After I bought my Prius c, I got an email asking me to take a survey online. Normally, I don’t like to take surveys but since I had a good experience, I decided to take the time to fill it out.

Everything looked okay at first, and I was on page 2 of the form as shown below.

Then, when I pressed “Next” to go to page 3, I got the following error:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC drivers error ’80004005′

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 125) was deadlocked on lock | communication buffer resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

/pages/insert.asp, line 838

Whoops. I tried going back and re-sending the page with the same results. Perhaps, they were doing some maintenance on the page.

Maybe they should log these errors to a file and show a more user friendly message. Or not.

Later, I got another email referring to the fact that I didn’t take the survey and wanting me to take it. Sorry, but you only get one chance to waste my time. Fool me once… well you know the rest.

Since 2007, I’ve been using the Buffalo NAS RAID but it finally broke down on me again, but this time for good. Frankly, I was more than ready to upgrade because I was starting to run out of space on it. For a couple of years, I’ve been eyeing the Drobo FS, shown below. So when my Buffalo died, I rushed out to by local Fry’s to get the Drobo.

Before getting to the juicy stuff, let me explain why I selected the Drobo instead of another NAS (Network Attached Storage) RAID. One of the biggest problems with traditional RAID is that you cannot mix and match different sized drives. So when I wanted to upgrade my Buffalo, I would have had to replace all the drives simultaneously. Drobo has a new system called BeyondRAID which allows the user to mix and match different sized drives, as well as add or replace drives on the fly without having to re-format all the drives like in traditional RAIDs. These features alone makes this RAID the best on the market, in my opinion.

The MSRP for the Drobo FS is $699 but Fry’s had it for $499. Luckily for me, they also happened to have a sale on Seagate 2TB drives for $149. These drives are fast and very quiet. The only problem was that it was limited to one per customer.

This is where I used my real world hacking talents to find a guy that let me buy 2 at a time. So I bought 2, then put them in my car, then came back and got 2 more from the same guy. That’s 8TB for $600. Nice.

It doesn’t hurt that the Drobo also looks cool compared to my old Buffalo, which looked like it was from the 80′s. As you can see in the back of the Drobo, it has the power switch (which is a toggle), the Ethernet port and even a slot for a laptop locking cable.

Setup was as ridiculously easy. Install the Drobo Dashboard software (more on that later), insert the drives into the front of the unit, then plug in the unit and toggle the power switch to turn it on. The Drobo accepts any 3.5″ SATA drive, even mix and match different sizes, and manufacturers. The drives slips into the slots bareback and without any screws.

The LED lights start to flash and after a little while, it’s ready for use. The big lights next to the drive give the current status of each drive. The green (or red if there’s a problem) LED on the left bottom is the status of the entire Drobo unit. The green LED on the right bottom is the network access indicator, and the blue lights at the bottom show how full the drives are. It’s a nice touch that you can see how much space you have without having to use your computer.

One thing that was a little strange is the front panel comes off completely and sticks back on with magnets. The first time I took it off, I thought I broke the door. It’s also a little hard to remove since the magnets are pretty strong.

The Drobo Dashboard software that comes with the unit allows you to setup and change the settings of the Drobo, as well as look at the current status. You can also have it email you when something goes wrong.

Drobo also includes a backup utility called Drobo PC Backup that will automatically backup your files to the Drobo in the background. It has the usual features to select the folders for backup and restoring from your backup. It also allows for a second backup drive to be setup so that you can backup your data on multiple drives. You can only install this software on 3 computers for free so if you have more, you may have to buy a license.

There were a couple of minor annoyances that I’ll mention. When you use the Windows file system to see the size of the Drobo FS drive, you will get some large size that doesn’t correlate to anything. In the list below, you can see that the total size shown for the drive is 16TB. I have 4 x 2TB drives + a 250GB = 8.25TB, and certainly not 16TB.

To see the actual size of the drive, you have to go into the Drobo Dashboard as shown below. As you can see, out of the 8.25TB, only 5.63TB is actually available for my data, with 1.04TB being used currently. It’s not a big deal since the blue LED lights on the unit tells you how full the drive is at all times, but it’s a little annoying.

