Random thoughts, organized and categorized for your consumption.
Rants
If I have a problem with something, here it will be.
Goodbye 2009, and good riddance
Dec 31st
Just by reading the headline you can see that I have no problems leaving 2009 in the dust. It was a crappy year in just about every sense. But rather than drone on and on about what really sucked about the ‘09, because really, I could, I will instead pull the old “look back” list trick from my friends in commercial journalism. It works for them so it ought to for me.
- The economy – I really should not have to explain this one. If you had stocks, bonds, a retirement account or any kind of savings you know it sucked this More >
PC Building Fun
Nov 26th
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I spent more than my fair share of quality time building and rebuilding PCs. Although it was all for a good cause, it was pretty painful. These PCs are supposed to work when you put them together, and yet these new boxes just didn’t run. As each build stretched on into the early morning hours it became clear that this was just a futile effort. In the end, I gave up my own (and a friend’s) working PCs to get the job done but I’m left with a puzzling thought:
Why is it that technology gets faster/better/cheaper More >
If At First You Don't Succeed, Fail, Fail Again
Jun 21st
I’ve had a tough week, technology-wise. Over the course of the last three days I’ve had two relatively new hard drives fail, a gigabit switch started having some ports go slow and a servo that controls the throttle on an RC airplane went nuts. I think it may be time for some time away from the keyboard.
I believe my new saying for hard disks should go something like this:
“There are no such things as good, dependable or safe disks. There are just disks that have failed and those that will fail.”
On the recommendation of some people on the Internet, I More >
All About Scams and ID Theft
May 19th
Two different events conspired to make today suck: an email purporting to be from the FBI and US Mail from a former employer telling me that my identity may have been stolen.
The FBI mail is the typical Internet scam, but this time with more legit looking information and 50% less bad grammar. It tells me that:
your e-mail address was among the e-mails that won this year promo award of UK National Lottery, that is the fund that was transferred to Africa , and it has been recovered.
Of course, I completely forgot about that lotto ticket I picked up when I More >
Worst Service Nominees
Apr 1st
I have recently had the great displeasure of participating in three different levels of grief and suffering with three different technology companies. All three were so terrible that I felt compelled to write about it and post the results here, in the unlikely hope that someone might learn from my pain. So here it goes…
Adobe: decided that it is OK to hang up on my calls twice for support to activate a product that I had purchased, transfer me between two different call centers and different support staffs in India, force me to repeat the same trouble-shooting steps no less More >
My Latest Vista Test: Network Throttling
Dec 14th
Over the past couple of weeks I have been copying large amounts of data back and forth from my desktop PCs and my ReadyNAS in order to facilitate clearing some local hard disk space and to really, honestly begin scheduled backups. Today while copying a particularly large file (greater than 2GB if you must know) I found that the transfer rate to the ReadyNAS was a measly 10 MB/s. I have a gigabit network setup and this represents less than 10% of the available capacity. Obviously something is up.
I have my full-time, every-day PC running Vista with SP1 and for the More >
When Malware Attacks, I Should Listen
Nov 25th
When your computer begins to slow down and then do strange things, you really do need to pay close attention because it is trying to tell you something. In my case Vista was attempting to communicate in a very inept way that it had been attacked by some malware and was in the process of going down the drain.
First I noticed the hard drive LED flashing rapidly all the time. Next I found that the machine wouldn’t stay in sleep mode any longer. Browser windows would pop open for no good reason. It was time to make a trip to More >
CA DMV SMOG boondoggle
Sep 15th
For those of us living in the republic of California and owning older vehicles, we have to put up with an annual mandatory visit to a “certified” SMOG test station to see if our vehicle is still “legal” to drive on the road. Unlike safety inspections found in other states, however, this test is nothing more than a way to extract additional money from your pocket if you wish to keep driving on the roads. It works like this:
- You first pay about $90-ish for the registration and license fees
- Instructions tell you to go and SMOG test your vehicle for “a More >
The Continuing Sadness that is the HR20
Aug 3rd
It has been almost a year since I was forced to give up my wonderful HD-Tivo box for the “improved” DirecTV version called the HR20. Since I’ve had the box I’ve needed to make a lot of adjustments, but one new adjustment just isn’t sitting well with me: lock ups and reboots once per week.
You see, DirecTV doesn’t seem to understand the concept of QA or beta testing. Whenever they get a new update for the software inside the HR20 they just push it out the door to millions of customers. For anyone that has ever gotten a bad update More >
Just Another Week in Texas
Apr 28th
Getting stuffed into an airplane like sardines in a can. Sweltering heat and humidity during the day with little respite at night. Eating enough bar-b-que’d animals to cause a meat coma. Encountering more trucks than the entire population of some small countries. Bouffant hair. Strange looks from the country folk when driving a minivan. Lots of NASCAR loving yahoos. A crazy amount of turnpikes and toll roads. Gas prices below $3.40 a gallon. The worst B.O. ever on the cramped plane ride home.
What else could all of this be but a trip to Texas?