Scratch that Spending Plan…

Well that was quick!

Yep, just over a week into the new year and I’ve already spent a fortune — unexpectedly.

I suppose that when the month is over, I’ll classify these most recent purchases as “business expenses” but that doesn’t hide the fact that I spent real money on them…

I hate when people are under the assumption that “business expenses” are freebies. They’re not.

And if you work at a company and freely spend money that isn’t your own, well, you should think about that some time.

Anyway, remember that awful day that I had back in October of 2007?

Don’t worry — it’s okay if you don’t. You can refresh your memory here.

The short of it is that I had a hard drive fail. I went out and bought a short term replacement and, while it hasn’t “failed” yet, it’s running at roughly 98% capacity.

It’s crawling…

Lasting for nearly two and a half years is pretty good but I’ve always feared another drive failure and I’ve also always known that I *need* to plunk down the cash to get a real viable long term and expandable storage system in place.

I finally did that earlier this week — but only after making a bonehead move and attempting to do it the “cheap” way.

I surfed on over to CDW and purchased another Buffalo Technologies DriveStation just like I did back in 2007.

It arrived earlier this week…dead.

I’ve never been a big fan of CDW but with Circuit City and CompUSA no longer in existance, purchasing the unit in person is all but impossible these days and then CDW went out and bought out my favorite online retailer so it seemed as if the only place to turn — and they had the best price too. That’s rarely the case — which is why I’m not a big fan…

Thankfully their returns policy is pretty friendly though they still haven’t processed my return yet — I’m hoping I don’t get hit with a 15% restocking fee for a unit that was dead right out of the box.

Eitherway, in desperate need of drive space, this turn of events put me in the hot seat. I decided that enough was enough — no more nickel and diming my way through this.

I bought a file server.

No more of this USB connection crap. I settled on a model from the NetGear ReadyNAS line of products.

Basically, it’s a computer case filled with hard drives.

Back in the 1990′s, I built a few of fileservers from old computers at zero cost and I considered doing that sort of thing again this time but that was back before RAID and, honestly, I don’t have time for that sort of project anymore.

I paid for it this time instead. So far, between the two purchases, I’ve surpassed the $1000 mark.

Tons of space and loads of redundancy are worth it though — especially having delayed this expense for years on end.

That’s what I decided. Or, at least, that’s what I’m telling myself right now.

It’s still not here and, sadly, it’s scheduled delivery is next Monday (MLK day, ugh…) so I probably won’t have it until that Tuesday.

Here’s to hoping that I can make it through another week with just over that 1GB to work with…

Now the only big ticket item (that I’ve been eyeing for years) left on my list is a good high-quality file cabinet.

Ever priced one of those out? Yikes — they’re expensive…

Posted on January 13th, 2010 at 7:48 pm by Brainy Smurf
Computers, Finance, Mistakes | 3 Comments »

Microsoft Money: Riding into the Sunset

I’ve heard the rumblings for years now that Microsoft would be giving the axe to their entry into the personal finance software realm but now it’s apparently on it’s deathbed.

I’ve been receiving this “nag” screen periodically for the past few days anytime I use the program:

I first purchased Microsoft Money back in 1997 — according to my entry in, yes, Microsfot Money, I paid $52.95 for it in March of 1997 at the now shuttered Circuit City.

Thinking back, and looking at the entries around it, I’m truly surprised that I dropped that kind of coin on something that wasn’t a video game (Diablo, anyone?) or something relating to ice hockey.

In reality, it was probably one of my wisest purchases ever…

Yep, I was able to accurately watch my credit card debt swell to over $30k.

Some people claim not to have a clue how deep in debt they are but because of Microsoft Money, I *always* knew where I stood financially. Not that I did anything about it for years but that’s a different conversation…

So, anyway, my first version of Money was Money ’97. It was pretty solid — as a 21 year old, I liked it enough to actually sit down each week and enter every single transaction. That’s saying something.

Eventually I upgraded to the 2002 version. It seemed a little buggy but it certainly looked a lot nicer. Perhaps buggy isn’t the right term — I don’t wanna get all those Mac-holes worked up. I found the “wizards” and “auto-budget” features annoying.

