"Greetings from California"

*note: Photo taken from the car while driving through California

Thanks to all who donated to help us get the car in shape and make the trip! We arrived safely yesterday at about 4:00pm Cali-time. I learned something while driving my family 2000 miles from home... Dring 120MPH is AWESOME! It wasn't on purpose, at least not the first few times. See, the car used to shake pretty bad once it got up to 60MPH. Last week, we had a new set of nitrogen-filled tires installed and had the alignment correct, again, thanks to donations. Now, the steering is solid, no shaking at all. So, I am just driving and watching the road, not paying any attention at all to the speed because I am just used to that shaking meaning that I am around 60MPH. Cathy tells me I need to slow down, so I look at the odometern and realize how fast we were going. The kids enjoyed it while it lasted, but I have to be very mindful of my speed, it is so easy to hit over 100 without even knowing it!

The family is glad to see us. We're staying with them for the week and leaving out Friday afternoon.
Its good to be here, but I can't wait to get back home. Man, that was a long drive...

Later, and God bless,
-myk

"Help Send Cathy to Cali for Christmas"

Need a little help sending the Mrs. to California to visit her family this Christmas.
Details HERE

Thanks, and God bless,
-myk

"We're number one!"

I received a call today from a man in Greeley, Colorado. He was looking for someone to help a family member of his here in Jackson, TN with some computer problems. This was interesting because of a few things. First, Greelel, Colorado is leterally halfway across the country from here. Second, I have a friend who recently moved from Jackson, TN to.... you guess it.. Greeley, Colorado. I thought maybe had had given me a referral or something. I asked the gentleman if he had heard about us from this friend of mine. The gentleman confessed he had never heard the name before, and advised he had simply googled for computer repair in Jackson, TN.
I did a little search of my own to find that my little computer repair "company" is number one on Google and Yahoo when searching for "computer repair jackson tn" or many various combinations of that.
Awesome.... Must be God, because I haven't paid anybody anything to earn that rating. I simply insert my website into my profile on many of the forums I frequent. Perhaps the spiders work in your favor the more places your name appears. A similar concept would be that of a store front. If you own a store with your name on a sign out front, that is one place in the world where your name can be viewed and it limits the amount of people who see you to those who drive past your store. However, if you begin to "tag" places all over town with your name, all of a sudden it increases your visibility exponentially... Weird how the internet works..

-myk

"Cows and computers shouldn't breed together..."

Just rant..

I own a 3 month old Gateway M-6881 laptop. Nice machine, actually. Those of you who know me know I use Linux. On this laptop, I have a dual boot setup, with about 60GB allocated to Vista and the remaining 190GB allocated to Ubuntu 8.10. I use Windows pretty much only for my Line 6 software that helps with editing patches on my guitar equipment. I also have a separate 250GB hard drive that is Vista only, and I have that just in case I have to ship the thing for warranty work or something..

On to my problem. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been burning a LOT of coasters. This past weekend, I did some testing by attempting to burn some data in Windows and try to burn from Linux as well... The results showed that the drive is in fact faulty. I get the occasional successful burn, but about 75% of my burn attempts were coasters, no matter what. In Windows, I got burn problems with WMP11, Roxio 10.1, Nero, or the built in Windows burning utility... In Linux, i get errors with Brasero, Nautilus, or K3B, with approximately the same 75% failure rate. This proves that the problem exists regardless of operating system or application. So I started a chat with a Gateway tech named Dalton. Told him the same story I told above and said that I would like to request a replacement drive, since the drive replacement is one screw and does not require an invasive repair. I do not wish to send my laptop in and have it down for 6-8 weeks when I can replace the drive myself in about 3 minutes.. He tells me they do not support Linux. I explain that I am not looking for OS support, I have a failing drive.. He insists that he cannot help me unless I am using Vista.. I told him i would be back in one minute.. Rebooted the system and booted into Vista, got the same clown, had to explain the same story again.. He has me to install a remote support tool to allow him to admin my computer from wherever he was. I humored him and told him I would do whatever I needed to do to get my drive, the system is under warranty and all.. He pokes around in the registry looking for God know what, checks some running services, looks at the device manager, then asks me to put in a blank CD, which I did.. Immediately an error pops up that some other application is using the device when he clicks on "Burn Data using WIndows". I explained to him that WMP11 is the device in question and he needs to close that if he wants to burn a data cd.. He asks me to eject the disk.. We go through this 3 times before I just closed WMP for him and asked HIM to try again So the Windows burning dialog finally opens up, he copies some data over, about 300MB, and proceeds to burn.. And it completes.. He says the drive is fine and terminates the session..

This irritates me because the problem is not resolved. I told him in the beginning that it is INTERMITTENT, and that I had just burned 2 coasters right before starting the session. So I called Gateway to speak with customer service. I got a nice lady on the phone who actually listened to me. I was sure to report the name and badge number of the jerk i had spoken with earlier, and briefly explained my problem, being sure to give details, etc... She apologizes for the trouble, gives me an incident number, and tells me my replacement drive is on the way... I ask her, "Why didn't the other guy do that? This is all i asked for in the first place, and it is not an outlandish request, as it is saving your company money and labor to not have a service center install this drive for me." She says " I guess he just doesn't know how to do his job properly, I apologize for the inconvenience, Mr. Robinson."

Why cant all customer service reps be like this woman???

-myk