The other problem is once in a while, the drive will disconnect from the network and will have to be re-booted. I had this same problem with my Buffalo NAS drive so this might be a problem with Windows, or even my router.

Drobo’s website also has some apps you can load onto your Drobo unit. Since the Drobo is a Linux-based box, you can run Linus programs on it to make it a local home server or media server. However, Drobo does not support these 3rd party applications so unless you know what you are doing, it’s better to let the professionals play with these toys.

So far, everything has worked as advertised and I’m very happy with my purchase. I’ve backed up my desktop and 2 laptops, and copied a bunch of files onto the NAS without any problems. To test it further, I added a small 250GB drive into the 5th and last slot to see how easily I can add drives. Just plug in the drive and the Drobo takes care of the rest. It can’t be any easier. I love it.

Drobo’s BeyondRAID technology is clearly the way of the future. I’m completely sold on it. If you’re looking for a NAS RAID, the only decision is what model Drobo to choose. It’s a no-brainer.

Have you ever had an errand to run or task to do, but you knew that you didn’t have enough time to do it? If you don’t have a spouse or friend to do it for you, you end up not being able to fulfill your duties.

That’s where TaskRabbit comes to the rescue. They have fully vetted “taskers” that will bid on your task or errand and you can pick the lowest bidder or whichever one you prefer. I haven’t used the service yet but I love this idea. They have people that will do delivery, house chores, shopping, moving, and even skilled labor like construction and auto work.

On the flip side of the coin, if you have some free time, you can sign up to be a TaskRabbit and bid on tasks and errands that are posted on the service. Might be a good way to make some quick cash. Payment is done through the website so you know you will get paid for your service.

According to Reuters, a hacker named YamaTough that is part of a group called Lords of Dharmaraja and affiliated with Anonymous, has published the pcAnywhere source code.  Authorities, pretending to be a Symantec employee, were in negotiations with the hacker to pay him $50,000 to destroy his copy of the source code.

According to authorities, they were never going to pay anything and was communicating with the hacker in order to buy time for Symantec to send out patches and to capture him. However, the hacker has announced that he was never going to take the money and it was just another way to humiliate Symantec. In the released email, the hacker claims to be located in Mumbai, India, but this could be to throw off law enforcement and the location of the hacker has not been confirmed by authorities.

What is known is that the source code has been published and Symantec has released patches to fix known vulnerabilities on January 23rd and 27th. Whether these patches fixes all vulnerabilities is not known and some companies have decided to stop using the product. Symantec states that they have contacted their customers and do not anticipate losing a lot of their customers. If they are using the latest patched version, it is safe to use pcAnywhere.

However, having the source code published allows other hackers to examine the code to find new vulnerabilities. In fact, this is the way open source code is debugged. Perhaps, in a strange turn, this will help make the product better.

Symantec, makers of Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security (and other Norton related products), as well as pcAnywhere, which allows users to access their work computer from home, have announced that they… wait for it… have been hacked by Anonymous and source code for some or all of these products have been stolen.

In case you don’t know who Anonymous is, it’s a group of infamous “anonymous” hackers that have been in the news because of their take-over of many government websites, including the Justice Department, as well as DOS attacks.

Although hackers could use the information about Norton Antivirus to create viruses to get around the antivirus software, this virus is likely to only work if the user is using Norton, and when the updates comes out for it, the source code will likely not be very useful.

However, what’s more damaging, and probably what Anonymous really wanted, was the source code for pcAnywhere. This product is used by many businesses and the purpose of the product is to allow an user to completely control another computer that has the product installed. If this isn’t a dream for a hacker, I don’t know what is. Normally, hackers are trying to install such viruses on the victims computers. They don’t have to install it, it’s already on millions of computers.

According to Symantec, they “released a patch that eliminates three known vulnerabilities” in pcAnywhere on January 23, but how many people have patched their version? Also note that once a hacker takes control of a business computer, anything that computer is allowed to do will be completely open to the hacker. This would include accessing private files on servers, changing passwords, creating new accounts and of course infecting other computers. All of which could continue to be of use to the hacker years after pcAnywhere is patched.

