Yesterday was one of the more frustrating days I’ve had as an entrepreneur. It was one of those days when everything seems to be against you, and no matter how hard you try you can’t manage to take a step forward. However, it came with a good realization:
Sometimes the only progress you can make is not taking a step backwards.
After dealing with other problems, I realized one big issue I was having was the fact that my test e-mails were being caught in spam filters. Once I figured this out, after going through everything detailed below, things were peachy. That is, until I realized I hadn’t been receiving e-mail from my university e-mail address for a week or more!
This movie is fantastic for the intelligent movie goers. Quality acting, good effects, and an interesting story line. Whats more, in the context of the movie it actually makes sense! I highly recommend you see it.
Still, as an experienced creator of virtual worlds, the psychology presented in this movie was quite interesting…
Simon Sinek talks about how great leaders inspire action. His ideas resonated with me, and it culminated in a post I have desired to write for quite some time.
Note: This is a long post because it is essentially two posts in one.
A few weekends back I went to see Alice in Wonderland with my two brothers. Obviously this is an unconventional movie choice for three guys, but there were few movies playing we are Tim Burton fans. Anyways, I think there is a valuable lesson to be learned from this movie.
(It appears they disabled embedding. Just click through to YouTube to watch the trailer!)
Tonight was the Big Dream Gathering at UNI. My Marketing professor was gracious enough to let me leave during the break, so I was able to enjoy the gathering from 7pm to 8:30pm or so. I arrived and was immediately impressed with the number of posted dreams, and I added three to the walls myself. I spent time reading every dream posted, and commented on a dozen or more posts. A big shout out to Mitch Matthews for hosting the impressive display and inspiring people to dream big!
On Tuesday I enjoyed my first day in my new office. I have been accepted into the Student Business Incubator (SBI) program at UNI, which is run by the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center. It is a rather large office and is well equipped and furnished, and it is provided to me for free. I was still absorbing the absolute shock of having a second office at the age of 20 when Laurie Watje, my teacher, mentor, and the SBI manager knocked on my door to give me a heads up: “Mitch Matthews, a UNI alum, is with Big Dream Gathering and will be stopping by to tape an interview with you around 3pm, so be thinking about what you want to say!” I was awestruck and terrified. Here I am, 30 minutes into my first day and now I have to give an interview on tape!
You see, to stay in the incubator you must make satisfactory progress in various areas of running your business, such as business development, personal development, networking, SBI involvement, and other things. You are required to obtain a certain amount of “points” per semester by doing various activities. This is easily achievable to anyone reasonably motivated, and I will certainly pass the requirement by a large amount. One of the things you can get points for is being available for incubator tours, which merely amounts to talking to anyone Laurie brings by when you are in your office. I could have turned down the offer, but beyond looking bad on the first day, I had no desire to! Fear is not a reason to reject opportunity. Indeed, one of the big lures of entrepreneurship is the ability to challenge myself in ways I have not experienced, the ability to improve skills that have gone undeveloped, and to thrust me into situations I that I find uncomfortable. Confronting things you are unfamiliar with and having the courage to do things you might not do otherwise is an important part of being not just an entrepreneur, but a leader as well.
Sure enough, a small mob of people swarm in around 3pm, and I hear the knock on my door. The time has come, and I think, “Now, what do I say without sounding like a fool?” While I’m not entirely sure I accomplished that, I felt like I had a great interview. Mitch Matthews is a very impressive and personable guy, and it was obvious that he has a lot of passion for what he does. As Laurie noted, he was coming around filming people to talk about their “Big Dreams”, for he runs BigDreamGathering.com and is going to host an event on campus that I will surely be attending. Part way into the interview the camera guy ran out of tape and went to retrieve another, but Mitch and I just kept talking anyway!
As my interview wrapped up he gave me a few very useful bits of advice and then moved on to the other incubator inhabitant present, Travis Steffan, who runs two bussinesses out of the incubator: Synn Clothing and WorkoutBox. I knew his story because I met him during a tour last semester when I was in a class, but I wanted to listen to the interview anyway because he is an impressive individual and a successful student entreprenuer. While listening I got to gab a bit with the other people present, which were mostly people from around UNI that were showing Mitch and his small crew around and grabbing people with Big Dreams.
Eventually the excitement passed and I took a few minutes to reflect on what had just happened. My first formal day as an entrepreneur and I had already accomplished these things after four hours:
Networked, which resulted in connections, advice, and a possible customer (before I have written any code!)
Filmed an interview, resulting in free marketing / press
Successfully delivered an elevator pitch on camera and off, with positive feedback from four or five people
Was told by at least three people they loved the name of my business
Had my business concept reaffirmed by people I did not know, which felt great
–
Registered domain names
Setup work environment
Read policy information
Gained points towards business progress for staying in the SBI.
As I walked to my night class I could not imagine a higher octane start to my business, nor could I imagine a more productive day. I had a great sense of accomplishment, and yet I technically have very little done. But as I say in the interview: I have all of the pieces, I just need to put them together.
