Day In The Life of Baz

I’m An Idiot

I had my secondary HD (120 GB IDE) partitioned with 2.8 GB FAT 32 and the rest NTFS. I think the smaller partition was what I used to use as a bridge for when I was interested in running linux. That ship had long sailed and I no longer needed it. Also, I was doing some stuff and got a low disk warning. So I decided that that extra 2.8GB would do me well. Also, I had plans on partitioning my main HD (250 GB SATA) to have a 100 GB section, because this is the faster drive. All this goes into modifiying my ideal system setup.

So I loaded up my trusty GParted Live CD in the DVD Drive and booted up. So my tasks were simple:

1. Delete the 2.8 GB partition on the IDE Drive
2. Resize the rest of the partition to fill the empty space
3. Resize the 250 partition on the SATA drive
4. Create a new 100 GB partition on the empty space.

I’m not sure what sort of experience that you guys have had with Windows in the past. But it seems that every few months Windows gets finicky. No matter how many programs I uninstall or stuff I delete it runs slow, crashes, etc. Instead of trying to figure out what the problem is I usually prefer just reinstall Windows. Reinstalling over an existing bad install, of course, isn’t the greatest idea. So as a result, I’ve devised a perfect drive set up.

Small C: Drive (Partition) - Essential Files

My boot drive or partition is usually the smallest on my system. On this drive I have the Windows operating system and my Program Files folder, where all my programs are installed. I don’t see any reason for this to be more than 80 GB. This drive also has the Documents and Settings folder which have your user folder (username or Administrator). This folder contains a bunch of folders with settings, etc. But a few of them are important to my set up:

• My Documents
• Favorites
• Desktop

A friend of mine recently had an accident with his cell phone. He has had a Motorola Pebel. You know, that cute lil’ clam shell phone. He said he was running when it fell. Sure, he’s a bit tall; a little bit over 6 feet, but it’s just sad that a phone can fall from hip height and be totally useless afterwards.

Picking A Cell Phone

Picking a new cell phone is hard. Now I recently had to pick out a new cell phone myself. I must say, picking a cell phone is very difficult. Me, personally, I’m an online shopper, so online reviews go a long way for me, but there is no better method than going to a store and feeling the phone. Here are a few tips on picking a new cell phone:

1. Read Reviews
   • Don’t just peak at the ratings,read a sample of the reviews
   • Go to both extremes: Read both the positive and the negative reviews. This way you have a better total knowledge for the product.
2. Go To The Store
   • Get your hands on it: Pick up the phone, feel it, press the keys, make sure you like it.
   • Bring your old phone: Most people usually upgrade their phones, so brining your old phone alone will make a good comparison. For example, what’s the point of getting a new phone if it’s bigger than your old one.

Now, there are a few extra things that would be nice if you could. Call quality is a major aspect of a phone. After all, it’s a phone. Good luck on finding a store that would allow you to call up your friends.

T-Mobile makes things a bit easier by offering a very limited pool to pick from. Oh well; they’re great on customer service, their rates are good, so I guess they had to suck somewhere.

Popularity: 8%

Introduction

Once again, we enter the world online backup. Enter iDrive.com. Free online backup. These guys pamper you with a whooping 2GB of online storage to fill your heart’s desire.

Features

The main difference between this and other online backups like EggDisk is that iDrive requires you to download their application, whereas other services have an online interface. This, I take as a slight disadvantage, since my main use for online backup is as an intermediary between where ever I am and my house.

Your backups are encrypted with 128-bit SSL encryption on transfers. This seems to be standard among most online backups that I’ve seen.

One thing I haven’t seen before is the scheduling feature. You can schedule backups to occur in the background with no user interaction.

Virtual Drive

This is one of the advantages of using a standalone program. You can set this up on your system as a virtual drive (e.g. F:). Then you can use it like any other Windows Drive, with one exception, it’s read-only. Huh? Why would they temp users with this feature and then make it read-only? Oh well.

About a month ago I’ve been trying to make a decision as to whether the web site host, 1and1 sucks. There is a blog that I manage, which I have hosted at 1and1. About a week ago, I noticed that some posts had mysteriously vanished.

Step 1: Request Back Up

The database was screwed, royally screwed. So, I figured that they’ve got to have some sort of backup right? Um, sort of. Now before I go on, let me state that this is totally my fault. I didn’t follow the advice in my post, which is do your own backups, so what the hell was I expecting? So, moving on: I called up tech support and asked whether they could help me. Yippie, they do do backups. Yay. Just one small problem, the only backup I could get was of two days before. No big deal. Since the whole database was somewhat screwed, restoring posts from the past two days would be no problem. So I said sure, and waited.

Step 2: Wait for Back Up

I called them at about 2:00PM while I was at work. I was told that they would get with the techs and they would place the on my site, where I could access it by FTP, and they would email me when this is done. Cool, I thought. I got home at 5:30PM and dived into my email, nothing. I hunted one the FTP server, nothing. What was going on? So, I called tech support again. Now, I’m being told that Database Backups can only be delivered between 24 to 48 hours from the time of request. O…..K? Maybe they have all the backups archived in some sort of solid archive and to restore my database they need to extract all of them? I don’t know, whatever. I figured I had no choice, so I waited. This was Thursday, and just to recap the best they could do was give me a backup done on Monday or Tuesday. No problem.

Popularity: 24%