Category Archives: general

General catch-all category

The Paperless Home — Options?

computers, general

After looking at the mess of papers that my wife and I try to keep track of all the time we’ve decided to try and go paperless. By this we plan on scanning everything in that we get from a financial perspective and then hopefully just ditch the paper. Of course, shredding it first.

After discussing it and knowing how we are I’m pretty sure that we have to make this simple. If it’s not simple we just won’t do it. So, single page scanners are pretty much out. We get too many multi-page documents, statements, etc. I just wish we could get all of our statements online and this wouldn’t be necessary. Next, it has to be easy to get them in to a format that’s usable. PDF is probably the easiest. We want them searchable too, though. I’d love to have document management as well because I’d like to be able to search them, categorize them, whatever so that finding one down the road or searching for a particular term would bring up all the documents.

I figure we’ll just have an external hard drive that we dump the document to, encrypt the drive if possible and then back them up on DVDs using encrypted files. If our house gets broken in to the hard drive basically has all the information to steal our identity so it’s gotta be hard enough that a common criminal or even someone he pawns the drive to can’t break the protection.

So, I started searching. On Windows, at least, I have a few options. It seems like the following fit the bill:

Fujitso S500

Reviews Amazon, NewEgg, and PCMag

This one seems to get universally good reviews. It’s fast. It does duplex. It’s easy to use. It has a small footprint. The downside? At $400 street price it’s relatively cheap for a full document feeder. You also have to use its software since it doesn’t support TWAIN or any other standard interface. It does scan to PDF and comes with Acrobat 7.0 and Abby Reader OCR which makes up for it a bit. Still, it makes me wonder how easy it will be to upgrade its software. Am I always going to be stuck with the current versions of Acrobat and Abby? They might be very good but with a TWAIN and ISIS driver it would be easier to upgrade. Right now, as I write this, it’s the one I’m leaning towards.

Microtek ArtixScan Series

Reviews: Well, all I could find were bad ones to be honest. I really kind of stopped looking after this. Microtek is not really known with document scanning product groups so I’m just going to skip it.

Xerox Documate 152.

Reviews: PCMag and NewEgg

I couldnt find as many reviews for this as the ScanSnap but it seems to come with a good software setup including PaperPort’s document management and OCR software plus it has a TWAIN driver. Nice. It is a little more expensive than the ScanSnap but I like the fact I can use it with other software if I want to. It does duplex as well. It will create searchable PDFs and so on. Is relatively small from a desktop footprint standpoint. The main downside is that it is a little more expensive than the ScanSnap.

Other

I looked at some reviews of a Canon DR-2580C and HP ScanJet 7800 but both were out of the price I would find value at for home document scanning. The Canon lacked software I would require as well. The HP had really good software but I’m not sure I really need some of the software that I’m essentially paying for with the scanner.

When I make my final decision I’ll post it up here along with some early inputs as well as the final document workflow solution I put together.

Dell Laptops Suck

general, rant, software

I’ve had this Dell D620 laptop for about 2 months now. It’s one of the Core Duo based laptops.

After two months my battery will not charge more than 79%. It says it’s full but then when I unplug the thing it immediately shows 80%.

If that’s not enough it will occasionally come out of suspend mode on its own. Normally it happens when I’m on BART and I put the laptop into suspend mode. Then, when I take it out of the bag a couple of hours later it’s running again and hot. And this particular issue is not limited to my 620. It happened on my previous D600 and D610. This never happened on my previous Thinkpads.

BTW, Whoever thought widescreens were a good idea for regular work? That’s the only way to get a Latitude now I think. For coding I would much rather have the older profile. Sure, for watching a movie it’s great but I would rather have a better screen for coding. The wide screen does nothing for me in that regard. I wish my company would go back to Thinkpads.

Wow, A Good Customer Experience!

general, rant

I had been pretty brutal with AOL so I thought I should point out that I recently had a great experience with Buy.com. On this recent occasion I had ordered a kit that had a bunch of adapter cables for things like USB, Firewire, Network connectors, etc. Anyways, the post office loses it. They attempted delivery once, didn’t leave a slip saying they attempted delivery, and then when I found out via Buy.com’s website that they did have it I went down there and they couldn’t find it! So I e-mailed Buy.com on Monday morning and got a response that afternoon. They asked me if I wanted a refund or a replacement. I e-mailed them back and said replacement. They let me know it might be a couple of days to process the claim and so forth. I was kind of expecting to not hear from them again. But this morning I had a sequence of e-mails that ended with them issuing a new shipment order for the product. And it’s only Tuesday morning! Wow. Seriously.

Great job guys. Buy.com totally won me over with their handling of this issue. Now, if only Amazon’s customer support could be as prompt.

Cancelling AOL – My Nightmare

general, rant

So we had this AOL account a long time ago. We had kept it up until now because the points my wife had on a credit card basically paid for it and we were lazy. We decided to cancel the account. Big mistake.

I call AOL. Enter in name, credit card, screen name. It confirms who I am. Then the lady comes on the phone and asks me similar information. I ask her why she can’t just see what I had confirmed through the phone system. “We do things on a different system and I can’t confirm that way”. Whaattt? Lie #1. Her name was Lucia or something like that. Of course, it’s not her real name.

