2005-2010 TSI: For Sale?

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Mike

A long, bitter, expensive exercise. Continue reading →

Documentation: I found a folder that contained a large number of documents concerning the attempt to sell the company. Some of them were in legalese, and some were very long. In most cases when they were germane to the story, I have included links to pdf files posted on Wavada.org.

I did not find any emails or notes about meetings. I have therefore needed to rely on my memory, which never had infallibility attributed to it at the First Vatican Council or anywhere else.

The plan: I had often thought about selling TSI, but I could never visualize how it could happen. In 2005 my partner Denise Bessette (introduced here) mentioned in one of our private meetings that she was interested in trying something different, perhaps in academia. We decided to investigate the possibility of selling the business. We were by no means desperate to do so. We were both earning six-figure salaries in those days. So, we were not going to forgo them unless the money was good. Also, we had a substantial backlog of profitable approved projects, and a new product, A^xN, that was doing better than we had expected.

We agreed on two primary criteria for any sale. Denise would not be an employee of the new company after she sold her shares. Since I could not imagine why anyone would want TSI without both of us, the second criterion was that my role in the company after the purchase would be temporary.

From the outset I was skeptical of the likelihood of selling the company under those circumstances. It seemed to me that unless there were some demonstrable synergy between either AdDept or A^xN and a prospective buyer’s product or service, I could not see the value of what would be left of TSI after both criteria were imposed.

I had informed my wife Sue, the other share-owner of TSI, that we were planning to explore selling it. When I told her that we hoped to get over $1 million for it, she was all for the idea.

Retaining a broker: Somehow we determined that it was necessary to engage a business broker to help us find a buyer. The fact that we had experienced very little success working with third parties other than IBM contributed to my pessimism. Nevertheless, I composed a very long letter that we sent to a few brokers who specialized in businesses like ours, or at least they did not specialize in much larger companies or vastly different industries. I do not remember where we obtained a list of appropriate brokers.

I have posted here a copy of the one that we sent to Steve Pope in March of 2007. He was not the first person to whom we mailed the letter. Here is a list of the brokers that we mailed to:

The first letter was sent to William Gunville², the president of Successions, Inc., in East Weymouth, MA, on March 31, 2006. I found no evidence that he or anyone at his company responded.
The second letter, sent on the same day, went to Kerry Dustin³ of the Falls River Group in Naples, FL. There is no indication that he responded either, but the file does have TSI’s financial statement dated April 8 in three different formats.
On April 28 I mailed four letters. The first went to Merfeld and Schine, Inc., in Boston⁴. We must have had some subsequent communication with them. I have a copy of a blank agreement that someone at the company evidently sent to me in August.
I do not remember ever conversing with Matthew Lerner of Newport Acquisition Services⁵ of Columbia, MD.
No one from the Catalyst Group⁶ in Boston responded to the letter.
The last of the April letters went to the Corum Goup, Ltd.⁷ in the state of Washington. I remember one telephone call that might have been with someone from Corum. The gist of it was that even though we might have found a niche that provided the principals with comfortable incomes, that did not mean that anyone would be interested in buying the company. The man on the phone said that this was quite common. This, of course, confirmed what I had previously thought. This same person also said that the most likely company to be interested in purchasing us would be a competitor. The fact that we had no real competition was therefore a disadvantage!
On May 2 I sent a letter to Bob Capozzi of VR Business Brokers⁸ of Milford, CT. If he responded, I have no record of it. He might have told us that we were too small for his company. Several brokers told us that.
On March 31 of 2009 I mailed the same letter to Robert Meyers of Marshall Business Brokers in Bloomfield, CT. By that time we had worked with Steve Pope for two years. We must have felt that we could do better.

Of all the firms that we contacted Steve Pope was the only person who thought that he could help us sell the business. We met with him a couple of times and talked to him over the telephone quite often.

We signed an agreement with him that cost us $1,000 per month for two painful years. I have posted a copy of it here. Note that our asking price was $1.5 million.

Both Denise and I found Steve to be pretty easy to work with, and he provided us with a great deal of useful information. We did not know what we were doing when we started this process.

At the time his last name seemed an unbelievable coincidence. For the previous three years I had been researching the history of the papacy (detailed here) in hopes of getting my ideas about the popes published.

The valuation: Steve insisted that we hire an outsider to undertake a professional valuation of TSI. He recommended a man named George Abraham⁹ and provided us with a write-up of his credentials and approach, which I have posted here.

We had to put together materials for him. Almost all of the information came from our general ledger. This cost us several thousand dollars and, in my opinion, was worse than worthless. It was obvious to me that he had just run information from our G/L through a software program that basically took the retained earnings and added the value of the fixed assets. Our fixed assets were minimal, and, as a closely held company, we had distributed nearly all of our profits at the end of every year. So, he concluded that our company was worth very little.

We considered the value of our company to be in its client list, the relationships that we had established with the clients, the strength of our staff, and the fact that the clients were totally dependent on us. None of this appeared in the valuation. When I complained about this, Mr. Abraham said that all of that was considered “good will”. He could increase it, but the first thing that any prospective buyer did with a valuation was to discard or at least disparage the portion that was attributable to good will.

I felt as helpless in this situation as I did when I had to fill out a “Request for Proposal” form designed by a consultant to use to assess potential software solutions. Those forms seldom allowed me to highlight the parts of our system that would help the prospective client the most. In the same way the valuation was going to be the first thing that a prospective buyer would see, and it did not allow us to highlight what was good about TSI.

Nibbles: TSI rented box #241 at the post office in Warehouse Point for communication that we might receive from Steve or from anyone else involved in the project. I went there every couple of days, take the junk mail out of it, and throw it in the recycle bin. I very seldom brought anything back to the office.¹⁰

I remember that a couple of times over the next few years Steve tried to connect us with people who might be interested, but nothing came of any of these exchanges.

I found four documents in which I answered questions about TSI’s approach. The first was a letter that I sent to Steve on January 31, 2008, about the alleged obsolescence of the AS/400, which by then had undergone a few name changes. I have posted it here.

I also have posted answers that I provided to many very detailed questions to people that I don’t remember named Peter, James, and Len. The first two were dated February 4, 2008. The last one was sent on March 14, 2008.

Denise and I were encouraged at first, but after a few months we began to hear less and less. Steve still called once in a while, but there were no prospects who could be considered even lukewarm.

