HartlessByDesign

So I had this long, descriptive blog entry for my favorite online apps/services. And then Firfox locked up on me and I lost it all. Grrrr....

I am now out of time so I am forced to simply list them for now. Maybe another day I will expound on them. Regardless, check them out! (Note, they are not listed in any kind of specific order).

1) Google Apps - host my mail and calendar. Gmail and Google Calendar rocks and now I can have them both with my logo and my personal URL! Best part, it's FREE!

2) Zoho Office Suite - an amazing online office suite and more with all the bells and whistles one can imagine. If you like simple, stick with Google Docs. But if you like features, go with Zoho! Best part, it's FREE!

3) Grand Central - one number to rule them all. A person can call one telephone number and all the numbers you set up will ring simultaneously. Listen to voicemail online either through their web interface or by email. Receive notification by email or SMS. Block numbers, send telemarketers to a spam voicemail box, customize rings, utilize webcall buttons (see mine to the right; call me toll free!), and much more. Best of all, it's FREE!

4) YouMail - replace your carrier's voicemail with this one and listen to voicemail by phone, online, or by email! A ton of features and best of all, it's FREE!

5) Yodlee - a great online app to track your finances. It automatically connects to your financial institutions and downloads transactions. I can go to one place to see my balances, transactions, bills, etc. Best of all, it's FREE!

6) SendMeRss - get all your RSS feeds in your inbox for FREE!

That's it for now. I'm sure you noticed that all the apps/services above are FREE. I'm all about free :-)

I hate days like this. Feelings of inadequacy, incompetency, uncertainty, and anxiety overwhelm me. To me, in part it proves the famous CS Lewis quote, "I find in myself desires which nothing in this earth can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world." How I long for that other world.

So a number of years I decided to put windows in the closet and use Ubuntu. And I am very glad I did. Ever since, I have been notorious for upgrading to alpha/beta stages of Ubuntu before they are released. There has only been maybe one occasion that I have absolutely regretting doing that. But overall, satisfied. I like the adventure of it because usually when I upgrade before to a beta version, things are broken and I have to find the solution.

I'm not very good at it since I am not a first/second generation Linux user who had to create everything themselves including drivers. Now they know how to get around Linux! Me on the other hand started off with Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and almost immediately upgraded to Breezy Badger. Even then, Ubuntu had streamlined things so much to where there really wasn't a tremendous need to be able to get around Linux using a command prompt. Don't get me wrong, I'm a total Linux noob, I can now drive the command prompt decently well. My problem is that I have not taken the time to learn the basics of some of the programming languages Linux and Linux programs are built upon thus I am not dive into the reasons bugs exist. However, I try to feed back into the community as I find bugs and am able to do so.

Anyway, so I took the plunge into Hardy. At first glance I'm not noticing a whole lot of differences than Gusty. I'm going to describe them in a bulleted list for glancing purposes.

 

• I first noticed that they changed the apt updater icon that sits in the notification area which looks much nicer than the one in Gusty.


• They also changed the layout of the list of applets in the Add To Panel to alphabetical order rather than sections (I like this very much).


• When you connect to a remote server, they mount it and give you the option of adding it as a bookmark which adds it to a quick list in the menu and nautilus. It no longer lists it as the name you provide it but rather "ftp as username on serveraddress" which I really don't like. The bookmark is named as I chose, but the drive mounted is not. I'm also having some trouble staying connected to the ftp server. Nautilus is consistently throwing errors then I have to kill nautilus, unmount and remount the server.


• FF3 is the default but as of right now, the majority of the addons I use are not FF3 compatible so I had to downgrade to FF2.


• Checkgmail which I rely upon heavily refused to open. After screwing around with it for a while, I finally tried completely uninstalling the program and deleted my ~/.checkmail directory. Reinstalled and setup and now it seems to work fine.


• My number pad on my keyboard would not type numbers regardless if numlock was set or not. I found a solution to that here. They write:

   

  
  I was finally able to do some hunting around Launchpad to find out why the numeric keypad on my keyboard "broke" once I got Ubuntu Hardy installed, and I was able to find a workaround for it. It's also not a Hardy bug after all but a GNOME bug, and I've got both a workaround and bug links for all that need it.