I hoped that the issue would correct itself when I upgraded to the 2005 version. It wasn’t perfect but that’s the version I still use today. Shortly after I got married, I hooked my wife up with the 2007 version.

What I’m trying to get at is that we’re a Microsoft Money family and have been for over a decade. And now they’re leaving us out in the cold…

The logical transition would be to migrate towards Quicken. I’m not happy about it but I’m not against it either — my concern is that importing my thousands and thousands of entries from MS Money (a defeated competitor) will be, well, hit-or-miss.

There’s something to be said for 12+ years worth of accurate right-down-to-the-penny data and I don’t want to, well, I don’t want to start fresh…

Why don’t you just keep using your version of Money, Brainy?

That’s a great question. I wish I could!

That “nag” screen above mentions something called Windows Live ID technology.

I don’t use that.

I never have.

Yeah, I do the online banking thing, but I don’t let the bank update my records. I can take care of that manually (offline), thankyouverymuch.

I went through all of the actions that the Microsoft Support page instructed me to and, well, since I was never using the service, it didn’t have any effect — so here I am stuck with a “nag” screen and a slight worry that someday the software will just flat out tell me, “Sorry, you can’t open this anymore…”

It makes me sad.

So, I ask, has anyone made the switch from MS Money to Quicken (or anything else) without too much of a problem importing data?

Posted on August 31st, 2009 at 8:52 pm by Brainy Smurf
Computers, Finance, Retro | 2 Comments »

Saying Goodbye to a Workhorse and Entering the 21st Century

I’ve mentioned a few times that one of the monitors that I’ve been using to type up these posts was one that I bought way back in 1997.

It was a 21″ Dell Triniton which, at the time, was the top of the line. You couldn’t get a monitor bigger than that back then. I paid around $2500 for it.

It was almost a status symbol to have the giant thing overpowering my desk. Of course, at the time, I was living in my parents and I had it set up where I’d had a 13-inch television hooked up to a Nintendo years before.

Yep, it was a status symbol that I could hardly flaunt. Yep, it was a DUMB purchase.

Anyway, I remember when it arrived — the damn thing weighed around 80 pounds, way heavier than a comparable sized television.

It was one of those awkward sizes too where it was tough just to get out of the box. Too deep to get your arms all the way around or navigate through a doorway, you know?

And then when I hooked it up and turned it on, my excitement quickly turned to disappointment. What the hell were those two slightly darker horizontal lines running across my desktop?

I spent over 10% of my salary for this thing — it should be perfect!

An A/V minded friend pointed out that those lines were how you could tell that it was a Trinitron.

Gotta love it — somehow the folks at Sony convinced the buying public that a terrible flaw was really a feature. Pure genius on their part.

Any how, last night, after 12 years of loyal service, I disconnected it and took it off of my desk and replaced it with a $189 Samsung.

I’ve been using a two-monitor set-up for years now — one 17″ LCD and the big 21″ CRT — and, lately, I’ve found that I’d much prefer to have two identical monitors rather than a mismatched pair.

It’s funny, barely cold and still carrying a mighty static charge, that old monitor already looks like a junky old relic as it sits on the floor.

And to think, just yesterday, it was my beloved workhorse.

Posted on July 17th, 2009 at 8:14 pm by Brainy Smurf
Computers, Retro | 3 Comments »

I’m a Chrome Convert…

Yep, I’ll admit it.

I’m using Google’s Chrome to browse the internet these days…

When it comes to browsers, I tend to hang on to the old standards for far too long.

I was *still* using Netscape Navigator for years after Internet Explorer 4.0 came out.

IE 4, which came out in 1997, was when Microsoft really pulled the rug out from under Netscape. I held off as long as I could but, by 1999, it was apparent that IE was the superior product and I stuck with the Microsoft variant for nearly a decade.

It was only last year that I gradually found myself using FireFox more than I was using Internet Explorer.

I’m not really sure why… Maybe it’s the nifty spell check feature? And, sure, some people claim that one is faster than the other but that’s bunk…

I’d say that so far in 2009, I’ve done 90% of my web surfing using FireFox but, of late, I’ve found that it’s is just one big memory hog — bringing my computer to its knees.

With regularity.

At first I thought it might be because I was running low on disk space. That’s been an problem in the past but that’s definitely not the issue — I’ve got over 200 gigs free.

