If you missed the webinar on Monday, you can listen to it here: http://bit.ly/c7FlM8

A special thanks to Matthew of EditMe for having me on to talk about starting a business.

Cheers!

If you’re not familiar with the term “Micropreneur”, you’ll likely hear a bit more about it in the coming months. To give you a really short description, a Micropreneur is basically the owner/founder of a Micro-ISV. Ah yes, another acronym to explain. A Micro-ISV is a small, independent software vendor. That’s basically a term that Microsoft came up with for any software company that isn’t Microsoft.

Next Monday at noon ET, I’m giving a free webinar with Matthew Mamet of EditMe on how to make the leap to being a Micropreneur. Here is the registration link itself, and here’s a link to the description of the webinar. Initially, the webinar will be a simple Q&A with Matt, but after we cover the following topics, we’ll open up the floor to questions.

• Validating your idea with potential customers
• Organizing the flood of your ideas into a coherent strategy
• Chicken Entrepreneurship – Pro’s and Con’s
• Day 1 on your own – what do you need?

Hope to see you there.

It’s a few hours late, but here’s my final notice on this blog for a new episode of the “Startups for the Rest of Us” podcast.

Episode 3: The Biggest Roadblocks to Your Success

Unless we do something really cool there, you’re not going to hear about it again. As a side note, I fully intend to keep blogging, so stay tuned. I have articles coming out of my ears right now and it’s not a pretty sight.

The second episode of our free podcast named “Startups for the Rest of Us” that Rob Walling and I created is live at our podcast website. This episode is titled “Stupid Reasons to Start a Software Company”. You can either listen to it in your browser or download the MP3 and a full written transcript of the episode has been made available. In an attempt to keep the noise on this blog to a minimum, I will only be announcing one more episode here. After that, it will be up to you to keep track of the new episodes, which will come out every Tuesday for the foreseeable future. So tune in and subscribe using any of the links below.

Subscribe Now:

• iTunes (this link opens iTunes)
• RSS
• Email

In other news, look for another blog post later this week. Enjoy!

Fellow blogger Rob Walling and I were featured on the .NET Rocks podcast yesterday. You can check out the interview here. We’ve been featured on a few other podcasts for the Micropreneur Academy that we put together last year. When I get a chance, I’ll post the links to those podcast interviews.

This morning, I made several changes to the server that runs my blog and will continue to make tweaks over the next week or two. Essentially I’m transitioning everything to slowly use the singlefounder.com domain instead of miketaber.net, which is probably what you are used to seeing. Interestingly enough, my Google Page Rank is going to be a 3 either way.

I would make all of the changes all at once, but I need to be sure that things like my RSS feed and my FeedBurner stats are still working properly. If I change too many things at once, it will take me longer to figure out exactly what caused the issue. With things like my RSS feed at FeedBurner, I won’t find out anything is wrong for a full day and I’d rather avoid that if possible.

Unfortunately, one byproduct of the most recent change is that the Tweet counters for all of my posts have been reset. An apparent casualty of war, which is fitting I suppose on Veterans day. There are a few other byproducts of the domain change, such as image links which still point to the old domain which might break in the future, should I ever neglect to redirect those URL’s properly. I’m hoping that the main artifacts of change are not noticeable for the most part, but if you happen to see something, please let me know.

Thus far, as I’m sure you gathered from my last post, the domain name change and facelift to the site are largely complete. Next comes more frequent blog posts. It’s not the writing that’s difficult. It’s deciding what order to publish them in and whether they’re good enough for “prime time”.

Stay tuned.

Today I did of an overhaul on my blog, giving it a facelift and a new theme. I’ll continue working on it over the next week or so. I’ve got a lot of other changes to make before I’m done, but should be finished by the end of the weekend. I expect to fix some UI elements here and there, but if you see anything that is blatantly broken, please let me know.

For anyone out there who is a Podcast fan, I was featured on a recent episode of the Startup Success Podcast with Rob Walling talking about the Micropreneur Academy. It’s one of several Podcasts I’ve been featured on with Rob over the past several weeks. I’ll highlight this and all of my other appearances on a separate page soon, but I thought I’d share this once since it’s the most recent and not everyone listens to or subscribes to the Podcasts I might be appearing on.

You can download an MP3 of the podcast for free right here.

Well, at 5:05pm on Friday (go figure on the time problems started), my computer was acting flaky so I decided to do the normal thing and reboot. Unfortunately, my desktop at the office decided to flake out entirely and for some reason decided it no longer wanted to be part of the Moon River domain. To top it off, the local passwords weren’t working either, so I couldn’t log in and do anything about it. I left it for the weekend and decided to deal with it on Monday when I got back.

So now it’s Monday and things have gotten worse. My PC has decided that it doesn’t like the filesystem on my boot drive and disk checks claim it is corrupted. My data drive is still perfectly intact, but the boot drive thinks there are now two partitions instead of just one and that neither of them is bootable. I think I’m going to have to resort to reinstalling the OS, which I always hate to do because of the fact that it’s just such a pain in the neck to reinstall all of my applications.

The only bright spot is that I’m pretty good about keeping non-essential data off my main PC and keeping backups of that data on an external drive and maintain regular backups of that external drive on my NAS server. I’m guessing that the odds of me having any essential data on that drive is pretty low, although I could be mistaken. I do tend to keep text files of notes I’ve taken about different phone calls on my desktop until I get a chance to enter them into our CRM system.

In other news, I’ve started on a new series of articles on how to build a consulting company. I expect to have the first article out the door sometime next week. It would be sooner, but I have a small computer problem to deal with.

For those of you who experience occasional typing problems with your VMWare machines, there’s still hope. Over the past few years, I’ve run into this problem several times, and every time the symptoms are basically the same.

When you’re using a remote console to access a virtual machine, as you start typing the characters will start repeating themselves on the screen. Most of the time, typing and then seeing those characters on the screen is exactly what you expect. Until you hit go to type ‘root’ into a Linux VMWare image and it comes out as ‘rrrooooooooootttt’. Typing very slow sometimes gets around the problem, but not always. Typing a password becomes especially difficult as you have no idea whether extra characters are appearing and depending on how your machine is configured, you might lock out an account. Rebooting the image will sometimes make the issue go away for a little while, but it often returns at the worst possible time.

I used to think this was a low memory related problem, caused by the host using too large a pagefile, thus causing delays and screwing with the low level interrupts. I came to this conclusion mainly as a result of running VMWare Server on a Windows 2003 server with about 4GB of RAM. After overcommitting the memory, this bug tended to surface quite a bit, so I started offloading the virtual images and only running a few when it was absolutely necessary. It turns out this isn’t solely related to memory.

There’s a VMWare KB article that explains how to address this issue and states that it happens due to low bandwidth situations. I beg to differ on the bandwidth situations, as I’m running gigabit on my network and lets face it. My network really isn’t that big. I have at most 2 hops between any given location and it’s generally limited geographically to about 10 feet.

Basically, their fix is as follows: power off the virtual machine and modify the .vmx file for the image you’re having problems with to include the following line:

keyboard.typematicMinDelay = "2000000"

Once you’ve done that, there will be a 2 second delay introduced to prevent single characters from repeating themselves numerous times. Unfortunately, I found this recommended fix didn’t work as well as I would have liked. You see, 2 seconds is a long time for computers. And after you’ve done this, the Backspace key becomes pretty much useless. After some trial and error, I found that cutting this value by 75% seemed to work pretty well.

keyboard.typematicMinDelay = "500000"

Since I added this line to each of my .vmx files, I’ve yet to run into this issue again using any of the remote administration tools provided by VMWare.