August 2008 Archives

After talking with a parent at my school about buying a Dell laptop at Best Buy I wanted to investigate it myself.  Check out the Dell & Best Buy page and you will see details how it works.  The key part is this:
Q: Who can I contact if I need technical support?
A: If you need support for your personal computer, please contact any Best Buy store. The Geek Squad from Best Buy has been authorized by Dell to provide technical support and warranty service for your new Dell personal computer. You can also contact Dell for basic technical support.
(highlighting is mine)
Now you might say "oh they recommend contacting Best Buy," but no what they mean is you can ONLY contact Best Buy.  Now it may seem strange to be longing for Dell tech support and its own issues, but compared to Best Buy it isn't even close.  I can't recommend anyone buying a Dell at a retail outlet with a warranty such as this.

It appears Staples is a bit better according to the Dell and Staples page.  Dell provides support for the first year, after that you are stuck with Staples tech support, whatever that means.

Just a warning to watch out for when a Dell really isn't a Dell.

It appears there is a bug in the Complete Backup that ships in Server 2008.  This bug prevents you from doing a recovery backup which is the best feature of the backup tool in 2008.  The bug occurrs if you have an OEM EISA config partition.  If that OEM partition is marked active the backup job will fail before even starting.  The only workaround is to temporarily make your C: drive the active partition, do the backup and then inactive the partition.  Alternatively when building the server if you make sure to remove all partitions from OEM on boot drive it should prevent this from happening.

More details can be found at this link and this link which are threads on Microsoft's TechNet forums.

One other interesting note is that it appears this bug or something similar existed in the shipping version of Vista (close relative of Server 2008) according to KB938316 and KB946010.  The root problem seems to be a problem with the backup/restore engine not being able to handle the active partition being different from boot/system partition.  Hopefully this can get fixed.

While visiting her family in Tacoma last week Kelly went wedding dress shopping.  Those dresses she didn't buy but merely tried on are pictured.  The grand finale is a secret until March 14, 2009.  The pictures are available here.

About a week ago we ordered save the date cards from Shutterfly.  They came with envelopes thankfully (even if they are an odd shape).  Today we finalized and collected all the addresses for people to be invited.  We printed the envelopes on our printer so we could add fonts and some clip art.  I got them off the printer and unsealed them (the laser semi-sealed them) and then Kelly stuffed them.  We have 73 save the date cards ready to be mailed on Monday.  Some people may be surprised by getting a card from us, but hopefully not too confused.

Now that the HD optical disc wars are over and Blu-Ray has won I have been wondering why Blu-Ray players continue to cost so much.  Arguably one of the best and most versatile Blu-Ray players is the Playstation 3 and interestingly it is almost always the least expensive.  This begs the question is Sony losing hundreds on every PS3 made or are all the other Blu-Ray makers (including Sony) making hundreds in profits on each player.  I am going to compare the new soon to be released 80 GB PS3 (old 40 upgraded to 80), Panasonic DMP-BD30, Panasonic DMP-BD50 and Samsung BD-P1500.

Anyone have any guesses on why Blu-Ray players are still so expensive?  Hopefully the player makers will wake up soon and realized to expand the market they need to reduce prices.  Also if you compare the two Panasonic players where is the $200 worth of upgrades?  All I can see is the addition of an Ethernet port, a little more flash ram and the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS:HD MA.  Is that really worth $200, I don’t think so.

To enable us to disseminate information and give people a place to look up details I have setup a new page for our wedding.  We will be adding more as it becomes known.  For now you can see the site at here.

Since we are attempting to have the wedding relatively quickly we almost immediately started looking for places to have the wedding and reception.  Kelly looked at several online sites and magazines to find places.  One of the most important parts of course is how many people are coming.  Kelly and I started a list ourselves and cam up with a little over 100.  Then we sent the list to our respective families to fill in any gaps.  After the families were done we got closer to 150.  This controlled our choices a bit, but not much.  We are guessing only about 80% will show up but have to account for 150 just in case.

We first looked at Chase Court on Thursday evening.  We really liked the place and it is in a great location.  Also the guy that owns / runs the place was really nice and answered all our questions.  Our only concern was that it might be a bit on the small side for the number of guests.  It was definitely a close second in our final list.

On Sunday morning we went to see Gramercy Mansion.  We later found out that we showed up at 9 AM for an 11 AM appointment, but they took it in stride quite well.  This place has the added benefit of being a bed and breakfast as well as a location for the festivities.  Also it is just a little bigger so we don’t have a concern over fitting everyone in.  It has 11 rooms for people to stay in from out of town too.  It is quite well decorated already so we won’t need to do as much which is a plus.  This is the place we picked and Kelly will be putting down a deposit on Wednesday.

The third and final place we went was Liriodendron Mansion.  They have open houses every Sunday 1 – 4 PM.  We showed up a few minutes before 1 PM and walked around the grounds.  We then waited by the door that listed the times and appeared to be the entrance.  Someone else came up and knocked on door and someone inside let us in and told us we were at the back door, which wasn’t at all obvious.  We then walked around inside by ourselves.  We never really figured out who if anyone was there to show us around or answer questions.  Also it seemed the inside spaces were much too small, the venue seemed much more setup for outdoor events.  We decided the place wasn’t for us.

As I said above we will going with Gramercy Mansion.  Now we just have to worry about all the other things.  More updates to come.

Since I figure there will be quite a few entries regarding it in the next year I thought I would add a category for it.  The first entry about the engagement has been added already.  There will be more to come I promise.

After the Comcast business connection was down at work for a day due to them and a day due to us (bad splitter) I ran SpeedTest.net on it.  I was quite surprised by the results.

This is actually faster downloads than my new FIOS at home, of course uploads it isn't even close.  Once everyone can get this speed it will be a game changer for video distribution.  You could real time stream Blu-Ray at this speed almost.