The buyer: Steve told us in early 2010 that an “entrepreneur” from St. Louis who had bought and sold several companies was interested in buying our company. His name was Tim Finney.¹¹

Denise and I had a conference call with him and Steve in early March. Evidently we did an abbreviated demo of our systems via Webex.¹² I don’t remember the details, but I found a letter that Tim sent to us on March 15 (beware the Ides of March!) that provided a fairly detailed analysis of what he was willing to pay us for our stock in TSI. It has been posted here. The important features were:

The total purchase price was $1,000,000 for 100 percent of the stock.
We would need to pay capital gains taxes on this amount.
I would work for another two years at a salary of $95,000. He would have the option of extending this another two years if “Tim and Mike agree that the business can or can not sustain itself at that time based on Tim’s progress with the software code/business.” In any case Mike would work for two months for nothing.
Denise would work for two months for nothing.

We were very interested. On May 7 Tim sent us a confidentiality agreement, which Denise, Sue, and I signed and returned to him. The confidentiality agreement has been posted here.

Tim sent the Letter of Intent a few days later with the specification that the closing would be by July 15, or earlier if possible. I made it clear every time that I talked with anyone involved that I needed for this either to be completed before August or postponed until September. Sue and I had scheduled a trip for August 8 through August 21.

The signed LOI has been posted here.

Tim made a trip to Connecticut in early June after the LOI had been signed. I discovered an outline of what I wanted to say to him. It is posted here. Denise and I met with him on a Saturday or a Sunday. I remember two things from that visit, which seemed to go very well. The first was that Tim said that he had purchase several companies, and had resold most of them. One that he was still holding was a software company, and he mentioned some sort of difficulty with it. The other memorable event was the surprising statement that he would have no difficulties with his banks. He claimed that he had great relationships with all of them. I only had two banks, and no one at either one had any idea who I was.

Both of these should have been red flags. I was already dreading needing to work for Tim for two or four years. If he already had trouble with other coders in a similar position, it might be even worse than I had imagined, and I already imagined myself being screamed at over the telephone on a regular basis,

His mention of the banks made it clear that he had not yet obtained the financing. I should definitely have called a halt to proceeding any further until he had lined up the money. It was a rookie mistake.

The office of Andros, Floyd & Miller in Hartford.

The lawyer: Back in April Denise and I could understand that we might be in over our heads. We asked our accountant, Tom Rathbun, if he knew of any lawyers that could help us in dealing with a prospective buyer for our business. He recommended that we contact Mark La Fontaine of the law firm of Andros, Floyd & Miller. We contacted him, and he sent us an engagement letter on April 5 that stated that his billing rate was $300 per hour. He waived the retainer fee.

Denise and I drove to his office one afternoon in April. We explained our situation to him. For some reason he was most concerned about Sue’s status with the company and the fact that she was part of our group health insurance. He strongly advised us to remove her from the group. I disagreed with his assessment. I was quite sure that I could defend our approach if someone accused us of fraud.

Mark explained the process of selling the company. I did not think that I got $300 worth of advice out of the meeting. I just had to hope that he would be worth the money when the exchange of paperwork got more intense. I am pretty sure that we provided Mark with a copy of the Letter of Intent. I don’t recall whether he had asked us if Tim had said in writing that he had lined up sources for the financing.

On May 20 Tim sent me forty-one “due diligence” questions. They are posted here. I wrote up answers, and Mark reviewed them. I then sent them to Tim together with the necessary attachments on May 24. The answers are posted here. Bring a lunch; it has eleven pages and several attachments that I did not post.

A second set of twenty-one questions came on May 28. They are posted here. My answers and supporting documentation was sent on June 2. They are posted here.

The third set of ten questions arrived on June 17. These, which were more personal than technical, are posted here. By this time I was getting very antsy about whether this process could be completed before Sue and I departed for our vacation in Russia. The file of answers has the same date and is posted here. Since all my answers were reviewed by Mark or his staff, one of the dates must be wrong.

I remember one after-hours telephone call that I had with Tim. I have always hated telephone calls, and I had been spending an inordinate amount of time writing up very detailed answers to his questions. He told me that I sounded like I had “seller’s remorse”. I explained that what he heard in my voice was my lifelong aversion to negotiating over the phone.

On Thursday, August 5, Tim finally sent to me and Mark the purchase agreement (here), promissory note (here), stock pledge (here), and employment agreement (here). I immediately called Mark’s office and left word that I was leaving for vacation on Sunday and would be back in the office on Monday, August 23. Nothing was to be done until they heard from me. I asked Denise to keep me apprised of any developments, but I warned her that I was not confident about how reliable my access to the Internet would be.

The documents were long and complicated. However, they appeared to my untrained eyes as pretty much in accord with the LOI. My obligation, which previously had consisted of a definite two-year commitment and another tentative two-year commitment had been changed to a definite three-year commitment.

Russia: For many months Sue and I had been planning to take a river cruise in August in Russia from St. Petersburg to Moscow (described in great detail here). Because the arrangements had been made in conjunction with our friends, Tom and Patti Corcoran, postponing the trip was never a serious consideration. I had put in a lot of effort to get the most out of the trip including spending a lot of time trying to remember the Russian that I had learned in the sixties. I even downloaded a set of flash cards for Russian vocabulary from the Internet. I used them for at least an hour per day.

I was very excited about the prospect of seeing both the major cities of Russia as well as a little bit of the vast territory between them. I was happy that the deal with Tim seemed to be nearing consummation, but I did not like the fact that I would be on a ship in Russia while the unsigned documents were in Hartford and St. Louis.

Viking Surkov is now known as Viking Helg.

On day #11 of the cruise, Thursday, August 19, our ship. the Viking Surkov, was docked on the northern edge of Moscow. I was scheduled to take a bus tour to Sergiev Posad, which had been outrageously described to us as the Vatican City of the Russian Orthodox Church. Before breakfast I had made my way to the center of the ship, where the Internet service was the closest to tolerable. My journal has only this brief description: “I had just enough time to download my e-mail messages. A couple of the work-related ones were rather disturbing, but there was not much that I could do about them.”

The disturbing messages were from Denise. Evidently Tim’s lawyers had been communicating with Mark about details of the agreement throughout my absence. That was disturbing enough, but Tim himself had contacted Denise and had told her that his bankers had been questioning some aspects of the deal. He wanted to rewrite the purchase agreement. I was astounded to learn that the bankers were still involved. I thought that surely he must have shown his plans to them before he sent them to the lawyers and then to us. What in the world was going on?

