Random thought exchange

Transition to GMail

08.30.2010
Technology

After a long debate with myself, I figured it was time to take the plunge and move my email to “the cloud”. So far I’ve been running it for a few days now, and I like it. I tried it a year or so ago, but I ended up reverting back.

My thoughts (in no particular order)

I tried to copy the emails from my computer over to GMail, but it was setting all the dates to the day that I I have all my previous email stored on my computer, so I can reference it whenever I want.
GMail supports my own personal domains – so I can send and receive without people noticing.
1. I find it offensive when Internet professionals and businesses use @hotmail.com or @gmail.com email addresses when they have their own domain.
I can still send and receive how I want from my iPhone.
I have IMAP configured, so I can still do anything I want with my folders, or as GMail likes to call them… “labels”.
I can access my email any time from anywhere, Internet connection permitting.
The spam filters are MUCH better than what Microsoft has done in Entourage. So far it hasn’t filtered any legitimate email to my spam box, which is always nice.
1. I have many server rules setup to wipe out a ton of spam before anything has a chance to make it to my inbox.
Google Docs! It’s awesome, and now I can save attachments to that.
Viewing online of documents. No more needing to open the document in the application. I can view it in a webpage and save time. Yes dad, that means that all of those “amazing photograph” emails with 20MB powerpoints won’t be AS annoying – but please try to refrain from sending them anyways!
I will not tell anyone my GMail address. I do not want to get email to it. If you want to know why, read point 2.1.

How much spam could a spambot spot if a spambot could spot spam?
No sign of the chapsticks
HighEdWebDev session notes – Day 1 and 2
Keep the donations coming in! Today is the last day!
Anonymous commenting is now enabled again!

Zaidie Harry

05.26.2009
News

R.I.P. Zaidie Harry @ 6:14 a.m., the funeral will be at Steeles tomorrow but don’t know the time yet. Baruch Dayan ha’Emet.

Shiva is only one day at my parents on Wednesday after the funeral until Thursday morning.

We will miss you!

He had to out-do the mitzvot… 613 + 1.

Zaidie Harry

iPhone 3.0 software
DC/UOIT 7th Annual Golf Tournament
At the good ol’ baseball game
Rogers website is ‘busted’
Cloudy with a… chance of meatballs?

My dads computer saga and my need to hoard old computer junk

10.19.2008
Rants, Technology, work

Yet again, my dad is having computer problems…

On a side note, I should really have a t-shirt with the superman logo on it.

Apparently, unbeknown to me, the computer at his office has been acting up. Every few minutes/hours/days (it’s somewhat random) the computer screen would just go solid black for a fraction of a second, and then back to normal. So it was workable, but annoying. Then, out of nowhere the screen would just get these totally random pixelated messy blocks and stay like that. It would be completely locked up.

The computer has an Asus P5PE-VM motherboard, which has on-board video.

I remembered that I had an old-ish (but brand new) motherboard and CPU in the basement, so I grabbed them, popped them in, but they were the wrong type, so the CPU fan didn’t fit.

So I decided that I would boot up in safe-mode, and run some diagnostic burn-in software to see if there were any errors that came up. It ran flawlessly for 90-minutes. I thought that maybe it was just luck, so I booted up into Windows normally, ran the software, and within 5-minutes – BAM – locked up and frozen.

That to me sounded like it was a driver problem. So, I upgraded the video drivers, windows updates, etc, etc. Nothing helped!

My next thought was to put in an AGP or PCI video card, and disable the on-board one.

So I found an old 16MB Voodoo 3D card that I had lying around. Popped it in, got into the BIOS, disabled the on-board video, and voila – no black flickering, no crazy mess of video displaying.

Outstanding!

Until…

The computer just totally locked up… out of nowhere.

Now it makes sense… it had to have been the RAM. You see, on-board video cards use a fraction of the RAM to run.

So off into the BIOS I go, play around with the timing, and whatnot, but no dice… the computer was still locking up.

I called Tom to see if he had any RAM kicking around – he wasn’t home but thought he did. A few hours passed, I’m playing around with other settings, cooling, but nothing worked.

Finally, I remembered that I had some old RAM. At least I thought I did. I spent about 30-minutes looking for it, and then I found them. I had 5 “older” sticks – 4x 512MB, and 1x 256MB. I remembered though that one of them was BAD… but why would I have labeled them? Why would I have kept bad RAM in the first place? I have some kind of nasty need to retain old computer junk for no good reason – well… in this instance (for the RAM) it was no good reason, but it was a good thing I had the video card.

So I pop in the first one, I run memtest-86 on it… after 35-minutes it found an error. This goes on for all the RAM. EACH FRIGGEN STICK IS BUSTED!

Why would I have kept bad RAM? What is wrong with me?

Anyways, going to pick-up new RAM tomorrow, and we’ll see what happens… hopefully that’s the end of it.