I mentioned previously that I upgraded the hard drives in my and my wife's Sony VAIO VGN A-190 laptops to WD2500BEVE. Well, mine just died. FAIL! Less than 8 months. Not sure yet the failure mode, but I can read stuff without any reported error, but a lot of stuff appears to be corrupt (by archive testing). Also SpinRite reads along for a while and then stops with some sort of error screen. This is the fifth time I've tried to use this software with zero results. FAIL! I've taken the drive out (look [here] for disassembly instructions with pictures - I need to add pictures for HDD removal), hooked it up to another machine and copied off what I could. Warranties for WDC drives are usually 3yrs, so I'm sending it in to be replaced. I wish I could pay a bit extra to get the new WD3200BEVE which, to my amazement, is now the new capacity king in the PATA 9.5mm laptop drive kingdom -- I didn't expect any manufacturer would continue to develop new hardware for this interface. My really big complaint is with Windows security. When attaching a foreign drive the security prevents you from reading many directories, but, of course, this is a twist-tie security measure because you can simply take ownership and grant yourself rights to these directories, but this means writing to the drive -- FAIL -- a big no-no on a failing drive. I did it anyway, and I recovered what I needed to recover and I'm running again on my old stock 80GB drive, but I think the world needs a solution to this problem, so I intend to figure it out. I'll follow up when I find it.

Was having sudden trouble with this router. It was rebooting constantly.

I couldn't even connect on the wired interface. Even with everything else turned off, the wan disconnected, and power cycled.

So, I held the reset while plugging in to get it to restore to factory settings, went through and set everything back and it just started doing the same reboot-a-thon again. Fail!

Upgraded firmware to 1.05, no help.

Googled. Turned off gaming mode, PnP. Still no go.

But, once I turned off IPsec, it started working.

I have no idea why this would work.

I used to own a Linksys WRT54G (v2) but it bit the dust after not a long time of faithful service. I decided to try D-Link. I wouldn't say it was a mistake, given the available options, but I think my next router will be a WRT54GL or Asus WL500G router; something that has third party firmware available for it. Proper routing is complicated enough now to warrant a more transparent platform to work against.

I just installed and am almost using TrueCrypt 5.1 on my laptop. Highly recommended. I have it on my work laptop as well. I say almost, because it stopped at 95.229% into encrypting with a data error (CRC). It will not proceed past this so I'm only mostly encrypted. Needless to say, I'm a bit worried about this, but I plan on trying out SpinRite. I'll report on that in the future.

[Update: Worked well enough to fix that problem but I'm not totally satisfied with it.]

Just uninstalled Windows Live Photo Gallery. Patches, failed patches, reliance on SQL Server compact edition and hanging wlxquicktimecontrolhost.exe and limited usefulness meant it just wasn't even good enough to ignore. Ouch.

I noticed this problem while downloading sessions from the mix08 site (visitmix.com) in iPod format so I can play them on my iPhone.

One of the sessions I watched was on the history of the ribbon (UX09). I've blasted the ribbon in the past, and I still don't like it, but after watching that session and considering the problem they were trying to solve, I have to admit that I'm pretty impressed with the level of thought that went into it.

My wife and boy are out of town for a couple of weeks so I thought I'd give the bus a try. Why now? So I can have a vehicle that I leave at home and another that I leave at work. I really have to have a vehicle available at work in case I need to get to a client site, although I could probably get away with a nano car like the Smart.

Phoenix has a pretty nice public transportation site (http://valleymetro.org) which includes a trip planner. Unfortunately, the way the schedules work out, I have a fair chance of missing my connection and if I do, it will be a half an hour before the next bus. Actually, Monday it was 45 minutes! Grrr.

What would make the bus workable would be:

• a spare car I could leave at work
• enough busses to where I don't have to time my trip - one every fifteen minutes would do.
• all stops lit and covered for shade and rain
• if I organized my stuff so I could work on either my work laptop or my personal one for anything so I wouldn't have to lug either one around but I could still reach across to get stuff off of either one

What would make the bus cool would be:

• an easier payment system, like a card that is connected to a credit card - the new all day card is nice, but having to pay $2.50 in cash is kinda clumsy. At minimum, $5 cash should get you an all day and another all day card that can be spent later.
• a way to associate a preferred route into your card which will automatically signal for stop - probably difficult to make this foolproof, but having it there mainly to prevent you from forgetting and overshooting your destination.
• a way to text you ahead of time if there are problems with your route.
• walk tunnels or bridges at connectioning points
• real time bus location

I can't believe a type cool on the same line as bus. Al Gore should give me a ride for that.