The big irony of a computer security company being hacked is obvious. What’s not so obvious are the ramifications of this breach, which might not be fully known for months, if ever.

Hopefully, you won’t have to do this anytime soon, but if a loved one passes away, Facebook has a way for you to memorialize their Facebook page.

First, go to their contact page for this purpose as shown below:

Fill out the form and submit it to Facebook for approval. You will get back a form letter like this:

That’s about it.

While I’m on this topic, if you are posting on a Facebook page of somebody that has passed away, follow these simple rules:

• Remember that family members are likely reading the posts so keep it clean and there’s no reason to bring out secrets that will hurt feelings or cause friction in the family.
• Please have some respect for the deceased. Post happy memories that will help heal the grief of others that are hurting. It’s a lot like going to the funeral or wake. We’re all hurting, so don’t be a jerk.
• I shouldn’t have to say this, but apparently I do. Don’t blame the victim of a violent crime. It doesn’t matter what her job was, or what she said or did. Nobody deserves to be murdered. Period.

Since the early days of the Internet, mailing lists have been used and one of the oldest open source free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists is called Mailman.

Mailman is the one that usually comes free with your Unix/cPanel based hosting account. Although Mailman can be used for email discussions between subscribers, many people (including myself) just want to use it to send out mass mailings to my mailing list. However, Mailman out of the box is setup so when anybody on the mailing list sends out something, everyone will get this message.

If you only want the list owner (that would be you) to be able to send out mailings to the list, read on.

First, click on “Sender filters” as shown below:

Next, find the section titled “Member filters.” This should normally be at the top. Now, click on “Yes” for “By default, should new list member postings be moderated?” and either “Reject” or “Discard” for “Action to take when a moderated member posts to the list.” as shown below. This will make the moderated members posts rejected (they will get a rejection message) or discarded (no message). See below:

Now scroll down to near the end of this list to the option “Action to take for postings from non-members for which no explicit action is defined.” and set to “Discard.” This will throw away anything that a non-member posts. And if you don’t want to be disturbed by these non-member posts, check “No” for the next option “Should messages from non-members, which are automatically discarded, be forwarded to the list moderator?” as shown below:

If this is a brand new mailing list, you are done except be sure to add yourself to the list but turn OFF the moderation setting for yourself. If you already have members in your list, you will have to go to the “Membership Management” page, then scroll down to the bottom and click on “On” for “Set everyone’s moderation bit” and click “Set” toward the right of that, as shown below:

This will set the moderation bit on for everyone already on your list. That’s it. You’re done. Now you can send a bunch of email to those poor souls that gave you their email addresses.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’ve had bad luck with HP for years, including my current computer’s hard drive blowing up only weeks after I bought it.  Well, about a year ago, I bought a 2TB removable hard drive for my HP desktop. Well, not surprisingly, it has been making strange sounds for the last few weeks, and a few days ago, it died. Boy, HP sure makes good stuff.

Not to worry. I know HP’s excellent customer service will help me with expert help. In case you didn’t catch that, I’m being sarcastic.

First, I Google the drive I bought a year ago, only to find out that HP no longer makes it. To rub salt in the wound, about 6 months ago, HP had a blow out for this drive for $118 (after promo code) on their website, which still comes up in the Google searches.

The closest thing HP has left on their website is a different 2TB external drive. From the picture, I cannot tell if it will fit inside my HP Pavilion m9450f.

HP USB 3.0 2TB Personal Media External Drive

So before I order my drive, I sent out this email to HP’s wonderful customer service, pre-sale department, shown below:

“I previously (9/2010) bought the HP 2TB Personal Media Drive (Product #BK229AA#ABA) that fits inside my HP Pavilion m9450f desktop.The drive broke after only 1 year so now I want to replace it. I do not see the same drive online. Is the HP USB 3.0 2TB Personal Media External Drive (part # BR389AA#ABA) the same and more importantly, will it fit inside my desktop?“

The yellow highlighting was not in the email I sent. It’s just to show that I was concerned about how it would fit inside my computer. HP customer service sent back this following email:

