I really dislike XM/Sirius now.

December 10, 2009 in Business Ethics, Gadgets, The Truth Hurts by datapoohbah | No comments

So the only place I use XM is on my motorcycle.  XM has value for me, as I typically like to ride long distances.  It’s not unusual for me to say ride 2400 miles over a 3 day weekend whilst rallying.  (yes you read that right twenty four hundred miles).

This certainly means I’m all over the place and being able to listen to a consistent signal or station is a good thing.

XM is pretty consistent on the highways, but when you’re in the mountains (which is where we prefer to ride) it can be spotty.  Especially when you’re on the north east side of the mountain.

So, being that I live in the North East, motorcycling unfortunately isn’t a year round event.   From sometime in November to at least the end of February, with a few exceptions the bike gets put away. 

Every year I call up XM, explain to them that I don’t need the service until March.  They threaten me with re-activation fees but when I persist they have usually discounted those months.  Enough so that it’s still worth it for that rare winter day around here when it hits 50 degrees and we go out for a ride.

Since the XM/Sirius merger, there isn’t any competition.  You can’t play one off the other any more.

I picked up my bill this year to start the negotiating process that happens every winter. Only to come to a few new realizations that really bothered me.

XMBill

I remember last year being promised the price wouldn’t change for, I *think* 3 years. 

So what’s the strategy?  We didn’t raise our prices, but we now have to charge you a music royalty fee.  WTF?

This irritates me.

I *may* not even listen to music, in fact I generally listen to sports, or the comedy channel.  Their 80’s channel only has 100 songs, if you ride a 12 hour ride you will hear all of them, often twice.

I’m not against the artists being paid, but I am against XM billing me for a line item that is simply part of their cost of doing business.

Very few industries can do this.   I don’t patronize car repair places that charge me a line item ‘rag-fee’ or ‘fluid disposal fee’, and I likely won’t patronize XM any more.

I also get dinged $2.00 so they can send me an invoice.  I’m perfectly happy to receive this digitally, but no, I’m not going to let them auto-charge me for anything.   When they auto-charged my credit card in years past they couldn’t seem to charge me the same amount twice (even though my subscription didn’t change)

This year, they have a new feature.  I am apparently not alone.  They now let you suspend your account.  So that later you don’t have to be threatened with re-activation fees.  They also get to continue to list you as one of their ‘subscribers’ albeit a suspended one.

So for now I’m a suspended subscriber.  Helping to dilute your royalty fees.  I expect that will remain until I just have to have it for a big trip.

We’ll see.

Setting up Ubuntu? Need a good tutorial?

June 29, 2009 in IT, Poohbah's Favorites, Worthy Tech Blogs by datapoohbah | No comments

The Indexer. comes highly recommended.

Good tutorial for installing LAMP with apt on desktop.

A great theme “Balazan”

and links to all the goodies you need.

When your mouse gets Parkinsons

April 19, 2009 in IT, Miscellaneous, Software & Utilities by datapoohbah | 2 comments

So the other day…  My mouse on my home computer just started shaking, shaking and acting very erratic.   This was well after April fools day so I was fairly certain I wasn’t being punked.

Items plugged into this laptop are/were:

+ a Logitech VX Revolution (Wireless) Mouse.

+ a Logitech diNovo Edge Keyboard (also wireless).

+ a USB cable into my USB KVM which also shows up as a mouse/HID device

+ a Bluetooth presentation mouse, though not currently active.

I did the normal trouble shooting steps.   Made sure my anti-viri software was up-to-date. Plugging and unplugging mice and keyboards.  I *thought* it was the diNovo Edge as it also has a little track pad.   It would go away for a while but not permanently.

It made using the computer almost impossible.

After a little more research I found technet Article: The Microsoft mouse pointer moves erratically or does not respond when you use a Microsoft pointing device # Q321122 and was appalled at the 82 steps it took to fix this.   Why this is still an issue after almost 2 years, and why since it is an issue that there isn’t a utility to deal with the 2000 registry entries I had to manually delete is beyond me.

But if your mouse suddenly gets the shakes.  You may want to look into this.

FWIW, deleting all the devices from the device manager had a greater impact than deleting all the registry entries.

-Datapoohbah.

No offense was intended to those that actually have Parkinsons disease and shake like my mouse was shaking.  It would be nice if you could eliminate a few drivers and registry entries to get rid of it.

Corporate Anti-virus What do you use?

