Category: Tech

Failover and Over

Wish I could blog more, but I’m afraid that unless you know everything about Microsoft Cluster Service for failover, on Windows 2008 Server, under VMware ESX 3.5, on EMC shared storage, over iSCSI, I can’t talk to you right now. And Sunday is the big 21-mile training run from the starting line of the Boston Marathon. While I’m doing that, the Web host service will be switching my account over to a new management platform. Will anything work Sunday night?

i(ain’t got no)Power

Most bloggers use a blogging host, and they don’t go to the trouble to be their own Webmasters on a Web host, like I do. This Web site is hosted by a company in Phoenix called iPower, or iPowerweb. It’s a big hosting service, specializing in small businesses. Sometimes, like yesterday, there’s some unscheduled downtime, as we like to say in the high-tech biz when things go wrong. Everything was OK after a while, without me doing anything.

The last time I had something go wrong that absolutely had to be fixed and wasn’t going away on its own, I called iPower tech support, and after an hour I got somebody on the phone who was very nice and fixed the problem. But I know that my friend Bismo, who uses iPower for domain and e-mail forwarding isn’t happy, and there are many other customers with complaints. These problems have become widespread to the point where the Arizona Republic recently had an article about iPower’s woes. Here’s a bit of it.

Web host firm plagued by client criticism

Andrew Johnson
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 6, 2008 12:00 AM

Complaints about Web-site crashes, shoddy tech support and billing errors have spurred fast-growing IPower Inc. to revamp its approach to customer service.

In recent months, the Phoenix-based Web-hosting company has nearly doubled its number of customer-service representatives and adopted new software to manage customer feedback.

The changes have come as the company finds itself the focus of Internet blogs slamming its service and customers threatening to cancel their accounts.

I’ll eventually be confronting some major changes to this site, including an update to the management console. I’m not looking forward to this, because the potential exists for everything to fall to crud. Whatever problems come up, I hope iPower is ready and able to help me.

Spam, spam, spam

The past few weeks have been brutal for spam floods, both in e-mail and blog comments. The Akismet service for WordPress does a great job of filtering out spam comments, but when the volume is bad, some slips through, especially when there are multiples of the same message. Here’s one example:

Name: best motorcycle insurance | URI: http://www.fullsizeinsurance.com/
| IP: 86.96.226.14 | Date: March 4, 2008

This is why I have to moderate comments. It’s not because any of the legitimate comments need censoring, it’s because I’d have to delete spam that would have already found its way to the RSS feed for comments.

JetBlue’s Great $1 Headphones

Our trip to Arizona was our first flying on JetBlue. Their claim of extra leg room compared to other airlines is absolutely true. There is no first class or business class section. Only coach, and no full meals, only snacks. Does this approach work? Yes, I think so.

Each seat has its own LCD television, with DirectTV, and some of the flights also have XM Radio. I found various technical problems, including one seat with a dead audio channel and another with TV audio coming through on the radio channel, full volume, with no control over the loudness. But in the seats where everything is working correctly, it’s good stuff.

Jet Blue Headphones

The free headphones JetBlue provides are worthless. Even if you get a working set, don’t bother. For a measly $1 JetBlue sells a much bigger, better, and more comfortable pair of headphones. These things are stunning for the money, easily besting the sound of the $20 Sony headphones I use for long distance running. They’re sold on the honor system, and some of the headphone boxes we saw at JFK are well out of view, making it easy to get away without paying. But why would anybody except a kid or a jerk even consider doing that?

The high end is rolled off a bit, and the detail is slightly veiled, but the bass is pretty good. Overall, the sound is balanced, smooth and easy on the ears. Are these the best $1 headphones in the world? Undoubtedly!

MA AZ MA

Well, we’re back. We’ve been back for a couple of days, but I’ve been clearing snow and decompressing.

We were in Phoenix with my younger sister’s family, seeing our father and one of our older sisters. We drove down to Tucson to see the Pima Air Museum and Biosphere 2, and we had a wonderful dinner with some old friends, DogRat comment writer Cactus Lizzie and her husband.

The running conditions in Arizona this time of year are ideal! Back home they’re anything but.

Our travels were greatly eased and assisted by a Garmin Nuvi 200. It has a few quirks, but this thing is a tremendously useful tool. The freedom from plotting out a route on a map and the elimination of the stress of searching for signs and exits is worth way more than what it cost — $170 with free shipping from Amazon.com. In fact, it’s on sale right now at Amazon for $177.20.

Eric caught a few seconds of video of the Nuvi 200 from the back seat, when we pulling into a shopping center between Tucson and Phoenix to get lunch. This was taken with another nifty new gadget, a Canon Elph SD-1000.
[flv:/Video/2008/FEB/Garmin.flv 440 330]