So, to anyone reading that wants to find the moral of the story, I leave you with these two lessons learned:
Develop an elevator pitch! It is absolutely necessary to be able to describe your idea and sell it to a person in just a few sentences.
The first day is -NOT- too early to buy business cards! You never know who you might meet that wants one. I was kicking myself for not having any!
I’ll try to post a picture of my office and maybe come back and insert the video of my interview once it has been posted.
As the semester finally wrapped up I found that my list of things to write about has begun to explode. However, at the very top was something I discussed with several people when talking about my software engineering project: the eureka moment. Epiphany.
When writing software, you often analyze several ways to accomplish a task and embark on what seems like the best one; but on occasion, the stars align and the meaning of life becomes crystal clear. Your solution is so perfect and elegant that you know, even feel, that it is right and it shouldn’t be any other way. I detail my experience with this below.
When buying my new graphics card I received a free 4GB flash drive. I didn’t realize this when I bought the product, but I was excited as you can never have too many flash drives! However, as I read its reviews I heard a great many complaints of it being slow. This made me wonder just how fast it would be, and how it compared to my other flash drives.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people to jump on the flash drive bandwagon. I bought (well, my mother bought) my first flash drive, a massive 128MB for over $120. That is a joke now days of course — you can obtain giant flash drives cheaply, and people routinely hand out “small” 4GB drives for free. And, as long as you plug them in once every twenty or so years they’ll retain their data!
Here I will detail the analysis of the flash drives I currently own, from my oldest, original 128 MB PNY flash to the newest free OCZ drive I have received.
In the order they were acquired, here is make / capacity (note that my original drive is the largest physically, even compared to the 16GB drive):
- 128MB PNY Attache (bought around mid 2004 or early 2005. It came with a Windows 98/ME drivers disc that I carry in my backpack to this day)
- 128 MB UNI ROTC – Special drive received from the department when I was in high school
- 2GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro – My first flash drive in many years. 2GB seems like a lot when you are used to 128MB!
- 16GB Kingston Data Traveler – Received from Distek, my employer, as Christmas gift in 2008.
- 4GB OCZ Diesel – Received as a free addon by NewEgg for buying two video cards.
—
I will test using CrystalDiskMark 2.2 using a USB 2.0 port doing sequential reads and writes:
Drive
Filesystem
Read (MB/s)
Write (MB/s)
PNY 128MB
FAT
4.858
4.172
ROTC 128MB
FAT
10.71
4.891
SanDisk Cruzer 2GB
FAT32
30.51
8.950
Kingston Data Traveler 16GB
FAT32
22.17
14.11
OCZ Diesel 4GB
FAT32
17.84
6.498
–
The conclusions are quite interesting. In comparison to similar technology, the OCZ diesel is indeed slow. There are many drives that function much faster then the ones listed here, though these are some of the more common drives.
It is interesting to me that write speeds increased dramatically, but now seem to wax and wane depending on what you buy. I also find it interesting that there was no clear winner here. The Kingston drive would be the obvious choice with good read speeds and the best write speeds, as well as superior capacity. However, the Sandisk drive has superior read speeds by a fair amount, and at 2GB will hold most anything I would want to carry around. I suppose these will be my primary drives depending on what I am trying to do.
As for the free OCZ Diesel… well, I think it is time to testReadyBoost with all 4GB of it
After programming heavily for my Software Engineering project, I determined that I could make extensive use of a third monitor. I came to this conclusion after having spent many long nights in front of my screens, endlessly resizing windows so that I could view what I would like to see, as well as view the chat with my teammates. I generally ended up with at least three SSH sessions open, and while I am aware there are many ways to quickly switch between windows on a command line (screen, buffers, and the like), the whole problem was switching at all. I was tasked with writing the search part of our system, which turned out to be interesting and a lot of fun. However, I was most productive when I was able to sit at the MySQL prompt and run test queries while writing the search code itself. I also needed another window or two to do general things without removing focus from my other two windows, and, for anyone who knows me well, I -ALWAYS- like to watch the performance of my computer so I generally had a session simply running htop.
After running my server for 20+ days, I shut down everything to go on Thanksgiving break. When I finally returned home, my server would not boot. Having gone through this before, I checked the RAM immediately, as it was an old high performance stick that saw heavy use in my desktop before being retired. The stick was at fault, and so my server was dead until I could buy new RAM. My graphics card was the only thing in my desktop that had not been upgraded in a while (two years or so), but I wasn’t going to bother ordering something until I actually needed parts. Now I had to order something, so I looked for new graphic cards! The desktop was running an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, and with the graphic card industry being the way it is, it had now moved into legacy status and there were much better cards to be had. So I decided that if I needed RAM for my server I would also throw in my new monitor and grab a new video card (an ATI Radeon HD 5770 from Sapphire).
