A little company called Stardock has an utility called Multiplicity which I use all the time. Basically, it’s a program that allows you to control multiple computers using just one mouse and keyboard, via your network connection. If you have a home or office network, and you use multiple computers, this is the product for you.

To use, all you have to do is move the cursor off the right side of the screen (or left side, depending on your configuration), and the cursor moves on the second computer. Once there, your keyboard is “connected” to the second computer automatically.

I find this to be more useful than having 2 monitors on one computer because you have a separate computer doing it’s work without having to share resources.

You can also share the clip board. For example, if you are looking at a website and want to put that on the second screen, just highlight the URL, type ctrl-C to copy, then move your cursor off the screen to the second computer, open the browser, and ctrl-V to paste the URL, and now you have the same website on the second computer.

Normally, I put my laptop next to my desktop and use it as a second screen. I can do searches, watch video or do other things on the laptop, while I do my real work on the desktop screen. Nice.

I found this really old ad in the April 1985 issue of Profiles Magazine (a magazine for Kaypro users). I wonder if Bill got a free subscription to WSJ or if he got paid in cash. How much would it cost to get him to do an ad today?

As if google didn’t already have just about everything under the sun, they now have business applications (like spreadsheets, word processing) online for free.

Moreover, they allow each person in the business to have their own webmail and POP email address using their own domain name. Yes, it’s all free.

They have instructions at google.com/a on how to setup your email. Each email address has 2Gigs of space. You have to have access to your CNAME record and be able to modify it to be able to use this feature. You can still pick up your email via a POP app like Outlook, as well as get your email on the road via their webmail interface.

The webmail interface looks pretty much identical to the regular google mail interface. I signed up for it for this website and it seems to work just fine.

So let’s see. You get free webmail and POP mail, using your own domain name… for free. Hmmm. That’s what I love about the Internet.

Always up – probably true
fast – not the customer service
easy – certainly not the customer service

What a nightmare.

Currently, I use 3 different hosting companies. Each has their pros and cons. One that I use is a local company called globat.com. I pay by the year so I don’t have to deal with them very often.

First some background info. When I first signed up, they were supposed to send me a refund, but I found out after the fact that you only get a refund if you use your credit card, and not if you use paypal. Funny how they forgot to mention that. Anyway, in my second year, Globat changed their programs around and offered a cheaper plan than what I had, with more features, including 1,000 Gigs of disk space (instead of the 5 gigs I had).

So I called them and the catch was, I had to pay $40 setup fee. But after doing the math, it turned out to still be cheaper anyway, AND I got more features. So I decided to go ahead with it. When I was signing up, I found out that even though their front page says, “$6.95 / month,” what they don’t tell you is that you have to sign up for 2 years to get that price.  Oh well. Even at the 1 year price of $7.95, it was still cheaper than my old plan.

So everything seemed to be good.

But today, I tried to login and got a message that I didn’t pay my invoice. The invoice was for the $40 setup fee that I had paid back in May and thought it was taken care of. Obviously, it wasn’t.

So I called customer service and everything seemed okay. They confirmed that indeed I had paid and they would credit it towards the invoice. Next, they had a new invoice for the following 12 months.

But there were 2 charges on the invoice that I needed removed.  The first was for unlimited sub-domains, which was included free with the new plan, and the second was the yearly domain registration. Since I had moved my domain to godaddy.com, I should not have to pay.  All this seemed obvious to me, but not to them apparently. In any case, the customer service guy told me that he could not remove these extra charges, and that he would transfer me to sales.

Sales?

You and I know damn well the sales department can’t help me but before I can say, “WTF?”, on I go to sales. The guy in sales sounded like a true car salesman. Anywoo, as expected, he sends me right back to customer service. Luckily, I got a lady that knew a little more about how to help me, and indeed managed to take the charges off. Yes!

But this is after being on with them for 57 minutes. Yes, I know the exact time in minutes because I have Vonage which tells me the exact length for each and every call.

After hanging up, I try again to pay the invoice. When I tried to pay by my prefered method of using paypal, I get an error message saying that my credit card was refused. Interesting, since I wasn’t using a credit card. So I call customer service again. This time, only for 5 minutes. She told me I have to use a credit card now because apparently, it turns out they no longer accept paypal. Strange how the screen showed paypal as my prefered method of payment anyway.

Okay, I’m getting tired of this bullshit so I decide to pay by credit card to get it over with. I enter my number and press “pay.” Another error message. I call back customer service, this time it’s just 1 minute. They tell me that my mailing address doesn’t match my credit card address. I tell them that it’s my personal credit card so the addresses are different. She tells me that in order to process my request, I have to temporarily change my address, submit the payment, then change the address back.

