Truthdig – Reports – After Pat’s Birthday
Recommended by my brother…
A fairly decent article debunking some of the hype @ the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii.
Just had a drive failure on my LaCie Biggest F800 1TB (Disk 3), and I left an email message for their tech support regarding a warranty replacement (I bought it in 4/2005, and I think it has a two year warranty).
I’ll track progress of their service delivery here.
Needless to say, I’m very happy I’ve got RAID, and didn’t lose any data due to drive failure, but just in case I’m making another backup of the files on the RAID controller before I do any hotswapping and rebuilding of the array.
Update 1: Called their tech support line, and lo and behold, they already had processed my email request, and sent me instructions on how to ship the broken drive to them. Looks like I pay to send it to them, but they pay for the way back. They claim to have a 2 day turnaround time.
Update 2: Sent out the drive by UPS on 10/20 – should be there by next wednesday. Only cost me about 10 bucks to ship.
Update 3: They received the box on 10/24 (Tuesday). Haven’t heard from them yet on when to expect the replacement.
Update 4: Got an email at 10:47 pm 10/26 (Thursday), indicating it has been shipped to me. Estimated delivery date is 10/31. Looks like they held to that 2 day turnaround time!
Update 5: Received the replacement drive on the morning of 10/30, a day early. Popped the drive in, and it rebuilt the array…the drive didn’t work properly until I unmounted it and remounted it for some reason, but everything seems fine now. Very pleased with the turnaround, but I think I could probably have just replaced the drive myself with the same results – the caddy they sent back was the same one I sent them, and the drive they put in looked like just a refurbished drive. Once the whole thing is out of warranty, I’ll replace any failing drives with bigger ones – hopefully there isn’t anything hard-coded in the array that limits drive sizes.
Update 6: Disk 3 failed again, after maybe 10 hours up. It exhibited some clicking thirty minutes before failure…I’m going to call LaCie tomorrow and ask them to send a new replacement out, and pick up the cost of shipping both ways. This time I’m writing down the serial # of the drive in the caddy – I’ve got a suspicion that they may not have replaced the drive at all.
Update 7 (4/2007): Prompted by a comment on this post, I thought I’d come clean and admit that I just rebuilt Disk 3 again, and it’s been working ever since. I was too lazy to call LaCie since it hasn’t failed once since the last rebuild (and it’s been about 6 months). The drive still occasionally clicks, and that makes me nervous, but I’ve got a 400GB drive still in the plastic wrap waiting for the old 250GB to fail, and be replaced. If Disk 3 goes down again, I’ll blog about replacing it while out of warranty, since this month is the end of my original 2 year warranty on the array.
Slashdot | Vista to Include Stepped up Anti-Piracy Measures
How loudly can you say, “HELL NO”?
I cannot be more happy to have converted to OS X this past summer. I hope M$ gets its ass handed to it on this one.
Jonah Goldberg: Terrorists’ ‘Excuse du Jour’ – Los Angeles Times
We all hang together, or we all hang alone.
Apple iMac (24-inch) review by PC Magazine
Yup, I want one. Got converted by the MacBook, and now I’m hooked!
DAMN YOU STEVE JOBS!!!
Update 10/11/2006: I got one. The damn thing makes my ultra-bright MacBook LCD look dull.
Anti Hawaiian Defamation League
As per founder Lana Robbin’s own words:
“We are not against defamation.” –Lana RobbinsÂ
I don’t think she realizes that defamation is illegal, and that defaming people by stating incorrectly that they are “Anti-Hawaiian”, although probably harmless coming from an extremist like her, isn’t very polite.
Oh well, accuracy, consistency, and logic were never my cousin Lana’s strong suit :).
Head-in-the-Sand Liberals – Los Angeles Times
Yes Virginia, we are at war.
Euler’s identity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Big Idea
YouTube – 20/20 Stupid in America
Interesting, but sad commentary on the terrible situation in U.S. schools.
Yup, our dear cousin Lana has her very own false-front corporation, “The Hawaii Foundation, Inc.” Yipee!
Spending by HMOs Is Ranked – Los Angeles Times
Nice to see some good press after the recent negative coverage regarding the transplant program in NCAL.
Home Sales Tumble to 9-Year Low – Los Angeles Times
My bet is that we get at least 35% price drops in the L.A. area within 3 years. Could be as bad as 60%, but we’ll see.
Yes, it’s official – I now do osx.
My dear wife got me a Macbook for my birthday, and I’ve hardly touched my PC for a week. It’s like having a souped up linux box with a kick-ass GUI.
Special note – get the base 512 ram, and buy 2GB of OWC memory, if you’re gonna buy a Macbook, it’s much cheaper. I should be getting my 2GB upgrade tomorrow, and I’ll be running memtest to check it out and reporting back.
Translations:
GAIM = Adium
VMWare = Parallels
Firefox = Firefox
Thunderbird = Thunderbird
WinSCP = Fugu
Nero = Toast Titanium
UltraEdit = BBEdit
Photoshop = Photoshop
Acrobat = Acrobat
RSSBandit = Vienna
RealVNC = Chicken of the VNC
OpenOffice = OpenOffice
Eclipse = Eclipse
Norton Ghost = SuperDuper!
iSquint == awesome way to get movies to your iPod
iPodRip == awsome way to get your iPod files (with all appropriate playlists and ratings) from your PC to your Mac
DVDShrink32 = MacTheRipper
Scientists respond to Gore’s warnings of climate catastrophe
The New New Gore! Still a loser.