Tim’s new plan: I don’t have any documentation of the new plan that I had to deal with when I returned to work, but I am pretty sure that I remember it in some detail. He proposed to buy only Denise’s 25 percent of the shares immediately. Sue and I would still be majority owners. I would hire him as marketing director at a salary of $50,000 per year. In three years he would buy the remaining shares if we had met the sales objectives that we had outlined. They are posted here.

I considered this proposal laughable:

Sue and I received nothing.
Since the business was not being sold, Steve Pope received nothing except salary cuts.
He wanted me to let my most valuable employee go and voluntarily terminate a relationship that I had worked hard to cultivate.
My new partner would be someone with whom I was dreading working.
TSI’s new marketing director had no credentials and no ties to either of our target markets.
He wanted to set his own hours and work from home.
If (actually when) the plan failed, it was still my responsibility.
Sue would kill me if I agreed to this.

I tried to explain why this was a non-starter. I don’t think that Denise would have agreed anyway, but our agreement with her prohibited her from selling her shares privately.

I made one more trip to St. Louis to try to persuade him. Denise thought that it was a waste of time and money, and so I had to pay for it myself. Tim picked me up at the airport in his snazzy Lexus sports car and drove us to his house/office in Chesterfield, MO. I tried to resurrect his original proposal with every argument that I could think of. He listened to me politely and said that he would think about it, but I knew that the deal was dead.

I wrote a letter terminating our contract with Mark as soon as I returned. Here is the text:

Please terminate our contract immediately. At this point, it appears that the deal is beyond resuscitation. If this transaction is somehow revived, we may want to start anew.
Thank you for your assistance. It is a shame that so much effort was wasted on such a futile endeavor.

Explanation and Speculation: Here is what I think might have happened. The banker(s) were probably not impressed with his idea. However, they must not have rejected it out of hand because he was still willing to buy out Denise. So, he must have been able to lay his hands on $250,000. I think that they probably were asking him to put up his house or some other fixed asset as collateral for the rest of the money. Either this gave him cold feet, or perhaps his wife put her foot down. In either case I blame the feet.

Could this gigantic SNAFU been avoided? I think so. I should have insisted that Tim show the Letter of Intent to the bankers. He had allegedly already bought and sold companies. I assumed that he would have lined up financing first before telling someone that he wanted to give them $1 million. Like Fllounder in Animal House, I fucked up; I trusted him.

Would the original plan have worked? It would only have worked if Tim had been able to convince two or three large retailers to buy AdDept. At that point the only ones left who did not use AdDept and also did a lot of advertising were Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s. Dillard’s, and chains of grocery stores and drug stores. Maybe he could have pulled it off, but I cannot imagine how. Maybe he knew how to persuade them to let me talk with the advertising managers and then give a presentation, but I had seen no evidence of it.

At the same time we probably would have needed to pivot our development to use more attractive input and output. We also probably would have needed to come up with a way to handle Internet advertising in a useful manner. Both of these tasks would be daunting.

Even if we had succeeded, I think that my life would have been hell for three years. I was absolutely and completely honest in everything that I said to him, but there were certainly things that he did not understand. For example, I seriously doubt that he understood that the A^xN revenue was dependent on the AdDept clients. When an AdDept client stopped using the system, was purchased or absorbed by another retailer, or outsourced the buying of its newspaper ads, all or at least a majority of the associated A^xN revenue disappeared.

Denise, who was ten years younger than I was, wanted to sell because she desired to try something else. I had no such ambitions. I wanted to sell because I could not see a way to make the business continue to be viable without a huge expenditure of time and money.

I would have done everything that I could to make it succeed, including going back to working 70-hour weeks. It would have required a herculean effort to make the business work without Denise. Keep in mind that I had celebrated my sixty-second birthday on the ship in Russia. Whom could I hire to replace Denise? I could probably find someone with the experience and skill of the Denise whom we hired in 1984, but no one in the U.S. could just take her chair and do what she was doing in 2010 without a lot of on-the-job training. My rule of thumb was that new programmers generally cost me more time than they saved during the first six months of employment, and Denise meant much more to the company than any programmer.

I would not have taken any vacations during those three years. That means that I would have missed the South Italy tour in 2011 (described here), which was our last tragic adventure with Patti and Tom. In 2012 we took a Larry Cohen bridge cruise, the famous honeymoon for one (described here). I would never have met Frank Evangelista. In 2013 I spent a few days at the Gatlinburg Regional bridge tournament with Michael Dworetsky (describe here). A lot of pleasant memories would have never been created.

Worst of all, I think that Tim would have inevitably come to blame me for the company’s failure. I can imagine awkward and even painful telephone conversations on a weekly basis. I don’t know what he would have tried to make me do to fix the situation. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. He might have sued me. I cannot imagine what the grounds would have been, but he probably had much deeper pockets for legal fees than I did. For a guy like me that would have been a real nightmare.

Expenses: Denise and I spent a lot of money, and I took on more than 75 percent of the cost. We spent $24,000 for Steve Pope’s activities. I don’t remember what the appraiser charged, but it was much more than $1,000. Mark charged us at least $12,800. The trip to St. Louis cost $500, and our dinner with Tim was nearly $150. So, the total charge was around $40,000. I also spent a great deal of time on this project, and at the time we were billing out my services at the rate of $1,000 per day.

This was not quite as bad as it looked. The expenses were deductible, and at the time I was paying a lot in taxes. Furthermore, if the effort had been successful, Sue and I would have received hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2009 I invested a high percentage of my savings in an indexed fund based on the S&P 500. I would presumably have augmented that with an even higher percentage of the windfall. From that time through October of 2023 the S&P 500 has increased in value by approximately 300 percent! Do the math.

1. Steve Pope was still in the business brokerage business in 2023. His company was called Pope and Associates, LLC. The website is here.

2. Mr. Gunville’s LinkedIn profile is here.

3. Mr. Dustin’s LinkedIn profile is posted here. FRG’s website can be viewed here.

4. M&F’s website can be found here.

5. NAS’s website is here. Mr. Lerner’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Several companies called the Catalyst Group existed in 2023, but I don’t think that any were the people to whom I sent the letter.

7. Corum’s website is here.

8. VR’s website is here. Mr. Capozzi’s LinkedIn page (posted here) indicated that he owned a VR franchise.

9. George Abraham’s LinkedIn page is here.

10. For a short while I placed the most current TSI backup tape in the P.O. box. The clerk quickly put an end to that. He said that it was not allowed for the owner of the box to put anything in it. The owner could take things out or leave them in the box, but only post office employees could place anything in the box. I did not argue. I think they were worried about a bomb.

