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Oh, myfax.com, why do you have to suck?
Friday, July 23, 2010
I know. No one uses faxes anymore. What’s the point when you can email a PDF?
Well, my client sends a lot of faxes to their small branch offices, which often consist of nothing more than a warehouse with no computers. So I needed a good email-to-faxing solution. I looked at a number of them.
MyFax.com is so promising. The service is easy to setup and to use. There are customer service and tech support reps who work 24 hours. They have helped me at all kinds of crazy times. That part is great.
The problem is that their billing, accounting, and general operations just suck. I had to spend nearly every day for a week just trying to get our accounts set up right – every time I got off the phone I was assured it was all taken care of, and the next day everything was the same. The interface is awkward, and I can’t make heads or tails of how they bill – although the number of times they’ve tried to adjust my account might be a part of it.
So MyFax – if you’re listening: figure it out, OK? You’ve got nice people who want to do the right thing. But they all look like idiots when they can’t fix a simple problem like setting the account types, and it’s annoying when the faxes stop working because your billing system sucks.
That is all.
iPhone 4 or something else?
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
My iPhone 3G is showing its age. Slow, lots of lockups, and the battery life is short. So the question is: When Radio Shack calls me to say that the iPhone I reserved has come in, do I buy it? Will I even notice the antenna problems considering how much AT&T sucks in Los Angeles? Why am I still an AT&T customer with the terrible call service we get?
Or should I make the leap to Android? I like Google. I use their calendar, some of their email, and some of their other services. The EVO 4G looks like an awesome phone, despite being large enough to literally have a kickstand. The Droid X looks promising. Am I too afraid to buy one of these phones with all these different specs, as opposed to the easy lemming path of just upgrading the iPhone?
Why does making a cellphone choice require a two-year commitment? I barely give that kind of commitment to my wife, let alone a gadget.
Is there anything good in online Mac backups?
Saturday, February 20, 2010
I’m so tired of crappy Mac-compatible online backups. I have four Macs at home that I want backed up offsite, and have tried nearly everything.
Carbonite is terrible on the Mac and constantly can be found sucking up processor and network bandwidth. Constantly seeing files waiting to be backed up, and getting messages that more than seven days have gone by since my last backup – if so, it’s not my fault. I have abandoned my account before the first year was up.
Mozy – had many of the same performance problems as Carbonite. I could never tell what was backed up, what was waiting to be backed up, or much of anything going on. I have abandoned my account before the first year was up.
Backblaze is fairly reliable, but I found that transfers were always slow to their servers, no matter how fast my connection was. I still use Backblaze to back up one of my computers, including my music collection (God forbid I should lose all my music). Backblaze is an “unlimited” size backup, but it cannot backup network drives.
iDrive works pretty well, and the online storage can be organized for either one machine or multiple machines (though don’t change this setting after you’ve already started backing up). $5/mo for 150gb isn’t a bad price for household use. The logging is decent and the newest version (1.40) has improved status displays.
BackJack was very reliable, but is the priciest option I’ve seen – $96/year per $10 gb. Still, it worked well.
I’m currently trying CrashPlan. I got a deal at the end of the year for 2 years of the Family Plan which allows unlimited backups for the computers in the household. CP is a little goofy in that there is a free version of the client and a paid version – the free version displays some ads in the window and businesses must buy the paid version for $60. But I think you can get by with the free version pretty well. Family plan is $100/yr for unlimited and supports networked drives.
That’s enough backup programs for now.
Britt Hume is an arrogant ass
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
His comments about Tiger Woods come off like Billy Mays pitching Christianity – “Hi, I’m Billy Mays. Have you done terrible things in your life and your current religion doesn’t offer an effortless path to redemption? Cheat on your wife? Steal something? Kill a person? Who has time in their busy lives to actually right those wrongs or make an effort to be a better person? Have I got a deal for you.”
The world is full of people shouting “my religion is better than yours!”, and the world is worse off for having them.
Crappy online backup services
Sunday, January 3, 2010
I’ve given up on Mozy and Carbonite – they both suck for the Mac and give me no confidence that anything is really backed up. They both routinely give me messages like “Last successful backup was more than 7 days ago”, and last week Mozy decided that suddenly I had 50+ gb that still needed to be backed up.
Having lots of computers to back up, I decided to try lots of different services. Mozy and Carbonite are the crappiest and spend far more time trying to convince me to not cancel my service as opposed to fixing their shit.
Backblaze isn’t terrible, but it feels like their software can both monopolize my internet connection and have the slowest upload speeds – I haven’t quite figured them out. iDrive has somewhat clumsy software, but has worked reliably – that’s the one I’m using to backup my home videos of my family.
I’m in the process of trying Crashplan, which usually receives a lot of praise. So far, so good. I can already see that I like being able to see a list of backed up files online, as well as information on the last backup date and the status of the current backup.
I won my fantasy football league
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
I said I was going to win, and I won. Pay up, bitches.
Eight months until the next draft.
Did you know that Amazon delivered same-day?
Sunday, December 27, 2009
If you live in the right city (see below), Amazon can offer same-day delivery of your items before 8pm. This is assuming, of course, that they are in-stock and eligible for the service.
Here I am being a schlub paying $3.99 for overnight delivery when I could have had it here today for $5.99. Oh wait, I don’t live in one of those cities. If I were one of those cities, I’d sure use it as a local selling point. Would I move to Baltimore just to get same-day delivery of my Amazon junk? Well, I surely wouldn’t move there if I didn’t…
- Seattle: Order as late as 1 p.m. local time
- New York City: Order as late as 10 a.m. local time
- Philadelphia: Order as late as 10 a.m. local time
- Boston: Order as late as 10:30 a.m. local time
- Washington D.C.: Order as late as 10:30 a.m. local time
- Baltimore: Order as late as 10:30 a.m. local time
- Las Vegas: Order as late as 11 a.m. local time