Mozy Tips

I got a cool tip from Tom the support guy at Mozy with regards to a couple of settings they have.  The gist of it was that when I was backing up my home PC (30+ GB) the initial backup would take days to complete and from time to time (reorganizing folders, etc..) I would have to do a large backup again.  When you are doing this, Mozy is pushing all this data to the web as fast as it can. 

What I've learned is that when you are maxing out your upload speed, you can't download very fast at all...  In fact, it pretty much brings your cable modem speeds to about the throughput of a dial-up connection.

After sharing my woes and thoughts with Tom he suggested I take a look at a couple of settings that will improve my life.  The first is the setting to "Reduce resource usage..."  At first glance this wasn't what I thought it was; however, after he explained it I find that it monitors mouse movement and throttles back the bandwidth consumed.  Very nice. 

The second is the bandwidth throttle itself.  I find that since I have more than one computer on my network, mouse movements might be irrelevant since I'm surfing from another computer.  What I've done here is change the settings to throttle back usage from 4:00 PM to 12:00 AM.  That way during my peak surfing times I can be ensured that I will get decent speeds.  I set this to 128 Mbps and it seems to be working great.

Here you can see the "low priority" setting on the upload speed... Throttled way back.

Give these settings a try.  You'll find that your Mozy experience is even better than before.

Finally - Inline Search for Internet Explorer!

Thanks to my Friend and Co-worker I found out that a company called IEForge has published an add-on to IE that allows you to have the super nice search like Firefox...

http://www.ieforge.com/InlineSearch/HomePage

Enjoy!

Picture Piles with Picasa

In case you don't already use Picasa from Google I would suggest you use it.  They have fantastically simple tools for managing photos and they also have probably the most simple Web Sharing tool called Picasa Web Albums that is directly integrated.  It is pretty much all the average photographer needs.

I was playing with a cool little feature today called "Picture Piles" A way to make a stack of your favorite photos that resembles what you would get if you threw a bunch of random Polaroid on the ground... VERY cool.  Check out one I made of my recent trip to Moscow.

Click on the photo to see a full res version of this!

United... It's All About the Drama

How on EARTH does United Airlines stay as a preferred business travel airline and none-the-less in business?  I fly a pretty significant amount for a human... let's see.  So far I have 80,699 actual air miles on United this calendar year and coming in a close second would be my accumulative miles on Northwest Airlines at a measly 74,823; or a grand total of 155,522 miles in the air... 

Holy crap. Where Have I been?!?  Not to mention that I have at least 4 more trips planned before the end of the year...

Back to UAL...

Given I've flown over 80,000 miles on United I have a pretty significant cross section of data in various airports that allow me to derive this conclusion.  They suck.  They execute horribly.

A trick they like to pull is the "we're closing the door for an on-time departure" trick.  I've had this happen in the last 3 of 4 legs I've taken where they KNOW flat out that we will not take off on time but they end up closing the door "for an on time departure" all for nothing more than to sit there waiting for something. Apparently all they have to do to log it as "on time" is close the door.  I guess it doesn't matter that we proceed to sit on the runway for 55 minutes waiting for... My next complaint..

O'Hare International Airport.  @#$%!!! The most absolute craziest and terrible airport in the country.  If there isn't a delay for fog there is one for high winds or thunderstorms or who knows what else happens in the Midwest.  Now granted this is a bit out of United's control but this airport MUST have the most weather delays in world.

I'm sick of sitting on the tarmac.

Anyway... I call this Drama because for some reason I've yet to have a real delay.  I might be running from gate to gate and I might get so stressed out I could boil water... But in the end.  I make my flight...

Lessons Learned

I've been having a lot of trouble around the house with large uploads and downloads of data.  Fixing this seemed like an insurmountable task.

As I was sitting here reading about some inane thing on the Internet I realized that my wireless router was getting a little "old" (in a Moore's Law sort of way) so I figured I would update the firmware.

Sure enough I was more than a full version back from the last upgrade I did... Believe it or not... Fixed and working perfect.  In the process of downloading a 488 MB file from my Box.net account which would have NEVER worked before this update... Oh yeah... Getting over 600 KB/sec too :)

Monster Wega

I upgraded my set to a new monster Sony TV (Sony KDS-60A2000 Grand WEGA 60" SXRD 1080p Rear Projection HDTV) that was recommended to me by a really good friend of mine.  I didn't do a ton of research because they know what they're doing and there is no need to dispute!

The set is totally amazing! It is soooo big that I feel like I'm in a drive-in theatre.  I will say however, that my first though was; I could go bigger!

Some stats on the machine:

• Full HD (1920 x 1080)Picture Resolution with SXRD chip
  
• 3 SXRD chips (R/G/B), Over 2 Million Pixels each.
  
• Contrast Ratio up to 10000:1
  
• 1080p Input for Full HD via HDMI
  
• 20.2 x 56.0 x 39.0 inches ; 94.5 pounds

As part of this upgrade I also picked up a new entertainment center specifically designed for a TV and all the components that are needed.  To me, its marquee feature, is the black panels on the front of the unit.  These sections are actually perforated metal screens that allow IR remotes to pass a signal through to the different components you need to run your set such as a cable box, tuner, etc...  I'm really excited for once to have a clean setup with no visible components!

This unit comes from a company called StudioTech.  Check them out - I think you'll find all of their goodies to be top quality.