(This is going to be the longest blog post I've ever written.)

Hello all. I've been away for quite a while. I have been put in the position where I work as hard during personal time as I do during actual work time. In fact, going to work is a bit of a relief to the life part. As such, I have not done any development at all on Dial-a-fix and I am very sorry. Vista support is long overdue (as you can see in the message you get when you try to run Dial-a-fix in Vista) but I have just not had the energy to complete this overwhelming task with my remaining personal time. Vista changes the way *everything* works to where Dial-a-fix is no longer able to perform the same tasks. For instance… I know someone who wanted to fix System Restore and was not able to make use of Dial-a-fix because the operating system is Vista. Unfortunately, in Vista, System Restore is no longer System Restore – it's more of a function of the Volume Shadow Copy service. So you see, I have no idea how that shit even works now. It's not the same at all. At least 50% of the DLL registrations don't even exist anymore. Most of the checkboxes would go away. Windows Update is now a program and a few services so I don't really know how that works.

I have not answered my email box for a couple of weeks, either, so I apologize if you wrote to me and I did not respond. You can try posting in the DjLizard.net subforum at Lunarsoft.net forums and hope that Tarun or others can assist you or wait it out for me to eventually get to you.

Below this line is where the long story begins…

I want to give you all some history about myself since I have never really posted about it on here before.

I started toying with computers when I was 3 years old. I played Atari 2600 in my Dad's lap – he controlled most of the action while I would fire madly and wiggle the joystick occasionally. I also used his Commodore 64, the only 8-bit computer that ever captivated me. Since I was beginning to read, I would type people's names (well, "Mom", "Dad", "Michael"…) and make colors and ASCII-like (actually, PETSCII) garbage on the screen. Not a great beginning, but there was promise. I was pretty fascinated by it, even at that age. I kind of knew what I would be doing in the future. By the time I was 5 I was already telling people I wanted to be a computer programmer instead of say, a policeman or fireman like most children.

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From ages 5-12 I would incessantly play every video game we had. To be honest, we were all big pirates — at the end of the Commodore 64 era we had at least 5,000 floppies with almost every game that had ever been made. No joke. I physically had a copy of 80% of all games you can find here if you exclude the games with exclusively foreign languages. I've played every single one of those games at least twice in my life. Of course I have some real favorites. They are the real classics that firmly planted my belief that games should excel in gameplay first, then sparkle. You lousy spoiled kids and your PS 3s don't understand what real games are… games with barely any graphics like Eternal Dagger, Sword of Fargoal, and all of the Infocom text-adventure games such as Wishbringer, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Zork.

My dad routinely showed me things on the C64 that only served to fuel my fire. He made pixel-perfect (but somewhat odd-looking) scenes of knights in full armor standing on rocks and such using a joystick and GeoPaint. (That's a YouTube link to an interesting implementation of GEOS… on the Nintendo DS!)

He also showed me "sector editing" (more commonly called "hex editing", at least these days) programs on floppy disks in order to change their words, or even change your character's stats! This allowed me to learn several computer internals and fundamentals at an early age. Since we did not have that much money growing up, I was pretty much doomed to the software aspect of computers anyway. It wasn't possible to excel as a hardware guy because there was no way for us to get tons of hardware to play with. Software was easy to copy…

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When I was 13, my dad was able to get a 486 DX 100 computer from a rip-off of a computer shop called Magix. I played Sim City 2000 and dialed up to bulletin boards quite frequently. I didn't own that copy of Sim City 2000, either, but I owned MS-DOS 6.22. I grew to know MS-DOS like the back of my hand, and I still remember most of it to this day. Dad purchased Windows 95 and installed it on this computer. Sometimes 95 would blow up and I figured out that installing Windows on top of itself quite frequently fixed problems with it. (I later found out that this was a common practice, and Microsoft even has a name for it: "in-place upgrade".) Because of this computer and its many quirks, I learned quite a lot about how Windows worked. I found out, for instance, that I could rename the three main directories (WINDOWS, My Documents, and Program Files) and reinstall Windows without formatting and losing data (or even having to back it up in the first place). You could then pull your data from the renamed folders when you're back into Windows, and then backup properly for the next time that Windows shit itself. I also figured out scanreg, which allowed me to restore the two registry hives to a previous date. Between the registry backups and in-place upgrades, there was no way a software problem could beat me! Yep, Windows 95 basically had "System Restore". All XP's System Restore does is roll back your registry hives but also a copy of many system files that may have changed. The only version of Windows (excluding 3.11 and prior) that has no automatic registry hive file backup is Windows 2000. Thanks, Windows 2000!

