Monthly Archives: July 2009

Don’t be a gerbil.

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Do not be content with running on a wheel that gets you no closer to your goals. Don’t rely on others to fill your food dispenser, and your water bottle. Learn to clean up after yourself, become self sufficient. You don’t need someone to clean and rearrange your place every two weeks. Plan, be active, exercise and learn something new. Try something you have never tried before, dare yourself. Just don’t be a gerbil.

Gerbils are content creatures. They run nowhere, eat and sleep and they excited to be back home in their tank after you clean it. They will even explore, and admire their clean tank as if they just moved into a new home.

No Gerbils were harmed in the writing of this blog.

Back up your Data Now or else….

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I had a rather rude awakening the other day. A Western Digital 500 GB Firewire hard drive I bought in 2007 croaked, died, started the dreaded click clik click on startup. This is a universal sound of death apparently. I did not have any irreplaceable on it, its just a big inconvenience and time suck.

I spent Friday looking into Data Recovery Options, which it turns out is an oxymoron. It really means “it will cost you a minimum of between 49.00 and 65.00 dollars for anyone to determine if they can even help you.”

Twelpforce (Bestbuy online) tried to help on twitter by enlisting about 7 people responding and talking around the problem until I suggested I take it to Best Buy in Natick to get it looked at and it was agreed that was best.

I got an estimate of 3000.00 from Data Doctors. They were very certain they knew my problem and that they could fix it. They even called me from CA after I spoke to a local office in MA. Great response time, but the pricing is crazy.

The thing I just don’t believe is this premise that fixing and recovering data requires a clean room. Mixing plutonium probably does require a clean room, Data recovery probably not so much. The thought that all these companies need 2500.00 to get a 150.00 hard drive to spit out it’s data is a little too wizard of Oz for me, even given the fact I produce video. If they charge that much why not let the person with the hard drive fly to the clean room and observe the process then in person. Make it a vacation to the clean room and data recovery world?

My feeling is that most of the companies online claim to be able to do data recovery but really don’t. It’s my gut telling me something smells bad. It’s also 49.00 – 65.00 dollars to find out what the problem with the failed hard drive might be, and maybe a solution.

We all rely on computers to do our stuff. We all have backups of our stuff. With millions of people paying 49.00 – 65.00 that’s lots of money spent on maybe. I say we save that 49-65 million dollars right now.

Maybe coming up with a better backup plan is a better idea. Hmmm I found mine online. Please see http://www.videomaker.com/article/14242/

Three Strikes I’m Out. WTF…

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Sometimes you just have bad customer service experiences, but when you have three in a row you start to question yourself as I have. Is it me am I doing something wrong? I will let you decide.

1. gomylocal: They had my company listed all wrong on its listing and when I tried to have them reset my password they said they could not do that. So I asked them to delete my listing. This revealed another version of my listing that was also wrong going back 4 years. I had them delete that one also so that’s that. WTF?

2. Marketcircle: (Daylite) This program is my ACT for Mac program that I wrote so many good things about last year after I got rid of windows finally. Well an update rolled out recently and now my database name and password are gone. Did they create a customer service incident? We will see. I am not in habit of deleting this info.
WTF!

3. Bank of America said they sent me a new bank card on june 11th, and yet I did not get one. So yesterday when I was heading out I had to rush to an open banking center for my temp replacement card expired. Can you say two hours of my life I can never get back. I mean WTF.

Bonus: I tried updating my map on Tom Tom last night and it crashed while downloading the new map. Sure they have my money but can I get the map to download nooooo. WTF?

You need to laugh sometimes and I try, but sometimes you just need to say WTF.