And every manufacturer you can name has contributed steaming product dung to the sh*tpile.

Yes, I’m annoyed.

For as long as I’ve had wi-fi, I’ve found that a typical router will crap out after 6-18 months of use.  I’ve tried every brand available and talked to many a sys-admin in search of recommendations.  It makes no difference.  The products are, almost universally, crap.

The last time I moved, I found myself in an area with a lot of competing wi-fi signals.  Since the POS I had was giving up the ghost anyway, I decided to buy a new setup.  For various reasons I went with a pair of Netgear WPN824 (version 3 if you care).  It’s cheap and cheerful and gets good reviews. More importantly, you can set them up as repeaters so the two routers combined should give a nice broad area of coverage with a strong signal.

The setup was slow, painful and not as described.  I ended up calling Netgear support, who eventually solved the problem by switching off all of the advanced features of the router, like speed.  Nice.

Anyway, that was 6 months ago, and now the things are failing 4-6 times a day.  I actually switched back to a wired connection because I was so tired of futzing with them.  Having finally lost patience, I did a bit of superficial digging and decided on the Linksys WRT160N.  There were a couple of warnings about not being able to install custom firmware, but I wasn’t planning on doing that anyway.  Reviews were generally good.

I checked online and the local TigerDirect seemed to have a decent price, so I drove over there and bought two.  Tiger have decided (who knows why) to resurrect the CompUSA name.  That should have been omen enough.

I got the routers home and plugged them in.  First of all, no repeater mode.  Suck.  Will have to get creative to work around that.  But an initial run on a wired connection with Speedtest.net showed about 3x faster downloads that I was getting with a wired connection on the Netgear. Yay!

Then I try a wi-fi connection.  My trusty Android Wi-Fi Analyzer suggests a good channel and off I go. Sitting NEXT to the router, and connected by 802.11n, I get less than 1/3 of the throughput of a wired connection.  10 feet away IN AN OPEN ROOM I get no usable signal.  I reach for Google, and crappy N support is a “feature” of the router.  The official response is that this is a known issue and you need to downgrade to firmware from 2008 because the latest firmware is shite.  It’s been shite since February 2009 and as far as I can tell, Linksys/Cisco don’t give a damn.  They certainly aren’t releasing any updates.  See this post for a typical example.

So back to Google.  I finally found a review site that seems to be worth a damn —  www.SmallNetBuilder.com.  Here’s an example of their rankings.  They also seem to follow up on products after a few months to see if they stand the test of time, unlike the “proper” review sites like cNet and PC World who apparently would give a thumbs up to a router with the brainpower of Sarah Palin if it’s little lights blinked okay.

After much debate, and considerable reluctance after my prior experience, I decided on the Netgear RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router (WNDR3700).  Not cheap, but actually threatened to do what I needed.

One of the nice things about the WNDR3700 is that it contains two radios, so you can set it up as a repeater without killing your bandwidth i.e. set one radio up as a repeater connecting to another WNDR3700 and set the other radio up as a standard access point.

So I returned the Linksys WTF160Ns to Tiger, argued with the guy that wanted to charge a restocking fee for a defective product and picked up a couple of WNDRs from BestBuy and Staples (no-one nearby had two in stock)

It took a good 4 hours to get the damn things set up.  A prime example of “why is this not easier”.

Here are the issues I ran in to:

1.  I could not get the repeater function to work.

When you set up repeater mode, you need the MAC address of the base station and the repeater unit.  Netgear very helpfully includes a sticker on the bottom of the router that has the MAC address of the router.  But guess what?  Since it has two radios, it has MULTIPLE MAC ADDRESSES.  Found that nugget buried deep in a Netgear forum. The MAC address on the sticker was, of course, not for the radio I had assigned to the repeater function.

2.  Using the repeater mode disables any security option except WEP

<sigh>

3.  ”Draft N” is a lying SOB of a label

It took a long time for 802.11n to get formalized.  But what isn’t clear until you try to use it is just how cluster-f*cked most of the draft implementations are.  I have 2 macs and a netbook that are all nominally 802.11n devices.  One of the perks of “n” is that it can run on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies.  This is good because cordless phones, baby monitors, regular wi-fi, bluetooth, Microwaves and Old Man Cranky’s viagra prescription can all run at 2.4GHz, so it’s a little noisy.  5GHz is, by comparison, a charmingly desolate chunk of frequency.  Yeehah.

Except not every 802.11n device supports 5GHz.  Back to the drawing board.  Stopping only to revisit issues around item #1 on this list.