I cleared my cache thinking that might help — as it used to in the old days — but I didn’t see a noticable difference.

Still, every hour or so, my hard drive would be pegged for 20 solid minutes. It was like I was running a defrag in the background or something.

After a quick check of the task manager, it became apparent that the process slowly killing my computer (to the point that I needed to reboot every couple of hours) was “firefox.exe”. Say what?

That single window sitting idly in the background is clearly sucking up far more than it’s fair share of my available memory and making everything else I do on the computer a frustrating nightmare.

Really, an idle browser window should NOT suck up more memory than Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, InDesign, and Microsoft Money (all of which were running at the *same* time and programs that I’d consider memory hogs in their own right).

So, good bye FireFox. Hello Chrome!

…and to think I even toyed with the idea of going out and buying a new PC (under $1000, of course) to eliminate the problem!?

Posted on May 2nd, 2009 at 8:58 am by Brainy Smurf
Computers | 7 Comments »

Internet Explorer Error: Operation Aborted

Seeing a lot of this lately?

Well, I’ve been getting it for the last 18 hours on seemingly every other site I visit.

When you click ‘OK’, you’re taken to the ever popular “Internet Explorer cannot display the web page”.

Hmmmm… Server must be down or something. Maybe it’s my connection? I’ll give it a few minutes.

Waiting… Waiting… Waiting… Same problem.

Eh, let’s try it in FireFox and see what happens…

Will you look at that? It works just fine!

I’ve been a fan of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for, well, since they wiped Netscape Navigator from the face of the internet. But of late, it seems as though Firefox is the more reliable browser…

This is the third time in a little over a month I’ve found something to display just fine in Firefox, but horribly wrong or not at all in Internet Explorer. This latest problem, I can’t even get pages to load in IE?!

I’m considering making the switch to Firefox myself (even though deep down I hate it with a passion).

To IE’s credit, apparently the “operation” messing up so many websites this week has something to do with SiteMeter, a popular site tracking applet that many people install on their sites — so it could actually be their fault.

Either way, shame on them for not testing their update on IE — still by far the most popular browser.

But, perhaps, they’re trying to get more people to move to Firefox.

Posted on August 2nd, 2008 at 7:54 am by Brainy Smurf
Computers | 1 Comment »

Not So ‘Cuil’ Debut…

Not sure how the founders of Cuil (pronounced like “cool”) hope to stick it to their former employer, Google, when all their site has been displaying is:

I wish them luck, but there have been quite a few Google challengers over the past few years…  None have been successful.

Yahoo is still hanging on (How? I have no idea…), but unless Cuil offers something really really new and exciting, well, they’ll go the way of Magellan — my original search engine of choice — in a matter of months…

Posted on July 28th, 2008 at 3:03 pm by Brainy Smurf
Computers, Current Events, Retro | 1 Comment »

My Review of the Garmin Nuvi 260

While I can’t really compare it to other GPS devices since I’ve never had a different one, I do have a few things to say about the Garmin Nuvi 260.

On our recent vacation, we traversed over 2600 miles with the unit “plugged in” and it got us everywhere we wanted to go.

We didn’t even need to look at our old Rand McNally atlas that we brought along, you know, just in case…

That isn’t to say that the Garmin Nuvi 260 is flawless…

The first problem I found with it was in downtown Chicago. While we were on the city streets, it worked just fine. But on the interstates that are 12 lanes wide with jersey barriers dividing it up every 4 lanes or so and city streets running parallel on each side of the highway, well, the Garmin was obviously unsure of which road we were actually on.

Understandable I suppose, it only appears to be accurate to within a few hundred feet and when there are 3 or more road ways all on top of one another within that accuracy zone, well, of course it was going to have some difficulty.

The good news is that even though we missed the turn it asked us to take (which would have been impossible due to the previously mentioned jersey barrier), the Garmin 260 was still able to guide us to our destination after “recalculating” a few times.

The next small issue I had with the unit came in Toronto — a city I’m semi-familiar with driving in. Like most modern cities, the whole downtown area is set-up in a grid style. My destination was north of the city on Yonge Street (a N-S route). At the time, I was on Dundas Street (an E-W route) about 5 blocks east of Yonge Street.