January 23, 2009 in IT, Miscellaneous, Software & Utilities by datapoohbah | 4 comments

We’re currently evaluating our corporate Anti-virus products.

For the past couple years we’ve used Trend Office Scan.  For the most part it’s worked OK.  The interface and admin tools are horrible though and it’s also good at finding things but not necessarily cleaning it up.

Over the last couple months we’ve had a few (read more than 4) instances where computers were infected and Trend Office Scan was oblivious.

We’re up for renewal in February, so the timing is perfect to switch.

In the recent cases of infestation we’ve been able to limit the damage and clean up after trend with other 3rd party products.  Mostly free versions so this really makes us suspicious of Trends effectiveness.

For the record, we are not open to any Symantec solutions.  That’s just not going to happen.  We’re also not big fans of McAfee.   Those two companies seem more focused on Marketing than creating reliable usable products.

We’ve looked at AVG and Kaspersky and Microsoft ForeFront and are leaning towards AVG.

AVG looks great on the client side, but administratively it’s kind of week.

Kaspersky is just overkill, we’ve toned down UAC messages, and installing Kaspersky will remind you why you did so.  It’s also prohibitively expensive.

Microsoft ForeFront, really come on…  A corporate anti-virus solution should not have the complexity of Sharepoint to administer it.  It also shouldn’t need to use 3 different servers.

We are leaning towards AVG but we are open to suggestions.

Requirements include:

  • Cost: < $20 a user
  • Basic Anti-virus is really all we need, we don’t need another firewall product and we don’t need extended browser enhancements or even email scanning.
  • Centralized updating and management is a MUST.  Our users shouldn’t ever need to do anything and we need to report on the condition of the product.

If you have a suggestion or a comment on any of these products please post away.

Thanks…

AVG Trial Download – Broken

January 6, 2009 in Commentary, Network Managment, The Truth Hurts, Utilities by datapoohbah | No comments

When your business model is try before you buy.

It’s in your best interest to make sure the ‘try’ part works.

We’re re-evaluating centralized Anti-virus and would really like to evaluate AVG’s Network offerings, but it’s proving to be harder than it should be.

avgtrialbroken1

We’ve used Trend for the past couple years and it’s been OK.  Recently we’ve had a few things get by Trend and AVG Free has picked it up and dealt with it.  So we’re anxious to give it a look.

Dell e4300 is bittersweet.

December 16, 2008 in Commentary, Gadgets, Network Managment, The Truth Hurts, Things that are Awesome by datapoohbah | 108 comments

e4300

We’re Dell fans, especially latitude fans.  Super stable hardware.  We recently did a technology upgrade in our department and switched from the D-Series Latitudes to the e-Series.   We have a handful of e6500’s, a few 6400’s and a couple e4300’s.

For the most part this 1st generation of laptops has gone well.  Not perfect, but pretty good.  The e64/6500’s have seen a few BIOS upgrades that have worked out most of the issues.   The fingerprint reader/software combination (Dell Control Point) is still crap though.  Very unreliable.  Especially when compared the Wave fingerprint software that came bundled with an XPS that I own.

Outside of that they have been pretty good.

The e4300, not so much.

This little laptop is super sweet.  Nice small, fast, good battery life.  But we’re experiencing some hard hangs/freezes.   We’ve tried multiple flavors of OS’s, multiple driver combinations, all with little success.   We’ve also replaced the motherboard in one unit.  The problem persists.

I realize these are relatively new, but it amazes us that a google search for this issue returns nada.  Both laptops behave the same, random hard lock-ups.

It seems sleep/video/audio related, and no we can’t make it happen but it’s enough to send them back for the time being.

We’re working with our Dell rep and hopefully someone from the Brand Team to get to a resolution.  We really want them to work and be stable.  There isn’t another laptop out there that $ for $, feature for feature meets the need.

So if you’ve experienced similar issues I’m interested in hearing from you.

Post a comment and we’ll get in touch.

UPDATE

On Friday the 19th I had a conversation with a Latitude Brand  Manager.  He assured me that this problem is well known, especially with e4300’s running Vista.  A BIOS updated to address this specific freezing issue is in the works and slated to be released on the 29th.

We’re going to hang tight until then.   If this is known inside Dell, and being worked on.  The fact that none fo the Tier 2/Tier 3 Support people had any clue is somewhat bothersome.   We’ll report back if the fix does what it’s supposed to.

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