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When I was 15, my parents found a computer in the trash. You read that right. It was even raining that night, quite hard, into the open dumpster where the computer sat. We took the computer in, opened it up, toweled it off, and allowed it to dry for several days. It worked fine on startup and never failed until the day I replaced it with a computer 10 times its power. Anyway, it was a generic baby AT beige box with a Pentium 75MHz processor, 8MB of RAM, Windows 98 first edition, and a ~500MB Conner hard drive. With this computer I was able to play Quake! I learned Turbo Pascal 7 because of a friend (Michael Huffman, Memorial High School, Tulsa, Oklahoma) and found out that with the right language I actually could be a programmer.

You see, at that age I found that while I was quite good at solving software problems, I was never very good at actually programming (I couldn't understand C at all – it seemed really hard, what with its pointers and big computery words and all). I dropped my 3-year-old pipe dream of being a programmer in favor of being an everyday bench technician, formatting your box and reinstalling your stupid software onto your stupid computer. This is like saying that instead of getting paid $250,000/year to be a professional car design engineer that you instead want to make $25,000/year as a mechanic in a mom and pop car repair garage.

Throughout high school, I gained the reputation of being that elite computer kid – the one everyone seeks for help, even the computer class teacher. My parents also perpetuated this amongst the family, so that everyone's computer problems became my own to repair. At that time it was very exciting and I wanted to play with anything and everything computer related. Through acquaintances at high school (I had very few actual friends) I learned about emulation (such as NES and Commodore 64 emulators for your PC) and mp3s (and this was in 1997!).

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After high school I wanted to get some sort of certification or degree so that I would be taken seriously as a young adult in an old adult's world. With much naivety I enrolled at a place called Tidewater Tech in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Not knowing any better, and their inviting sign within walking distance of my house, I started taking a class there for computer networking. That sounds awesome! I was sort of into "hacking" at that time (computer security and forensics, etc), which is no longer the definition of "hacker" that I choose to subscribe to these days, but it was enough to keep me interested for a while.

There were many problems with my presence at this school:
* I found myself constantly correcting the teacher about little things, little things that might mess someone else up such as reversing the definitions of "kilobits" and "kilobytes", or other trivial computer concepts.
* The school was not "accredited" (I didn't know what this meant, nor did I seem to care – I was in a school… for computer stuff!).
* It turns out that I don't like networking one bit.
* Almost every single person dropped the class. There were 3 of us left that actually completed the class out of the 30 that were there on the first day. A lot of people were switching careers at the age of 30+ to the computers field, which I don't consider to be a very wise decision at all.

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That school did help me find one thing – my job at CITS, the customer support services division of the popular Japanese camera (and more) company Canon. They are very traditional in business thinking, but they are quite generous to their employees. I've never seen such a benefits package or employee morale any higher than at Canon ITS. Canon taught me everything I know about customer service, and they even gave me quite a bit of computer repair experience. At first, I answered phones to support customers with their Canon BubbleJet&tm; printers. Later, I moved on to scanners, then cameras. The printers division was pretty much the ghetto of the call center. The absolute worst customers called in about printers. There's something about a printer's accessibility that invites people who have no business at all owning a computer. There was quite a lot of inflated self-entitlement thrown at me in that queue, so I quickly moved on to the scanner ("Imaging") department. For some reason, customers with scanners are from a completely different neighborhood than the calls regarding printers. Scanner customers seemed to have quite a bit more reading comprehension capability, as well as actual patience with us representatives.

The scanner department was the best! I learned so much about how DPI really works, most everything you need to know about image file formats, and practiced my Photoshop skills. Most of my calls were marked "fixed" in under 8 minutes and I almost always had absolute certainty that they would not be calling back unless it were for something completely different. A lot of the senior scanner guys who answered calls with me started to notice that I seemed to have the answer for everything, so they began calling me "the scanner god". It's hard to be humble when people call you shit like this, and I'd always overhear a Tier-II scanner person tell a Tier-I scanner person to "go ask the scanner god". I'd roll my eyes at being called such a thing and proceed to troubleshoot their call for them.

My callback rate was ridiculously low, my turnaround time was ridiculously fast, and as such I was placed at #3 out of over 350 employees in the campus. (Yes, it's such a large place that you have to call it a campus.) That #3 spot was because of a hundredth of a percent difference from the guys above me when calculating the spots by call volume and turnaround, etc. My score was something like 99.97% and the guy above me was 99.98%. In the actual formula the differences between us were something along the order of just a few seconds.