The simple way to get there would have been to to drive west on Dundas until I hit Yonge, turn right (towards the north) and then hit my destination.

But the Garmin instructed us to turn right, turn left, turn right, turn left, turn right, turn left — basically directing us towards the destination diagonally.

I immediately understood what it was doing, connecting our current position and our destination in a straight line and choosing the closest route.

Have you ever tried turning left in the city? On a main road? Where trolleys still run on rails? With tons of pedestrian traffic? And in a country where you need to give pedestrians the right of way?

It’s something that’s best to avoid.

I didn’t obey the Garmin in this case, mostly because I knew where I was going, but had this been in another city, one I’m unfamiliar with, it would have been quite the stressful drive when it didn’t really need to be.

The last little glitch with the Garmin occurred as we were heading home. We crossed the border in Buffalo, New York where the QEW becomes I-90 or the New York State Thruway. I-90 then eventually turns into the Mass Pike which leads right to Boston — which points us towards Connecticut.

We made a quick side trip to Eden, New York — maybe 10 minutes southwest of Buffalo and I-90 — to visit a kazoo factory. The Garmin 260 worked perfectly. Unfortunately the factory was closed. Boo…

Afterwards, we punched in our home address as our next destination and the Garmin took us through mile after mile of desolate farmland on slow two lane roads.

It was slow going and we were a little low on gas — not an ideal situation. I’d say it added nearly an additional 2 hours to our drive when, technically, the Garmin should have just told us to go back the way we’d come and join up with I-90 for some travel at 70+ mph.

On the bright side, taking the scenic route put us up close and personal to one of the wind farms that have started dotting the upstate New York landscape over the past decade. They’re a pretty neat sight.

In the end, I’d give the Garmin Nuvi 260 a big thumbs up. Its limitations, while annoying, are totally within reason. Best of all, it never failed to get us where we were headed.

Posted on July 7th, 2008 at 12:35 pm by Brainy Smurf
Computers, Vacation | 5 Comments »

Google Street View: Really Cool or an Invasion of Privacy?

As I’ve detailed before, I’m a frequent user of Google Maps.

It’s amazing how much you can visualize from a satellite photo. As a result, I now find regular street maps to be rather boring. There just isn’t enough detail. (Shhhh — don’t tell my Garmin.)

Well, earlier this week, I noticed that they recently expanded their “Street View” option to large sections of the country.

Yeah, San Francisco, the Las Vegas strip, and much of Manhattan have been this way for a couple of years now — the idea is nothing new — but now my quiet little side street is included too! We’re in the club! Woo-hoo!

From the looks of the photos, based mostly on the foliage, the Google Street View team drove by my house some time last fall just before the leaves changed color. Probably early October — the neighbors have a pumpkin on their front step.

I realize some of the paranoid out there are very much against this whole project — worried about their privacy or something — but quite honestly, if someone *really* wanted to get a picture of your house, you know, like a stalker or something, they could very easily just look you up in the phone book and hop in the car. It’s not that big of a deal. To me, at least.

Anyway, in case you were interested, here’s the Street View photo of the house that smelled like dog piss:

Glad I didn’t move into this place… It would have been far too small, and even though they’ve since paved half of their front lawn, it still would have been a struggle for us to get all of the cars lined up nicely. I wonder if it still smells?

Anyway, it was kinda neat to see my house on the internet. My car in the driveway. My car in the parking lot at work — amazing, I was in two places at the same time!!! My favorite grocery store. My high school. My parent’s old house. The seedy neighborhood I’m afraid to even drive through. I’d show you all of it, but I doubt it would be that interesting.

But there are a number of sites out there that post interesting and funny shots that the Street View camera’s have caught, so if you have a few minutes, it might be an enjoyable waste of time!

As a sample, here are a few of my favorites from Street View Fun:

The Street View car is, well, speeding.

Crime in progress? Something fishy is definitely happening here.

Hubba, hubba…

Ichabod Crane had better keep an eye over his shoulder…

Posted on June 13th, 2008 at 7:12 am by Brainy Smurf
Computers | 2 Comments »

Dumb Purchases of the Past

Following the six hundred dollar Canon Fisheye purchase in January of 2007, another complete lapse of financial responsibility occurred a few weeks later.

