If you are ever looking to buy something buy it from Costco. Why? Cause they will let you return anything giving you the comfort you would not get elsewhere.

On Aug 10, my wife and I bought an HP mini Netbook. We thought it would come in handy. While this is not a review of the Netbook, I will tell you that we simply found the small size incredibly awkward for normal use, and the lack of an optical drive made life difficult at times (something I thought would not be an issue). We thought we would use it all the time but ended up barely using it all. Just last week or so ago it started to have major problems. Whenever we would try to boot it up it would hang on the HP Logo screen, and would require several On-Off switches, and popping the battery in and out a few times, before it would eventually boot up – not good. We were starting to regret having spend the $400+ on it.

I dug up our receipt for warranty purposes and found that it had been 95 days since we bought it. Turns out Costco has a 90 day return policy! So we figured, rather then sending it away to be fixed on warranty, we’d try returning it and wash our hands of this Netbook experience. I called Costco, explained the situation and that we were just a few days past the return policy expiry, and they said to bring it back, no problem.

So that’s what we did, we took it back, and they refunded our money in full with no questions, problems, or anything. What other business would do that? I can guarantee Future Shop and many of the other big box stores would never do such a thing!

Over the years my wife and I have spent thousands of dollars at Costco. We’ve bought mostly groceries, but also some big ticket items like tires and electronics. This fantastic customer service is just one reason we keep going back. By allowing us to return the Netbook, it just helps solidify our patronage to the store, and almost guarantees to them that they will recoup the small amount of profit they would have made from us had they not taken back the laptop.

Costco, thank you for kicking ass!

It isn’t often that I post reviews in my Blog, but it is something I think I will start doing more of, as I am finding people seem to like reading reviews.

In the past I have reviewed our 2008 Mazda 5, the new Monopoly City Streets game, and today I am writing to review Memory America, an online Computer Memory shop. (Stay Tuned, I will also be reviewing my new DeWalt 18V Hammer Drill – but I haven’t had time to play with it just yet).

About a year ago I replaced my old boat anchor 17” Dell laptop with a more manageable 15” Toshiba Satellite. (It literally weighs about 8lbs less). This new replacement also brought with it my first experiences with Windows Vista. Equipped with 2 Gigs of ram I quickly realized this was just not enough for Vista.

Today I took the plunge and ordered 2 new chips, 2GB each, from Memory America to bring the computer up to 4 Gigs. My hope and assumption is that this will significantly speed up the machine. I hesitated ordering online, but their prices make it more affordable then what I can find locally, so I decided to go for it. Typically I have never had any problems with online orders, but because the ram is something I am not 100% knowledgeable of I was a bit hesitant.

I am a bit of a novice when it comes to computer upgrades etc – sure I know more ram is good and I know how to swap it out but had no idea what type etc to order – following the easy navigation on this site made it a breeze to find what I was looking for. If they didn’t make it so easy to find the right ram, I would have probably spent a few more dollars and bought locally.

I found their shopping cart system a breeze and ordering was easy – now I just have to wait for the memory to arrive! Ram should be here next week some time.

I’ll also add I must have been having an off day because only after I ordered the ram did I think to pop the cover off the bottom of the laptop to see exactly what memory was in there – thankfully I had ordered the right stuff.

Many many years ago, long before I was born, the telephone was invented. Several years later, it started to appear in homes, and eventually was located in nearly every household.

Today the telephone has come full circle and many people no longer have “land lines”. Instead they have made the switch to exclusively use their cell phone.

Computers, and the Internet more specifically, are doing something similar. Not too long ago the idea of a personal computer in every home was a thing of science fiction. Today, most homes have them, and many have several. It wasn’t long ago when the internet first started to gain in popularity, and now, that too has found its way into just about every home that has a computer.

Just like the telephone, the internet is going mobile too. It is now easy to find cell phones that are fully internet compatible, laptops are impossible to find without a wireless network card, and many have cellular modems built in, and now netbooks are also online anywhere you go. The internet is everywhere, and it is leaving the home and expanding into the world.

It won’t be long before your internet access account is simply a WiFi subscription, following you everywhere you go. If you want to work from the beach, just grab your laptop and go, no worry about huge cell phone data charges as it will all be included in your plan.

Some day, globally free wireless broadband may be available as well, paid for by advertising – but I personally would prefer to pay a few bucks and remain somewhat ad-free.

I have no doubt that in my lifetime (probably within the next dozen or so years) wireless internet will be available everywhere – after all it practically is today. Perhaps it will work along the same lines as Satellite radio – the technology is all there, it just needs to be refined.