11. Tim Finney’s LinkedIn page lists his occupation as CEO and Founder. It is located here.

12. Webex is an Internet product from Cisco systems. It allowed people to view on their own systems what was being displayed on remote systems. This was, of course, before Zoom existed.

2023 September: The Big Black Box

Posted on September 28, 2023 by Mike

It’s name is Asus. Continue reading →

By the beginning of September of 2023 I had become quite frustrated about the time that I had been wasting because my Lenovo desktop computer, on which I had keyed in the great bulk of the entries in the 1948 Project (introduced here), was intolerably slow. The biggest problem was that the system would quite often lock up for as long as ten or fifteen minutes. During these periods the disk light was on continuously. I had tried to determine the cause by examining the output available in Windows’ Task Manager, but I had no luck. I had also asked the Greek Squad to look into it. The agent signed on to my system, deleted a lot of temporary files. That seemed to help for a day or two. However, it reverted to its previous behavior shortly thereafter.

Another problem was its connection with the Cox modem/router. The connection would be lost for no apparent reason, and it was often difficult to recover. A few years earlier I attached a modem that I had previously purchased to a USB port. That did not seem to help much

So, in desperation I decided to purchase a new box. I did some research on the Internet. The new systems seemed to have much faster processors than my Lenovo desktop. The hard drives were in most cases a little smaller, but that did not concern me much. The amount used on the Lenovo was far less than the capacity of any of the available machines.

I had had pretty good experiences during my last two computer difficulties (outlined here) with the Geek Squad people at the Best Buy store in Manchester, CT, which was about a thirty-minute drive from my house. I therefore decided to buy one there.

I cashed in the points on my Bank of America Mastercard for a Best Buy gift card in excess of $300. The units at Best Buy started at about $600 unless I was willing to settle for an obsolete model that ran Windows 10 or an “open box.” I decided to put a new system on order shortly after I received the gift card in the mail.

Unless I did not mind making several trips to the store, I figured that the easiest way was to order it online and pick it up at the store. Before I did so I had an electronic chat with one of Best Buys sales agents. I told him which model (an Asus) I was interested in, but I also expressed my concern about the difficulty of migrating the programs that I used. I specifically emphasized that the one that I was most worried about was Outlook, Microsoft’s email product. The agent assured me that the Geek Squad people at the store could help me with that. That convinced me to put the system on order. It was scheduled to be at the store on Friday, September 21. I actually received an email that it had arrived a day early. I had a big project to work on over the next few days, and so I planned on picking it up on Monday.

I had a long and strange electronic chat with agents from Best Buy on Friday. When I explained my concern about Outlook I was transferred to a different agent who allegedly specialized in this. A little later I was transferred again. This agent assured me that the Geek Squad would do the entire migration for me and made an appointment for me for 3:20 in the afternoon on Monday.

I left for Best Buy at 2:30 on Monday and arrived at 3. I had no trouble obtaining the new computer. I had brought with me a bag that contained the Lenovo that I had been using as well as a very old external hard drive for which I had lost the power cord. I intended to ask the Geek Squad people after they had migrated the programs and data if there was any way extract the files that were on the external drive onto something usable.

The Geek Squad guy was very friendly, but he said that they only did data, not programs. This was very upsetting to me. The only reason that I had purchased the machine from Best Buy was for the help that I expected to receive. Migrating the data was no challenge if you had a large external hard drive, and I did. I was so upset about the lies (or maybe misunderstandings) that I left Best Buy without remembering to ask about the hard drive. As I drove out of the parking lot I was so concerned about what should be my next step in making the system in my trunk operational that I almost ran a red light and caused a serious accident. The rest of the drive home was uneventful.

Plan Z: In my research I had come across a company name Zinstall (website here) that markets a downloadable program called WinWin that the website claimed was able to transfer all of one’s programs and files from any Windows computer to a new Windows 11 computer. It cost $129 plus tax.

On the evening of Wednesday September 27² I started an electronic chat with someone named Paul from Zinstall. He assured me that they installed software, called WinWin, that could transfer all the programs, but it was possible that Microsoft would demand proof of ownership in the form of a serial number or program key. A little more research convinced me that this was quite unlikely. Besides, I could not see an alternative. So, I purchased the software. I received the following email:

Thank you for choosing Zinstall.
A. DOWNLOAD LINKS
1. CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK to download the SOFTWARE: (link)
2. You should download and run the software on BOTH computers: OLD and NEW.
3. IMPORTANT: before taking any further steps, you should carefully read the USER GUIDE. CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK to download the user guide: (link)
B. ACTIVATION INFORMATION: Below is your Zinstall license activation key serial number. You will need to supply this information when prompted by the software.
Serial number: WNPV-XXRR-BJDK-VJK6-USOP-I2XP-LGXO-6UEV-74
Registered email: Mike@Wavada.org
C. SUPPORT AND SERVICE We are glad to assist you with your transfer.
1. SUPPORT QUESTIONS & TROUBLESHOOTING: For any support questions or assistance, CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK: (link) where you will find answers and solutions for your questions, as well as options to contact the Support Team.
2. If you require TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE, please submit the “Support Case Form” and run the Diagnostic Tool on both computers (old and new). Both the Form and the Diagnostic tool are available at the link above.
D. FULL SERVICE – REMOTE ASSISTANCE: IF you prefer the convenience of having an expert tech perform the whole transfer for you, you have the option of a Full Remote Service add-on. It is available here at a discounted “bundle” price: (link).
E. BEST PRACTICES: HOW TO PERFORM A MIGRATION? Before starting the migration process:
1. Make sure you have a backup of your computers.
2. Save all open files and close all running applications.
3. Completely uninstall all Internet Security Suites, Firewalls, and Antivirus on both computers – OLD and NEW.
4. You don’t need to purchase any special cables or external hardware to do the transfer. If your computers are connected to a home network, you don’t need to do anything – Zinstall will use the network for the transfer. Otherwise, you can just use a regular network (aka Ethernet) cable – you probably already have one – to connect the computers directly. Here is what it looks like: (link).
5. While wireless is usable as well, if you have an option to use Ethernet – use it. Wireless is inherently slower, and may be interrupted by network disconnects.
6. The migration process requires “Administrator” user privileges.
IMPORTANT: The transfer may continue for a very long time – DO NOT INTERRUPT the process, even if it seems that nothing is happening for a while. REMEMBER: Once started, the migration process is completed unattended – you are not required to stay near the computers, and may leave it for the night to complete.

