January 18th, 2009
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my email alerts or RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
About three weeks ago, I was shopping for a right angled power cable so I could rack mount the Dell switch I use to connect all the ethernet jacks in the house to our router. A simple item I could have easily mail ordered but I wanted that instant satisfaction. I started off at the local MicroCenter since they’ve been good in the past with having miscellaneous computer parts but I didn’t have any luck this time. I tried a few more places, struck out, and twittered about it.
Since it was a Sunday, I gave up and figured I’d just order it online but promptly forgot all about it. Much to my surprise, someone at MicroCenter picked up my tweet and followed up with me.
So I went ahead and placed the order for in-store pickup and planned to get it after work. Alas, it wasn’t going to be that easy…
Again, much to my surprise, someone from MicroCenter’s parent company contacted me via email to apologize for the confusion and offered to send me some gadget goodies to make up for my troubles. I gave them my shipping address and a comment about other good experiences my wife and I have had with them:
I do believe this was an isolated incident as I’ve had good experiences for the most part with the Marietta store. In fact, the people in the Macintosh department were very helpful when my wife purchased her most recent laptop for her video production business.
I’d certainly shop there again- I’ll just view any online quantities of less than 5 as suspect as mentioned when I called the customer support number about the auto-cancelled order.
My gadget goodies came this week. Needless to say, I’m pleasantly surprised with the extent that MicroCenter has gone to make sure a customer remains happy. What started out as a potential loss of a <$10 sale ended up in a ton of goodwill. Here’s what they sent me
The two led flashlights are pretty cool by themselves but the wireless mouse is unique- I’ve never seen one with a numeric keypad built in. Microcenter has (re)gained a loyal customer!
Tags: customer service
Posted in Geek | Comments Off
October 17th, 2008
Tonight and tomorrow I’m attending BarCamp Atlanta which is a user generated conference. The basic premise is that in order to attend, you need to be prepared to present a 30 minute session on a topic of your choosing. I’ll be talking about hacking consumer products with alternative firmware i.e. upgrading your linksys router with OpenWRT or installing Debian on a Buffalo Linkstation.
My next few posts will be my notes from the sessions I’ve attended.
Updated 11/17:
So much for posting session notes! My wife called in the middle of the conference saying she needed to go to the hospital for kidney stones. Now that that crisis is over, I reviewed my draft notes and realized they weren’t that great to begin with. But I’ve converted my presentation into PDF slides available here: BarCamp Atlanta 2008
Tags: barcampatl
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
August 14th, 2008
I found this in our local Kroger the other night. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to drink this stuff!
Tags: Life
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
February 14th, 2008
I’ve been running into DNS problems when using the CheckPoint VPN connection from work and finally figured out the issue. I setup my home network to use OpenDNS and since it returns a default entry for any unknown lookups it kept sending my intranet lookups to them.
The workaround is to configure OpenDNS to NOT try and “fix” lookups for certain domains. The process is outlined here: http://www.opendns.com/support/article/164
And if you’re not using OpenDNS, it’s worth checking out. DNS lookups are much faster than your upstream ISPs servers. And if you’ve got kids, you can set it up to block DNS for questionable sites.
Tags: dns, Geek, OpenDNS, VPN
Posted in Geek | Comments Off
January 21st, 2007
Tags: firefox
Posted in Geek | Comments Off
January 21st, 2007
Passed on to me by my friend Taz
- What is your occupation?
- Systems Administrator/Configuration Engineer
- What color are your socks right now?
- Not wearing socks
- What are you listening to right now?
- Watching Alias
- What was the last thing that you ate?
- A TV dinner (the wife is out of town so I’m eating like a batchelor)
- Can you drive a stick shift?
- Sure- took my driving test in a stick-shift van!
- If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
- Burnt Sienna
- Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone?
- My wife as she was about to board an airplane to head home.
- Do you like the person who sent this to you?
- Yes
- How old are you today?
- 34
- Favorite Drinks?
- Coffee, beer (dark or hoppy), and Riesling wine
- What is your favorite sport to watch?
- Indoor lacrosse
- Have you ever dyed your hair?
