A friend of mine was recently “awarded” a brand new Zune for his work with the “empire”. Given his “love” for the “empire”, and knowing my love for Linux, and after seeing a rumor that there was work in progress on making a version of Linux to run on the Zune; he sent it to me - with the explicit requirement that I promise to put Linux on it as soon as possible.

Trouble is, it turns out that the rumor was way over-stated. While there are people working on getting Linux running on the Zune, they haven’t even come close to getting it to the first stage of something basic loading.

So, here I sit with a Zune. What to do? Well, I guess I’ll just have to attempt to use it as Microsoft intended for a while and see what it can do, and how well it manages to do it. I have a 5th Gen 30G Video iPod also, so I can do a little comparison, but I’ll mostly just stick to the good and bad of it straight up.

To start with, I have the brown? one. It’s a semi-transparent hunter green over a chocolate colored base. Kind of a cross between a cool effect, and poop.

OK. More to come shortly.

Well, I’ve found proof that software isn’t the only place that companies scrimp and cut corners in an effort to wring every dollar out of the consumers. How? I’m wet. From the knees down, I look like I was wading in a pool. This is due to a simple act of fertilizing my lawn using one of those “just connect this container to the end of your hose and fertilize and protect in one fell swoop” products. The problem is that they didn’t use a good quality process to ensure that something as standard as a hose fitting worked properly. It barely held, trying to tighten it just caused it to “hop” a thread, making it looser. So, I spent 15 minutes spraying my lawn while the host-to-bottle junction poured water all over my legs and feet. Yippee.

I just don’t get the mind-set of “cheaping” out on (or screwing over) the very people who keep you alive… but we all know that software companies have been doing it for ages. If I did that to my customers, then I’d be out of business…. I guess if your market is 2 billion, you can afford to ignore the 100 million that you’ve pissed off.

I had a weird moment yesterday. I walked into the garage, the door was wide open, the breeze was warm, the sun was bright, and then it happened. I was a kid again. No, I didn’t “feel” like a kid…. I was a kid. I had the incredible urge to run outside and play. Specifically, to hop on my bike and ride around the cul-du-sac, just for the fun of it. To jump on and off curbs, pull a wheelie, ride with no hands, to see how far I could lay down the bike to the side and still keep going. Just for the pure joy of it.

And then reality hit me…

I was an adult. Adults don’t play. For an adult to ride a bike, you have to be going somewhere or for some reason… the park, for example…. or out for exercise. I imagined the neighbors locking up their kids after looking out and seeing a balding, overweight, middle-aged man, just tooling around the cul-du-sac - not “going somewhere”. It wouldn’t be a pretty picture.

I took my once again sane mind, and headed into the office to see if I could get a little work done.

So, why do I have the urge to go run around the yard barefoot?

While working on a printer for a representative of a large Christian organization (that shall remain nameless) the other day, I was trying to explain the benefits of using something like OpenOffice.org instead of MS Office. My reasoning was along the lines of cost, security, access, and information preservation, but I was rebuffed by his comment that they get a major discount on MS Office because they are a non-profit with a lot of people. “It only costs us around $100 or so”, he says. Here’s the thing…. they have over 120,000 people working for them. All of them have MS Office.

So, let’s see just how dedicated we are to reaching out to people…. that’s $12 MILLION dollars that could have been used for outreach, but it was an “acceptable” amount of money to just throw out of the budget - every two to three years - because it’s software that “we’ve always used”. Now add in the $40/year spent on anti-virus software, another $4.8 MILLION dollars. Oh, let’s not forget the client access licenses for the servers, plus the cost of the server operating system, plus the cost of the hardware upgrades needed for every operating system upgrade, just so 95% of the people can do their web browsing, email and documentation……. It just boggles the mind that a Christian organization that is “focused” on reaching out can just blow that much money.

Of course, everyone does it - even small Churches. It just looks worse for that organization since they have so many people. I just wonder how many more people could be reached if all Christian organizations would take a little time and come up with an IT infrastructure that showed as much financial good stewardship as they put into all other areas of the budget.

Obviously, there are some situations where money must be spent on some particular IT or software solution. But blindly paying for something is just such a waste… there are too many people to reach.

……. sometimes I feel that I’m shouting at the deaf ……..

Well, I hope you like the new style better… the old one was getting dated. This one basically started as the “Silver Lexus” style… but it will be changing. I’ve already replaced the image of the Lexus with something MUCH better, and as I continue to tweak and modify the look, feel and layout; I will most likely rename the theme completely…. but for now, credit where credit is due.