  First off, there's an easy workaround for it. Go into the Keyboard Preferences (System >Preferences > Keyboard) and go to the Mouse Keys tab. Simply uncheck the box for Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard. (I know the grammar sucks on that sentence. I need to find a bug for that as well.) That will let users of Ubuntu Hardy, and other distros that use GNOME 2.22, to regain the use of their numeric keypad.

  There are two bugs for this on file. for Ubuntu Launchpad has bug #197589: Numeric keypad no longer works after upgrade. That bug actually pointed me to the GNOME bug on Bugzilla, #521197 - Numeric keypad no longer works after upgrade. With any luck we'll have this fixed for the next milestone for Hardy.

  
  


• They have a cool little program in the System Tools menu called Hardware Testing. It runs tests on your hardware where you can say yes it works or no it doesn't and provide comments as needed. At the end, Ubuntu sends a report to launchpad so that Ubuntu can get feedback on hardware issues. Very nice. Thankfully, all my hardware thus far seems to be working well including compiz fusion with my nvidia video card. Of course some of that could be that I got it working with Gutsy with a bit of work thus it rolled over to Hardy. It may be different if I did a clean install.

 

Well I suppose that's it for now.

Talked to the AC dude and guess what he demanded that they do it and charge $250. "It's my license and I can cancel the whole thing and ship everything back to the warranty company and be done with it." I can understand a concern for his license but when four other companies who have been in business for years have no problem with it, it leads me to believe something is fishy. Well guess what, Elite AC and Heating has lost my business.

So, recently we had our air handler, the ducts and all that replaced right? Well, when the dude first came he said "Oh yea, you guys have a 4ton unit, blah blah blah." Gave us a quote based on a 4ton unit. Then he comes back to install the unit and says, "Well you have a 2.5 ton unit so we are going to install a 3 ton blah blah blah". But of course he gave no price change to the quote other than a $200 discount his wife "accidentally" quoted us (if we paid in cash). I was like, "okay whatever. I'm not going to cause a scene." I did do a little googling afterward and saw that the price difference wasn't all that much. Anyway, the day the installers are installing the air handler and all that, one of the workers said, "You have a small freon leak that you may want to talk to him [the owner] about." Okay small leak, will deal with it come spring. That was oh about a month ago.

 So, its getting hot, turned on the AC and nothing. The house doesn't even cool a degree but maybe even gets hotter. So I call the guy who comes out and walks out for one minute with no tools (no way it was even a second more), comes back in and says "Did my guy tell you what was going on with that thing?" "He said there was a small freon leak," I said. "Small!?? That is a huge leak. We are going to have to replace it." He calls and manages to get the home warranty to pay for the unit but has a list of fees they will not cover, $250 of it to dispose of the freon and unit. Okay whatever.

So then I get to thinking, well our trash service picks up heavy stuff on Thursdays. That would save us a some money. I call them and they say oh yea we'll do it as long as the freon is properly drained and the unit is tagged. Great! I call the AC company back and the wife says "Absolutely not! Our license requires that we take it and dispose of it in our warehouse. It is the law." I explained what the trash company said and that they do it all the time but she said no. So now I'm suspicious. I called 4 other companies in the area and they all laughed saying that no it was not required by law, it was my unit so I could do whatever I wanted with it, they would come out drain the freon and then I could take the unit to a scrap yard and get paid for it. One guy even offered to come out and do take the unit and the freon for $50 bucks. All of them said that if they were the ones installing the unit, the wouldn't even charge to dispose and haul off the unit. Erg. I get the feeling I'm being screwed over.

Anyway, I hate confrontation but the AC dude and I will have a little chat when he gets here and he probably won't be my AC dude any longer.

As I said at my old blogger site 

Well, I'm a geek and geeks have to do things their geeky way. So, I moved my blog to http://www.hartless.org :-)

 What more can I say? Here I can do a lot more with my site than at blogger.