This is just a short one - my brief rant about the early abandonment of a promising network card.

I bought a KillerNIC M1 at the end of 2008 in order to reduce ping time in online games. I have tended to stay well back from the top of the line where the general purpose CPU is concerned in systems I build for myself, so I had high expectations about the benefit I would see from this card offloading additional work.

I was pleased with the overall performance of this card on my 64-bit Vista system once I upgraded to the latest beta drivers at the time (4.1.0.36).

But here is the problem - those beta drivers were the last drivers they ever ‘released’ for this card - and you can only get those by digging around on the beta forum. Windows 7 is on the horizon and there is no word on any support for these cards other than reports of BSODs from early adopters.

I am having flashbacks to my driver experience with ATI video cards back in the day (around 2000) when it took them forever to get new drivers out for newer platforms.

So here is my message to you Bigfoot - I NEVER buy ATI cards. I don’t care what their benchmarks or feature checklists show. NVIDIA always gets my business because of the terrible support I received from ATI almost a decade ago and because of the awesome driver support NVIDIA has always provided.

Someday maybe - if NVIDIA drops the ball - I may take another look at an ATI card.

Right now Bigfoot is in the doghouse - you guys can forget about any more business from me and I will recommend against your products every chance I get.

Back in the good old days when I seemed to have more spare time for that sort of thing I played with selling some mp3 and CD recordings of multi-track hymns I recorded.

Well, crocketthopper.com has been defunct for a couple of years now, and I don’t see myself ever getting back to attempting to sell the music - so here it is:

Free for your listening pleasure

oh-jesus-my-savior

tallis-evening-hymn

return-oh-god

oh-tell-me-no-more-of-this-worlds-vain-store

supplication

samanthra

almighty-king-whose-wondrous-hand

Greetings friends, family, cohorts, peers, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera!

I expect the focus of this blog will evolve over time - but for the moment I plan for this public diary to span personal, political, and professional topics ranging from Software Engineering to liberty to the value of human life - body, soul, and spirit.

I have read that most blogs are read by at most a dozen people - so I will approach this public/private endeavor with an expectation that most of my readers are already acquainted with me in some way. Clay Shirkey makes some great observations about the weirdness of this phenomenon in his book Here Comes Everybody - writing a blog is like having a conversation in the food court of a mall - it is sort of private, but eavesdroppers abound. In the blogosphere however, this behavior is encouraged