business.

And I don't mean to pick on TechCrunch here... lots of sites were calling the iPhone a massive hit before the first device had been sold over the counter. There's no shortage of this sort of speculation.

In fact, TechCrunch themselves poked fun at all the hype a few weeks ago by calling it the second coming. Hilarious.

  Technorati: iphone, business, apple, techcrunch, cellular

What a month June was... Ugh. Among the highlights:

• Getting acquired.
• Taking a vacation to California.
• Coming home (alone) to oversee having the house interior painted.
• Going to the ER for stomach/GI issues (while home alone).
• Getting admitted to the hospital for three days.
• Learning that I need surgery to resolve the issue (second in 2007?!?).
• My new laptop goes belly-up (again).
• Next-Day service from Dell takes several days.

And the first calendar month without a blog update in a while.

From a health perspective, I'm ready for 2007 to be over. I've not had any major health issues since I was a kid (ruptured appendix) and now it'll be two surgeries in one year. Ridiculous... but at least both were/are fairly simple and won't have any lasting effects.

On the tech side, I've been slowing working my way through Adam Nathan's WPF book, experimenting a bit with Virtual Earth, made some incremental improvements to iTunesExport, and have enjoyed watching all the hype (and hyperbole) over the iPhone. On the iPhone, I think it's hilarious that people camped out to be among "the first" to get one, while others walked into an AT&T/Apple store the next day and walked out with one 5 minutes later.

Earlier this week, I turned on XM Radio in the car and was greeted with a "No Signal" warning -- and dead air. This had happened once or twice before in the last four years and fixing it involved a call to XM's Customer Support line, waiting on hold for far too long, and then dealing with some of the worst support staff I've ever experienced.

Both times, they "sent a signal to reset" the radio and it was fine within 10 minutes or so. But it took phone calls of 20-30 minutes to get there.

So I was dreading making that phone call once I got to work and decided I'd use Google to see if it's possible to request this "reset" online. No dice, but in searching I found that the entire XM system was down. That saved me a phone call, I suppose.

A day or two later, I got an email explaining that they had "resumed normal levels of service" and apologizing for the inconvenience. Apparently, some software update in a satellite went bad and it took hours to get the problem resolved. "Sorry, our bad."

The truth is, I didn't really miss it. Sure, I enjoy the programming when I have it... but the truth is that I find myself listening to my iPod far more often than I listen to XM. Many of the channels I listen to on XM are NOT commercial free (news/talk channels from other organizations) and the channels that are (XM's own music channels) increasingly have too much DJ chatter and advertisements for programming on other channels. And their exclusive content (such as Major League Baseball, Oprah, and until recently, the Opie and Anthony show) has never interested me much at all.

On the other hand, I still dig listening to podcasts on the iPod and there's no shortage of new ones coming out all the time. I've also been using the "Smart Playlists" feature of iTunes more often, which helps get me playlists that are very focused on the things I most enjoy listening to. Plus, I can use the iPod in places that my XM SkyFi currently doesn't work, such as while exercising, in planes, and so on.

Their handling of this outage is further making me re-think my subscription to the service. Not only was their never a notice on their web site (the logical place for many people to turn when they have problems with their radio -- if only to get the support phone number), but they're apparently offering a pittance of a refund. Engadget reports that they'll refund about $.87 to customers due to the system outage -- but only if you call in and request it.

Yeah... my experience with XM wait times is such that sitting on hold to ask for $.87 is a money-losing proposition. On an hourly basis, I'd make more money sewing clothes for Kathy Lee Gifford. To say nothing of the incompetent staff on the other end of the phone. The right thing to do here is to just automatically deduct the $.87 from next month's charge for anyone who was affected by the outage (XM implies it wasn't everyone by saying it affected an "undisclosed number of customers").

I like (not love... not need... just like) XM Radio... but their competition extends far beyond potential-merger-mate Sirius Radio. Their competition is with iPods and every other MP3 player. It's with PSPs, laptops, home media centers, Tivo, game consoles, and every other way in which media can be delivered to me.

At $12.95 a month, it may just be losing that competition for my money. I'll definitely be paying attention to how much XM-specific content I listen to over the next few weeks.

  Technorati: xm radio, satellite radio, customer service, podcasting, portable audio

I've used Firefox for a couple of years now... but with its rich support for extensions and themes, it's the browser that never stops evolving.

This weekend, I happened upon a very cool bit of functionality that's actually built right into the browser's search bar - no extension required. To check it out, click in the default search box (or use CTRL+K to put your cursor there) and make sure that Google is your current search engine (CTRL+UP and CTRL+DOWN will cycle through your installed search engines).

Now try typing some of these, without hitting enter:

• 54^3
• 100 cm in inches
• sqrt 4096

Because of the auto-fill capability in that search box (which suggests searches as you type), these expressions and conversions get calculated and returned on the fly. Given that most people have a web browser window open all the time, you can't get much more convenient than this.

Here's a blog post that provides some other Google tips that you may not be aware of. I've used most of these for a while, and not all work on the fly like the expressions above, but checking time in foreign cities and getting quick movie showtimes were cool new ones for me.

On a related note, here are some of the must-have extensions that I install with any new Firefox setup:

del.icio.us Extension -- The new 1.5 version replaces the built-in Firefox bookmark capability by adding a sidebar with dynamic tags and swapping the built-in bookmark keyboard shortcuts. Note that your standard bookmarks aren't touched and are always available.

Flashblock -- Blocks Flash objects from appearing in any web page. Instead, you get a little Flash logo that you can click if you decide you want to see the Flash app. Makes the web a LOT less "blinky."

Google Toolbar for Firefox -- Provides one-click access to all sorts of Google searches and properties. Turn on the Suggest feature and you get the same "suggest" functionality described above.

IE Tab -- Some sites just don't behave well in Firefox. This extension lets you open a site in a new tab that hosts Internet Explorer right inside the tab. No need for a separate IE window!

Send Tab URLs -- When I'm researching something, I will sometimes have a LOT of tabs open. This extension creates an email message with the title and URL for all current open tabs. Very useful when you want to send some research to others or when you want to send some links to the office or home.

Tab Mix Plus -- Lets you control all sorts of settings around tabbed browsing and managing tab sessions.

Tabs Menu -- Couldn't be simpler. Adds a "Tabs" menu to the menu bar, with a dynamic list of current tabs under the menu. Very useful when you're trying to navigate a ton of tabs.

  Technorati: firefox, search, web search, extensions