While going through my spat of updating last night, I forgot to write up about how I spent my Saturday evening. A little over a month ago, two of my friends started their own business -- they bought a Computer Troubleshooters franchise. It seems like an interesting concept, and I hope it works out well for them. They offer IT services for home users and small businesses. It looks like it's very similar to Geek Squad, but with more of a focus on small business. If you're having trouble with spyware, or configuring a home network, or whatever, you call these guys up and they'll come and help you out. I don't think there's going to be a lot of money in it for them with the home user market -- they won't be able to charge too much in order to get business, and they probably won't get a lot of repeat customers, or when they do, it will be inconsistent. To be successful, I think they're going to end up going after the small business market -- businesses that use computers, but don't have their own IT department. That kind of work will be more consistent, too.

Saturday night, my friends hosted a "grand opening" party for their business. About 35 people showed up -- probably for the free food and a chance at one of the door prizes. That's the main reason I showed up -- I wanted the 19" flat-screen monitor they were giving away. ;-)

I'm really glad I went. It was a great opportunity to catch up with several of my friends that I haven't seen in years. Several of the other guests were former coworkers, too. I ended up spending most of the time I was there catching up with one of my best friends from back in the Vanguard days.

By the time they finished giving away all the door prizes, I didn't win the monitor. I did, however, win one of the prizes -- a gift certificate for a free computer "tune-up". It's probably a cool prize, but not really worth it for me -- and computer tuning that I need to do at home, I can do myself. Besides, with my Mac, I don't tend to have the kinds of problems that Windows users have -- coming over to search for viruses and spyware is pretty useless on my machine. When my buddy drew my number out of the box and realized that I won that prize, he laughed and said "...And the prize goes to probably the most technical person in the room!" I don't think I was the most technical person in the room, but I was close. *shrug* I'll give it to my mandolin teacher, who is always telling me about problems with his computer.

My buddy from Vanguard won a gift certificate, too. We joked about setting up an old 386 computer as poorly as possible, loading it with spyware and viruses, and then complaining that it couldn't do something that it was never able to do in the first place. That would be kinda funny.