Serious computer database problem at the new AT&T :
I go online drilling through a "Cingular.com" website, to see the new AT&T Unity Plan and it tells me my legacy SBC line (20 years old) of 713-xxx-yyyy is not recognized as an AT&T line. Such issues with the computer database the website ties into will:

1. Generate many, many needless support calls.
2. Guarantee to lose AT&T Unity plan sales.
3. Cause grief for Unity Plan participants, and possibly generate lawsuits when folks get
charged for calls promised to be free.

and if it today after the Unity Plan has been in existence many weeks AT&T still doesn't know which phone lines are its own it has major database problems.

Not that I'd ever get the Unity Plan. I can make all the long distance calls I need with my Cingular cell phone, so converting my $13 (base price) land line to a $40 (base price) plan to qualify isn't going to happen. Indeed if AT&T ever keeps its promises to the FCC (made as a condition of being allowed to merge with Bell South) and sells "stand-alone" (or "naked") dsl, I'd have almost zero reason to retain a landline.

Time to upgrade to 802.11n With prices dropping on 802.11n equipment it was time to upgrade my home network. Went with DLink equipment for four reasons.
1. It's worked well for me in the 802.11g paradigm.
2. Its less than half the price of Apple hardware.
3. Apple doesn't provide 802.11n hardware for PCs.
4. Dlink hardware was on sale at Office Depot, who also
accepted a $10 off Office Max coupon.
Would've been very easy but I had to go through two steps.
1. First set up as 802.11g network with new hardware.
2. Change over to 802.11n, and convert from WEP encryption to WPA encryption.
My legacy 802.11g Linksys Bridges, and Belkin PC card (in my Macintosh "Pismo")
all talked nicely to the new Dlink after reconfiguring them for WPA. I haven't been
able to identify an 802.11n PC card for the Macintosh laptop that would work;
it'd need to use a Broadcom chipset as Apple does for 802.11n.

Thank you Bill Gates: So I want to scan in a document so I can email it to someone; I was going to insert it in an MS Word document. Then my MS Word decided not to run. So I got out my Install CD for Office 2003, and "Repaired" my Office 2003. Apparently it just reinstalled it, as when it finished, I needed to reinstall 11 patches, updates and security fixes for Office 2003.

Rattling Cingulars' (The New AT&T) Cage:
Finally worked my way up to a Vice President; and got satisfaction for
Cingular sending txt message SPAM to an account that had txt messaging
deactivated.

They went through many iterations.

First the CSRs said it was an Administrative Message.

Then the head of the "Office of the President" said it was a Marketing
Message.

Today the VP called it an accident and proved to me they were sorry.

Cingular plays semantic games: "I think I've never seen a SPAM message we can't call an administrative message" they might say. Yesterday, despite having txt messaging disabled for my account, Cingular SPAMed my cell phone with a txt message SPAM promoting txt and photo messaging. I called to complain, and they're worse than Lily Tomlin now; just total arrogance.

Upgrading an HR20-700 DirecTv unit:

Trivial to add Hard Drive Space to this DVR, just use the eSATA port on the rear.
Only gotcha, is the unit transfers to using ONLY that new external drive, so all your
settings for what to record, and all your previous recordings become unavailable.
They're all still there on built in hard drive, so one could reboot with new hard drive
removed to get back to old recordings, but for now no transfer mechanism between drives.

It was all so trivial. I had a spare Hitachi 500 Gig SATA 150 drive,
It was an OEM drive on my MacPro, now replaced by SATA 300 drives.

I used Macintosh Disk Manager to make the drive one partition of
"Free Space". The drive was then mounted in a Nexstar-3 External Drive
Enclosure with eSATA interface; bought at Frys. The HR20-700 is
powered off. The eSATA drive is plugged into the HR20, and then
powered on; THEN the HR20 is powered up; after about 10 minutes;
voila; the HR20 is now using the 500 Gig Drive instead of its original
300 Gigger.

One could also use the now available (but still pricey) 750 Gig Hard
Drives, or an even pricier eSATA RAID drive of larger capacity; I
learned that from reading some Discussion group which said the HR20
only supports SATA 150.

DirecTv Plus HD Dvr : I got one delivered this past weekend, with a new larger dish with 5 LNB and receiving both Ka and Ku band, it receives Mpeg4 signals from DirecTv, so it spot beams local stations in HD. The DVR is not a TiVo, so it took some edumaction, as its quite different. But for every nice Feature it lacks that TiVo has, it has some others that TiVo lacks. DirecTv is promising that with the launch of two more satellites this summer, they will carry many more National HD channels. One of the nice features of this unit is the RF capable remote. Upon setup it downloaded firmware upgrade 012a, which apparently corrected many of the recording bugs.
Only real downer was grief that DirecTech caused with an incorrect work order.

More on Vista Launch Event : Lots of food and drinks, plenty of ball point pens, t-shirts or Post-It pads from Vendors with displays. Most had drawings for a Zune. Perhaps MS threw it in after charging so much to let them co-sponsor the event and have a booth. Almost seemed like it was Drawing: First Prize - Zune, Second prize - Two Zunes.

Then the Free software. NOT AT ALL AS PROMISED. Office 2007 - Not provided. A link to download a 2 month trial copy (in 2 pieces even), which if you remembered to use the "Promotion Code (Activation Code) supplied, rather than the one emailed with the download link, you would have a permanent copy of Office Professional 2007. One minor glitch after that grief, if you installed it with the "Pre-release" Vista supplied, Office refused to install security updates, saying "Can not install update, you're running a Beta of Vista, would you like to Upgrade?" At full retail price of course. I declined, and instead Installed Office 2007 on my XP partition, but Office 2007 failed to run after the final reboot, but decided to behave after a 2nd undocumented reboot, and even authenticated with no hitch despite having been already installed once.

