Opening Spring 2010
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Lotusphere 2010 – Yes, I will be there!
I am lucky enough to be able to go to Lotusphere again. This will be my 13th time inOrlando. I also went to LS97 in Nice.
This year I will be arriving to MCO on Saturday at 9:40am, and leaving Friday at 1:55pm. If anyone is interesting in sharing a cab, let me know. @TexasSwede on Twitter or texasswede@gmail.com. I am flying AA 1434 from DFW, anyone else on that flight?
Also, if there are any Swedish readers of this, I have a favour to ask… Could someone bring a few items that are hard/impossible to find here?Just let me know how much it is and I bring cash. What I am looking for is 2 or 3 of the larger (double) packs of Vasa Frukost (900g?) and 2 or 3 tubes of Kalles Guld. The regular Kalles Kaviar can be found at IKEA here in the US, but not the premium Guld. Let me know if you can do this, I would appreciate it!
For anyone not familiar with Kalles, it is the most sold brand of caviar in Sweden. It is made from salted and smoked cod roe and comes in a metal tube. You squeeze it out on bread (for breakfast) or on hard boiled eggs. A piece of bread with a sliced egg and some caviar on top is a delicious and helathy way to start the day!
The best Cognac I ever had
Theo just blogged about some wine and single malt whisky, which reminded me about a blog entry I had planned to write last week, but then work came inbetween.
Recently my best friend from growing up came over from London on a business trip, so I picked him up at the airportand we went to have dinner at Capital Grille in Dallas. The food was good, if not as good as at Nick and Sam’s where we went at a previous visit. But still good.
After dinner I had a Cognac. I am usually more a single malt person, but on occasion I enjoy a good cognac as well. Capital Grille did not have any really exciting single malts, so I decided to the the Delamain Vesper cognac. At $48 for a glass, it was pricey, but worth it! This 35 year old cognacwas incredible smooth, had a great fruit flavor with a hint of vanillaflavor and a very long aftertaste.
I been looking in the local liqour stores for it, but no luck. Even wrote to the importer, who told me no stores inthe DFW areacarry it. They told me to contact their local sales rep/agent for this part of the country to see if I could buy abottle. So when I get back from Lotusphere, I plan to do that.
If you like cognac, I can not recommend this one enough. At between $120 and $199 per bottle (online prices) it is not cheap, though. But I would say it is worth it.
New toy just in time for Lotusphere
As I wrote back in June, I managed to do a submersion test of my (then fairly new) Blackberry Bold. It worked perfectly fine after that. Then a little bit later in the summer I dropped it on concrete and got a small crack in the screen. I checked with insurance, it would cost me $125 to get the phone replaced, and it was not bad enough to spend that money on a new phone, which probably would be a refurbished anyway.
The phone started acting up about a month ago, dropping calls, etc. Sure, could be the network (I have AT&T) but I walked into the local AT&T store and talked to the sales guy. He said it sounded like a problem with the phone, and it should be covered by warranty. He then opened the battery compartment and looked, then said "OK, no water damage. Tell that when you call AT&T about warranty replacement."
So a few days later I called, and was told to open the battery compartment and tell her color of the sticker on there. I told her it was red, and she said that it indicated water had come into contact with the sticker. Oh well, just wonder why the sales guy could not tell. The label is supposed to be white when no liquid has touched it.
I decided to hold off a bit longer. Then the camera stopped working (even if it later started working again, after about a week) and the battery started to drain quickly and teh phone got really warm while charging. Something was obviously wrong.
I called the insurance company on Monday. While on hold, the automated voice mentioned that I might be eligible for an upgrade. So I checked online, and I could get the Blackberry Bold 9700 for just $99 after mail-in rebate. When the 9700 came out, I decided I would stick with my 9000, that it was not worth to spend the money on an upgrade. But now, with the phone acting up and Lotusphere coming up, I had to bite the bullet.
I received the phone Thursday (no shipping charge when placing order online!) and have now been playing with it for 2 days. Here are my thoughts.
