Scott Hanselman

I get a lot of email sourced from this blog. It's really getting crazy. I used to get a few a day, but now it's at least 15 a day. Seems lots are from students who want all my interview questions answered. Sorry, it'd take a while to type them, and if I had them, I'd have them posted. :)

Since the Ultimate Tools List I've got a lot of these:

Dear Scott,

Yada yada, love the list, yada yada, keep it up. I'm the President|CTO|Owner of yada yada and we have this innovative product called Yada that is amazing. Here's a free copy|key|download|developeredition, and I hope you add it to the list!

By the way, I turned off referrers so the whole blog should load faster now. I log only trackbacks. The Ultimate Tools List had 6746 unique referrers (referrers are not people who visit, but unique places folks came from) and it was loading so slowly it was starting to hang FireFox.

You may notice that most of the software on the Utils List is free. That's by design. Truth be told, I'll pay happily for software that will change my life, no hesitation. Especially when I notice that I'm on my fourth or fifth "30-day trial" I know I need to buy that software. But, I'm a cheap bastard at heart, it's part of my Scottish heritage; we are bred cheap.

"You'll never catch a cold from a Scot, because a Scot never gives anything away."

If you send me a free copy of your software, of course I will install it and use it. I will try anything free for a week (or until it sucks or blue screens me) and if I love it, I'm happy to post about it. I love MaxiVista, I love CodeRush, I love PeterBlum's VAM, amongst many others. But I loved them from afar, like a software stalker, before they knew me, not for any other reason. I'm not into the whole paid sponsorship thing. I'm a shill for good software and cool products because I love good software and I'm enthusiastic.

If I dig your stuff, I'll totally review it and spread the word. If I thank you and you never hear from me, your software didn't fill a vacuum in my life. It wasn't an ideavirus.

All that said, I get a lot of random email and I appreciate it all. Today's interesting email comes from a dude at Dell. He didn't send me free stuff. Instead he came with an interesting question and the answer was a cool product.

He knew I liked multiple monitors so he wanted to know how to get output from FOUR separate machines on to ONE monitor in a split screen.

My friend, you buy a quad splitter combo KVM dealie (PDF datasheet). This isn't just a splitter/duplicator or signal amplifier, it is actually a "VGA Aggregator." That's cool. That'd be a nice way to monitor four machines rendering in a farm, or a Web server farm or be a freaky multitasker. I don't know this company, but I think their stuff is shiny.

I like getting interesting questions. Now, if only I could get more free stuff...

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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