- Sadly yes!
- Do you have any Pets?
- A dog named Indy
- What is your favorite food?
- Bacon cheeseburgers
- What was the last movie you watched?
- Something About Mary. It happened to be on TV in the background so I don’t know if that counts.
- What was your favorite toy as a child?
- A children’s carpenter set from my Aunt Gina. Ironically, I don’t have any carpentry skills around the house.
- What is your favorite fall or spring?
- Fall. The smell of leaves and sound of lawnmowers in the distance remind me of growing up.
- Hugs or kisses?
- Hugs. But I’m not really a touchy-feely kind of guy.
- Cherries or Blueberries?
- Cherries. Especially Black Cherry soda or yogurt.
- Do you want your friends to email you back?
- Nah- since I’m being lazy and posting it to my blog.
- Who is most likely to respond?
- No one. I haven’t publicized my blog at all.
- Who is least likely to respond?
- See above…
- Living arrangements?
- House in the burbs
- When was the last time you cried?
- When I got married. And no, it wasn’t tears over lost batchelorhood!
- What is on the floor of your closet?
- Old shoes that really should be thrown out.
- Who is the friend you have had the longest that you are sending this to?
- None- doing the lazy web thing.
- What did you do last night?
- Upgraded my home server, caught up on the Tivo backlog.
- Favorite smells?
- Fresh coffee, laundry coming out of the dryer, the smell right before a rainstorm.
- What are you afraid of?
- Drowning
- Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers?
- Cheese with bacon
- Favorite dog breed?
- Mutts
- Number of keys of your key ring?
- 2
- How many years at your current job?
- 1 year 3 months.
- Favorite day of the week?
- Friday. Especially Friday night.
- How many states have you lived in?
- Other than my consulting gigs, 2- Pennsylvania and Georgia.
- Favorite holidays?
- Labor Day. That was when my Dad, my sister, and I would vacation in the Poconos at the cabin my grandfather built.
Posted in Life | Comments Off
January 21st, 2007
Another great blog entry from lonesysadmin.net! I’ve been burned too many times by upgrades too. Either they fail or leave a lot of cruft behind. As a result, I try and do fresh installs whenever I can. Or use linux distros such as Gentoo which are designed to handle rolling upgrades.
To make installations as easy as possible, I try and set up the infrastructure to automate it. I wish there was one common way to do this. Instead I’ve had to use kickstart, jumpstart, IgniteUX, and multiple Windows techniques. It’s a pain to go through this exercise but it pays off in the long run when kicking off a system build only takes a few minutes.
” In-Place Upgrades Suck” by The Lone Sysadmin
[tags]sysadmin, geek, gentoo, automation[/tags]
Tags: automation, Geek, gentoo, sysadmin
Posted in Geek | Comments Off
January 21st, 2007
As a systems administrator/configuration engineer, I’m well aware of the value in organizing and maintaining data. But as this blog posting by a fellow sysadmin attests, often we go overboard.
If you’ve worked in IT long enough, you’ve heard the platitude that “disk space is cheap”. Sure, compared to the washing machine sized disks from the mainframe era it is cheap, but it’s still far from next to nothing. And I don’t think it ever will be. In terms of hardware, enterprise RAID storage is still more expensive than the $1k consumer terrabyte media servers that are becoming popular. But the human cost is always there- time spent searching through useless data, time spent shuffling ancient data between servers, time spent backing up data that will never be looked it.
” Only Keep What We Need” by The Lone Sysadmin
[tags]sysadmin, storage[/tags]
Tags: storage, sysadmin
Posted in Geek | Comments Off
January 17th, 2007
Posted in Geek | Comments Off
January 16th, 2007
Wrigley’s gum advertisers accidentally used China’s national anthem as background music because they thought it was “catchy”.
I can sympathize. My best friend and I would fight over which country to represent when playing Summer Games on the Commodore 64 solely because we wanted the best song to play during the medal ceremony. It’s been a while but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese national anthem was one of our favorites!
NPR : Wrong Anthem, By Gum
[tags]funny, music[/tags]
Tags: commodore_64, funny, music
Posted in Life | Comments Off
