Just in case future generations forget....

Traditionally, standing at attention during the National Anthem or the Presentation of Colors ceremonies is a sign of respect.   

So if you, the person reading this years from now, doesn't understand why this NFL team (Jacksonville Jaguars) is kneeling, consider these facts: 


Eschewing league rules to stand, this team affirms and demonstrates their constitutional right to protest.
This team is visually displaying a "message" to everyone that there is a perceived injustice or intolerance afoot. 
The ceremony is meant to be reverenced.
The ceremony is meant to be a unifying act for all Americans.
This team says they are loyal Americans and love America.
This team chooses to ignore tradition and instead protest during the ceremony.
Photographers seem exempt of decorum though the ceremony (had to say).
Some on this team didn't like what the U.S. President said and decided to protest America. 

Protesting during a reverent American ceremony is...... I'll let you decide if this is respectful or disrespectful.

Bonus Fact:
AFC Championship Jan. 21st, 2018:  New England Patriots 24, Jacksonville Jaguars 20

Hoorah!

My new stock answer for these soul-draining marketers

Original Message:

Hi Eric,

We are BLEND - and we think a strategic partnership between our two companies could significantly move the needle for you. As a full service digital agency, that's what we do… create content and technology that resonates emotionally, but is built on a solid foundation of KPI and ROI.

In other words - we get results.

blah... blah.... blah.....

My Reply:

We are absolutely pumped about your agile marketing engagement and value proposition to work synergistically with our results-driven growth hackers who think outside-the-box and are best of breed in today's results driven world.  There is no doubt that the cost-per-click and cost-per-like model increasingly seeks a defender for out-of-pocket justification by the Go-To person who negotiates pre-launch campaigns.  As Scrum Leader, I enthusiastically employ the custom activation model to realize ROI and analyze KPI throughout the value-added ideation process. Have you every asked yourself how a Realm Oracle can curate big data to perform deep dive gamification of authentic geotargeting PPC, SEO and not to mention SEM?  This strategic forward-thinking team player must let loose the Social Media Visualizations which are internally streamlined via n-way conversations which are dynamic to marketing automation.  In summary, Influencer Marketing can only be created, achieved, managed, improved and mentored successfully when there is hard working leadership with extensive experience and creative synergy to garner full conceptual continuity and context of social commerce without overly showrooming their detail-oriented aggregation of inforgraphics and influencer analytics and to motivate go-getters and thought leaders who simply want to maximize SUCCESS!

In closing, we're ok right now.

Alienware Alpha Base - 5 Yellow Flashes

There are many dissatisfied customers who have bought these small Dell gaming computers which are made in China.    The unit itself is not bad - Core i3-4170T, Nividia GeForce GPU, etc....  But periodically, the unit will not start up and the yellow alien flashes 5 times.   Sometimes, unplugging the A/C adapter (sometime overnight) allows the system to boot again normally.   I haven't figured out a pattern to make this happen but I'm guessing that it just a faulty cap or inductor.  I need to because it'll help convince Dell's Repair Depot that something is fundamentally wrong with this design.

Update: 6/10/16.  Unit came back over a month ago from Dell repair.  They replaced the mobo and so far this computer has been working great.   There's no reason Dell should not recall this product and make courtesy calls to others affected.

The EasyLog EL-WIFI-T

Been looking for a cute and compact wifi device to monitor a server closet.  I decided to order an EL-WIFI-T  even though it had only had 1 star review on Amazon.

It's the size of your palm can easily mount on the wall.  It can run on battery for maybe a couple weeks but can receive permanent power from an old Android phone charger (not included).

Here's how you set it up:

To wrap your mind around what you just bought from Lascar Electronics Ltd.
http://www.lascarelectronics.com/
(which btw, Lascar, is in southern England with a tiny tiny sign)

you simply refer to the included quick start guide which directs you to:
http://www.easylogcloud.com/

which in turn has you first create an account at:
https://www.wifisensorcloud.com/

(which, for your information, is owned by a sister company Corintech Ltd
http://www.corintech.com/
which btw, Corintech, is surrounded by houses in southern England)

which you then refer back to easylogcloud.com to download the PC
software at:
http://www.filesthrutheair.com/
which you realize is Corintech's store-front site for all their products.


