10 Reasons Why Developers do not Make Good Hardware Administrators

Early this year, we had a power spike at our house during a wind storm...the net result, our home computer became unstable. Here are 10 reasons why developers don't make good hardware administrators:

1. Can't tell if the root drive failed
2. Can't tell if the power supply failed
3. Get lucky flashing bios first time
4. Get unlucky trying to flash bios second time (note, it's not good for your machine to power off during a flash).
5. Purchase new main board because first main board got fried during the bios flash
6. Tries fitting an ATX power supply into a MicroATX case
7. When putting full size ATX power supply into MicroATX case, the optical drive (7 3/4" long) will often not fit together, i.e., can't stuff an elephant in a 32oz jar of peanut butter
8. Tries fitting a MicroATX power supply only to find out it pushes the CPU core temperature over 150 degrees within 2 minutes of turning on (still can't figure out why this happened).
9. Refuses to contact technical support (this might be more of my own fault, I'm a bit thick headed).
10. Software Makes Sense!

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Update: Apparently some of the Geek Squad corporate manuals have been leaked. One of which is their trouble shooting guide, what they use when you bring your broken computer into BestBuy. I could have used this earlier.

Not that you care...but I do

Christmas Day 093
Originally uploaded by K3bert.

So, with the new blog, I figured I would post a picture of what is important to me...my wife and greyhounds. This is our small family. My wife's name is Charlotte, the blue grey is Gracie and the red grey is Ester. Here Charlotte is givng Gracie her Christmas present, but I don't think Ester is able to wait for hers.

No much else to say, but if you would like to see more photo's, visit my flickr site.

Email...worst form of communication?

Recently, I've been asserting to co-workers that email is the worst form of communication. The primary reason...you are assuming that by sending the email, the recipient(s) are reading it. When you receive 100+ emails a day, this is most likely a bad assumption.

A grass roots movement has begun in the development group at my company that I'm finding makes email a pretty good form of communication. The answer is quite simple. When composing an email start with a list of users for FYA (for your action) and FYI (for your information). Thus, people that you expect to respond would show up in the FYA list and others that you are including for their information, simply put their name in the FYI list. It's amazing...out of 50 emails, I'll typically only need to respond to one. This simple trick makes it a lot easier to read through the emails to identify the ones you care about...the net result, quicker response times on my part.

Why K3bert?

Howdy. What happened to BernardStudios.com? It's gone, finis, asta la pasta baby. Why? K3bert sounds cooler. At work, a new VP of development started and there were so many Kevin's she was dealing with, she started calling me KEbert...as in Kevin Ebert. So, I thought I would change bernardstudios.com (which doesn't have a lot of meaning) to K3bert...I replaced the "e" with "3" because "kebert.com" was already taken.

So, here we go...no idea of how consistent I'll be with this blog, nor how often I'll update it or what kind of content to put on it. I am sure though it will contain info for my friends to keep up with my small life on earth.