One thing that had not previously been clear was that I needed to connect the two computers via an Ethernet cable if they were not already on a network. I thought that it would be sufficient that both used wi-fi. I had been planning on sending the data through the modem/router from Cox Cable.

I asked Sue if she knew if we had an Ethernet cable. She said that she had at one time put all of the miscellaneous cables in a big plastic tub. I naturally asked where it was. She said that she didn’t remember. I was not surprised. I made a mental note to drive to Target on Thursday morning to purchase one. Target’s website offered a seven-foot cable for $10, and they seemed to be in stock..

In one of my dreams that night, however, I had a revelation that there might be one in the north end of our basement near the AS/400 that I brought home in the summer of 2014 after we closed TSI’s office in East Windsor.

When I awakened in the morning I hastened downstairs and discovered that there were indeed two Ethernet cables in a snake’s nest of cables near the computer. I wrested one away and without too much difficulty I was able to connect the two black boxes on my desk. When the yellow lights appeared in the sockets for both, I rejoiced. I had saved $10!

The migration: The instructions sited above were thorough and instructive. As someone who wrote such instructions for users of his code for thirty-five years, I have one quibble. Users expect the written instructions to be in the order in which they are to be executed. In this document some of the most important pieces of information are near the end. I admit that I never read sections B, D, and E until I started writing this account on Friday.

I downloaded the WinWin software to my old system, Lenovo. I found the executable file in the Download folder and ran it. According to the instructions I should have run it as administrator, but I didn’t. The program churned for a few minutes and then asked me whether this was the old computer or the new one. After I selected “old” it told me to do the same thing on my new computer Asus.

I had planned to use the same display on both computers.³ So, at this point I needed to detach it from Lenovo and insert it into Asus. This turned out to be a much bigger pain than I thought that it would be. In the first place the lighting in that area of the office was not good.⁴ The head of the cable was held in place by two screws. No screw driver was needed, but it took longer than I remembered to screw and unscrew them with my fingers.

After I attached the display I turned on Asus for the first time. It came up rather quickly. Among other things it asked for a PIN. I used the same one that Sue and I use for the garage door opener. It invited me to take a tour of Windows 11, but I postponed that adventure until some undisclosed point in the future.

Instead I selected the Edge icon on the desktop, downloaded the WinWin executable again, found it in the Download folder, and ran it. The same window came up, and, when asked, I said that this was the new computer. The program then searched for the old computer. This was the moment of truth, or I should probably call it the first moment of truth.

It was not to be. The screen displayed a sad message (#324) that indicated that it could not find the old computer. The likely cause, it said, was either that the two boxes were not connected or that security software on one of the boxes was preventing the connection.

I checked the back of both computers. The Ethernet cables seemed to be securely attached. I then uncabled the display from Asus and reattached it to Lenovo. By coincidence almost as soon as I could see the display again a window appeared for the Webroot program that the Geek Squad had installed. It had options to end three types of security. I did so. Consequences be damned.

I then sent to the support team at Zinstall an email explaining the situation and identifying the error message number. I received two identical “high importance”messages one minute apart: “Hello Michael Wavada, This is an acknowledgment we have received your email. We will contact you soon. Best regards, Zinstall support team”

I would have preferred something more specific than the word “soon”, even if it was “within the next 24 hours”. I felt that Zinstall recognized the urgency of the problem, and I could expect an email with specific instructions within the next five minutes, or five hours, or maybe five days. I stayed at Lenovo’s keyboard⁴ and won game after game of two-suited Spider Solitaire while intermittently checking the Inbox in Outlook. At about noon I fixed myself a ham sandwich and ate it in front of my desk while I kept my eye on the Inbox.

I almost always took a nap after lunch. Mine on that day was a rather short one, and I rushed back to check the Inbox as soon as I was awake. No dice.

At 1:47PM I sent a short missive to Zinstall support: “How long is soon? It has now been over four hours.” Nearly an hour later I was about to send another email when this showed up in the Inbox. It was signed by Sam R.

Thank you for contacting us.
You have Webroot still active on the old computer.
Please disable Webroot firewall on the old computer (or simply remove Webroot from the old computer), and run Zinstall again on both.
Please let us know how we can assist further!

I replied as soon as I could: “I believe that I disabled it before running Zinstall. I tried to delete the folder named Webroot, and it said that I need permission from SYSTEM to do so. I do not know how to do that. Actually I seem to have two copies of Webroot. One in Program Files, and one in Program Files x(86). The Geek Squad installed them.”

Sam R. must have been horrified about what I had attempted. He wrote back rather quickly.:

You should not delete folders directly; instead, you can typically right click on the Webroot icon in system tray (bottom right corner, near the clock) and select “Shut down” or “Exit”.
Or, to uninstall it, go to the list of installed programs and select Webroot there.
Alternatively, if you cannot get rid of Webroot, another alternative is to use Zinstall with a USB external drive instead of network.
Do you happen to have a USB hard drive available?

I did have an external drive with a great deal of storage, and it was within two feet of my right hand. Nowhere in the emails or the online instructions booklet was there any mention of this option. Maybe that could be plan Z2 if we could not get past the security issue. In the process of disabling Webroot in the way that he described I noticed that the system clock was off by more than two hours. While I was in the same system tray I also found a Malware icon. There was no option to disable it. I select “Quit” instead. Both icons disappeared from the tray.

Uncertain whether Sam R. would still be working, at 5:04PM I sent the following message to describe what I had done since receiving his (her? their?) last email:

I tried this twice. On the first try I received the same message as before even though Webroot was not listed in the Apps. The second time I removed Webroot again (the system had rebooted on its own) and Malware Bytes from the Apps in the lower right corner. This time the program on the new box found the old box, but it warned that I was using a wireless connection that might be slow or fail. The lights for the Ethernet ports are on on both machines. Is there a way to verify the connection? I do not have a network (other than the Cox Cable modem/router). I just ran a cable between the machines.

Later I became convinced that Lenovo had not, in fact, rebooted on its own. I was pretty sure that the AC cable had been jostled loose while I was moving the display cable back and forth between the two boxes.

I decided to try it again, and I was cautiously optimistic. However, the email sent at 6PM told a different story: “It is now showing message #11. This is SO FRUSTRATING!” Message #11 said that my account had reached the limit on the number of tries. I did not receive an answer on Thursday.

I was poor company all evening. I was close to giving up on Zinstall, but I had no alternative at this point. I began to consider contacting American Express to tell them not to pay for the service. I went to bed at about 9PM, which was quite early for me.