Did I smack you upside the face and confuse you with a list of domains?  We'll take it like a man because my head was spinning too.

Now, I'm a fairly smart programmer but when the device refuses to save the config during initial setup, then I'm at a loss.

Because the save settings wouldn't take and the software throwing up FAILED messages, I had to reach out. Corintech's tech support told me to first hold the button down for 20 seconds to factory default the device.  That did the trick - the settings will now save.  Why it wasn't factory defaulted out of the box.... I don't know.

I eventually got it to work using my closest access point and all seemed fine.  Later that day I wanted  to connect it to a different access point closer to where the EL-WIFI-T will be permanently mounted.  So apparently you have to, again, hold the button down for 20 seconds to factory default the device and start your configuration over from scratch - all just to change WIFI access points.  Not good.


Ok... I had to take a nap.

Now that this device is up and running all we really need to know is to use wifisensorcloud.com to monitor the temperature. So far, so good. There is some definite patience involved with setting up a Lascar device as it does take several minutes for it to check into its cloud service and eventually pull the settings.  Nice.

I am happy with the overall features. I can see a temperature graph over time (pictured above) and I should get a email alert should the temp falls out of range.  The free cloud free account let's you monitor up to two devices.   I couldn't find another company that did this for free, so I can't ask for much more.

My only grips are the "out-of-the-box" experience for new users must be very overwhelming. Lascar/Corintech needs to greatly simplfy setup with both the firmware settings save issue and the barrage of domain names involved.

But, with that said, I would still recommend this product with 3 out of 5 stars..... one week in.

Windows Update Error - 80072EE2 - Dell

I would just like to echo a post from another blogger about an issue that bit me. After wondering why Microsoft FixIt would not kickstart the windows updates to work, I used a network tool called fiddler to discover the laptop was trying to access an ip address of 172.23.49.241. Using that ip address keyword, Google found the below post which amounted to the removal of the "UseWUServer" key from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU

 

Brand new Dell Computer does not check for Windows Updates after Factory Restore Error 0x80072EE2

http://www.ryanvictory.com/posts/dell-computer-0x80072EE2-windows-updates-error/ Thanks Ryan.

NEVER buy Pandigital Products

A few years ago, Pandigital hooked its wagon up with Microsoft's Windows Live FrameIt techonology.  I bought two pandigital products (PANTV1512) nd quickly discovered that they photos services simply didn't work - right out of the box.  Pandigital created and sold many of these picture frames only to be crippled a year later when Microsoft pulled the plug on FrameIt.

After a year or followups and calling, Pandigital (which initially promised a firmware update) has now decided to abandon it's products and customers and will not honor its commitment to produce firmware updates.

So, the public is left holding a stunted product.  Pandigital will not even take them back as an RMA or exchange.


As of 12/5/2011, they don't even show their corporate headquarters on their website: http://www.pandigital.net/

A truly remarkable company that no one should ever buy from.

Should HP support S.M.A.R.T. for consumer systems?

While wanting to get more bang for the buck, I handsomely configured online a HP Pavilion Elite HPE-410t for $908.99.

 

An HP sales rep suggested a "Smart Buy" system called a HP Pro 3130 MT for $859.00.  Without getting into the specs of each system, let's just say the HPE-410t had better/faster everything. 

 

The trick is the HP rep said the Elite is a consumer-grade product which doesn't support S.M.A.R.T. technology.
"NO SMART HDD TECHNOLOGY", he says and supplied a powerpoint slideshow to compare Commercial vs. Consumer.  I haven't been able to find a url for this .ppt online. Not a surprise.