4.  WEP sucks

I’m not as paranoid about the security aspect of WEP.  My principal concern is that on many routers it apparently reduces throughput by 50%.  Yay.

So after yet more googling, I went with WPA2.  I was very proud of myself until…

5. WPA2 Implementations Suck Too

One of the devices I wanted to connect is a Nintendo Wii.  Wii doesn’t like WPA2.  Specifically, Wii doesn’t like long keys because Nintendo were alledgedly too lazy to implement WPA2 fully.  Now if I hadn’t already set up a bunch of devices with the nice long key, I would just have changed it.  But there is a workaround.  Apparently the passphrase you use with WPA2 gets converted to 256 bit key.  But sometimes that doesn’t happen correctly, so this chap has a web app that will generate a 64 digit hexadecimal version of the key.  It looks something like “b2334781c5b2c1d8628ed47b5699e76d15a9ecd1092c911b5830bf37a8c56294″.  It’s really fun typing that in with the wiimote.  But at least it worked.

In conclusion

So after multiple days of messing about, I seem to have more or less everything working.  My download speed is about 2x what it was and I’m not fishing for the router reset every time I want to get online.  I’ve yet to win my battle with WPA2 and the iPhone 3GS, but I suspect the Nintendo workaround will bear fruit.

The big question is: how many months will I get out of this setup and will it actually be any better in the long run than what wasn’t working before?

More importantly, I am left asking why on earth it takes this much time and energy to solve what should be a well understood problem.  Instead of routinely squeezing new products out of their collective corporate behinds, you’d think Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, Cisco and all the others would take a minute to make stuff that (a) actually works and (b) doesn’t require a day of Googlewhacking to debug.

<sigh>

Update: I forgot to mention one other thing — I also got a performance boost from replacing Time Warner Cable’s default DNS servers with OpenDNS server IP’s.  You can sign up for a free account here, or just use their IP addresses instead of whatever DNS servers your ISP provides — OpenDNS nameservers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

But aside from that, I increasingly believe they are sucktastic for the simple reason that they are very very poor journalists. Their fact checking is atrocious and getting worse.

I was reading an article published today by GMA News that Google Alerts sent my way. Not sure I’d ever heard of the site before, but the article is riddled with inaccuracies. But lo and behold, it’s not a GMA article at all, it’s regurgitated newsy goodness from our charmingly journalistic friends at AP.

Let me give you some examples:

“As 2010 draws nearer, techies can expect a key year for communication technology with Apple set to launch a new iPhone, Microsoft to launch its Microsoft Mobile 7, and there’s the Google Android 2 on the way.”

Hmm.  Could have sworn there was a tiny, almost unpublicized launch of a new phone from Motorola that may (and I say “may” because I don’t have the army of fact checkers and proper journalists at the AP’s disposal) have been running Android 2.0.

But that’s just the beginning (literally, it’s the opening line).

Launched in China in October 2009, the Apple iPhone 3GS is now conquering the world’s most populous mobile phone market and is set for a great start to 2010.

Conquering?  Not really.  It’s starting to tick up but many folks agreed that the launch was pretty disappointing (see this article for an example).  But hey, we’re only on the second paragraph…

Let’s press on (I hope you enjoyed that pun)…

The iPhone is not without market rivals. Most notably, Google Android is now offering a competitive operating system, with key applications and gadgets. This will be expanded in 2010, with the launch of Android 2.0, also known as Eclair.

As well as being Bluetooth-capable, the new version will include the option to have multiple accounts on one device, a search function for saved text messages and multi-touch support for the virtual keyboard.

Hmm.  I have a first gen G1 running Android.  Certainly has a Bluetooth setting — maybe it’s virtual bluetooth?

And one of my favorite lines:

Microsoft Mobile, which will launch its Mobile 7 platform next year is another growing contender.

Wow.  Maybe they live in a bunker where the original PalmOS is still the bees knees and Windows 95 is a rock solid 32-bit OS.  If you know anything about the mobile market, you know that sentence is missing the words “for a rapid death”.  According to Gartner, Windows Mobile lost 28 percent marketshare between Q3 2008 and Q3 2009 (or so say these guys).

Luke Peters, deputy editor of T3 Magazine says that lots of phone companies will be aiming for increased processing speed in 2010.

I know nothing about Luke Peters, and wish him no ill-will, but I hope he is smarter than this quote makes him sound.

A very popular application is Google Maps, which users can easily access on their mobile phones to find out their exact location. But it goes further than that, with the latest applications offering extra information which is directly linked to where you are.