On Friday morning I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Sam R. The time stamp was 4:14AM.

Thank you for the update, it’s great that the connection issue is solved now that Webroot is removed!
Regarding wireless, you do not have a huge amount of data on the old computer, so you can transfer via wireless as well.
As long as the wireless network is not abnormally slow, it will complete just as well.
Note also that you can use the old computer while the transfer is in progress, if needed – just press the Windows key on your keyboard to get to your apps / desktop.
Please let us know how we can assist further!

I asked him about error #11. He said that that had been cleared. I did not respond to his comment about being able to use the old computer. Once the process started, I intended to monitor it on the new computer. I had no intention of touching any of the cables once the migration was under way. He probably did not remember that I was switching the display from one machine to the other.

Before I ran the WinWin program on Lenovo I made certain that neither security program was in the system tray. When I moved the display’s cable, I was very careful not to jostle the AC cable on Lenovo. I then checked to see that both Ethernet lights were on.

At about 8:20 (I know because I always awaken Sue at 8:30) I initiated the WinWin program on Asus. This time it found Lenovo, and it did not present the warning message about using a wireless connection. It must have been using the Ethernet cable.

The process took about three hours. I used part of the time to go through the papers that had been accumulating on my desk for a few months. That was a worthwhile activity. I found a year-old credit from Costco for $1.48 and the paperwork for applying for a discount on the real estate tax levied by Enfield. I also found my hanging file for income tax for 2019. I had no idea why it was out of the filing cabinet.

I was very impressed with the window that displayed the various steps in which the program was engaged. It also showed two percentage bar graphs that indicated the portion of the step being executed and the total process that had been completed. At the bottom were statistics about things like the rate of data transfer and the size of the files that had been copied.

When it was finally finished, it congratulated me on a successful migration. I have seen many such messages before, but this was the first time that I really thought that we had accomplished something important together—I mean the program, the computers, the cabling, Sam R., and I.

I restarted the system as directed. It came back up rather quickly, and I entered the PIN. The desktop looked almost the same as it had before. The program tray was missing two icons. One was definitely for Spider Solitaire. I purchased a new copy for Asus, for $0, and it popped back up in the program tray. The other one might have been for a program that I had downloaded to convert YouTube videos to MP3 or MP4 files.

Outlook. etc.: It was time for the second moment of truth. With some trepidation I clicked on the blue Outlook icon. Microsoft somehow recognized me and asked me to key in the password associated with the account associated with my email address. I found it on my password list. Microsoft approved it and immediately installed updates to the software. I then needed to key in the passwords for my two email accounts. I got the Cox one on the first trick, but I made a mistake on the one for Wavada.org. Once I got it right all the emails that I had received from both accounts showed up after the next Send/Receive.

Everything seemed to be there, and I liked the new look and feel of the software.

Problems: After one day’s use I had encountered only three problems. As I mentioned, I had left one program open on Lenovo. It took me less than five minutes to bring the Asus version up to date. At one point while I was surfing in Firefox Windows11 interrupted and reported that it needed to restart. I had no choice but to let it. It came right back up, but I lost about an hour’s worth of work in WordPress. I don’t know why it had not been saved, but I will need to be more careful about updating these long blog entries more regularly.

The strangest problem was encountered using the editor of posts in WordPress in Firefox. Below is the screen for editing a blog entry in Chrome. This is also how it looked in Firefox on Windows 10:

Notice the blank area to the left of the text and the slide bar on the right that is now most of the way down the “Post” area on the right.

Contrast this with the same screen on Firefox.

The Firefox version shows a frame from the Dashboard on the left. The two slide bars are both so thin as to be effectively invisible to a septuagenarian. The one to the right of the text works correctly, but the one to the right of the Post column only raises and lowers the Dashboard on the far left, even though it is long enough to need a slide bar. Furthermore, it has no effect on the Post area. This makes it almost impossible to add more tags after a point.

I don’t know if this was a problem in Windows 11 or WordPress. I planned to install a new version of WordPress soon. I later learned that it was neither. The slide bars in Windows 11 were much smaller. Sometimes they were nearly invisible.

Performance: The new box is lightning fast, and so far it has never locked up.

1. The technical experts at law enforcement agencies on television often extract files from hard drives that survived plane crashes, arson, floods, and the like. Surely the agents of the internationally renowned Geek Squad had similar tools at their disposal.

2. I ordinarily played bridge on Wednesday evenings, but the game on 9/27 was canceled because only three pairs planned to intend.

3. Sue thought I might be able to use a gigantic display that she had squirreled away in the three-season porch. I was thoroughly skeptical even before I learned that it had no cable.

4. I did NOT need my cataracts removed. That will probably come some day, but not before my subsequent appointment with the retina specialist on October 18.

2005-? Wavada.org

Posted on June 17, 2023 by Mike

My very own website. Continue reading →

In 2003 Sue and I took the “Best of Italy” tour sponsored by Rick Steves. I then wrote a journal compiled from the notes that I had recorded every day. After I was satisfied with the results I assembled them into a pdf file called “How I spent my Italian vacation” that I shared with other tour members and a few other people. That document is posted here.

The programming tools: During this same period IBM discontinued support for the Net.Data product that I had used to write the software for A^xN (introduced here), TSI’s online clearinghouse for insertion orders from advertisers to newspapers. Instead, IBM had agreed to offer the php environment that had been developed by Zend¹. I had previously learned about php from Ken Owen (Introduced here). He had told me that I could create and run php programs on my Windows computer for free by downloading WAMP, which stands for Windows (operating system) Apache (HTTP server) MySQL (database) php (scripting language). I downloaded it to my PC, set it up, and used it to write a little problem management system for TSI that was actually used for several years.

I had already learned that in order to do programming for the Internet that accessed a database you really need to know five languages: HTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), SQL, and a scripting language to fit all the pieces together. I had books that documented the first three. I soon discovered that books on php and MySQL were not necessary. The syntax of each was thoroughly documented online, and answers to every question that I had were easily found using google. I never had to ask anyone for help.

The first project: Sue and I had planned for another trip to Italy in 2005. This time we invited our long-time friends Tom and Patti Corcoran to accompany us on another Rick Steves tour, “Village Italy”². I intended to take notes and assemble them into another journal. This time, however, I wanted to do it a little more professionally. I purchased a Cascio point-and-shoot digital camera, mostly using points from one of my credit cards. Since I wanted to allow others in our tour group to be able to enjoy the journal, I needed to build a website. I knew how to do that on an AS/400, but I wanted projects like this to be independent of the business, and I was not about to buy an AS/400 and try to run it from my house. I wanted someone else to manage the site for me.

