Mozy added to my craplist

I tried using mozy after using their free service for nearly 2 months. I paid them $82.00 for a 2 year contract. Thus far things aren't going very well. The first time I tried to do a backup the system locked my out and thought that I was on more than 1 server when I wasn't. This happened twice.

Today WhenI tried to continue this I recieved another issue, this time with port 443 not being able to reach their server. I sent out two technical support requests with no avail.

I am getting ready to get rid of them via the wonderful power of a visa chargeback. Thus far I cannot recommend doing business with them due to their colossal incompetence.

I am tired of calling them every time their program bombs. Probably going to try spideroak.

Thomas

A tale of Customer Loyalty and why its good

I am one of those people who has the memory of an elephant. While I do believe in forgiving and forgetting (with people), I tend to be very harsh on companies that lie, cheat, or otherwise try to bamboozle me.

I am also especially generous when a company treats me right. If I have a company who I trust, and who loses perhaps a little bit of money on a transaction, I will stay with that company even if their prices are double their nearest dodgy competetor who has wronged me.

Case in point: Tom Tom vs. Garmin. I bought a tom-tom and the thing destroyed itself even before working. The firmware update process wrecked it, and I ended up returning it.

Garmin (I am going on my third garmin now) has pretty decent products, and occasionally has quality issues, but they make up for it. On my first garmin, I had trouble with the auto plug in adapter. They sent me 'free' ones even after the warranty expired (to the tune of about $40.00). So when my trusty street-pilot finally died (7 years!!!) I bought another garmin, the Zumo 550. The zumo recently bit the dust, and garmin STILL honored the warranty even though the device is > 1 year ownership. NO COST other than shipping the defective unit to them.

I will admit that I did have to go through about 3 hours of technical support hell, but ultimately when everything else failed, they gave me a warranty exchange.

So when I didn't want to do the 'cross' ship option (nearly .3 kilodollars) I went to tiger direct and bought, you guessed it, another garmin. So they have made money by honoring the warranty and made me a loyal customer again.

THomas

New Sun Recumbent (LWB)

I got a good deal on a Sun recumbent this weekend. I took it out for a 14 mile spin today. The LWB is really smooth, but takes some getting used to. High speed handling was excellent, the seat (I prefer mesh seats) is not too bad for a 'hard' seat. I will be experimenting with different seats, as well as different tires. I also like the simplicity of the chain drive, as well as 'default' components that aren't expensive to replace.

20 Inch tires are also nice, 20 tire choices vs 3. for the old 16's. I also like the shocks. VERY good, in fact better than my crane creek shock on the old satrday.

LWB is also easier to get up the stairs.

Ereader disaster and don't shop at borders!

Well, since I am going to be going into the hospital for an extended stay, I decided to look at an ereader (ebook) reader from sony, thinking that it would be worth a go.

I went to borders thinking it would be easy to return it, but only to find that they won't accept returns. The sony prs-700 is HORRIBLE. It is unreadable, it has awful resolution and the software blows HUGE chunks. E-ink display technology just isn't there yet, not enough contrast. I also found I had to make the text so large just to read it.

I will be waiting 5 years or so before trying e-ink agian. Otherwise, you are just better off buying a mac and using it to read....

I put it on ebay, and only hope to lose $25.00 in the deal.....will find out. Don't shop at borders, they suck!!!!! They are on my 'i am never going to shop here again regardless of how much they offer me in incentives".

Safari 4 and My thoughts on the Mac

Well, I am writing this on the new safari 4 browser. It seems loads faster than firefox. I can read google without waiting an eternity. If this was the one thing keeping me from going from firefox it was the speed. But safari thus far seems cool, fast, and stable. I will find out more. I also bought the brickmaster 200 by cuisinart. Its basically a convection toaster oven with rocks inside of it to get nice even heating and a good loaf of artesian like bread.

I finally perfected my chia seed loaf, and a friend is editing my book. I also love my new (actually old) noisy clacky keyboard from unicomp (I got the endura pro with the built in track-point). My mouse story also takes an interesting turn. The Microsoft mouse that I so horribly complained about is working fine now, and is my main mouse on the mac. Just don't use the Microsoft mouse drivers!!!!!

Freebsd 7.1 and Zfs for my NAS

Well, I finally updated my nas to 1tb this weekend. ZFS thus far has turned out to be very cool and easy.

1. No waiting 10,000 years for filesystems to format, zfs is instantaneously ready
2. ZFS automatically takes care of mirroring, even correcting 'bad' blocks on EITHER primary or 'mirror' e.g. if bad on primary, will look to 'mirror' for correct blocks. It can then correct the primary.
3. ZFS is still 'experimantal' and requires at least 1gb of memory to work. Here are the tweaks to add to the kernel:

vmem.kmem_size="512M"
vmem.kmem_size_max="512M"
zfs_load="YES"
vfs.zfs.arc.max="100M"
vfs.zfs.vdev.cache.size="10M"
vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1"
vfs.zfs.zil_disable="1"

Those entries go into the loader.conf in your /boot directory.

ZFS also uses TONS of processor. When I was sending 190gb of files processor was at 80-100%. So a multi core is necessary if you want to use on your 'main' machine....

I also threw in some apple customizations:

first, the MDNSresponder.conf file

# sample mDNSResponder conf file
#
# name type domain port text record
# ---- ---- ------ ---- -----------
Marilyn _afpovertcp._tcp local. 548
Marilyn _ssh._tcp local. 22

this lives in the /usr/local/etc mDNSResponder.conf file.

You also need to install the netatalk and the Mdnsersponder, and "HOWL" to get apple working. YOu also need the following in your /usr/local/etc/AppleVolumes.default

Just put your shares at the end e.g. /export.

The system went from 20mbps on a 1gbps network to 36mbps with appletalk. Also nice is the fact that I can 'browse' to the share.

The freebsd has seemed very stable, with the appropriate modifications. ZFS does use TONS of memory, however (200mb) on my setup....

Also cool is the ability to 'send' backups to any other nas on the network via a single command, and well as adding to the pool w/o having to do considerable resizing.

I haven't finished my 'time machine' project on it yet, but zfs quotas will ensure that they won't eat up the entire 1tb of disk.

Do Thomas' Dream of Electric Grills?

Well, I decided to get an electric grill this year since my old george foreman grill died after 5 years of hard service.

I had read about the weber q140 electric grill and balked at the price. $220.00 for a stupid grill! I shrieked. So I went to wally world and purchased a 'cheap' grill Still a benjamin, however. The thing turned out to be useless.

So I went out to a local ace (everyone else didn't have the q in stock, and that’s why I went to wally world) , and purchased it.

The other grill barely got up to 200 degrees. Fine for smoking, but for grilling 350 degrees or higher is needed.

My first burger on the q140 was great. Instead of being dry and poorly cooked, the hamburger was juicy, and cooked in only 8 minutes (the wally world special took nearly 15 mins to cook, and the burger was dry and horrid).

Th grill does require a table, since it isn't a free-standing unit. It did cost me $300.00, but I can now successfully grill on the required electric grill (we live in a complex that bans gas grills).

Don't waste your time on 'cheaper' grills.

Thomas