So I'm posting here and telephoning and emailing to Microsoft complaining about not providing the promised goodies for attending the Launch Event (did you know that in Excel 2007 you can take a column of data and sort it - from highest to lowest value? Such was the valuable information presented by Microsoft).

Vista will wait : Microsoft didn't produce a 180 day licensed copy of Vista at their "Launch" event as promised, so I'm sticking with XP SP2, which running IE 6 when I have to use IE is so much better than the buggy resource hog of IE 7.

Windows Vista on an Intel Macintosh? : I've been runing Vista Release Candidate 2 on my Intel MacPro with not too many problems; so I was interested to read reports of others using the Released Retail version of Vista on the MacPro. One such experience is here . Conclusion: It runs fine under Bootcamp, not so fine under Parallels.

Keep your PC System secure : I find out about this great Security site that will give your PC a free scan. Http://secunia.com download Java if necessary, and then scan. I found out that my freshly installed Flash player, version 9.0.16.0; wasn't current and some exploits could make me vulnerable, so now I have version 9.0.28.0

Apple gets snarky? Great new TV commercial. See it here. It makes the same point I made many Oct. 9 last year about Vista's "security". Vista asks for verification for seemingly EVERYTHING, which when users get annoyed at that will cause them to turn it off, leaving Vista insecure, as Apple suggests, or blindly clicking "Allow" for everything as I feared will happen.

An earlier commercial, also fully grounded in the truth, apparently got Bill Gates' goat. See that one here.

Just wait, after Vista : Vienna. Lastest rumors from Microsoft is they won't wait 5 years between Operating Systems versions next time, indeed they're planning on the next version, code named "Vienna" for late 2009, and to help speed up its debut, Microsoft may worry less about backward compatibility. Perhaps a good way to sell more copies of MS Office if MS Office 2007 and earlier won't run on Vienna? Story here:

More ways to save on a bonafide copy of Vista:
An "Upgrade Version" can be made to work as well as a full Install version, allowing Clean installs to an empty Hard Drive. Save Big! Instructions here or here .

Save even more if there's a teacher or student in the family with an Academic Version.
Prices here.

Let's review: Full version MS Windows Vista Home Premium : $239.99
Upgrade version MS Windows Vista Home Premium: $159.00
"OEM" version MS Windows Vista Home Premium: $129.99
Academic Upgrade Version MS Windows Vista Home Premium: $69.99

So save the most with an Academic upgrade version. $69.99 is almost reasonable.

Also if you add in Academic versions, my previous count of 27 different versions of Vista
is an undercount.

Dell pulls Windows Vista from Top of the Line machine: Seems NVidia's Vista driver is causing serious grief with Vista and the NVidia top of the line video card, used in Dell's top of the line PC. Solution: Sell computers without Vista. Story here.

Buying ink for Printers : With ink jet printers especially, but I discover now with a color LaserJet, the price of consumables is relatively high. The old Gillette cheap razor, expensive blades marketing, I presume. For some Epson inkjet printers its cheaper to go to Frys and buy a refurbished printer, throw away the printer and keep the ink, rather than buy a set of ink cartridges. With my new HP LaserJet 3800n (which I love) it'll be a close call whether to buy replacement toner cartridges or buy a lowercost LaserJet 3600 (which uses same toner cartridges), throw away the printer and keep the ink cartridges. I see any sales on the LaserJet 3600, I'll know what to do.

Slow going for Vista ? : So I'm in an Office Depot and ask the Store Manager: "How's Vista selling?" "Not very many" was his reply. Stories of slow sales are appearing. One such.

Microsoft Windows Vista for Free : Not really, in some ways it's better than Vista. Some reviews have complained that Vista is just a gussied up Windows XP that requires a new computer. Well go here, and gussy up your Windows XP so it looks just like Vista, and you can feel like you're running Vista, without the slowdown or the expense. It's free software called the "Vista Transformation Pack".

Decrapifying : Dell computer makes extra money by loading up their computers with software you may not want, but will slow your system down. One clever gentleman wrote software to strip off all those add-ons at once, to leave one with a closer to virgin version of Windows XP. Between the facts that the software worked well and became popular in some circles, and the fact that other computer makers learned from Dell how to make a few extra bucks; a need appeared for a more generic version of the Dell Decrapifier. Thus the PC Decrapifier was born. It's available free here. It's been refined and is now up to version 1.7 The author is now working on a version for your new computer that comes with Windows Vista, and already has a "beta" version available at the same web location.

The 'Huh?' starts now : A look at the big picture surrounding Windows Vista. Story here.
Story tells how Microsoft is confusing every one with 10 versions of Vista (its 27 by my count), and by keeping secret about some of its policies. Here's my list of 27 Versions:

1. Windows Vista Starter Edition (Third World only)
   
2. Windows Vista Home Basic
3. Windows Vista Home Basic Upgrade
4. System Builder Vista Home Basic
   
5. Windows Vista Home Premium
6. Windows Vista Home Premium Upgrade
7. System Builder Vista Home Premium
   
8. Windows Vista Business
9. Windows Vista Business Upgrade
10. System Builder Vista Business
    
11. Windows Vista Ultimate
12. Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade
13. System Builder Vista Ultimate
    
14. Windows Vista Enterprise Edition
15. 64 bit versions of 2 - 14, make for 13 more Versions.