“Please know that, the HP USB 3.0 2TB Personal Media External Drive is designed to work with any PC through USB 2.0 and the new USB 3.0 interface. It is compatible with any USB-enabled PC; backward-compatible with PCs that have USB 2.0 operating on Windows XP 32, Windows Vista 32, Windows 7 32/64. And yes, it will fit with your HP Pavilion m9450f desktop pc.“

Notice the wording in their email:  “fit with” and not “fit inside.” I should have red flagged this and asked again for clarification. But being the trusting person that I am, and the fact that I’ve had such good luck with HP customer service, I just went ahead and bought the drive.

There seems to be some type of language barrier here. This kind of reminds me of the excellent customer service I got from Hell, I mean Dell… where I almost had to kill somebody and the level of incompetence made me wonder how they can survive.

But I digress.

To make the story short (too late), when I got the unit in a few days, while I was opening the package, I already realized that this drive would NOT fit in my HP computer. Big surprise. Oh no. Now I have to return this thing.

Instead of being a dummy like when I called Dell and was on the phone from 4:30pm to almost 7pm, I used the live chat online to talk to HP via the Internet. I got somebody on there within 2 minutes and in a “mere” 14 minutes, got the RMA# and instructions on how to return the unwanted drive. They certainly are very good at taking care of returns. They are going to refund me the entire amount, even including the overnight FedEx charge. At least they’re good at something.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t solve my problem. I still need this discontinued drive from somewhere. Ebay here I come.

The tires on my old 2004 Toyota basically are bald. It’s time to get new ones. In the past, I’ve used the dealer but I know they charge more. But now that I’m buying everything online, I decided to try buying tires this way and hopefully save some time and money too.

Using google, I found Discount Tire Centers, which apparently has stores all over Southern California.

Discount Tire Website

Their nice website allowed me to pick my tires based on my car, and even make an appointment at their nearest location, which was just down the street from me. Their prices were very competitive too. Nice.

So on the day of my appointment, I arrive at the Discount Tire Center at 1992 S. Sepulveda in West LA, park and go inside. There was nobody behind the counter. Strange. After just a minute, a guy comes out with a customer and they start discussing his options. While this is going on, calls are coming in and this lone employee must answer the calls while trying to help this live customer. I could tell this was going to take a while.

Fast forward to my turn. I show him my appointment print-out and he starts typing into the computer keyboard. I can already tell there’s going to be a problem. He tells me he doesn’t have any record of my appointment but he’ll check to see if he has the tires I need. He then literally calls 2 places on 2 phones simultaneously. One on each ear. Talk about multi-tasking. Unfortunately, this amazing phone trick yields zero tires.

Actually, what’s amazing is what happens next. He tells me that the online appointment system is run by another company and I need to call a guy at that company. With that, he wipes his hands of me and the sales pitch is over. The strange part was not that he wanted me to call some other guy, but that he didn’t try to sell me something. This was a perfect opportunity for him to upsell me to some expensive tires that he has in stock. But no upselling. In fact, no selling at all. It was just bye-bye.  Weird.

So I called the number he gave me and indeed it was the voice mail of the guy that he says the number was for. I explained my situation and left my number for him to call me. It’s been months and I’m still waiting for a call.

At this point, it was apparent that this company didn’t know online from hole in the wall so I was no longer thinking that I was actually going to get tires from this company, but I didn’t want my credit card being charged and wanted to cancel my order.

After getting back home, I went back to their website and found their corporate phone number. Amazingly, I got a live person there without any waiting. I explained my situation and she explained to me that the online service simply emails the local store and it’s up to them to take care of the appointment and ordering of the tires. So apparently, either the local store didn’t get the email or more likely, they don’t know how to read their email.

She was very nice to me on the phone and explained to me not to worry about the credit card because it doesn’t get charged until all the services are completed. She also told me that she would look into the apparent disconnect between their online system and their store.

That’s all nice, but it’s too late for me.

