Minimally Exceptional

I recently picked up an acer laptop from someone at work. The hard drive failed, and he was in the market to buy a new computer anyway, so he passed it along to me.

I just happened to have an extra 2.5″ hard drive, so I plugged it in, tracked down the recovery disc, and fired it up.

Turns out acer doesn’t give you a factory restore disc. Instead, they put the restore data on a recovery partition and have the user burn their own recovery disc.

It’s a cost cutting measure, I guess. Doesn’t sound like too evil of an idea, but as always there is a catch. What if your hard drive fails? No problem. Put in a new drive and restore from your burned recovery disc.

The thing about burned media is that consumer grade writable media is more unstable than a pressed cd or DVD. As a result, burned discs can have reliability issues when it comes to using them for backup and recovery. Needless to say, the burned recovery disc has failed, so there is no way to get the original drivers and OS reinstalled.

A quick review of acers website shows that there is a twenty four hour help desk. I fire off an email with my problem and get a relatively personalty-free answer in a few hours. This email told me two things: I was dealing with an automated help system (A ROBOT), and I could purchase a new recovery disc directly from acer.

Great! I click the link, enter the serial number, and… get an error code. I report the error code to the help desk rep who then tells me that acer is no longer able to produce my recovery disk because this is a “legacy machine” that is no longer supported. A legacy machine? Come on. This laptop is 20 months old. If it was a work machine we would still be depreciating the bastard. His (its) advice to me? Purchase a retail operating system, install it, and track down drivers for hardware on the Internet.

I don’t know about you, but I do not have extra cash lying around than I can burn on another copy of an operating system that I already own a legitimate license for. Acer should be embarassed that this is “the best [they] can do” for customers who spend a grand (or more) on a computer and accessories and need help less than two years later.

There is no way that I am the only person in this situation, which means there is likely a small but angry group of acer owners with effectively bricked units, and the way I see it there are three options:

1) shell out a bunch of money for a copy of an OS that they already own a license for,

2) switch to a free OS that they likely don’t want, or

3) get over the fact that their laptop is now a large and expensive paperweight.

None of those opitions are good ones. It’s no wonder people pirate software. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, but I can tell you with pretty solid confidence where my next laptop will NOT be coming from.

Oh, sorry – did I say “paperweight”? I meant “Legacy Paperweight”.

Why am I so stupidly addicted to Shirt.woot? I mean, I love the shirt.woots overall (there are probably 6 or 7 that I bought and wear regularly), but the random shirt.woot gets me every time. In all fairness, I guess I am addicted to woot and their super cheap SD/Micro SD memory cards, because for some reason I buy 3 of them whenever they’re up (and Laura yells at me every time).

I guess it’s better than being addicted to cocaine or meth, but I just can’t figure out why I am a sucker for $7.00 mystery shirts. I have picked up the random shirt.woot three times now (with a fourth on the way), and ordered the maximum of 3 shirts each time. So that ‘s a grand total of 12 random shirts. In terms of the shirts themselves, I’m batting about .500 pending this week’s order. I have had one really great set of 3, one lame set of 3, and one set with two good ones and a lame one.

I’ll have to take a look at the shirt.woots that I have so far and post some of the ones that I really like.

What is it about a random shirt that hooks me in every time? Is it the uncertainty of not knowing what you’re going to get or how great/terrible they’re going to be? Is it the high hopes of getting a neat shirt that you wanted but missed the first time around? Am I just that much of a total dork?

…

Well, I guess I answered my own question there, didn’t I.

Watchmen starts showing in theaters soon, and I have to say that I’m pretty excited. The graphic novel is just awesome. Plot, characters, artwork – really, there is nothing about it to not love.

Flickr and YouTube both have a lot of promotional pictures and videos up, and they look great. Strictly speaking about physical appearance, it looks like they did a great job casting (with the exception of Veidt, who I am on the fence about). Rorschach and The Comedian both look very true to the original concept.

I do have one concern – the ending. The original story does not have what most would consider a happy ending. I have read that the film will have a different ending, and hopefully at least a little bit of artistic integrity is maintained. If the movie ends with Hollywood rainbows and sunshine, I’ll be at least a little disappointed.

Who am I kidding? Even if the ending is sunshine and rainbows, I’m still going to watch it and enjoy the hell out of it.

I recently switched hosting services. Previously, I was using Hasweb, which when I signed up with them four or so years ago, they were a great deal. If I pay for a year in advance, I get 5GB of storage and 100GB of transfer for about eight bucks a month.

I wanted to be able to upload and make available for download the concert recordings and DVDs that Laura and I have put together – I want to distribute them, but my upload is capped at a low enough speed that seeding through bittorrent isn’t feasable. Obviously, HTTP access isn’t happening on 5gb of space.

I started looking for a new host a few weeks ago, and found HostMonster. Their plan looked great, had lots of storage, and tons a bandwidth all for a reasonable price. Sounded great, until I read the terms of service. No profanity, not offensive content.

Fuck, I guess that’s out.