- The phone is smaller. I am still getting used to the smaller keyboard, at least initially I did more typos when texting.
- The screen has a higher resolution, 480×360 instead of 480×320. This cases my favourite theme not to work anymore. I can download it, but it does not show up in the list of available themes.
- The trackpad is very nice, but will probably take another day or two to get used to. The nice thing is that dirt won’t get in there to cause problems, like with the ball on the older Blackberries.
- OS 5.0 installed from factory. Very nice. There are some small details I don’t like, hopefully I can change that using Blackberry Theme Studio. For example, in the inbox the name of th sender is black and bold while the subject is gray and normal, making it much harder to read.
- The reports say that the battery life is better than on the old Bold. This is of course hard to tell after just 2 days, especially when loading software, transferring files from the old phone through USB, etc.
- Mini-USB connector replaced by micro-USB. My car charger and spare wall charger won’t work, unless I get some adapters. At just over a dollar each, I will probably get a couple. The shipping is the expensive part, though. My Motorola P790 portable charger that I got for Lotusphere last year is also using mini-USB. Oh, if you don’t have one of those chargers, pick one up! They are down to $15 or less now…
- My charging cradle won’t work anymore either, since the phone is smaller.
But generally I am happy with the new phone. Just some small quirks, and I am sure I will get used to them or figure out how to address them.
Below is a picture of the two phones side-by-side. Bold 9700 to the left, Bold 9000 to the right.
Dead USB harddisk? It may still be alive!
Abouttwo years ago I bought my first1 TB harddisk, an external USB-drive from Hitatchi. I been having it connected 24/7since then. It have mostly been used for backup purposes, Isyncronizeall my photos there from the internal drive where I normally store them. But I have also beenusing it to download files, especially when the other drives in my computer were full. At times I used Bittorrent to download things (like ISO images ofUbunty, SUS, etc), and since I then shared the files for a while, there were a lot of read and writes.
About 2 weeks ago I noticed a worrying clicking sound from the drive. I turned it off, let it cool off and turned it on.The sound got worse, and theexternal indicator was spinning for minutes instead fo seconds. And of course the computer refused to see the drive.
So what data did I lose? All the pictures werecopies of the ones on the internal drive, butI might have some other files on therewhich I did not have backed up. ISO images and similar could be downloaded again, but I hated to not know what else I might have lost.
I assumed I had to go buy a new drive, I need that space for files and I want somewhere to store a copy of all my photos. Iwent to the Hitachi website to check on warranty, even if I knew the warranty most probably was expired long time ago, but does not cost to check. Yep, expired. No surprise there.
Then it hit me. What if I could open the case, take out the physical drive and hook it up to my computer using one of my USB adapters? I started looking more closely at the drive. No obvious screwholes, butthere were two labels on the back, with teh text "Warranty void if removed". Feeling on them I could tell they were covering two screws. 30 seconds later the case had been opened. Another 60 seconds, and I was holding a 3.5" 1 TB SATA drive in my hands.
I hooked the drive up to my SATA & IDE to USB adapter, plugged in the power and connected the adapter to the computer. The drive showed up fine, I could look at the files, and running the hard disk diagnostics in Ubuntu showed that the drive was fine.
It seems like it was simply the electronics in the USB case that had died.
Then, just 2-3 days later, a friend called me intears. Her 500 GB external USB drive (Western Digital MyBook)refused to show up in her computer. It had made some sounds earlier,which she ignored. Now the drive was dead, and she was missing all pictures from the first five years of her daughters life. No other backup, of course, the USB drive was her only copy.
I did the same operation on her drive. It was much harder to open and had more screws, metal and junk inside. But finally I had a SATA drive in my hands and plugged it in to my computer. When I texted her a minute later that I was able to get to all her files, she was extremely happy!
So if your USBharddisk dies, it may just be the electronics. Buy a $20-30 USB adapter (should be in your toolbox anyway!), hook the drive up that way, and chances are that the datacan be saved. Also, don’t use a USB harddisk as only storage for important files…