4 posts tagged “technology”

There is nothing wrong with the email password, I just went to the office and checked. It's something rather weird going on in the server and the tech guys (I hope) are looking into it now... at least all my sites are working fine (so far).

So if you're desperate to send me an email, do so on my gmail account.

I couldn't be arsed to go to the office and change the master email password. The server (in the US) had to be restarted a couple of days ago and for some reason my email password was reset to a previous one! Weird.

Anyway, I have this server in the office that is rock solid, until I decide to screw it up by "improving" a setting, then, you can expect 10,000 emails to get simply sucked into a void never to be retrieved again. Honest. I had emails from 1996 in there, but as I decided to upgrade that server to a more recent release, and that upgrade didn't go very well for some reason, I decided to format the disks and start all over again, thinking, quite naturally, that I had backed up everything.

Well I did. Except for the email directories!

Bummer.

Anyway, that was 6 months ago and we still survived, goes to show that emails really shouldn't be kept more than 6 months as they would be useless and just take up space for nothing. I wonder if there is a setting in my favourtie email client (Thunderbird) which I can set the delete actions on per forlder basis. Have to look into that. But our policy has always been belts and braces. So the important emails are always printed and filed, just in case, and that has helped us quite a lot.

Anyway, I have this "knowledgebase" system where I just write things down on scraps of paper and keep them handy for whenever I need them. I transferred that methodology to saving these things in my computer's hard disk; I simply write something or a snippet of information in TextPad or NotePad and save them into a folder I call "knowledgebase" however, with the amount of information I have stored in there, I couldn't find the bloody piece of information I require because of all the other scraps in there! That's why I'm happy to have discovered Spotlight which can find things for me... of course things have to be in there in the first place to be found... needless to say, that scrap of paper which had the "howto" connect to the server remotely and change settings, is, uh, actually on the server!

I know. Stupid. But you have to excuse me as I've just migrated to this luscious MacBook and not all information has been copied to it. I thought it had, but this morning's need demonstrated otherwise. That's fine, that's why I never delete anything of the old computer until after a month or two of using the new one. Then the old one gets formatted and donated to a child or colleague.

The fortunate thing is that the office is literally only down the road, less than 5 minutes and I'm there... I just can't be arsed to go just yet, I'll just have to depend on the main server's webmail today, and will have to check all the passwords on all of my email accounts tomorrow morning.. or this afternoon... or whenever.

Fridays.. what can I say?

I noticed it almost the first day it was annouced, and fell in love with it instantly. What's there not to love anyway? It's light, high resolution, black, fast, bags of disk space and memory, can run multiple operating systems, has a CD and DVD burder, and even the keyboard is sweet. Once you get used to it, you would ask yourself why didn't someone do something like this a long time ago... no more need for punching keys to type, just carressing them is enough! But even with all that I couldn't bring myself to buying one. The price I think was too much for what it is - but that's the usual thing with Apple, you pay for the name as well as quality, and as I intended at the time to write in Arabic, it was essential that I get a machine with an Arabic keyboard. Those were not available in the local Apple store.. so I just forgot about it. Until, that is, Hani came over to visit a couple of weeks ago, and then, my already crumbling defences were completely destroyed!

I called iMachines, gave them a bit of hassle to get me a better price, which they did, and I got my driver to pick it up and deliver it to me at home... the picture, I think, says it all doesn't it!

The machine hasn't been far away from me since. I even stopped using my MacMini since I got it and I think that my son Arif has taken that one over, but not officially I might add, the bugger wants me to buy him a proper gaming machine to play the latest series of online games on it. I don't mind doing that, but the agreement with him is that I'll only pay one half of the price if he saves the other half, which is more than fair I think.

So yes, I am very happy with my MacBook, except for a couple of niggly things: it runs very hot to be used as a laptop in the litteral sence, and the screen creeks when I move the laptop or open and close the machine, which is driving me nuts. Those and one other thing, it has far too many sharp edges.

I'll talk to iMachines on Saturday to see if they can replace it for me. This will be a real test of their customer service, especially since Sofyan (the owner) is away on holiday at the moment and I'm not going to tell him about this yet. Let's see how his staff take this..