WTF?! What year is this again? Let’s take Amazon.com, for example. They allow you to have a billing address, a shipping address, and a separate credit card address. Yes, 3 addresses. Globat has one. Are these guys just learning to use the Internet or something?

As you may have surmised, this experience didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about globat.com. In fact, I think I’ll start figuring out my plans on moving to another host.

Everyone that’s read my blog knows how I hate myspace, but I use it to keep in touch with my friends.

Well, they just added the dumbest feature I’ve seen on a website that’s supposed to be worth over $600Mil. I guess they finally noticed that people were changing the design of their myspace page, so they added a profile editor. Their link says,

Check out the New MySpace Profile Editor NEW!
Now powered by Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer

I understand they have to make money with advertising. That’s okay with me. The part that’s insane is, after you design your new profile look, you get a screen that says,

Congratulations! You just created your very own customized MySpace profile! To complete this process and save your changes, click the ‘COPY’ button to grab the below code and then click the ‘PROFILE EDIT’. Paste the code at the bottom of the ‘I’d Like to Meet’ section. That’s it. Woo

Woo!? Woo my ass. You mean it took this long to come up with code that tells you to copy and paste some HTML code into your profile… you mean the exact same way people have been hacking their myspace page since the start!? You gotta be joking!

You may have heard that Jobs decided to port Apple‘s browser, Safari, over to Windows XP, and Vista. I’m not a Mac user so I wanted to see how good Safari is and downloaded the updated Beta version 3.0.1 (which supposedly fixes some security flaws).

Sounds good in theory but after installing, it comes up with no text in the browser. Not even the usual menus like “File”, “Edit”, etc. Okay. I downloaded the “lite” version without QuickTime so I try again after uninstalling. Second try, same as the first.

Hmmm. I guess that’s why it’s a Beta version.

Let me start off by saying that I learned to program computers on an old HP mini computer. My first programmable calculator was an HP. My first laser printer was an HP. A good friend of mine from high school graduated from Caltech, then went to work for HP.

So, when it was time for me to buy a new laptop computer back 2003, it was a no brainer for me. I went to my local Best Buy and looked at their choice of laptops and decided to go ahead with my purchase of the HP Pavilion ze5470us because I wanted a powerful CPU and didn’t care about size or battery life.

Although it was an expensive ($1,800), bulky and very hot running notebook, I didn’t mind it because it was relatively fast (at the time). But after about 6 months, I noticed that when the unit got hot, the LCD screen would start to flicker in a strange way. It was one of those things that wasn’t bad enough to take in for repair but was annoying.

After a few more months, the problem became worse and I had to take it to Best Buy for repair. Luckily, I bought the extended service plan thinking that notebooks are fragile. Unfortunately, it took one week to send to the repair shop, one week for them to look at it, and one week for them to ship it back. When it came back, they said nothing was wrong.

To make matters worse, there didn’t seem to be any communications between the Geek Squad (the Best Buy in house repair guys) and the out sourced company that was actually doing the fixing. I took the notebook back home and suffered with the problem for several more months.  Eventually, I figured out that the computer must be on for about 4 hours before it was hot enough for the failure to occur.  I took it back to the Geek boys at Best Buy and told them that it was a heat related problem, but only after a few hours.

This story is getting boring and long, so I’ll just get to the point. I sent the unit back 6 times. 2 of the times, they were not able to figure it out. In that time, they replaced the LCD, the LCD circuitry, the keyboard, and the hard drive. Pretty much, they replaced everything except the motherboard. 

During this period, I got sick of not having a notebook so I bought a Toshiba notebook. It worked perfectly and I still use it to this day. When the HP finally broke down again, Best Buy told me I could get a new notebook that was the same price or less. I decided to get another Toshiba. I’ve been happy with both.

Now, you’d think that I would learn my lesson with HP. No way. When I needed a new desktop in 2004, I went back to Best Buy and got the HP Media Center PC m1070n. I took it out of the box, booted it up, and after about 40 minutes, the mouse would freeze. After 2 more tries, I took it back to Best Buy. To their credit, they gave me a brand new one without asking any questions.

Next, I bought an external hard drive that plugs into the desktop directly from HP. When I plugged it in, there was no power. Upon opening the unit, I discovered that the power cable, as well as the data cable to the second CD player were not plugged in. Luckily, I’ve built PCs from scratch so I knew where all the cables should plug in, and everything worked fine thereafter.

