Rants and Raves

The RIAA (Recording Industry of Association of America) is apparently backing off of the individual lawsuits they’ve been filing and working with major ISPs (read that as AT&T, Comcast, and Cox) supposedly with the help of New York’s Attorney General (hey, he failed in his war on Usenet child pornography, so we can only hope him as much success here) to implement new policies where by your ISP monitors your habits and slaps you on the wrist (or terminates your service).

The new “3 Strikes Plan” basically is a boom for the ISPs because even though they like to advertise “unlimited” internet service, they’d love to find ways to limit it and charge you for your use.

ISPs are looking at this as a way to test and implement system that cap your downloads, implement metered service, and just outright block you from doing things you might want to (and may in fact be perfectly legal).

My advice is start looking for an ISP that has gone on record as NOT supporting this type of activity and send a single to the “big boys” that you can choose who to spend your money with, and you will not accept limitations placed on your unlimited internet service.

Who’s a good choice — apparently Verizon has gone on record already as not supporting or participating in assisting the RIAA other than as required by law.

NOTE:  Remember, Comcast has basically told the FCC that they don’t have to disclose anything they don’t want to about their traffic shaping and filtering policies to customer, and they’ll file litigation against the FCC if they are fined.  So be warned, you may subscribe to Comcast’s 50MB service but you’ll only get what they want you to have!

Tags: ! ALERTS !, Communications, Technology by roger
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I’ve started to make the conversion of my servers and virtualization hosts to Windows Server 2008, and with Windows Server 2008 comes Hyper-V.

While I believe there has to be a rather substantial update to Hyper-V, most of  the initial feedback is promising, and the performance is good.

Since I already have an investment in virtualization using Virtual Server 2005 R2 (x64) Hyper-V is the logical choice (though you could consider others – Virtual Box would be a free alternative).

Microsoft makes it possible for you to import Virtual PC or Virtual Server machines only if you purchase the Virtual Machine Manager; for those of us who don’t run a virtual data center that might be a bit much (I think it was available through my MSDN subscription, but I really didn’t want to install it).  For those who don’t mind a few manual steps you can use Matthijs ten Seldam’s Virtual Server to Hyper-V import tool – VMC2HV (I’ve included links at the bottom of the post to his BLOG as well as direct to his SkyDrive for download).

With VMC2HV you will have to manually remove Virtual Machine Additions from your old virtual machines, and manually start the process of HAL upgrade and Virtual Intergration Services Install on your Hyper-V machine, but it’s very straight forward and Hyper-V will actually give you info-tips to guide you along.

The tool is fairly straight forward to use, the only thing you need to remember is to have it swap SCSI0 with IDE0 (if you used SCSI drives on Virtual Server, remember that Hyper-V can only boot from IDE drive; hopefully that will change soon).

• Matthijs ten Seldam’s BLOG
• VMC2HV Download

Tags: Computers, Software, Technology, Windows by roger
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Many financial institutions that issue “cash back” or “rewards” debit cards and credit cards are in poor financial shape at the moment.

As a precaution you may want to cash in your points now in order to insure that the institutions don’t make a change to the program that greatly diminishes your value.  In addition you might want to find another financial institution that isn’t in precarious financial condition with a rewards program to use in the interim until your current institution stabilizes.

The two largest banking institutions that have liberal rewards programs that are in financial trouble are Citi Group and Bank of America.

The largest banking institution that has a liberal rewards program that isn’t in financial trouble is Chase.

Tags: Credit Cards, Finance by roger
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Citibank has rolled out a mobile banking application for many phones on most major cellular carriers.

Personally I’m not sure why we’ve gone to a model where vendors seem to believe we need all kinds of applications to do simple things that could be done through a web browser… perhaps that’s an unfortunate side-effect of the iPhone craze (or perhaps better said as crazies).

I think it’s great that banking institutions are thinking about ways to provide services to individuals who have cellular data plans, but I think it’s unfortunate that we can’t just use simple standards — after all, the point is to enable the flow of information, not to make an application that people play with like a game.

To use the Citi Mobile application, you need a supported handset on a supported carrier, and you have to sign up, download, and activate it through the Citi “My Account” web portal.