Luke Peters refers to this concept as augmented reality.

Hmm.  Okay, maybe he’s not.

“Augmented reality is an idea that came around really in the start of 2009 and allows, now that you can track wherever your phone is, whether it’s an iPhone 3G or a Google Android phone, it means that companies can layer information over realtime video to show you exactly what’s happening in your surroundings,” Peters says.

Oh sweet Jesus help me.  Phones with GPS’s — crazy idea.  Not as though they’ve been around for a while.  RIM, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and a few hundred million shipped products might disagree, but what would they know.  And for the love…  could we not spend just a moment in Wikipedia or some other fact source??? AR new in 2009?  “The term augmented reality is believed to have been coined in 1990 by Thomas Caudell, an employee of Boeing at the time” .  Oh, and the iPhone 3G that this guy is so in love with won’t run AR applications, you need a 3Gs.

Matthew Bath confirms that the emphasis is really on software next year. “Again 2010 is a story of software,” Bath says. “You’re going to see a big rise in downloadable stores that enable you to download software to totally customize your mobile phone, whether that’s finding out where you’ve parked your car to scanning barcodes in your local supermarket.”

Hmm.  I’ve heard of this.  It’s called an application something or other.  App Store?  Sounds wacky.  Although Bath reckons the store is downloadable, so maybe it’s an augmented reality Walmart to go in your pocket?

<sigh>

Now this article happens to be on a topic I know something about, so it’s easy for me to poke holes. And perhaps the AP has some good reasons to quote people that don’t understand the topic they are talking about.  But part of the reason the AP is so incensed by all these damn bloggers and their pesky blogosphere is that they claim to be “real journalists” where as we are all just factless parasites who don’t do our jobs properly.

The fact checking is so craptastically far off, it makes me wonder about all the AP stuff I read that I don’t know much about.  Is it all as craply checked as this?

Just wondering…

I was having dinner with a good friend earlier this week. For the sake of anonymity, we’ll call him M. M is someone I used to work with and have a great deal of respect for. We have over 12 years of history together and have, on separate occasions, both asked the other to come and work on a new startup. Since he lives out of state, we don’t catch up as often as I’d like.

For a significant period of time M was a high level VP with a Fortune 500 company. He was heading up a big initiative that was very important to the company’s future.

In typical big company fashion, they told him to go do it, held him accountable and then enabled every conceivable roadblock to prevent success while personally putting him and his team through the wringer.

A classically clear example of set up to fail while betting on success.

In 2001 M’s ever growing desire to quit dovetailed neatly with some corporate downsizing and he took a layoff package. After a few months off, he started his own business, effectively doing what he was supposed to be doing at the company he used to work for.

Eight years on, M has had some ups and downs, but things are generally good. He will never again work as an employee of a big company.

During dinner we discussed what he called his “recovery” from working in a big company. The short version is that you get very used to the salary, the bonus, the perks and perceived position and it takes a massive slap in the face to get real. It took him at least six of the last eight years to realize that the big company lure was a shitty deal. He downsized his life and has been much happier ever since.

Less money, but zero inflicted bullshit. He still deals with BS, but it’s on his own terms and not mandated by some idiotic HR lackey (or other empty suit) with more papers than brains.

Big company “benefits” are a highly effective drug. They dull your mind to other possibilities while chaining your feet to your desk.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my six figure salary back in the day. It doesn’t suck to buy a bigger house, nicer car, take a swanky vacation to Hawaii, join a healthclub, get a big home theater system etc etc. And no matter what you make, it’s always easy to spend it.

But the further you get down this road, the more your reality gets distorted. You just get used to spending $60 or $100 on dinner, instead of the $30 or $40 you used to spend. Or buying the $50,000 car instead of the $20,000 import.

And when that happens, you’re stuck. Even if you are entrepreneurially inclined, it’s hard to take a startup seriously. You

can’t

drop from $200k a year to $80k with lots of prospects. The budget just doesn’t work. Not without some serious life changes. And that goes double if you have a family.

And so your tolerance for bullshit goes up. Way up. In the case of M, I believe the company he worked for broke almost every promise they made to him and yet he still stayed and tried to do the job he was tasked with.

Another friend of mine, we’ll call him K, is also at a Fortune 500. K is somewhat senior, but not on the management team. He’s paid very well. K gets to work by 7am, leaves by 8pm and usually works weekends. He’s been there for over 3 years and his schedule has always been like that. It’s not officially expected, but it’s certainly not discouraged.