Already annoyed with the RAM blown and having to gimp my desktop (took 1GB and threw it into the server for the time being) while being embroiled in coding, I eagerly awaited my parts. However, 15 minutes after placing the order for my monitor (a 22″ 5ms Acer, similar to my other two 20″ monitors), a sale on Newegg began for a similar monitor that had a better contrast ratio for ~$20 less. Thinking there was no way they could have processed my order in 20 minutes, I went to cancel. My request was denied. I tried again. Request denied. After further inquiry, it seemed that the monitor I ordered just 20 minutes earlier had hit their shipping lines! Instead of being disgruntled I merely canceled the order for the other monitor and decided I would be content with fast shipping of the pricier, slightly less capable monitor. In the mean time, my other order (video card and RAM) did NOT ship until Wednesday, the day I received the monitor I had ordered two days later than the parts. Newegg, recognizing their shipping hold up, decided to 2-day air ship the parts to me so I could get them today (12/4/2009).
Having done my research ahead of time (and thus, part of my reason for writing this blog post as that research was hard to find), I knew that my ATI Radeon X1950 Pro legacy card would very likely conflict with my new ATI Radeon HD 5770 under Windows 7, despite being workable under Windows XP. Now, after two hours of trial and error, I have found that you indeed cannot mix a legacy card with a newer card simply because it is no longer supported by Catalyst Control Center, which is needed to govern multiple ATI cards. So, it seems, ~$330 later, I simply have two more inches of screen space and an extra monitor on my desk, waiting to be used. The question now is do I buy a second graphics card or find an alternative? Having come this far, I’m inclined to say the second graphics card is the way to go. This is also after some research which led me to some interesting devices, but all for more then $160, which is about what another graphics card will cost me.
So, to recap for anyone searching:
If you want to use three monitors with your computer, the easiest and most reliable way to do so is with three DVI connections. In that regard, you will want two graphic cards, with at least one of them having two DVI/D-Sub outs. For maximum reliability and compatibility, and the ability to CrossFire or SLI later, try using two of the same card. If you have an older card that is no longer supported by ATI, you cannot mix it with a new card on Windows 7 due to driver conflicts (this has to do with the way Windows 7 pulls and uses legacy drivers). However, you should be able to use a newer card (that is, any card not in legacy status) with a brand new card (say, mixing a 4000 series and 5000 series) and have it work just fine.
Another question remains: If you have two cards and Crossfire them, can you support three monitors? I was curious about this too, but according to ATI only two monitors are supported with CrossFire at this time, although this link seems to say up to five can be supported. I should note I’m not much of a gamer or performance chaser. Instead, I chase my own productivity, and it so happens that multiple mid-range graphics cards seem to be the answer!
While I do not have hard benchmark numbers, it is quite clear after a few minutes of use that this card is a big advance over my Radeon X1950 Pro. It had double the memory (1GB v. 512MB) and it is faster (GDDR5 v. GDDR3). It has a much higher clock speed (850Mhz v. 600 Mhz) and a much larger number of graphics pipelines (800 v 600). I was concerned about heat (which any good system builder should be), so I watched in CCC as I ran the Windows 7 benchmark program. As the test chugged away, I watched the GPU get red-lined for a bit and the fan never went above 33% (great for noise), and the temperature never went above 50C. I suppose the question now is how hot will two of them get in my case? They will be quite close to eachother, and the top one will receive little air flow, so I am concerned. However, my temperatures are something I monitor quite heavily (I’ll probably write about that eventually), so hopefully it won’t be a problem
I spent some time yesterday playing Team Fortress 2 to test out the card a bit (I don’t play many games, so it is the most intensive one I have). I jacked up all of the settings to max, including Anti-Aliasing 8x and Ansiotropic Filtering 16x. The card ran like a champ — it never really broke a sweat, leaving its fan at 33% and never going above 55C while maintaining over 60fps, usually much more (100+).
For the curious, Windows 7 rates my system thus (scale ranging from 1.0 to 7.9):
Processor (C2D Q6600) – 7.1
RAM (4GB 800Mhz 4-4-4-12 GSKILL) – 7.1
Graphics (Radeon HD 5770) – 7.3 (up from 6.0)
Gaming graphics – 7.3 (up from 6.0)
Primary hard disk (WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM 500GB): 5.9
Thus, my base score is 5.9, with my disk drives being the only item under 7. This is a little curious to me as both of the drives are quite new and feature dual processors each with access to its own 16MB buffer. That said, I run the two drives in RAID1 using my motherboards fakeraid, so it isn’t surprising there is a performance hit here. All of that said, my desktop is considered extremely high end, and thus I will not need any more updates until I build a completely new rig in a few years. Until then, I look forward to testing triple monitors and another new 5770.
In the mean time, I’ll settle for my Linux box getting it’s own monitor:
Sometimes a talk turns into an experience, and Evelyn Glennie delivers. Evelyn is a Grammy-winning percussionist and composer who became almost completely deaf by the age of 12. Who better to teach you how to listen?
