I had a backup. Really.

What? No bond measures?

If you don't live in California, this is not going to be interesting (though living here is no guarantee of interest either).

California has periodic elections like every other state, but next week we've got an off-cycle special election strictly for eight ballot initiatives. Half of them are being pushed heavily by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and most of them are generating lots of heat, but this is the first election I can remember which has no bond measures.

Anyway, for many years, I've written an analysis of the ballot propositions and emailed them to my friends: I can always tell when an election nears because I get "Hey, where's your writeup?" emails. I'm running late this cycle — it's been busy — but have finally finished:

Steve California Ballot Analysis - November 8 2005

I'm much more interested in educating than convincing, and in a few cases am actually open to being convinced myself (I changed my mind on one of them during the process of writing due to thoughtful input from others).

Trash your laptop with a battery...

What a lousy experience. I spent today at a customer doing network upgrades all over: XP/SP2 installs, loading all the latest patches, spyware scans, etc. The works.

I spent a lot of time on the boss's laptop, and to top it off ran a FlashBIOS update on his Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. Dell has a great system to flash the BIOS from Windows, so there's no need to boot from a floppy drive (which this machine doesn't have). I do this all the time.

After rebooting, the system reported that it was indeed running the A15 firmware (instead of A12), but the keyboard was unresponsive — both the laptop itself and an external keyboard — and the "booting in <N> seconds" message took 5 minutes to count 30 seconds.

This was hosed long before the hard drive was involved, so it smelled like a bad FlashBIOS update, but it all ran properly. I was left with the sinking feeling of being the guy who had his hands on the system all day, updating this and that, but "I didn't break it". It's a lousy feeling.

I took it all home with the intention of trying to find a way to flash an older update, or at least copy the boss's date from the hard drive, when it all started working. Huh?

It turns out that the problem was a bad battery. This is a four-year-old machine, and both batteries have no juice left. The owner uses it in a docking station at home or at the office, and had no reason to replace these dead batteries (he didn't have any idea they were dead).

What I assume happened is that one of the batteries has failed beyond full drainage, and that it's always been bad. The A12»A15 BIOS update treats the battery differently, and this is what hung the system. I have a different Dell laptop which uses the same batteries, and it was just luck that I tried shuffling them around: one battery hangs the system in realtime, every time, whether in the BIOS or in Windows. Removing the devil battery un-hangs the system six seconds later, every time.

Everybody who's worked hands-on with lots of customer equipment has had the experience of things breaking, and the implication that it was our doing. Sometimes it is our doing, but when working on troubled equipment, we get the attention when things go wrong.

It's nice to have iron-clad proof that it's not our doing.

Steffan Soule - Fantastic magician in Seattle

While at the Microsoft Global MVP Summit last month, our product-group dinner/party (Security and Networking groups) included a magician as ambient entertainment. I always enjoy a good magician, but this guy was fantastic. Cards, rope, rings - anything that he fit on his small table - I never saw a repeat trick in more than an hour of watching. And even though I had a pretty good idea how something was done, I could not see the evidence in spite of close scrutiny. How he pulled that card with my name out of the little box remains a mystery.

Steffan Soule is just extraordinary. His delivery is low-key, he's friendly, and he's really good at engaging his audience. He's been doing corporate events (like this one) for more than 20 years, and with proper advance preparation is able to build in the company's schtick/message into his act.

I'm doing what I what I always wanted to do (software), and it's obvious that Steffan is living his dream too. It's always a joy to watch one who is truly an expert in his craft, and he certainly was.

Thank you, Steffan: you're truly an artiste.

Looking for reasonable corporate IM solution

I have been a religious user of instant messenger applications for years, and it's been a wonderful customer-support tool as well as a way to chat with customers. Many customers have Yahoo! IM, AOL, or MSN accounts, and we're able to take care of business.

I'd like to outfit all of one customer's staff workstations with IM, mainly to allow "We need to reboot the system" broadcasts as well as Remote Assistance desktop support.

One solution is to just get everybody a Hotmail account, but I don't care for this much: it's hard to manage external accounts, requires the internet, and probably isn't secure enough. So I'm looking for a corporate IM solution.

Microsoft sells the Live Communications Server which looks very full featured, but it's at a crack-induced price of something like $100/user. There is no way I can justify $2500 for IM services internally - I'd use NET SEND first.

So I'm looking for a corporate IM solution for my customer: commercial software is OK, but it can't be this kind of don't-take-us-seriously pricing offered by Microsoft. Some requirements:

• Easy desktop installation with .msi: this lets non-admin users install it on a desktop with Group Policy. I guess I could live with a .EXE installer, but I'm not excited about it.
• Authentication on the DC - I want to avoid having to maintain separate user accounts to mirror the Windows user base.
• Compatible with roaming profiles: I want a user to login at any desktop and get his/her same configuration. I guess that storing the config on the server could accomplish this.
• "Remote Assistance" support: as far as I know, the only way for me to jump on a user's desktop remotely is if they send a Remote Assistance invitation via MSN messenger, but I gotta believe (hope?) that there are hooks for others.
• Secure, remote access for external users without VPN access.
• Multi-server client integration would be nice: if I'm at home, and three unrelated customers all have this, I can (somehow) connect to each without running three clients.
• Not browser based: standalone application only.
• No Java - sorry, just not up for that.
• I don't care about Trillian support, but others might
• Conference/Chat support
• Broadcast-message support
• Some kind of API for integration might be fun: then I can run some kind of bot which might let users check the status of critical servers (the payroll server is either up or down, etc.). Not required.
• We're running SBS2003: would prefer not to dedicate a separate machine for this.
• XP/2000 desktop support only: no Mac/Linux required.
• We don't need/care about voice or webcam support.

I've never spec'd this before, and have only thought about the details for an hour: I invite not only suggestions for products, but bullet points that I might have missed.

Anyone?