I was given a lot of privileges for a Tier-I person, including the ability to make outbound calls (they unlocked my phone!) and actually receive customer callbacks on my extension (which I was never allowed to tell people, or even use, before). I was also one of the only Tier-I folks who was allowed into the PQE room (at one point, when I found a bug). PQEs (Product Quality Engineers) are begrizzled fuddy-duddies who think that it isn't possible for a Tier-I person to understand these magistical computermajigs.

Occasionally I did some things on the phone that were not technically allowed at Canon, such as giving them computer repair advice or actually fixing their computer problems. We were there to support only the Canon products, not their computers. They're supposed to call their manufacturer for support when Windows is blowing up, but we all know how that ends up, and in what country, too. I'd throw in my two cents or "accidentally" fix their computer, which sometimes solved some of the challenges encountered while using Canon products and still retain a nice call volume and turnaround time. I'm pretty sure all of my superiors simply overlooked what I did as if it didn't happen because they wanted to keep me and I was actually doing the customer an extreme, although risky, favor.

After I literally knew every possible problem a call might be about in the scanner department, I got bored and applied for and was accepted into the digital photography department. I was able to play with Powershot cameras, and even the fabled EOS digital SLR cameras. Same situation here, except everyone in this department was too snooty to notice that I was emanating pure awesomeness from my person. I got bored and moved on again… to Florida.

The Florida stuff isn't important right now except to say that I met my beloved Vanessa and moved to Florida and began again. In Florida I got a job with… a PC repair shop that was not part of a franchise or owned by a big box store. This is where I got my first hands on repair experience. I was able to finally work on computers that are physically in front of me. I immediately swelled with newfound knowledge and was immediately known as that guy again. That savior guy that always fixes everything. I was actually still not very receptive to what people said about me because I didn't want it to seem like I was a jerkbag like the guy I was replacing. Apparently that guy thought he was the messiah and made sure everyone knew it, which is probably why his attitude got his ass replaced. So yeah, feeling pretty humble right about now, if not just to keep my job.

I worked there for a few years and got hired at FIGITALFOC, the dream job! (I changed the name in case this page ended up in a Google search later on to burn my ass.)

I had heard about how cool the owners are and the company had a serious moral agenda. This is the kind of place you want to be… a place where customer service is first, we're always nice to everyone, and we often give away tons of free advice and labor and go the extra mile whenever possible. Sometimes we don't want you to pay us to fix your 5 year old machine because we think it is more cost effective to purchase a new one. You don't know how many people appreciate being told this instead of being pillaged for their monies. Sometimes we don't charge for labor done at the front counter at all, but this is probably going to change (as it should).

At FIGITALFOC, I began doing development work for our tech CD which contains our bootable rescue system and tools of the trade. At home I worked on the infamous Dial-a-fix using Delphi, the successor and object-oriented version of good old Turbo Pascal. Through Mark Russinovich's Sysinternals software, blog posts, and book (Microsoft Windows Internals: Fourth Edition) I became quite enamored with the inner workings of Windows. The best version of Windows in the universe is currently XP, and it is quite easy to get inside of. Vista is a bizarre, masochistic parody of Windows, and Windows 2000 seems to fall just short of truly being "NT 5". That might also be why XP is also technically NT 5. (Windows 2000 is "NT 5.0", XP is "NT 5.1", and Vista is "NT 6.0".)

Now I know how to do a great deal of things such as roll back individual registry hives or recover your data by making a sector copy of it (there's that sector stuff again!) and other sorts of crap. I try to excel because I love what I do and I like to do things the most exactly rightest they can be.

FIGITALFOC performs software-level data recovery services on 5 hard drives a week, often every week (especially if you take an average over time). I have seen most types of failures, and successfully rescued 80%* of data from 80%* of drives we attempt to rescue (* Note: figures are completely made up but bear at least one, but not including or limited to more non-trivially-sized units of semblance to reality).

And then today happened.

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I've been writing so long it's not today anymore (this post was written regarding the events of December 11th). At any rate, this was supposed to be the other part of this blog post's title where I exclaim "What is wrong with you?!" repeatedly while trying to remove staples from my face using a pitchfork held between my two big toes but I won't be able to get to it now (no more energy). Sorry folks, but I'm fucking you over on the Self-entitlement story – I can't write the rest of this because I'm so frazzled. That's why it says 0 of 1 up-top. There is no false advertising going on there.

I'll give you a bowelful of my indigestible bullshit later on when I can think. If you're lucky, Self-entitlement (1 of 1) might be as long as this post, but don't count on it. I might not even show up! What do you think of that?!

- DjLizard