I did a little research on the Internet. A company named iPower seemed to offer everything that I needed at a fairly reasonable price. Its tools seemed to be well documented, and, especially for the first few years, the technical support was excellent. My first contract with them was signed in July of 2005. I might have had a free month or two before that.

I decided to name the website Wavada.org. Wavada.com was available, but I had no intention of using the website to make money. I wanted to a place to noodle around with Internet programming (my personal computer, which at the time was a laptop) and a separate place where I could show some of the things that I had developed to the world.

I needed some tools on my PC to let me edit the text and images. I had previously downloaded TextPad, a “shareware” (free but with requests for donations) product that was better at editing text than the program that came with Windows. I purchased a copy of UltraEdit, which could be tailored for use with the color-coded and spaced text of php scripts, and Paint Shop Pro, an inexpensive program for editing image files. My plan was to do all of the development on my PC and, once everything was working, upload everything to Wavada.org using either File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or the File Manager program that iPower provided.

The first journal: My first big project used php to create one web page for each day of the 2005 trip. I created a folder named Images and inside of that folder a folder the trip (VI). Inside the trip folders were folders for each day (VI01, VI02, etc.) and one each for the full-page version of the photos³ and the page (VI00) describing the preparations and the travel day. I later wrote a php script that was included at the top of the code for each trip that. This contained all the common scripts for handling layout and navigation as well as the unique elements such as character sets for foreign words.

A separate php script for each page contained the code necessary to display the page. Most of the necessary functions were stored in a file named JournalFunctions.php. A file named JournalSetup.php contained other settings. These were all “required” on every page. Styles were stored in JournalStyle.css and JournalMenuStyle.css.

For the most part the original design worked fairly well. One difficulty that I had no way to anticipate was that the Unix version on the iPower servers was more sensitive to capitalization than the Windows version. I had to be careful with the file names assigned to images.

Twenty years later I find it astounding to report that I completed all of this within a few months. To each member of the tour group I sent an email that invited them to view the finished product on Wavada.org. Quite a few of them looked at a good portion of the journal and responded that they really liked it.

Other projects: I needed to design a home page. I knew that I wanted to have a huge wave as the background so that people would know how to pronounce the name Wavada. I found a photo of with very high density that depicted a monstrous wave better than I could have even imagined. It was on the Internet, but I don’t remember the location.

iPower offered an incredible array of free features that were associated with the website. The two that I made the heaviest use of were email and WordPress. I only needed to create three or four email accounts, but I made good use of them. I made Mike@Wavada.org my primary email account. Much later I created another account called Yoga (the name of my laptop at the time). Email sent to the Mike account was automatically downloaded to Outlook on my desktop. The Yoga account was not. So, I could send or forward emails from Mike to Yoga for activities (such as ZOOM meetings) that required the laptop.

I also set up an account for Sue, but I don’t think that she ever used it.

The other free feature that I employed a lot was WordPress, the software that I used to make this and hundreds of other blog entries. The oldest object in the WordPress section of Wavada.org is from 2010. However, I don’t think that I made much use of the product until March of 2012. That is the date of the oldest images that I uploaded. I might have written a few earlier blog entries that contained no images. An incredible number of these images—and a few other files—were uploaded during the pandemic and the subsequent months.

At first the home page for Wavada.org simply contained links to the few items that I wanted to allow the public to see. I changed the format dramatically when I discovered a widget that was available in google’s jQuery library. This allowed me to present the table of contents in an attractive tabbed manner.

I wrote a large number of programs concerning the game of bridge (introduced here) for my own use. For a while I maintained a complicated set of programs that I wrote to keep a detailed record of the bidding agreements with my partners. Eventually I decided that this was too much work (as of 2023 I had played with 141 different partners). I also created online programs for displaying an article index for topics covered in the Bridge Bulletin (posted here) and for providing game plans for challenging declarer problems (posted here).

I figured out how to parse the pdf files for hand records from bridge games. I created a database of these hands so that I could establish probabilities to associate with certain bridge situations. For example, I determined that Losing Trick Count⁴ was more accurate at predicting the number of available tricks at game level or lower than point count that has been modified as suggested by Marty Bergen in his Slam Bidding Made Easier book. However, the opposite was true for higher contracts.

I started to attend Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club in 2004. At some point I created a webpage for the club. It was still in use in 2023. The link is here.

As an adjunct to my job as webmaster I created a database of bridge players throughout North America on Wavada.org for District 25 of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). That story has been chronicled here.

I adapted the code for the travel journals to create online pages for each chapter of the book that I wrote on papal history entitled Stupid Pope Tricks. The book is posted here. The story of the Papacy Project that led to its creation is chronicled here. I also posted in the same format Ben 9, my historical first-person novel about Pope Benedict IX, here.

1. In 2023 this product is still offered for the i5 operating system. Zend has been purchased by other companies a few times.

2. The journal for the 2005 tour is posted here.

3. I used the same file names that Cascio provided with the letter b at the end. For later journals I dispensed with the uploading of the smaller versions of the photos and instead uploaded a full-page version of each image and used HTML to specify the size displayed in the journal. I also changed the naming of the images in the daily folder to be meaningful.

4. Losing Trick Count is explained here and elsewhere on the Internet and in print.

1995-2000 TSI: AdDept Client: Cato Corporation

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Mike

Cato: the low-end AdDept client. Continue reading →

Virginia Meyer¹, the VP of Advertising at Cato Corporation², called me one day in early 1995 to ask about the AdDept system. I flew to Charlotte, NC, and made a presentation. Somehow she persuaded the company’s IT department to buy AdDept for her on an AS/400 that they were using for some other purpose. I installed the system in July of 1995. Over two decades later I still do not understand why they bought the AdDept system and used it for five years.

Cato was definitely unlike any other AdDept client. During the first visit Virginia explained that the company had about six hundred stores. They generally ran only one sale per month, and they timed it to start just after welfare checks were likely to be received. This way of thinking was not prevalent at Saks or Neiman Marcus. For a while Cato had left purchasing of broadcast ads to the individual store managers. However, several of them spent their budgets on Christian stations with extremely poor ratings. The advertising department eventually brought the buying in-house.

Virginia’s motivation for wanting the system was primarily because I said that we could provide her with sales data about the stores. Most of the work that TSI did was to construct an interface with the corporate sales recording system and to produce a report called Volume by Market. Many new fields had to be added to the store table in order to produce it. The one that I remember most vividly was one that designated whether the store was near a military base.