The one thing I am not certain about is the future of cloud computing (essentially using web based software for all your needs – word processing, graphics, gaming, etc). It is in use today by many, the most common being the various Google Aps, but I am skeptical that the masses will start to trust all their file storage on machines not in their control, requiring internet access to retrieve their documents.

There is a certain convenience in the whole cloud, but I personally like having all my files available on my personal machine, sitting there in front of me, where I have full control and easy access. Even if internet connections are sped up considerably, opening a photo stored on your local machine will always be faster than grabbing it from your online storage.

I suppose though, if the future goes in the direction of the cloud, I will have no choice to go there with it. I am however, all in favor for wireless internet available everywhere. (as long as they block it in resort towns – don’t want work following me on vacation)

A Finnish software developer has had a USB flash drive implanted into his prosthetic finger. After losing part of his finger in a motorcycle accident last year, Jerry Jalava’s doctor suggested he have a USB drive built into his replacement digit.

When he needs to use it he simply pops off his finger and sticks it into the computer. I think this is a great idea, and am thinking about getting a couple drives surgically implanted into my nipples. (I was going to say somewhere else, but that’s too crude even for me to write publically – although I guess I just kinda did.)

Aside from playing around with this blog, I also have a very geographically specific website dedicated to my local area. On that website I also offer free classified ads for locals.

For some time now my other site has been hit hard by spammers from the affiliate program clicknearn.net based on Pakistan. I tried contacting the affiliate program, and they replied saying that they feel strongly against spam, but never did anything about it with their affiliates. I suspect that they actually couldn’t care less, and in fact, are probably the spammers themselves.

Ultimately I started banning the IP’s of the people spamming my classifieds, one at a time. But they kept coming with several posts a day. After doing some digging earlier this week I discovered www.blockacountry.com which quickly and easily generates the htaccess code required to completely block a specific country from your site. I generated and posted the code, and now, no more spam. YAY.

I hated the idea of blocking an entire country from my site, however, as my site is very specific to my local area, I doubt there are many people from Pakistan actually interested in my site anyways, so that combined with the removal of SPAM, I took the step and just blocked them all.

I later posted what I had done in Twitter noting the block a country website and got a reply from “imrananwar” who noted that he has founded an registry to help track problem ISP’s so that all of Pakistan is not hurt by these types of spammers. I provided him with the list of ISP’s that had spammed my site, the nature of the spam, etc. He is working to help reduce spam, and while I am not sure if he will succeed, I am happy to see that there are people out there that care and are trying to do something about all this bad stuff.

Ahh, I remember back in the day – our old 486 4-100. It was lightning fast, faster than all my friends, and faster then all the computers in the school – that thing rocked. It had a HUGE hard drive in it too, a mind-blowing 512 megs, and those 8 megs of ram, almost unheard of!

Its hard to believe that we have exceeded those amazing storage and technological capabilities! Today, 1TB hard drives are not uncommon, and even JumpDrives far exceed the capacity of hard drives from just a couple years back. I saw a secure 16 GB JumpDrive at Lexars website that had a capacity meter built in – pretty cool really. 16GB on a jump drive is really quite amazing considering that just a few short years ago, standard hard drives didn’t even reach this figure.

With USB 3.0 in the works, it wont be long before every computer has it, and that will open up a lot of opportunities for speed. I can see a future where all your software, operating system, everything, is stored on a jump drive. Take the jump drive to the office, or over to a friends house, plug it into their machine, and run all your software, games, operating system etc, all off of the JumpDrive. Today, USB 2.0 would likely be a bit too slow for this idea to work, but when usb 3.0 takes off (expected next year) its speeds of up to 10x that of 2.0 may make this kind of usage possible.

(Note, if 16 GB is not big enough for you, CDW has a 64 GB jump drive available, but at over $5000, you might want to wait a bit)

What is this world coming to? I have to say that I simply do not understand.

A keyboard featuring the Klingon alphabet has gone on sale for £43.99 for all those die-hard star trek fans out there. The fake language was originally created back in 1984 for the Star Trek series and since then thousands of learnt to write and speak the strange non-existent language.

I have never been a Star Trek fan, so I just don’t get it, but if you are one, you may be interested in ordering this bizarre product. It has been made available here. It is available only with a PS2 connection – strange, USB has been around forever

When you are eating dinner and the phone rings, do you answer it? I know some people that don’t, but I for some reason, do – and in most cases will talk with the person, at least briefly, interrupting my dinner. The telephone interrupts my favorite TV programs, family time, work hours, and sleep. – it’s really a nuisance.