For fun, I decided to call the HP support 800 number to see if they would be able to talk me through pluggin the cables in. The call was directed to a support person in India who was obviously reading scripts from his computer screen. He was not able to help me and the engineer who could, was not available. They told me they would call me back but never did.

Not learning a damn thing, I bought a HP psc 2510 printer/scanner/FAX machine about the same time. Fortunately, that has been working flawlessly to this day. I guess HP still knows how to make printers.

On a side note, the HP LCD that I got with the desktop blew out it’s power supply about one year after I got it. I replaced it with a Sumsung LCD which has been working very nicely to this day. I do like my HP Media Center though. It has slots for just about every memory card you can think of, including the ones that go into my Canon digital camera and my LG cell phone. The video inputs on the front behind a cover is nice too.

So will I get another HP? I don’t think so. But I’ve been looking at the new Vista loaded HP desktops and they look pretty. But I’d be a moron to get another one.

I do recommend their printers though.

I saw this on TV. What do these codes do?

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

How Things Work and Not Work.

I hardly ever use my land line so to save money, I decided to switch to Vonage.  For those who have not seen their TV ads, it’s a company that provides VOIP (voice over IP) via your broadband internet connection.  I wish I could get rid of a land line completely but I still need to FAX and buzz people into the building. I wasn’t sold on the idea but decided to try it.

Got the box in the mail in 2 days, plugged it in as per the instructions, and to my shock, it worked the first time with no problems whatsoever.  Even my FAX worked.  It gives you a voice mail and all the other usual goodies (caller ID, forwarding, call waiting, etc) and unlimited long distance calls.  Nice.

I was so amazed at how easy this was to get working, I decided to continue my tech trek.

I have a Tivo so I decided to sign up for the Amazon movie/TV show download program called “Unbox”, which gives you $15 for free when you sign up.  The way it works is, you choose a movie you want to “rent” and it downloads it to your Tivo so you can watch it on your regular TV (instead of having to watch it on your computer).  It all sounded good and it’s free so I tried it.  After 2 calls to the Amazon Unbox customer service (waiting about 20 minutes each time), it still doesn’t work.  I decided to give up on it.

So I’m 1 for 2. That’s 50%.

Then, I read on Engadget that Verizon (my old landphone carrier) sued Vonage and won an injuction for infringing on their patent to connect phones via the Internet to other phones.  Not only does Vonage have to pay like $56M, they might have to close up shop. Son-of-a-$(%#!

So now I guess I’m 0 for 2.

MS decides to not make the Zune compatible with the other MP3 players and music websites.  It came out this week.  Zzzzzz

PS3 comes out at the end of this week.  Blue-ray, blue-tooth, blue-balls. It’s all blue. As “Gears of War” comes out for the 360 this week, Sony says they might not be able to deliver the measly 400k units for the U.S.  So the retailers are scrambling telling their pre-order game fanatics they may not get their PS3, but they get a free DVD.  Huh?  Why does Sony even bother to have billboards and TV commercials for the PS3 when it’s already sold out of units!

Nintendo’s Wii also comes out this month.  It actually will have some “real” games on day one, unlike the PS3.  I guess Nintendo knows games.

MS dropped the part in Vista that was going to change the entire file system to be a relational database to make searches faster.  To see how this makes a difference, I’ll give you a perfect real life example.

I needed to look for a specific file that I knew the name of on my WinXP based system.  I used XP’s explorer to do a search for the file on my drive “C”.  No wildcards.  A specific filename.  Chunk, chunk, chunk. Anytime this decade would be nice.

After about 5 minutes of waiting, I got bored and opened up a browser window and googled my own address for fun.  In 0.41 seconds, I got a list of websites that had my address in it.  One was an article written by somebody at the same address about some weird scientific stuff.  Another one was a website that had a game that was a copy of an old game I wrote in the 90′s.  Some other weird ones that looked at too.

In the mean time, my search for the file continued.  After doing some other work, I noticed the hard drive went quiet so I looked and sure enough, after about 20-30 minutes, XP finally found my 1 file.

There you have it.  The difference between XP’s (and presumably Vista’s) file structure for searching vs. Google.  Is this a fair comparison?  Not really. XP only went through about 5k of directories, maybe 50k-100k of files in 30 minutes.  Google found my results from several million websites on the Internet in 0.41 seconds.  Hmmm.

In XP’s defense, their system does not take up any space on the hard drive, whereas google’s method would probably take up about 1G of hard drive space.  Will I give up 1G to save 30 minutes?  With the way prices are with hard drives, the answer is now yes.  10 years ago, no.

So I look forward to Vista’s release in 2007.  It will be slow and beautiful.

Oh, sorry.  Have to go do another search.