Eventually my search lead me to Hostgator. Hostgator also had a great plan. I’m paying $15 a month for 200GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth – more than enough for what I want to do. I signed up, changed name servers on my domain, and was up and running within a few days. Overall, the process was much less painless than I expected it to be. I was expecting flurries of emails to and from support desks and techies trying to move all of my stuff from host A to host B. This was much easier than the other web change I made, which was registering Laura’s domain at somethingferretrelated.com and changing the main domain associated with my hasweb account. That was a little more painful.

Anyway, after a few days of uploading, downloading, md5 checking, et cetera – the first set is available online. Info files aren’t there yet but they will be after this weekend.

In the downloads section there is now the Greg Howard 2005-07-15 DVD, the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Early DVD, and the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Late DVD. The Matt Nathanson / Graham Colton / Kyle Riabko show at the Gargoyle in 2004 will be going up next, as soon as the graham and kyle discs are ready. Yes, this is the ripped pants show.

So anyway, I’d like to think that’s a pretty significant improvement/addition to the site. There’s finally content available here other than my petty bitching and geeking out. Go nuts and download them if you want them – I’ll password lock the directories if/when I run out of bandwidth.

Once it’s common for computers to have one or more terabytes of storage, what will we call it?

Will we call it a ‘ter,’ kind of like a ‘gig’ or a ‘meg?’ Will we call it a Tera? Or will we just refer to it by it’s common name – a ‘metric shit ton’?

I have crossed the magical 1T mark on my home computer. I already had a 250 and a 300 in my desktop, and last night I bought a 500gb external drive. It’s pretty neat, actually. It connects to my router and is a network enabled device, so I can hook it up to any computer on my home network, including my laptop with wireless networking.

As neat as it is, I have a little bit of a bitch about it: Proprietary software.

It uses the MIOnet service to connect the hard drive to your computer. It also uses MIOnet for remote access. If I leave my modem, router, and drive powered on and connected, I can access the contents of the drive from any internet connected computer by grabbing the MIOnet client off of their website.

Neat concept, but it really irks me that I have to install and use their bullshit just to get the basic functionality out of the device. Especially considering that the software wants to be connected to the internet all the time. I just didn’t want to use it, and it’s kind of a deal breaker.

Fortunately I was able to get around it. I’m actually really pleased with myself that I figured it out. Since I’m not much of a techie these days, I’m always a little worried that I’m losing the little bit of tech savvy that I still have.

It’s a Western Digital MyBook world edition. I haven’t been able to find anything about how to get around the proprietary software, so here’s how I did it just in case anyone is out there googling for answers.

Here’s some basic network information. I have 4 devices on my home network. Two desktop PCs (one running XP Pro and one running XP Home), a laptop running XP Media Center 2005, and a nintendo Wii. I use Earthlink DSL for my internet connection, and I have a netgear wireless router. I can’t remember the model number on the router.

So I sat here for a long time last night trying to map a network drive to the mybook. No luck. Windows network could detect the device, and see that it had two folders, but neither of them would map to a drive letter. I was prompted for a username and password, and the login information that I had set up when I initially installed the device didn’t work.

Then, on a whim, I logged into my router configuration, where I could check the status of connected devices.

I guess it’s worth mentioning that I manually assign local IP addresses to all of my devices. I need to do this so that I can open specific ports to use with bittorrent, which I use quite a bit. So all of my devices are 192.168.1.XXX, where I assign the XXX. My Wii is 192.168.1.4, my PC is 192.168.1.2, et cetera. The myBook was being automatically assigned an IP address of 192.168.1.4 (the Wii was off and so the address was not in use.)

That’s when something useful hit me – what if I just tried access that address via firefox?

Well I did – and it took me to a manual configuration screen for the mybook and prompted me for a login and password.

Here the login and password from the initial setup worked. Within the config pages of the drive, I was able to do all kinds of stuff. Set up users and passwords, manage file shares, and manually assign the drive an IP address. So I did all those things. I set up a username and password, I set up a file share (essentially just a folder on the root of the drive that will serve as the ‘root’ of the share,) and I forced the IP address to be the next in the sequence of available numbers.

Well guess what? If I try to map a network drive, let’s call it Y:, to \\192.168.1.X\SHARE, it prompts me for a username and password. If I use the name and password that I set up in advanced settings, the SHARE folder maps to y: as the root.

Perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. I uninstalled the crappy software, rebooted all computers, and mapped the drive to each computer just to make sure it works.

My initial thoughts on the drive itself is that it’s very asthetically pleasing. It’s glossy white with blue accent lights – think the Wii – and isn’t nearly as big as I’d expected it to be. It’s a little noisy depending on how you stand it up and what you have it set on, but it’s no louder than a cpu fan. Performance wise, I haven’t had a lot of time to do anything with it as it’s only been a day, but it seems to be a little on the slow with write speeds. I’m not really suprised. I’m not using gigabit networking or anything. Probably no slower than a connection to a standard external USB drive.

So anyway, that’s my story. I’m going to go see how quickly I can fill a .5 terabyte drive.