K’s employer went through a re-org and his group now reports to a different, less relevant part of the organization. That got K started on getting back to a startup or small company. He got two different interesting offers, one full time and one on a moonlighting basis. But when it came down to making a decision, he froze. He just couldn’t imagine leaving the mothership, the salary and the perceived safety.

Two other recent run ins were with guys that work for a company that has treated them abysmally. They’re paid well, but the place has been in constant re-org and their office keeps getting the shitty end of the deal. Despite repeated assurances that the worst was over, they were recently told that their location will be closed entirely. Their jobs will end unless they are willing to relocate, but the relocation doesn’t really fit with either of their personal lives. If they aren’t chosen for relocation or don’t agree to uproot their entire life, they’ll get some kind of severance, but they don’t know what. They are in absolute corporate limbo.

These guys have valuable experience in a hot area. They are very capable and have a demonstrable track record. You would think they might be willing to jump, or at least put some feelers out. But no. Both are waiting to “see what happens”.

And I know plenty of other folks that fall in to the same boat. They are paid well and treated poorly. They’re tasked with big hairy audacious goals, only to have the rug pulled out from under them at ever turn. They are promised support, promotion and flexibility and receive nothing. And they run fast and work hard, often moving mountains to achieve their goals only to be screwed by a large, autonomously stupid machine that cannot understand or reward individual value.

I believe it’s a shitty and truly faustian bargain. You are selling yourself, your conscience and your abilities… to a buyer that is incapable of sticking to the terms of the deal.

And compounding that shitty deal is the fact that no matter how high you rank, you can still get tossed out at a moments notice. In the current economic climate, the corporate safety net is an illusion. When even Don Dodge isn’t safe, it should be a wake up call that big companies are often fundamentally broken.

I know not everyone is wired like me, and I often think having the entrepreneurial gene is the embodiment of the chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”. But if you’re a cog in a big company, even an important one, take the time to step back and examine the deal you’re being given.

Take out the shitometer and get a proper reading. How much are you putting up with just to support a lifestyle that doesn’t really make you happy? Does the company really keep its promises? If not, hold them accountable. You can bet your hiney that if you missed your goals, you would be held accountable, just ask them for the same deal.

p.s. if you have a big company job, are treated well and generally happy, feel free to ignore all of the above…

It’s mostly simple things:

1. Their prices are usually good.
   These days they’re not always the cheapest, but their prices are always towards the bottom end of the range.
2. They don’t charge if you check a bag
   Every other airline I’ve flown lately charges $20-$30 per checked bag.  If you travel with a lot of gear, or family, that adds up.
3. They actually have some idea of customer service and generally operate from the view of keeping customers happy, rather than the “customers are a nuisance” approach of American, United and others.

The best example of #3 was my experience earlier today.  What was a 3 leg trip (from A to B to C to A) got revised to a standard round trip.  With other airlines, there would be cancellation fees (up to $150 last time I went through this) and a complicated process to get whatever credit remained. That credit can also only be used when buying a ticket by phone, not through the website, which means it can only be used to purchase more expensive tickets than are advertised on the airline’s site.  A nice end to end scam that ensures you get almost no refund from a canceled/changed trip.

With Southwest, I simply called, gave them my confirmation number and they canceled the legs I no longer needed.  The full price paid for each leg was instantly available as a credit against future travel (and good for 1 year).  What’s more, when I booked the new leg through the website, there was a link (as the agent told me) to “apply travel funds”.  I clicked it, typed in the confirmation number for the original (now canceled) leg and the credit was applied.  What’s more, I was able to apply credits from multiple canceled flights to a single new purchase.  And it all took less than 10 mins.

It’s always refreshing to see a company in a competitive business that builds customer service into its roots to such a degree that it permeates every aspect of their thinking…  And that’s why they’ll keep getting my business.

In fact, the pulsating satanic blob monster is nothing more than a colony of tubifex worms. Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, explained to News 14 Carolina that the creatures frequent “sewage and pond sediment”, and elaborated: “They seem to respond to the light from the camera. That light is pretty hot.”

Buchan did, though, admit: “I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them. We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.”

Not sure if that’s better or worse…  Thanks to my big brother for the link (The Register)

After I arrived here, I was shocked to find out that in the great state of NC, you can’t order a medium rare hamburger at most restaurants. The state mandates that unless the restaurant grinds their own beef, you can only order medium.

Why the legislature wasted time on such silliness is beyond me. But allegedly it’s for my own protection.

It’s nice to know they care.

Oh, except while it’s fine to jump in on irrelevant details of my health and well-being, they’re sure as heck not going to mess with any established monopolies that might like to rip money from my wallet without so much as a thank you.

