1. MBP was placed on hold, for no reason. I got no phone call, no notification whatsoever, so my next day shipment never arrived so I called to find out what was up.
2. I was transferred to voice mail.
3. I was hung-up on, twice.

I decided to just cancel the order and not to get another MacBook. Lenovo Anyone???

1. Machine Locked up with external mouse/keyboard.
2. DVI Display started blinking on dock.
3. Memory Failure

After the memory failure I took off the back cover to discover my 800MHZ DDR2 memory had been replaced with two different generic knock-off memory chips. Yes, I sent them good memory, they kept it for themselves and gave me 667Mhz crap memory in exchange.

So I sent it to Dell again to get repaired, let’s see what I get in exchange.

1. 17″ was too big. It was awkward and a little heavy.
2. The Glossy Screen. I did not like the glossy laptop screen, Anti-Glare/Matte is the way to go.
3. UI/Metaphor. Not so much here. I could get use to it, but I did not like the way Office looked on it.
4. VMWare Impossible w/4GB of Ram. I actually had the computer lock up once and I got locks/swirling wheel of death a few times while trying to run my VMs under VMWare Fusion 3.01.

I’ll get another PC, just not a Dell, see in my next post.

I was not certain as to what I was going to do but I had to travel a little today to go see family and during the trip I just decided how exasperated I was in dealing with this issue, I did not know it, but when I walked into MicroCenter, I walked straight to the Apple section and looked at a few of the Mac Book Pros. The one I saw which really caught my eye was a 17″ model from earlier this year, it’s got the Core 2 Duo, not the i5 or i7, but for a rock bottom price of just $400 more than another crappy Dell, I decided then and there to walk out with it and stop fighting my PC/Dell.

I still have my PC for games and some development, but things are changing….

1. SSD Drives – This has made the performance of my laptop just as fast as my desktop (gaming withstanding). I’ve purchased my 2nd OCZ Agility 2 60GB Drive.
2. Cable Madness – While I still have a few cables at my desk there’s none on the floor.
3. Zero Power Cables On Floor – Since Lilu started crawling around it’s been increasingly difficult to keep here away from the desk.
4. 3 Monitors – Not as useful as it once was. I am finding that I’m just moving everything over to my large monitor anyway and the extra monitors are more distractions than help.
5. More Room for my iMac – With the 3 monitors I had very little room for my Mac, since I’m doing iPhone development, having the extra desk space is nice, I can just hope over and do some work.
6. eSata – This allowed me to put a 1TB drive next to my laptop and store all the goodies I needed.
7. Less Clutter / Distraction – This simple system is allowing me to be a little more organize and when I take the laptop with me, I’ve got my work with me for the most part. Though I might be finding myself moving to a portable 1TB drive in a month or two based on convenience and portability.

Big thanks to MicroCenter for helping me out.

Some of the issues I’ve had:

1. eSata Eclosure/Dock – MicroCenter (Trip 1) The first one was labeled in correctly (Thanks China) and it was USB2.0. MicroCenter (Trip 2), after returning this I found an older enclosure, but without an eSata cable, so I returned the USB2.o one, and purchased a cable, up installation the SATA connector to the HDD broke. MicroCenter (Trip 3), after returning the cable, I decided to get a dual eSata Dock, but there was a small piece of paper saying that your computer must have a “port multiplier”, my Dell e6400 does not have one, so back to MicroCenter. MicroCenter (Trip 4), after returning the dual eSata Dock, I just got a single eSata Dock. Success!!!
2. Old PC refused to boot. It hung on an automatic update and never turn off, so I killed it, and no reboot. So I had to copy everything over manually…
3. Old 1TB Drive did not work in new eSata Dock, WTF!!! So I had top copy over via my Ethernet while it was in a USB2.0 dock… Going on now and through the night.
4. 24″ Monitor DVI blinks on my e6400. I’ve narrowed this down to either a crappy monitor, or my e6400 can not drive 1920×1200, fortunately I have a 1920×1080 that seems to be working OK on the DVI port.

In conclusion it’s been a long day, about 14 hours in all, minus about 3 hours playing with Lilu. I’m glad it’s done and I hope there are no surprises tomorrow!

8/22 Update – Two More Reasons

1. Power – My old PC and 3 Monitors used on average about 260 Watts, this laptop and single monitor uses about 100 Watts. The cost savings is around $12/month.
2. Noise – I am surprised at how frigging quiet my office is. Even with an insulated case the lack of hum is really noticeable.

Actually… This post is not so much an article about Facebook Places as it is about curiosity, or rather a curiosity gap. You see whether you like it or not, the title of this post alone created a gap in knowledge between what you knew and what you didn’t. This article is just a small experiment to combine this fact, with a Google trend reporting “Facebook places” in the top 2 of search results…

You can read more about the curiosity gap here and find out about the dirtiest hotels of 2009.

When you start to add up how many impressions you would get from such a low PPC you would need keywords totally in the hundreds of thousands per month to get hundreds of clicks per month.  Then with a conversion rate of a generous 2%, you might get 4-5 sales per month.

To really make anything meaningful you need to have a PPC between $0.75 and $1.00, but at these cost you only really get profitable at over $100 profit per sale, this is because your advertising cost per sale are between $75~$100.

So while I loved the book, I wish I would have read this PPC assumption before I had to figure it out by spending a few hundred dollars…

This site provides detailed information about Grandview Ave, in Grandview Heights, Ohio. It will soon have an iPhone application for real-time GPS and other information like events and specials.

“The file “&^%$*\StarCraft II” could not be found. If this problem persists, please contact Blizzard Technical Support. (IsAbsolutePath/path is not absolute)”

Updated Fix:

1. Open Command Prompt As Administrator
2. Enter: >net user administrator /active:yes
3. Start > Switch User
4. You can now login as administrator
5. Run install from this account normally
6. Logout as administrator
7. Login to your normal account
8. Go back to the command prompt and enter: >net user administrator /active:no
9. Play your game!

You have two sales man come to you to sell a widget.

• Sales Person A – Tells you about 20 different things and how they can be customized and tweaked to get exactly what you want.
• Sales Person B – Tells you you’ve got 3 choices, where one of those options will give you just about everything you need.

Which sales pitch is simpler? Which sales pitch will work if the person you are selling to only understands about 5 of the 20 things you just mentioned.

Less is more when it comes to selling.