DarkStar Communications

A favorite holiday as far away as Mars (they also make pet food, by the way), Halloween is a great time to go door to door attempting to collect as close to 100 Grand Whatchamacallits as possible. (For our Canadian friends, an American 100 grand bar is sold in your country as a $95,350 bar.)

We want to, but we can’t possibly mail out candy to all of you. By my estimates, it wouldn’t even be practical to send just one M&M to each Ventrilo and TeamSpeak user. If you are in the contiguous United States and would like a piece of candy, please contact our support department and we’ll see what we can do to make sure we mail you one (while supplies last.) Be sure to mention this blog.

The big surprise I’ve been talking about is coming soon. I know you’ll love it.

Oh, and I read in Modern Witch Magazine that this year brooms are out and vacuums are in.

Information about the next version of windows is already pretty public. The article includes a screen shot of the most stripped down windows released to date.

Sounds interesting, but I’m not holding my breath until well after Vista has been service pack’d a few times.

The new office is great, we can handle twice the support now. Additionally, it allowed us to wall-mount two 32 inch Philips LCD TVs in front of our support reps. These screens are monitoring (excuse the pun) all of our servers, so we’ll have an instant visual warning if a server goes down.

The fish are still at the old office, we moved all the furniture ourselves, but a 30 gallon tank is too much. We’ll have professional movers help us with the fish tank. The tricky part is saving the water because it contains all of the microorganisms we’ve been breeding for a few weeks.

We’re proud to say we have been able to offer 100% uptime and support throughout the move. Before our network at the old office was shut down, a new network was fully operational at the new office. If we hadn’t blogged the move, you never would have known about it from our support response times. I’d like to personally thank our support techs for being so cooperative throughout the move.

I really can’t wait to update you on our next big thing. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll be able to announce it. Stay tuned!

I’m guessing a Tacoma is epic or legendary. Just a guess.

We got a new server a few days ago, replacing the ancient server our support center was run on. The new server is an Intel Xeon Dempsey 5050 and has 4 GB DDR 667 ECC. It was about time to see Ol’ Betsy go, she had been in commission as our support center server since early 2005. We set her free on a farm. She’ll have more room to run around there.

We’re working on a few big projects around here, but I can’t announce them yet. We doubled the size of our support staff and next week we’re moving to a new office. Naturally, we decided on a new office after we finally finished setting up our new 30 gallon salt water fish tank. Now we need to figure out how to transport 30 gallons of water (and tropical fish!) down three flights of stairs and across town to the new office. We have a lot of fish, and I can only fit two, MAYBE three in my pockets. You know, for clown fish, the situation is not that funny.

The fish got me thinking; they aren’t the only thing in the company that is tropical. Our Ventrilo and TeamSpeak servers in Brazil and Hong Kong are all tropical. Perth, Brisbane and Israel are just barely not tropical. That’s a whole new angle we can take on servers. We sell tropical servers!

Hopefully I’ll update soon, unveiling what we’ve been working on for you.