Browsing Posts published in July, 2008
Have you ever thought of replacing your computer case with something else? Some of us really lazy geeks don’t even bother with a case, we just have it all laying out and about. Well this guy decided to forgo the case go with Lego to support his computer parts: take a look here.
I like the way he has a set of small blue doors that open to help cool the MicroATX power supply!
Okay, many people have been asking for this for quite some time and there seemed to have been a push when the US released their version of the list but ours seems to suck. Apparently there are a ton of exceptions. According to an article on the CBC website any number of groups can still call you.
“Charities, political parties, polling firms, newspapers and companies that have done business with an individual over the past 18 months can continue to make unsolicited phone calls. Canadians who do not wish to receive such calls can ask at the time of a call to be removed from the organization’s list, or contact them ahead of time and request the same.”
I suggest you give the article a read if you are a fellow Canadian. Then forget about using the service because the investment of your time in adding yourself will possibly out weight the time lost on hanging up on the telemarketer.
I must say that I prefer to get the one call, tell them I am not interested, ask them to remove my name from their list and then I log into my Primus account and perminantely block their number :)
Oh, and don’t forget that you will have to call them back ever 3 years to keep your phone number, cell phone number or fax number off that list.
Hey… maybe we can waste a couple of billion dollars on this like we did with gun registry that is a more of a bureaucracy registry than anything!
I know that you’re probably all thinking that you have the best hard drive out there and “never had any trouble with it”, and that’s great! I have been doing some side work for some people and I can honestly say that 66% of the work I do is hard drive replacement and Windows re-installation.
I remember working in a local computer shop during my youth. We used to have the odd batch that was total crap but I remember that we repaired all kinds of problems. I remember this batch of Samsung hard disks that were more likely broken then working at all. But then there were some Quantum hard disks that were ROCK solid! I know, not the Bigfoot!
It’s a bit ironic because in the past month I have had 2 of my hard disks die on me. I had a WD 500GB external drive crap out that held all my backups. I also had a 160GB in a test machine that I run sometimes when I am not in the mood for the laptop. It died just the other day.
I asked some of the guys at work and one of the gents that is in the PC Build department said that most the the rebuilds they need to do on X60 tablets are due to dead hard drives.
So our of frustration comes a post. I hope that HD manufacturers realize that most of us would like something that lasts the life of the PC instead of saving a couple of bucks. After all this isn’t a modem we are talking about… ALL OUR DATA IS ON THERE!
I have been poking around for some time looking for marketing tips for my blog while also trying to come up with my own ideas. I follow a ton of people and noticed a post on twitter the other day from Chris Brogan, 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media. Chris is definitely an expert in this area so I and going to work on trying to follow the majority of his ideas. Increased viability will for sure drive first time readers. Then all I have to do is keep them coming with my outstanding whit! Woohoo! Crap, this might be harder than I thought.
It looks like a lot of work. I am up for it, the only issue I have is the lack of sleep. I still work at a 9-5 job to pay the bills but it gets in the way of my progress online. The Sleepy Geek really comes from me being tired. Two small kids and my wife also works and we are always on the go.
I want to try and get my work out there. I have started to blog and really what I want is to develop a good sized readership. I thought it best to get some content on the site before I really started to push at branding my name. I intend to use some of Chris’ ideas such as reading other blogs and commenting as much as possible with intelligent information. I want to also concentrate on building a community.
So here goes Chris, a wealth of knowledge and nothing but time to get it done. Thank you for your help and if I apply it correctly I can’t see it NOT working.
I was having a little trouble logging on to Live messenger and thought it was something wrong with my setup. I thought nothing of it until I rebooted about 5 minutes later for something else and then a light went off in my head.
Hmm… maybe it’s my MSN messenger, so I went over to meebo.com and tried to get in there. No luck. So now I am really thinking there is something wrong. I asked my dear wife and sure enough she isn’t able to log on either.
Everyone else having trouble? Wonder what the issue is!
For the recent past since I have been posting to my blog on a regular basis, I have been uploading my posts to lockergnome.com and undo.tv. I have been using these sites as sort of a syndication of my blog to gain readership. It’s exciting to get your word out there and have people seeing it.
As some of you know I was on vacation last week so I wasn’t doing any posting. We stay up north where there is no phone, never mind an internet connection. When I got back and started getting ready to post things I was greeted with a 404 error from unto.tv. I did a little looking around and found that the expiration for the domain is July 24th which just happens to be tomorrow! I wonder if the site was emptied before the domain expires.
I am a bit sad that the medium isn’t there any longer but I totally understand why. If you were there in the past couple of months I was the only person contributing content. I think the major players in the endeavor stopped sometime in the spring.
Chris might have some insight into this and I look forward to his comments when he reads the post. I don’t think the idea for the site worked out, Chris and Leo who were the top contributors and also the owners of the site I believe; have moved on to their current projects.
Does anyone know of any other site similar to undo.tv that people can post their content to?
Upon return of my vacation I had a meeting at work and learned that we would soon start the testing and piloting of Windows Vista for the client machines. It’s a good time to start thinking about it as XP end of life is in a couple of years if I am not mistaken. We will most likely start deploying people only late 2010 or early 2011 but this is a good head start.
So me being me, I decide that if we are going to be using it at work then maybe it’s a good idea to use it day to day to learn the ins and outs. Don’t get me wrong, I have used Vista on and off since before most people were able to get it, but I never actually installed it on my main machine. I have a desktop at home that I had it on which I used for video editing and some web stuff, but my laptop is where my life is.
I grabbed a copy of it and installed it on Monday. The installation is lightning fast as you all know by now, but I just can’t get a hold on the UI. I can’t tell you what it is exactly that I don’t like but I feel like I am constantly walking through a pool. Everything is just a little harder and heavier to accomplish.
Back to XP I suppose. There is too much work to get done to fight with your UI when really you don’t get anything more from it. There is nothing extra in Vista that I need to get my work done, so the cost for benefit is awful!
I will try again, I will need to eventually. But for now, XP it is.
Vacation at the cottage is over :( Sad to be over, but glad to be home. It was nice to unplug from the world for a while, spending a lot of time with the family. It was a blast to just relax with the kids and my wife all day.
All that being said, it’s nice to be home. Glad to see my house and glad to see my own bed. I have a pinched nerve in my back and I think it’s mostly to do with sleeping in another bed. DOH! What do you want for cottage paradise?
- Uh oh! We are leaving the cottage… Vacation is pretty much over. :( #