Tags: Cellular, Communications, Credit Cards, Finance, Software, Technology by roger
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Lots of whiny posts here of late, and I’m hoping that I will have more positive and fun things to BLOG going forward with the new year.

Again a reminder to all my readers, if you’ve had a good or bad experience you want to share, let me know — I’m happy to report on it here, and I’m happy to give you pointers on how to setup your own BLOG as well.

Tags: General by roger
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The tail of an ox says, “Time goes, time comes.”

– Creole Proverb

Tags: Axiom by roger
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As one of my Civil Engineering friends used to remind me…

Shit flows down hill!

So when you’re trying to get action, start at the top and let “physics” help achieve a speedy resolution… or more plainly put.

Tags: Axiom, Shit List by roger
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I just dropped off some US Postal Service Form PS-1500s at the post office down the street, and have to relay a “funny” (maybe sad is a more appropriate word) episode…

The postal clerk said she’d never seen these forms before and went into the back to get her supervisor (who refused to give me his name).

He told me that the post office didn’t do “that”… and ask me where I got the forms, I told him the USPS web site (the people in line laughed, and that didn’t make him particularly happy).  Then he insisted again that the post office didn’t do “that”… and I ask him why the post office would have forms for something they didn’t do (and again I got laughs from the line).

He agreed to take the forms, and I reminded him that throwing them away would be a violation of postal regulations… he told me to get out of his lobby (presumably that would make him the station manager).

I’ve filed complaints with the US Postal Board of Governors before (and I just fired off another), but I always find complaining to my Representative, Senators, and President (all at once – which I’ve done as well) creates enough inquiries that the complaints is actually taken seriously.

I generally expect bad service at the post office, and it’s always amusing that the post office and quote postal regulations left and right when they benefit the post office… but few postal persons know anything about postal regulations that benefit the consumer.

For information on PS-1500 and taking control of your mail box, see my previous post:

• How To Stop Unwanted Mail

Tags: General, Legal, Shit List by roger
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I find it fairly interesting when you file complaints at many companies you get a “canned” response and it includes a statement to the effect that because of privacy concerns that they cannot provide information about actions taken to correct the matter.

WTF?

Sounds to me like this is just a “blow-off”… without accountability and closure it’s a waste of time to file a complaint.  Since the person filing the complaint should be an integral part of resolving it, and be involved in determining when the issue has been corrected they need to have access to information relating to the investigation.

Maybe it’s me; but I’m just far less tolerant of customer service with no accountability; I’d prefer to take my business else where.

Tags: Shit List by roger
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If you own a Seagate hard drive in the Baracuda 7200.11, or Barracuda ES.2 (SATA only), or Maxtor DiamondMax 22 series you might want to read on…

Seagate has confirmed that a number of issues customers have been seeing in 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, and 1.5TB drives is because of an issue with firmware (it also affects other drives, but apparently is seen most often in the “larger” drives).

There have been a number of write ups on the internet about this problem, and Seagate released firmware SD17 in December 2008 which they believed fixed the problems; and then SD1A in January 2009 which again they believed fixed the problems; but reports indicated that these firmware revisions may actually create one of the very problems Seagate is attempting to address.

The firmware issues can adversely effect the drives performance or it can render the drive totally useless (brick mode).

In an effort to prevent worse PR than Seagate is already suffering for this problem, they have stepped forward to assure everyone that they are working on the issues, that the drives have five year warranties (three for Maxtor), and that they will pay the costs for data recovery service if the drive bricks and cannot be used.

I’ll take this opportunity to remind everyone that Seagate is a California based company; and California has a “lemon law” and fairly strict consumer protection when a vendor advertises products that are supposed to have some feature and fail to deliver on that promise.  It’s unlikely Seagate will allow this problem to spin out of control, the financial liability is simply too high for them (we’re talking about potentially being forced to repurchase almost every drive they’ve sold for the past three years AT THE PRICE THE CONSUMER PAID for it if they don’t fix the problem soon.

You can view more details in the knowledge base article below, and subscribe to updates.  You can also view many rants on these issues by doing a web search.

• Seagate Knowledge Base Article

Tags: ! ALERTS !, Computers, Hardware, Technology by roger
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