In hindsight, I should have double checked my appointment before going there and I probably could have avoided the problems I had. I still may not have been able to get my tires, but at least I wouldn’t have gone there and wasted my time. I guess the official looking print-out I got from their online website gave me a false sense of entitlement.

By I digress.

On to the next website I go looking for tires. The next one I found was tirerack.com. This one is different in that it just sells the tires to you and ships it to a tire installer near your house. As you can see from the website below, my car can have 2 different sized tires depending on the options I got on my car.

Tire Rack Website

Unfortunately, being the moron that I am, instead of double checking the tire size simply by going to the garage and looking at my tires, I decided that I knew my tire size from memory. You already know where this is going. I went ahead and ordered the tires and had it sent to a Firestone Auto Care center near me. Because Tire Rack is an online company, there is no sales tax so even with the UPS shipping, the cost was basically the same as Discount Tire. Nice.

Unlike Discount Tire Centers, Tire Rack emails me automatically when my tire shipment has arrived at Firestone with their phone number and instructions on what to do next. So far so good. I call Firestone and they tell me the tires have arrived and I schedule an appointment to come in a few days later.

When I arrive at Firestone, unlike at Discount Tire Center, there are 2 people behind the counter, not to mention other people sitting in a waiting area for their cars. This looks much more promising so far. The guy behind the counter goes to the computer and my appointment is actually there. He asks for my key so he can get my odometer reading.

Unfortunately, when he comes back, he gives me the bad news. I’ve ordered the wrong sized tires. He tells me I can send the tires back to Tire Rack and have them ship the right sized ones, or he has the right size in stock but it will cost a little more. Yes! This is the upselling that I was expecting at Discount Tire Center but didn’t get.

At this point in the game, I was happy that he was upselling me and quickly told him to write me up and install those more expensive suckers right on my car.

While waiting for the installation, I called Tire Rack and they said I can either take the tires to UPS, or have UPS pick them up at Firestone, which would cost more. Completely defeated at this point, I told them to have UPS pick it up and I’d be happy to pay extra to end this nightmare purchase.

Finally, after about 2 weeks of online play and false starts, I had my new tires installed at a cost higher than initially expected, not to mention the extra UPS cost I incurred. The guy at Firestone told me there were other things wrong with my car but I ignored him and drove away quickly before he did any more upselling on me.

At this point, you’re thinking this epic fail is over. No it’s not. After a month, I noticed my credit card wasn’t credited with the return of the tires so I called Tirerack and learned that Firestone had sent them the wrong tires. That’s right.

The customer service lady was kind enough to tell me that she would contact Firestone and work this out with them for me. However, she also told me that this could take a while to work out because they will probably dispute the claim. And she wasn’t kidding. In this case, a while may mean forever. It’s been months and I’ve pretty much given up on it.

So in the end, not only did I waste weeks, got frustrated and spent a long time on customer service calls, I ended up spending hundreds of dollars more than if I had just had my dealer put the tires on. What an epic fail this turned out to be.

So what the moral of this story? There are more than one lesson to be learned here.

First, when making an appointment online, do not trust that the system works properly. Double check the appointment by talking to a live person.

Second, don’t be a moron. Double check before ordering online to make sure you are ordering the right thing. Just because the website tells you what to order, doesn’t mean that’s what you should get.

And lastly, sometimes in trying to save a few bucks by ordering online, it may end up costing you more money.

I’m going to take tires off my list of things to order online.

Sprint has teamed up with Google to offer Sprint users the ability to switch over their Sprint number over to Google Voice. Or, if you want to keep your Google Voice number, you can replace your Sprint number with your Google Voice number.

This offer is being slowly rolled out to some users, since it’s apparently still in the preview slash beta phase.

Sprint + Google Voice

The only small catch is this is in beta and Sprint will not be taking any support calls regarding this switching of numbers. And as you probably know, getting Google on the phone is basically impossible. So the bottom line is, you will be on your own with this one.

Although I already have Google Voice, I’m not sure if I’m going to use this feature because I really don’t use my Google Voice very much. The only time I use it is when I want to “hide” my real Sprint number. If I use this new feature, I won’t have both numbers anymore.

So for now, I’m just going to wait and see.