For example, much of the area is exclusively serviced by Time Warner Cable. I pay more here than I ever did in Phoenix for service that is generally slower and definitely less reliable. But I can live with that…

A far worse example is the monopoly held by Progress Energy, our non-friendly local power company who are the sole provider for the area.

I’m currently in the process of applying LCLSMF to my life (less complications, less stress, more fun), as a result of which I’m moving. The new place will be half the size of my current one.

Progress will not connect the power at the new place without a $350 deposit, paid in full upfront. The deposit is regardless of credit history. They claim it’s based on 2 months of utils at the new property, but as I said, it’s half the size of my current place and I’ve pretty much never paid more than $170 for a month of electricity in my current home.

If I don’t pay, I don’t get electricity. If I don’t pay before I move in, they hit me with a reconnect fee too. There’s no assistance, no terms, nothing whatsoever in the way of help. They also won’t connect on a weekend, so I have to pay for extra days before I actually move in. And they hold the deposit for TWO YEARS.

Unbelievable.

Thanks NC. Great to know you’re looking out for the consumer in these difficult times.

P.s. Slow blogging lately as there’s been a lot going on. I have a bunch of things to talk about that hopefully I’ll get to in the coming weeks…

…

I have a lot of sympathy for those that would be impacted by the collapse of the big three automakers, but very little sympathy for the companies themselves.

Growing up in the UK when all the heavy industry was dying, I saw the government pump millions into failing industries that could no longer compete.  They collapsed anyway.  I’d hate to see that repeated here.

What’s particularly galling about the US auto industry is that it knows better.  Granted, some of the issues relate to the lifelong labor contracts they’ve been forced in to.  But still…

These guys know how to build cars efficiently.  They know how to develop new technology and they know how to make safer, more fuel efficient vehicles.

Don’t believe me?  10 points if you can correctly guess where Ford’s most technologically advanced assembly line is…

Did you guess “backwoods of rural Brazil”?  Spend some click power and go view this video. And then try and reconcile that with what you see in Ford’s US factories…

“How bad is it? At the current rate of job loss, within two months, it will be worse than The Great Depression.  ”

So on with the post…

…

Lots of folks are being introduced to the dreaded “Reduction in Force” aka legalese that makes it easier for HR to do layoffs. Unless you have the best luck in the world and an impeccable hiring record, you will have to deal with layoffs at some point in your company’s life.

But what amazes me is how badly some companies handle this.  There are a ton of resources and case studies, not to mention that most companies have HR professionals who should be on top of this when it has to happen.  There’s simply no excuse for doing it badly.

A very good friend of mine has just been through a layoff.  The company announced that they would be downsizing about 8 weeks ago.  They are still deciding who goes and who stays.  Needless to say, the impact on morale has been huge.  The company’s best people are actively looking for new jobs and they’ll be left with those that are either unable to get new jobs or oblivious to what is going on.  Management’s indecision is placing the entire company’s future in jeopardy.

When it comes to downsizing, I’m a big fan of Jack Welch. The basic rules are (a) clear purpose, (b) quick execution and (c) deep enough cut the first time so business can go back to normal.

But inevitably, there are plenty of other suggestions on how to proceed in difficult times, and I’ve personally been through most of them.  The scenarios I seen include “lets all take a pay cut”, “volunteer to go”, “you all choose who should go” and “management decides”.

“Lets all take a pay cut” doesn’t solve the problem. People won’t stomach more than a 5-10% cut, and that’s usually not enough to solve the problem.

“Volunteer to go” only works if you have a greying workforce. In a typical company, relatively few people will volunteer to quit their jobs.

“You all choose” rapidly turns into a McCarthy-istic witch hunt. It pretends that there are no politics in the workplace, which in anything other than a 1 person company, is an absurd denial of reality.

So that leaves “Management Decides”. As a responsible executive, I think anything other than “management decides” is a cop out. If you have any kind of credible organizational structure (i.e. not 100 people reporting to once person) it’s really not that hard to rank team members. It may not be fun, but as a competent manager, you know who’s a star, who’s a good worker and who’s at the bottom of the pile.

So if you are faced with layoffs, do your job and do it right.  Your team deserve it.

As an entrepreneur, you often find yourself in the position of thinking that some giant leap is a really good idea, only to later find out that it was actually a pretty ill-conceived plan that had some major holes in it.  But if you can leap, learn and move on, you’ll be much the better for it.

P.s.  I hate Barney.  No, that’s not relevant to the topic, it’s just a related fact.