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If Cell Phone and ISP Companies ran the other utilities companies

Gone are the days when you could go into a store and get an unlimited data plan. Even though it is advertised as unlimited, that is seldom the case anymore. You got cable companies such as AT&T and Comcast that have caps of 150GB and 250GB a month respectively among others. Some companies will charge you a fee but others will deny service after a repeat offense. These caps are probably in place to prevent streaming subscribers to services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, or Amazon Prime to hog all the bandwidth.
A few years ago it was mostly believed that if a consumer used a lot of bandwidth, he or she was using bittorrent and downloading illegal music and movies. This is not the case anymore, Netflix alone accounts for more traffic than bittorrent. Even Comcast was caught sniffing your data to find out if you were using bittorrent to then throttle and slow down you data.
Some years have passed, and now with smart phones being nearly ubiquitous users hogging the data is still a problem. Verizon will offer you 4GB of unlimited data, AT&T has similar caps and they will charge you extra if you go over. T-Mobile will not charge you extra but they will slow down your data after your allowance. Hours of using Music and Movie apps such as Pandora and YouTube will quickly deplete your data allowances. C-Spire, previously known as Cellular South, Continue reading “If Cell Phone and ISP Companies ran the other utilities companies”

Strickland’s Letter

About two years ago when the Football World Cup was going on in South Africa, I decided I had earned a nice over the top all leather La-Z-Boy. To my surprise, the only place in town that carries them is a furniture store called Strickland’s. I had to give them my address for them to deliver it to my place.
Now after two years, I still get letters in the mail from Strickland’s every now and then. The last letter I got reads:

“Bring this letter with you during the week of 4/16/12 and take 50% off of 50% of your full purchase. That’s half off regular price of half of your purchase. Buy one piece, a room full or a house full and take 50% off of 50% of your total purchase.”

I didn’t make this up, you can click on the image to maximize it. I think this is a coupon for 25% off but they said 50% so many times and half that I am not sure if it is a coupon for 12.5% or 6.25%. I have a feeling that if I go there they will ask me to pay double for the first half and twice the second half. I also find it funny how they start the letter with “Dear Valued Customer”. Not only they think their customers are so valuable they won’t even address the letter to their names, they also insult the poor senior citizens walking in with what they think is a 50% off coupon. Letter attached after the break. Feel free to print it if you want to get this deal, LOL…

Continue reading “Strickland’s Letter”

Wordless Wednesday – Dog FAIL !!!1

ALTERRA Coffee does not even call to say thanks…

One morning craving caffeine, I decided to try the coffee machine at the office because I was too lazy to brew some real coffee. This machine comes with little packages that you can just insert into the machine to brew the coffee of your choice. So, I figured I will try the Colombian, how bad could it be? It was not horrible but the geography on the cover shows all hope is lost for the education system in America.

The one on the left is correct but the one on the right has the North Pacific Ocean north of Panama and the Caribbean Sea in the middle of the Atlantic. I wrote a letter to point this out to ALTERRAcoffee.com and to tell them to put the Caribbean Sea where they had the North Pacific Ocean. I never heard back from them, but to my surprise a couple of months after my letter they actually fixed their packaging. I thought it was hilarious that they actually corrected it and I was kinda disappointed that they did not even sent me a thank you note or you know… a cup of coffee? :p

Continue reading “ALTERRA Coffee does not even call to say thanks…”

How to create a WP7 App – Hello World

Say NO to the SMS “Tax”

As you may already know, the “evil” telecom companies want to squeeze every cent they can out of you by making up fees. SMS or Short Message Service is what is usually described as texting by your carrier. In the last decade before the explosion of smartphone, SMS used to fill a gap where there was little to no connection to the Internet. SMS functioned though SMS centers hence requiring its own infrastructure.

Nowadays, this is completely irrelevant as most smartphones typically use standard mail protocols such as SMTP over TCP/IP. Meaning, if you have a smartphone, it is very likely you are being charged for something that should be covered by your data plan alone. Of course, I am not familiar with pricing from all cell phone companies; however, if you are on a “bundle” plan and texting is part of it, most likely they are just getting a bundle of money from you. Otherwise, if it is clearly spelled out as a separate fee, you might want to consider just not paying for it and using alternatives that require your data plan alone.

There are several apps out there, each one with its limitations, but with more features than SMS. So far, Kik is my favorite cross platform messaging app as it is free and it is available for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and WP7. The makers of Kik are currently being sued by RIM, the maker of BlackBerry Messenger Continue reading “Say NO to the SMS “Tax””

Why I got a Blackberry

I recently acquired a Samsung Focus which is another run-of-the-mill phone with a full touch screen front that are supposed to be “innovative”. Who knows if the new iPhone 4S will redefine the type, that’s probably a matter of opinion. Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that I went from a BlackBerry Pearl to a Curve, to a Bold 9700 and finally to a WP7 Phone and somehow I miss my BlackBerry. I miss BBM, the longer battery life, message integration, switching languages on the fly, docks that don’t require pushing or pulling, one-handed operation, the security features as well as a full non-touch QWERTY keyboard. These are very resilient and durable devices. I left my Bold 9700 on top of my car and when I took a curve at 30 mph it went flying into a ditch. It has a couple of punctures and scratches on it but when I put the battery back in everything worked like a charm. I seriously doubt that would be the case with other types of smartphones. I believe in several areas the BB’s still can’t be beaten. If you’re a very social person and do lots of messaging and email. I don’t think the BB can come close to being beaten.

As you may know if you actually used one, Blackberries are way behind in the App department with their “developer unfriendly” OS, which is the root cause for the lack of Apps, Continue reading “Why I got a Blackberry”

What to do with a small SSD?

As with most technologies, SSD is actually becoming affordable. There are several entry level drives that vary from $80 to $120 in price and 20GB to 60GB in size. However, I strongly advice to step it up to a bigger drive because you are going to run into several issues and annoyances if you go with a small capacity SSD.
First of all, since the drives are so small, the OS will most likely take half the space of the drive. You then install Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop, or any other big app that will benefit from the performance gains and you’ll start running out of space.
Putting media in a mechanical drive should go without saying. Then take a look at hibernation, if you are not on a laptop, you might want to consider disabling it. Hibernation uses an amount of space equivalent to the amount of RAM you have on your computer. 4GB is pretty common and 8GB is starting to become the norm, meaning that would be space you will have to live without. To disable it in Windows 7, open a command prompt and type

powercfg -h off
Next, if you already have something in place to regularly back up your computer, consider disabling system restore. Go to the Control Panel, select to view by Large Icons instead of Category, pick System, and then System Protection. There, you can click on the Configure button, and you will be able to disable System Restore for your booting drive.
After that there is Pagefile.sys, a file in Windows that acts as virtual memory. If you have a large amount of RAM, you can easily do away with this file, make it smaller, or move it to another drive. Simply, go to System again, click on Advance System Properties, in the Advanced tab, click on the performance section the settings button. That will open the Performance Options window where you should click on the Advance tab, then on the Change… button in the Virtual Memory Section. Some sources advocate these changes for small performance gains or to extend your drive’s life, but the jury is still out on that. For certain, they will save you space in your drive.

However, the latest intel chipset on the market, Z68, has a clever way to handle these small drives. It will allow you to use Smart Response Technology (aka SSD caching). It acts as cache for a mechanical drive. It will speed up your system automatically without having to deal with all the nuisance of a small SSD maintenance or SSDs in general.
Continue reading “What to do with a small SSD?”