My dumb purchase for February of 2007 was Adobe InDesign CS2 — the successor to Adobe PageMaker, a desktop publishing application. You want to make slick looking PDF files? InDesign is the program to use.

I foolishly purchased it for a website design project that I had already completed (and been paid in full for). The client came back and asked that I turn my design into a hardcopy format — not really understanding that a booklet/brochure and an animated dynamic website were two totally different mediums… As if the animation wasn’t a dead giveaway…

I agreed to do it — without additional payment as they seemed to think that was part of the original proposal (and I didn’t call them on it) — but first I needed the software…

To my credit, I didn’t pay the full price…which happened to be $699 at the time.

I knew I wasn’t going to use this software very much, hardcopy is *not* my specialty, so I went looking for a legitimate copy of it on eBay. In the past, I’ve had pretty decent luck purchasing software there. To date, nothing totally bootleg has come my way.

In the end, my copy of Adobe InDesign CS2 set me back $300.

Since finishing up that project, I’d say I’ve used the program maybe 5 times. Sure, it’s come in handy in a pinch, but certainly not anywhere near $300 worth of handiness.

Posted on May 5th, 2008 at 7:54 am by Brainy Smurf
Computers, Mistakes | 1 Comment »

Hopeless Bleak Despair

Have you ever had one of those things happen when it just sucks the life out of you? That happened to me on Friday.

No, not the DJIA 300+ point drop on Friday — that was a mere annoyance.

Friday night, my external hard drive died. It just clicks two or three times, then shuts itself down. Now, being an external drive, this type of failure doesn’t put me offline, but as each day passes, I come to realize, “Oh, yeah, there’s another file that I’ve lost…”

This specific drive was a 500GB Western Digital MyBook. I’ve never had much luck with external drives. In fact, I can’t stand them. This is my second to die in a little over a year.

Our extra income comes from a business we run out of our home — or actually, off of this dead hard drive. Five hundred gigs of website code, PSD files, and raw photography files gone.

Was it backed up? Well… let’s just say, I think I had enough of it backed up to get by in the short term. But this will certainly be an incovenience. An expensive one.

I researched having the drive sent to a data recovery company. I’ve no doubt the data is still on the drive and recoverable. The problem is, the quotes I’ve received have ranged in price from $995 to $2495.

Not sure why the range is so large, but even $1000 would hurt too much right now, so I’m trying to carry on, and chalk this one up as a big loss. Not a financial one, but one where I’ve lost all of the time I spent creating those files.

So far, I haven’t had to tell a client flat out — nope, we don’t have that on file. I know the time will eventually come, and if it’s a critical file, well, I suppose I will have to send the drive off to be recovered.

In the meantime, I’ve ordered another external drive. At a cost of $375, I should have a Buffalo Technologies 1TB DriveStation Duo arriving from FedEx this morning.

This one uses RAID, so it’s got a bit of redundancy, but even still, call it whatever you want, it’s still just two external drives stuck together. And external drives always fail.

It’s odd. I’ve never, in the past 15 years, had an internal drive fail. Not once.

On that note, I always say that I’m going to build my own RAID using an old computer case and fill each drive bay with a huge hard drive and just connect it to my main PC as a network drive, but unfortunately technology is changing too quickly to do that on the cheap.

I know, I know, people always say that sort of thing about computers, but for years and years hard drives were either SCSI or IDE. You had two options. Now you have to toss eSATA into the mix. And now all of the externals are now USB or Firewire — which also come in different variations. Makes utilizing an older PC difficult since older PC’s don’t usually allow for all of these different connections. Sigh…

The next few days will likely be spent setting up the new drive, backing more up to DVD (another alternative that fails all the time and takes forever) and crossing my fingers that someone out there develops a hard drive that doesn’t have any mechanical parts cause, seriously, today’s hard drives are just glorified record players and that’s kinda scary when you think about it.

Posted on October 24th, 2007 at 8:07 am by Brainy Smurf
Computers | 5 Comments »

Storage Unit Blues

This past weekend we spent a few hours over at the storage unit we’re renting for around $140/month.

Earlier this month, I vowed to clear it out this month so as to stop paying for it. It’s really the only sizable monthly expense left that hasn’t been cut.