She then tells me that I will have to go online and log in and then call her back. No, she can’t search any more for the information she needs she tells me. Lie #2.

I try to login. It tells me the account has been shut down for a TOS violation. Grrr.

My wife calls back because I’m about ready to blow a gasket. I get Jeremy this time. He tells me he can’t find the account name either (that I just re-validated on the phone yet again). We figure out that the billing name had been updated to my wife’s name (it had been under mine earlier for some reason).

Jeremy tells us that our account had been locked due to a TOS violation for spamming. Then he accused us of being spammers. Good move, Jeremy.

We tell him it wasn’t us but we just want to cancel it. He tries to redirect us and tell us how to get our account unblocked. No, we tell him, that’s not why we’re calling but that if we’re spammers, why not just cancel our account anyways? Then he tells us he has to transfer us. Lie #3. He hangs up on us!!!

We call back. We’re not giving up. We get Shirley this time. She seems ready to do it! Yes!!

Not quite.

Now they want to go through this long series of questions on “how they can improve AOL”. The wife is polite but firm and manages to bypass the questions but it took almost as long to not answer them as it would have to answer them. Why do they make it so difficult?

And entertainment entities like TimeWarner wonder why their profits are dropping. Treating customers like this is no way to keep them in other areas. Or to get them back in the future.

By the way, they try yet again to keep us. I know it’s their script and the reps have to follow it (we were actually pretty polite but just very insistent on the phone…we don’t get abusive with the people doing their job although if they get pissy we will elevate it) but this script sucks…why can’t AOL just act right for once?

What does all this tell me?

AOL knows they have a defective and failing product. If you know your product is only getting better and more compelling (I mean, you believe, truly believe that) then you let people cancel without an issue because in a service that size some people will always decide to cancel service for some reason. And you hope they come back. But maybe it just wasn’t for them. But the way they handle it just tells me that they have a crappy product that they know no one really wants to pay that much for. Have fun trying to keep your customers AOL. It’s going to be fun watching you slide into oblivian.

This is just evil…

general

It’s been making the rounds but PayPerPost.com is just evil. Here’s how it works. The company pays you to blog about a product that has paid them to generate buzz. So you write the entry, submit it, and once it’s approved you get paid. Paid reviews basically.

This is even worse than product placement. At least with product placement in movies you know it was paid to be there. How do you know when someone is just shilling for product in blogs? It casts a shadow over the whole blogosphere, really.

Here’s another angle. I have a product and I want to create bad buzz for my competitor. I wonder if they let people pay for bad buzz about a competitor? Hmm…I can see that getting used.

I suppose someone could come up with a service that allows you to check if a product is in their current or past list of clients so you could cast the entry in doubt since you could cross-reference it when they were paying clients.

To be fair, not all the offers say the buzz has to be positive. But it’s still evil none the less.

I suppose I could submit this and get $10 from them for creating buzz about them but my integrity is worth a bit more than that.

Bookmark Synchronization on Firefox Part Deux (With Google)

firefox, general, software

Thanks Google! (Sarcasm alert, sorta)

Wouldn’t you know it, after I spend time getting Foxmarks working on my own server and then documenting it, a friend sends me an e-mail this morning alerting me to the fact that Google Labs just released Bookmark Sync that will store bookmarks, tabs, cookies, history, etc. in my Google account. I installed it this morning and it’s pretty sweet. I opened a bunch of sites, then closed Firefox and opened it up on another browser and it restored everything from my other browser. It’s actually pretty cool.

The downside…startup time is really slowed down a lot. It syncs everything at startup and even on a relatively fast connection (our 100 Mbps pipe won’t be active until next week) it took 20+ seconds.

Google encrypts passwords and cookies so with a pin you designate that is separate from your password so that’s cool. So far it seems to work pretty easily. I’ll try it out and see how I like it compared to Foxmarks.

At least I have a couple of options now for synchronizing bookmarks between computers.

Enabling Google Analytics

general

I got my invitation code for Google analytics this morning and enabled it. It’ll be interesting to see how it compares to aw-stats reports and which seem more relevant or useful. Although, so far the cluster maps graphic that is down the right side of the side bar on this page is the most fun one in that I can see where people are visiting my site from quickly and easily. Lots of North American and European visitors and even a few from Africa, South America and so on. I imagine that most are coming in for my Java related postings.

Visiting Fayetteville, North Carolina

general

I’m here in Fayetteville, North Carolina this weekend for my sister’s wedding, graduation and officer commissioning. I’m staying at this hotel (sorta) in Spring Lake which is next to Ft. Bragg. So, anyways, on to some interesting interesting observations.

There are two, yes two Wal-Mart SuperCenters within 20 minutes of my hotel, both in the same direction. Yet, there is only one Starbucks. Not exactly sure what to think about that except for the fact that I can’t stand Wal-Mart.

I’m also not sure I’ve ever seen so many strip clubs and adult stores in one area. Yes, there’s a big military base here but you’d think with it being in the bible belt that they’d be less obvious about it. But then again, there are some god-fearing folks that don’t seem to mind a little action every now and then.

Otherwise it seems like a pleasant enough place…and congratulations to my sister, Jennifer. You looked beautiful on your wedding day, sis! Have fun with helicopter pilot training! I’ll post some photos for my trip soon.