Sure I could unplug it, or turn off the ringer – but then how would people call me? I am learning to hate this device, but the reliance on it, and all technology has me hooked. I can’t even leave home without my cell phone – what if something happens, I have to have my phone with me. I hardly ever use our cell, but yet it follows me everywhere. What’s going on with this world? It’s almost like the telephone is a virus we can’t escape. When it rings I think, “Ah crap, who is it now.”

I am constantly checking my email, and spend probably half my life sitting in front of a computer or television. Sure I work on the computer, so that’s an easy 8 hours a day – but why must I watch TV, or use my laptop during my free time. I am sure that all this technology is causing mass tumors to grow in my brain.

My favorite part of vacations is that we often go to places without telephones. We’ll hit up Pacific Village in Tofino once a year – beach front cabins without TV’s, radios, or telephones. I leave my cell turned off, and watch in the car. Complete isolation from technology. Those vacations are the best times of my life. No email, no phone calls, no commercials telling me I need to call Sam. (That lawyer guy in Michigan – you know the jingle: “You can talk to Sam. 1-800-call Sam”. Grrr. Go away Sam Bernstein.).

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time to a land before all this dependence on technology – but then how would I watch Judge Judy?

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Remember all the hype about 9 years ago when our clocks rolled from 1999 over to 2000, and how the worlds information systems were supposed to come to a crashing halt, and the planet as we know it would essentially self destruct? Do you remember what happened? No? Probably because nothing happened.

Sure big corporations had to spend a lot of money on programming to fix the issue, but in those few short years leading up to the new millennium, the issue was fixed, and the average person would have had no idea that there was an issue in the first place.

Well, we are at that point again, or will be, in just a few short decades. Based on current programming practices at precisely 3:14:07 on Jan 19, 2038, all of our computer systems will crash and man kind will be sent in to a world where no computer will operate correctly.

Some people are a little bit worried about this problem, but as for me, I am convinced that in the next 29 years, programmers will have this dilemma solved.

Some Details
While I have some programming experience, I am far from a programmer. The majority of readers of this blog are also not likely to be programmers, so I will try and explain this as simply as possible – in point form.

• Time on your computer is stored as the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 at midnight
• This data is stored in a “signed integer” data type typically labeled as “time_t”
• The modern 32 bit computer (most likely what you are using right now) stores “signed integer” data types in 32 bits.
• The MAXIMUM value a 32 bit “signed integer” can hold is 2,147,483,647
• This represents a time of Jan 19, 2038 at 3:14:07 AM
• Exactly 1 second after this time, the signed integer will crash, having nowhere to go, it will turn negative. (for a number of technical reasons)
• By default it will revert to the value of “time_t” to -2,147,483,648, which represents Dec 13, 1901 at 8:45:52 PM.

Having computers suddenly jump about 120 years into the past would have catastrophic results on the majority of systems out there. To fix the problem on any 32 bit system represents a huge dilemma and programmers just don’t know how to fix this.

Why Worry
One fix to the problem is with the use of a 64 bit system. While they are not common place at the moment, 64 bit systems are out there.

My assumption is that we will see 64 bit systems as main stream well within our 29 year time span to get this problem fixed. I will be VERY surprised if there are even any 32 bit systems still operational in business in 30 years from now.

The old Commodore PET, the Tandy, and the Apple II were 8 bit systems. When was the last time you saw one of these? Last time I saw a Commodore I was in Elementary School. They were popular back in the 80′s.

If we can go from 8 bits to 32 bits in 20 years, I am sure that we can go from 32 bits to 64 bits in that same time frame or less). I suspect that we will be in a 64 bit world far sooner than that.

Want More Technical Info
I learnt of this issue at WebProNews, and they cited an article here: http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw/Y2038.html. This page is currently over quota on their hosting account, so feel free to check it out in Googles Cache here.

I absolutely hate to admit that I kinda like Windows Vista. It did take some getting used to as much has changed, but the more I use it, the more I actually like it.

I have heard of many people having tons of problems with it, but for me there were only 3 problems I had to deal with, and now all 3 are corrected:

1. Office 2003: I installed it, but every time I opened word or excel it prompted me to accept the TOC. I eventually found a work around through registry edits to make this problem go away. (And yes, it was a 100% legal and legit copy of Office).

2. É and é: When going for the question mark (?) or forward slash (/) often the computer would switch to the red character on the keyboard instead; the (é) or (É). I fixed this by changing the language settings from Canadian English to American English. The problem has not returned

3. Weird Mouse Thing: The cursor would randomly jump from one field to another while typing causing total chaos when filling out online forms. I for the life of me cant remember what I did to fix this, but I found instructions online, followed them, and it fixed it.

Other than these 3 things, Windows Vista has been good to me. Regardless, I still find the following comic strip (from XKCD funny )