Well, it became apparent that, this late in the month, it’s not going to happen before the September rent is due. Even an amount like $140 in the wrong direction hurts when you’re trying to pay down the credit card debt like crazy. Grrrr…

We did, however, make *some* progress. Three full contractor bags worth of stuff went to the dump. The storage space is still filled to the ceiling, but that was still quite a step for me.

One of the stranger things I threw out was a box with piles and piles of Columbia House and BMG catalogs from the late eighties and early nineties. Vanilla Ice on the cover of one, Shanice on the cover of another. They were all stacked neatly — like I treasured them. Seriously, why did I hang on to stuff like that? Ridiculous.

Also thrown away were tons of computer programs on the old 5.25inch floppies. Sure, I’d like to go back and play the original Space Quest again, but in the 20 years since I last played it, it hasn’t been enough of a draw to actually do it. And so, into the garbage it went.

One suggestion my wife had, for things that should really be thrown out but still brought back memories, was to bring a camera and take pictures of the items before tossing them into the garbage bag.

I’m not quite there yet — maybe when I go through the boxes a second time to lighten the load even more before bringing it all back home.

Looks like we’ll be paying for another month. Sigh.

Posted on August 21st, 2007 at 10:32 am by Brainy Smurf
Computers, Credit Card, Finance, Music, Retro | 4 Comments »

Re-inventing the Wheel

Let me start by saying that I’ve never been on the Apple side of the fence. And I’ve never considered hopping that fence either.

I was going to hold off on this post until Friday, to time it with the iPhone’s launch, but I didn’t really want to add to the ridiculous hype already slated for the release… so here’s my take on it a few days early.

As you may have guessed already, I’m not going to buy a $600 iPhone (ever), but I am interested in how the market will respond to the device. Apple’s marketing machine is second to none, with a great track record to prove it, so I’m sure they will sell millions of these overpriced gadgets, but this is the first time they’ve drifted into an already saturated market.

How will it do, facing huge, not to mention established, competition from Treo, RIM, HP, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, and Nokia? Not one of those companies will be pushed aside easily.

And, nearly all of those companies already offer a device that can and will do what the iPhone does, except they do it much better, have been for months, for half the price, and that can fit in the palm of your hand.

What is Apple bringing to the table that isn’t already commonplace? What is the hype?

With the iPod, Apple exploited the fact that the MP3 player market had no clear leader. Sadly, for the general public, there are MP3 players available at Walmart for under $30 that exceed what the iPod does… weird how an overpriced memory card with a jack for headphones became a cultural icon — but that’s Apple’s marketing at work.

So, really, what does the iPhone offer that the other phones don’t? The touchscreen interface seems to be what a lot of the buzz is about. Oooooooohhhhh…

In all honesty, the whole touch screen with gestures deal seems like more of a gimmick than anything super useful. And not to be gross, but unless the touchscreen is fingerprint-proof, you’ll also be carrying around a microfiber cloth to watch your movies in oil-free goodness. Just think how much oil from your skin will transfer when using it as a touch interface or from your ears during a call. Just being realistic.

Oddly enough, being a bit of a geek, I also find it peculiar that a phone manufactured by a computer company would create a cellphone that will not serve as a wireless modem for a laptop, err, iBook. Is Apple abandoning their computing roots in favor of re-inventing Sony WalkMans and Nintendo GameBoys? Apparently.

And look at the size of the thing?! It’s almost as big as my corded phone at home. It’s like people are getting excited again about those brick phones from the 1980′s. Start lugging that thing around, you know, to impress people. Anyone still carrying a boombox on their shoulder? You will be soon, it seems; if the Apple trend continues.

Technology is totally going backwards. A couple of years ago, people wanted a 60 inch plasma TV with a surround-sound system but now the goal is to watch a movie on your phone with tinny sound through cheap headphones… I don’t get it.

Am I strange in that all I really want my cellphone to do is make telephone calls? Sadly, the reception on every cell phone I’ve ever owned leaves something to be desired.

Maybe if the previously mentioned phone companies concentrated less on the gimmicks like ringtones and camera features, the phones would actually work like, well, the old corded phones. Now that’s a feature I’d like featured on my phone!

Can you hear me now?

Posted on June 27th, 2007 at 8:33 pm by Brainy Smurf
Computers, Current Events, Rants | 2 Comments »