Being the geek that I am, I buy a lot of stuff online. This weekend I snagged an hard drive caddy for my HP laptop on eBay, made necessary because HP sells them for the extraordinary and extortionary price of $145. The whole laptop only cost me $613!

In any case, I ordered the part for $20 on eBay and was pleased when I got my UPS Quantum View email telling me at had been shipped. When I when to check on where it was, I became less pleased as it said the package had been delivered already to Houston. I live in Pittsburgh. So, I started swearing and panicking and trying to figure out where on earth they put a Houston address to my name. (Read more…)

I went to CNN today and clicked on a link about something or other. Since CNN loves to repurpose its content, this turned out to be a video, but not one I was allowed to watch. I got this bizarre message (click it to see the whole page):

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You reap what you sow, I suppose. Yesterday, I criticized Cuil partly for their lack of stability under stress.

Last night, one side of my UPS died. Just died. No beeps, nothing. One side works, the other doesn’t. I guess one of the batteries has finished its lead-filled little life. That took out my primary name server and my in-house hub. At first, I thought it was just the hub, so I borrowed one from my brother-in-law and swapped that out. Still no light on the name server. Figured that out and managed to keep the downtime to an hour or so. Given that the two secondary name servers were alive and well, all was okay. it didn’t last. (Read more…)

Cuil was finally ready for its big debut. The Press had picked up the story. Digg was awash with stories of how it would kill Google.

So, I decided to check it out and I have to say I am disappointed. I’m cool with their Gaelic spelling of “cool,” but there are two significant problems with their service as currently released. (Read more…)