What, you may ask, did this have to do with advertising? Not much, but Virginia had been trying for years to get the IT department to provide her with sales information so that she could tell whether the company was spending its money wisely. The IT people had never addressed the request.

The people: I got to know a few people in the IT department. I remember that we went somewhere for lunch at least a couple of times. Aside from them and Virginia, the only person with whom I worked was Lisa Nutter³, who managed the advertising business office. She was our liaison during her short career at Cato.

Memories of Charlotte: I remember going to Charlotte with Doug Pease, who was introduced here. So, we must have done a demo for them either on their equipment or at IBM. I remember that I was very impressed by the airport in Charlotte (now called Charlotte Douglas International Airport in 2023). It had a very nice selection of restaurants in its central court and a large collection of rocking chairs positioned along the windows. It was a hub for US Air at the time. I could fly there directly from Hartford.

Near the exit from the terminal was a large statue of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, the monarch whose behavior so upset the American colonists. She gave birth to fifteen children. Mecklenburg County was also named after her duchy. I have not researched why she was so popular in this remote corner of North Carolina.

Traveling from the airport to Cato—or anywhere else in Charlotte—required driving on Billy Graham Parkway. I guess that I should not have been surprised that the people and politicians in Charlotte were proud of his legacy as Richard Nixon’s moral compass.

I recall little about the demo or the first meeting. The thing that I do remember is that Doug and I spent most of a day at Carowinds, an amusement park that was on the south side of Charlotte. Actually part of it was in South Carolina. A brick sidewalk marked the boundary. I was not sure at the time whether I had ever been in South Carolina, and so I made certain that I crossed the border at least once.

Doug and I challenged each other to ride on the stand-up roller coaster called Vortex. I won’t say that I really enjoyed the experience, and I would not do it again. However, I am glad that I tried it once. Important note: neither Doug nor I got sick. If you are interested in what it was like, you can watch this video.

We stayed at a Holiday Inn that was at the far end of the parking lot for a strip mall on Woodlawn Road just west of I-77. The primary attraction of the strip mall was The Gentlemen’s Club of Charlotte. I learned that “gentlemen’s club” is a euphemism commonly employed in the South for what northerners would call strip clubs or girlie bars.

I am pretty sure that I stayed in this hotel, which at some point before 2023 was converted into a Holiday Inn Express, for all of my trips to Cato. I did not patronize the GC of C, but I did manage to run a few miles on several evenings in the residential area behind the hotel. The nearby KFC was my primary source of nourishment on most of those evenings. I also liked a Mexican restaurant named Azteca⁴ near there.

On one of my visits I came across a Cato store in a strip mall. I took a short circuit around the store. I saw enough to know that it was not for me.

I ate lunch with the IT guys on a different visit. Somehow I lost my American Express card, the only credit card that I had at the time. I had to cancel it and get a new one. It was a bother, but no one tried to use it.

For some reason I was invited to a meeting at Cato that was attended by the president of the company. His name was, not surprisingly, also Cato. He was not impressive. The other executives at the meeting seemed to need to explain everything to him.

Epilogue: Early in 2000 I received a phone call from Virginia. She told me that they were canceling the AdDept maintenance contract and the open programming projects. Denise Bessette (introduced here), who by then was TSI’s VP of Product Development, took this news very hard because one of the issues that Virginia mentioned was that some of the open projects had been open for several months. Shortly thereafter Lisa resigned.

I suspected that the company must have instituted austerity procedures. Almost never did a client cancel its maintenance contract and continue to use the AdDept system. In fact, when I started this project, I expected to learn the Cato was no longer in business. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Wikipedia in 2023 it had 1,372 stores with five logos.

1. Virginia Meyer worked at Cato until 2002, but her influence seemed to vanish in 1999. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. Despite the fact that Cato has always been a family-run business that was named after its founder, it’s logo is in capital letters, which gave me the impression that it was an acronym.

3. Lisa Nutter’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. A restaurant called Plaza Azteca opened in Enfield, CT, in a location that had already been the home of several failed restaurants. Parking was difficult, and many other restaurants with established clientele were nearby. Sue and I went there once and were not impressed.

It closed after only a few months.I don’t know if it was affiliated with the one in Charlotte.

1995-1996 TSI: AdDept Client: Color Tile

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Mike

Short but sweet. Continue reading →

The Color Tile stores had the crooked TILE letters. Tandy Corp. once owned Color Tile as well as the other store pictured here, RadioShack.

Color Tile¹ was a chain of small retail stores that was based in Fort Worth TX. In 1995 it had over six hundred stores. The IT Department, which already owned AS/400’s, contacted Doug Pease² about using AdDept for its advertising department, which was quite small compared to the ones for department stores. Doug and I flew to DFW, rented a car, and drove to Fort Worth to demonstrate the AdDept system and to talk with the employees in the advertising department.

The presentation went very well. I sent them a proposal and a contract. They signed and sent TSI a deposit. Shortly thereafter I flew back to Texas and installed the system on an AS/400 in the company’s data center.

These are the two people from Color Tile in a conference room in Ft. Worth. Doug, whom I cut out of the photo, and I were sitting across from them.

I could find no notes from the time that I spent at Color Tile. I only found the photo at the left when I was looking through my Tandy photos.

Throughout the installation I only worked with a couple of people in Color Tile’s advertising department, and I don’t remember their names. The guy insisted on taking me to lunch at a real Mexican restaurant. He said that he wanted to prove that eating Mexican food need not require spending excess time in the men’s room an hour later. Mexican food never affected me that way, but I definitely enjoyed the meal with him.

The woman was very excited about the progress that had been made in just a few months. However, the company declared bankruptcy in January of 1996 and was liquidated a little more than a year later. Later she was hired by RadioShack (described here) and worked with the AdDept system for several years.

Fortunately, Color Tile owed TSI very little when they entered bankruptcy. In the end the company left all of its vendors high and dry.

1. The retailer Color Tile, Inc. should not be confused with Colortile, a brand of floor covering that was still in existence in 2023. The confusion is enhanced by the fact that Colortile’s signage often splits its name into two words.

2. Much more can be read about Doug here and in most of the entries for AdDept clients.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: AS/400

2005-2010 TSI: For Sale?

2023 September: The Big Black Box

2005-? Wavada.org

1995-2000 TSI: AdDept Client: Cato Corporation

1995-1996 TSI: AdDept Client: Color Tile