 

While reading the list of Commercial benefits (ie. Legacy OS Support XP Pro, 5 yr warranties available, longer life cycles, TAA compliant, SMART HDD Technology, etc.), everything seemed reasonable that the Consumer grade product would not necessarily need those added values - everything except for one important thing: Data Integrity!

 

To me, by not supporting S.M.A.R.T. for consumers, HP is admitting that the ubiquitous S.M.A.R.T. technology of today is not important to enable for non-commercial users.  Is data integrity not important for Granny and Pappy?  HummPpf!!

 

I don't know if HP is deliberately disabling (crippling) their BIOS to not support S.M.A.R.T.  Perhaps they are only supporting a subset of the features and market the systems as completely unsupported.  Or HP could be installing pre-crippled OEM hard drives (I really hope Western Digital isn't playing this game). 

 

I am disheartened with HP as I thought they were getting smart.  Shame.  This is 2010, not 2000.  Support S.M.A.R.T. already!

 

 

I'm very sorry Avira!

I uninstalled an old version of the Avira antivirus and a webpage pops up a with a "why-are-you-leaving" feedback form.

Should I feel guilty for uninstalling something so beautiful as Avira? Is this a subliminal message that my very own beautiful wife will suffer a virus attack while laying in her bed? Or is this simply stock photo overkill?

SAS 5/iR FAIL!

The Dell E2K-UCS-51 (B), simply known as UCS-51, is an inexpensive RAID 0,1 card for SAS drives. It'd worked dutifully for a couple years until our mission critical CentOS 5.3 box froze with:

sd 0:1:0:0 rejecting I/O to offline device

I thought to myself that a hard drive I/O error would have said sda, not just sd. Surely the controller didn't go bad - I've never had a raid controller die on me. Upon reboot the kernel quickly blurted out:

mptbase: ioc0: ERROR - Diagnostic reset FAILED! (ffffffffh)

mptbase: ioc0: ERROR - didn't initialize properly (-1)

Since this is our mission critical server my heart fell to the floor. Next boot, did CTRL-C to go into the card's raid configuration and received this:

I/O card parity interrupt at 41A7:A382

So now the card's own bios is crashing. Great, did it corrupt my raid-1 array?! Frantically I purchased another card off ebay and drove there and back as quick as possibly. The new card worked. All I had to do is reactivate the array which resync 'd the secondary harddrive automatically. CentOS boots fine.

Although I have backups, I did a lot of praying over the weekend because putting a backup box into production is a bit harder than just swapping out a card. The Lord Jesus brought me through it.

-eric wood

Dead AB Micrologix 1000

When an operator replaced a blown 2/10th amp fuse with a 20 amp one, eventually some device is going to have a bad day - in my case it was an Allen Bradley Micrologix 1000 PLC.  After repeated failed attempts to find a replacement PLC from the now defunct OEM and knowing absolutely nothing about PLCs, a local engineering firm quoted $8000 to enter in about 100 rungs of ladder logic into a new PLC.  I'm desperate but I'm not willing to be taken advantage of.  Regretfully, they declined my counter offer of $1500.  So, I purchased the same PLC off ebay for $99 and was determined to take a stab at programming it using AB's free version of RSLogix called RSLogix Micro Starter Lite (v8.10).  Even with the ladder logic printed in the back of the machine manual I realized this was over my head.  So I took a stab at swapping the power supplies (which is the bottom board).  Yeah, it worked.  Why didn't we think of that in the first place?  The top board (where the firmware and logic is) was obviously spared from the (lightning?) damage.  I went ahead and purchased a serial cable and downloaded the ladder logic from the PLC into an .rss file for safe keeping.  So why $8000? Does having a EE degree gives you a license to rip people off?  Turns out that even $1500 may be too cheap to do what I done for $99 even when the code is already provided in printed form.  One PLC guy recently told me he got out of the automation field and into the IT field because of liability insurance costs of $50,000 was prohibitive.  Because PLCs typically start/stop/run heavy equipment, insurance companies claim high risk exposure of personal injury.  So he's sticking to the IT industry where $500 liability costs are palatable.