A Day Late

When I purchased my new Powerbook last month I had to figure out how to migrate the settings and files from my old one. I’ve been backing up my home directory and applications directory regularly to DVD using tar but I had the suspicion this wouldn’t migrate the settings properly. I was right, so I started looking for a proper way to backup and restore a user in OS X. I found a backup program created by Apple. It allows you to do complete or partial backups of a system and allows spanning of DVD’s to create the backups. Very nice, but I was disappointed to discover you have to have a .MAC subscription, which run about $99/year I think, to use the backup program. Am I the only one this doesn’t make sense to? I have a DVD burner on the system, so why do I need a subscription to some online service/community to create backups on my DVD drive? In the end I ended up tar’ing my data files and then tried to recreate all my settings.

During the process I discovered tar really doesn’t work with “package files”. Specifically my Quicken data files. On my old machine the data files appeared as a single file, but when I untared them on my new machine they appeared as a folder with multiple files within and were completely unusable. This was really frustrating and took me a few hours to figure out a way to transfer the file successfully. I searched Quicken’s web site about backing up OS X files, thinking surely someone else has come across this. Apparently no one has. It seems like a rather large security risk to me. Quicken for OS X automatically backups up the data file (I think it keeps the last 10 copies). However, all of these 10 backups are stored on the hard drive, so should it fail you’re basically screwed. Even if you copy the data files to a dvd directly, with or without archiving, they’ll be unusable. So for some reason, cp and tar don’t work with special OS X files known as “packages” or at least they don’t work with the Quicken data file packages. In the end I discovered an OS X command line archive utility called ditto that would properly archive the Quicken data files so I could transfer them to the new system.

Looking back, I’m wondering if I could’ve created an image file of my home directory. Oh well, too late now. Anyway, I have yet to find a good way to backup my system, if anyone knows of one, I’d be interested.

It looks like Qwest has upgraded their DSL service and is offering a free upgrade until the end of May. Meaning you can upgrade to a higher speed which costs the same per month as the current package and the upgrade fee is waved. Currently I’m on the Deluxe package, 640 Kbps down and 256 kbps up speed. The upgrade should take it up to 1.5 Mbps down and 896 Kbps up. Initially the information I received indicated the upload speed was staying at 256 Kbps. It’s a nice suprise to see it’s being increased also, since from a hosting perspective it’s more significant.

I guess I shouldn’t be too excited. I haven’t had any bandwidth problems/complaints yet, but like most guys I like things that are bigger, better, faster, etc etc. Anyway, I made the upgrade call and they said it should be enabled in the next few days. So, for those who have sites hosted on the server you should be able to upload and download files a little quicker. For the rest, you should be able to download quicker.

We’ve come a LONG way from the 2400 baud/second modem days, haven’t we?

I consider myself a fairly patient person…but I think my patience is finally at an end with AT&T Wireless. As I mentioned a while back I’ve moved to an apartment in Orem. I was a little ticked to discover that my phone has virtually no reception inside my new apartment. This confused me because:

1. I’m located in the center of the Provo/Orem metro area (can it be called that?)
2. My apartment is only a couple hundred yards from the I-15 freeway which is supposed to be the best coverage area around.

The At&t Wireless store is close to where I live so over the weekend I decided to stop by and see if there was anything I could do. I’m really trying to avoid having a land line hooked up. I talked to a guy there and he told me that they’ve had problems in that area with ONLY my particular model of phone (Sony Ericsson t68i). He said all the other phones have performed fine in that area but the t68i’s have had problems. He suggested I call customer support and see if they would give me money towards a new phone. Ok…this is a BIG issue I have with AT&T Wireless. WHY THE HELL DO YOU HAVE STORES IF THE EMPLOYEES CAN’T DO ANYTHING? Everytime I’ve gone in with a problem it’s been the same story “you’ll have to call customer service”. Which translates into traversing the endless automatic phone menus to finally get transferred to an actual person. Of course you have to wait on hold 30 minutes before talking to said person. Then you’re lucky if the person actually understands what you’re trying to explain. Honestly, the employees in the stores are nothing more than glorified cash register operators. If you expect to get any sort of customer service out of them, you’ll be disappointed. Despite Sprint PCS’s problems, it was nice to be able to walk in the store and have an actual person work through ANY problems with me. Soo…back to the problem at hand. Yes, only my phone model won’t work where I live. Call me skeptical but I wasn’t entirely convinced by the “only that model of phone doesn’t work there” story.

Well, I guess he was right. I had a friend from work stop by who has AT&T and his phone seemed to work fine in my apartment. Signal was fairly strong and he could make calls with no problem. I’m lucky if I can get a call through with my head pressed against the window and even then it’s only a matter of time before the call gets dropped.

So, I decided to call customer service today and see what kind of cash I could get for trading in my phone. I called no less than 10 times throughout the day and NIGHT and got the same message everytime “your call is important to us…” (BS!!) “…we are currently experience a high call volume. Your expected wait time is greater than 20 MINUTES!”. Ummm…to hell with that! Who has that sort of time to sit on the phone for up to 30 minutes just to get customer service!?

The thing is, I like the phone I have. It has everything I want and it works great everywhere except where I live (DAMN IT DAMN IT!). The thing I like best is the bluetooth connectivity. So, on the way home tonight I decided to stop by the At&t store and see what kind of bluetooth phones they had. They had 2, the cheapest was around $200. Keep in mind I paid $40.00 for my t68i. Why are they so expensive? Because they all have digital cameras built in. I DON’T WANT A CAMERA! I want a PHONE with bluetooth. Nothing more, nothing less.

So yeah…I can think of a lot of things I’d rather do with $200.00. I really don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t want a new phone. I wouldn’t mind changing providers but I don’t think my contract with AT&T is up yet. So to sum up AT&T WIRELESS SUCKS!!

It’s been a while since I posted an entry so I thought I’d take a minute and scribble down a few things. I’ve finally finished moving (for the most part). The day I started, I came down with a cold so that knocked me out for a few days. I got better and was planning to start moving some things the next day…that would be the day I came down with some kind of stomach flu bug. Once again, delayed a few days. I think I’m finally passed it all now. I really can’t complain, it’s been a few years since I’ve been really sick so I guess I was just due.

Anyway, that’s basically the sum of the last week and a half. Hopefully the next will be a little better.