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CodePrairie .NET

South Dakota .NET User Group

I Hate Linux

August 2007 - Posts

  • Six Months: One benefit... NDA

    Not a second after I posted the last post I remembered one major advantage of this point... portions of my NDA with my previous employer would have expired... specifically the portions regarding their ownership of anything I create, invent, write, etc.

    Why is this important?

    Back when I was only an intern there (nearly 4 years ago) there was an immensely useful piece of software that came from a company in France, a piece of software that was only part of a larger suite and one that my employer was the only authorized seller of it in this nation (we rebranded it).

    One problem (aside from the extreme cost)... hardware dongles.

    One weekend while at home I sat down with a copy of the relevant ISO document (ISO 13818-1 defines MPEG-2 Transport Streams, the fundamental basis of digital television today) and got to writing a basic version in VB.NET of one of the applications in the suite and come Monday morning was quite proud of my work and figured I should probably tell my manager just in case they had a problem with me writing an app at home that could theoretically compete with something the company sold down the line.

    After seeing a couple of screen shots my manager was shocked... and along with a short document I wrote up explaining my intent for writing it and how far I wanted to take it he took it to the department manager.

    In short I wanted to make a piece of software I might sell for $50-$100 that had a few of the features of something the company sold for ~$70,000... so needless to say mine would be pretty limited by comparison.

    After giving it a read through the department manager took it on to the head of the sales department and they scratched their heads for a while. Eventually the department manager got back to me and said that while he technically couldn't force me to stop building my app... he assured me that if one day there was news from up front that they'd lost a large sale because of the personal work of someone in the engineering department... heads would likely roll.

    Needless to say I didn't continue it. Partially due to that threat, but also because I figured that they could technically take control of it from me at anytime due to the before mentioned NDA.

    That isn't the case anymore... and perhaps it's time to consider restarting that project (from scratch of course).

  • Six Months

    Running into a former co-worker this week made me remember a rather unfortunate anniversary that has come and gone... the six month anniversary of me leaving my previous full time programming job due to my hand issues.

    Last week when seeing HD4 the PA had asked if I had any kind of assistance coming in and I said no and went through the list of things that a person in my position might qualify for and why in my case I do not and ended with SSDI and said:

    ... and then there's Social Security Disability Insurance which requires one to be disabled and out of work because of it for a year or be expected to be for a year... I've got half of that under my belt already which means I've got another six months to wait at least unless one of my doctors were to write a note for me saying that they still have no idea what's wrong with me and that given previous experience see no reason to believe that I'll be fixed and able to work again for at least the next six

    To which he replied:

    Yea I don't think we are going to be able to do that

    Not really a surprise.

    It's both interesting and horrifying to realize just how long of a time that's been since I last held down a full time job.

    It's interesting to consider just how many nights I was able to stay up until the wee hours... and how many mornings I could sleep in without worry of alarms, schedules or having to be anywhere while it's horrifying to consider just how much that time has cost me in terms of food, gas, insurance, housing, etc... money that I don't have and will be paying for for likely years to come.

    It's also quite disconcerting to realize that it's now been nearly 6 months since I went under the knife to try to fix my issue and in the end I seem to be far worse off today than I was prior to that.

  • DHCP4WHS is getting noticed

    In the days after I first released DHCP4WHS I got notice on some of the following sites/blogs:

    That's right... not just one, but two German language notices. Forget Norm MacDonald's old theory... perhaps it's now time for a new theory regarding that country... Germans love Brendan Grant.

    One of the biggest events in the history of DHCP4WHS was it's being featured in this alleged picture of the RTM version of Windows Home Server as seen over on wegotserved.

    Bo Ya!

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