Victory! 

I did the full Redhat 9 install today and then started using it once I setup IM.  Still habit had me working more under Windows than *nix.  Shortly after that I had MFWCOTW (my first windows crash of the week) and kept working -- just fired up an SSH window under Linux and resumed.  No problem. 

Redhat 9 is impressive.  The installation is actually good.  It even found my sound and video card correctly.  I don't have sound under Windows anymore but I do under Linux.  Go figure. 

Of course its Redhat which means it didn't take long to end up in dependency hell the 1st time I tried to install something.  Ah rpm.  Thy name is sh**.  Still I'm working and not losing time to reboots.  That's key.

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Marketing 101: Great Marketing is Personal -- Werbach and Supernova

Its been a while since I've done any writing on marketing so I thought I'd pass this along.  To start with our definition:

Marketing is the creation of demand for a good or service.

I'd also add that good marketing is personal -- in order for you to create demand in me, the more personal you are able to be, the better..

I just had a proposal for talking about Feedster at the SuperNova conference rejected -- and I'm actually more enthusiastic about the conference than I was before the rejection.  So why ?  Well Kevin Werbach who's behind the conference was really, smart:

1. Quick Rejection.  I submitted this either Saturday or Sunday.  I was rejected on Monday morning.  Wow.  No burearucracy, no paperwork, no BS.  I'll compare this with the OSCOM event coming up in Cambridge this month which rejected me after a period of months.  I'm fine with rejection (no really -- I am) but don't leave me on hold forever. 
   
2. He took the time to make a few comments to me in his email about why.  That's excellent.  It tells me how to do better next time and showed me that there's a real live person on the other end of the bit chain.  And while it didn't hurt that he actually knew who I was, I was more impressed by the fact that he took the time out to talk to me.

If you're thinking "Gee it just sounds like they did the polite thing" then I'd agree with that.  Good marketing is polite.  Its not the intrusive, popup laden internet marketing crap -- its treating people with respect.  And that creates demand.

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Update on DriverHell 2003

Well on my Thinkpad I ran SP1 and ***poof***.  My CD-RW drive was magically found.  On the one hand I'm glad it worked but on the other I'm confused why for something as common as USB support (for a device released before the operating system itself) doesn't work out of the box.  And then I was told when I went to install the Adaptec software that "it has a known incompatibility with this version of Windows". 

Time to restart Windows, lose my Fireware drive, clear up disc space and then burn cds.  I'd rather eat glass.

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You Can't Get There From Here

(Even though I've said "no more Windows rants, after the huge waste of my time this weekend due to "Driver Hell", I felt the need to vent.  That and the cats are tired of hearing "#*&$(# Microsoft *($#*($# Drivers #*$#)($*#)( ".  So if you've read my anti-Windows rants before then please feel free to move right along.)

It has been, shall I be polite?  Oh I don't know -- the hardware weekend from hell.  Close to nothing in the Wintel world worked.  This particular set of utterly "joyful" experiences culminated with the discovery this morning that I can have EITHER my USB CD-RW drive working or my Firewire hard drive -- but not both.  Oh and my Firewire drive doesn't work at all (I mean doesn't even display in Explorer) unless the machine is shut down between restarts.  Joy oh freaking joy.  Clearly this makes it hard to burn the Redhat 9 cd images to migrate my new desktop to Linux. 

So I figure that I'll be smart and use another computer -- I just installed Windows XP Pro onto my Thinkpad to use for testing some stuff (this install is literally under 24 hours old -- no winrot at all) so I think to myself "I'll just install the CD-RW on that machine and burn them from the Laptop".  Nope!  Despite a fresh set of drivers from HP for the CD-RW drive, it won't install.  Unrecognized hardware errors.  Try again.  No dice.  I'm now installing SP1 -- just the 1st of 35 critical updates in the admittedly foolish hope that hardware support will be fixed in SP1 and I'll be able to use my CD burner again.  If that doesn't work then I guess I'll have to move disc space around until the ISOs and the temp space need fit on my internal hard drives and then dpo the burning from my desktop.

Oh and the crowning humor in this excursion into "Driver DisasterFest 2003" was when Windows told me, on my main desktop, that for both the Firewire drive and the CD-RW drive it couldn't find the drivers.  Now both these pieces of hardware worked previously.  So I just told it "c:\winnt\system32\drivers\" and it worked perfectly. 

I think Windows has Alzheimers.

Note: Microsoft very often blame drivers written by 3rd party companies on Windows problems.  Yeah I'll buy that in a lot of cases but not in this last one -- the problem here is clearly a flawed driver model.  Two drivers for two different types of devices written by two different companies that fail in the same way.  That clearly isn't their fault -- this is a Windows issue. 

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