What is it with help-desks and canned answers?, sometimes I feel like punching right through the screen, reaching the monkey on the other side and smacking it ’til it can’t tap the keyboard no more!

Joking aside, what really annoys me is the fact that they treat me like an idiot, I could be talking about specific details of whatever, and they’ll answer with more or less “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” — It’s outrageous!

Companies should really add a field tn the registration form that reads “I’m a: *select* Dummy, Somehow of a geek, Professional nerd” — And route their tickets accordingly!

Oh well… I should probably ease off the monologues and rants for today.

Now, If only I could find that sysadmin’s email address… That would make me a happy guy, I’ll even forget about the monkeys!

Managed to restore most files from my test server. Had to setup all services back again though. Next time I’ll keep a ghosted harddrive so this doesn’t happen again! — Technology pfft…

My home server just crashed rather badly, this is the system I use to run PHP, MySQL and a few more services, it’s actually the server I use to deploy and test my own scripts and work before going live. I’m not surprised though the machine was almost entirely recycled from junk, except for the main HDD… I also had a few important docs over there and the last svn checkouts from my personal projects which I didn’t get to backup this week

We’ll see if I manage to recover it. And more importantly, setup the development environment and services so I can get back on track!

I wish I could have a proper raid array with an independent file server… Oh well.

Customer Image from DX.

A bluetooth dongle of course! – I got mine from DX about 10 months ago (still working great by the way!)

I thought I could mention it and give out the link for anyone interested in buying it. Mine came with a blue LED (just power, not activity) and overall it’s been working nicely ever since I got it.

I wish I had BlueSoleil or a similar application, since XP’s BT functionality is horrid. What I do on a pinch is type “fsquirt -receive” on the console, which brings up the receive dialog for bluetooth on XP.

Anyway for under $2 US Dollars you can get this nice BT dongle, it only takes a couple weeks for the shipping (which is free by the way) — No third-party drivers needed either on XP. More…

I was looking for a couple tools to install in my cellphone, specifically EE related tools (calculators for wire, capacitance, etc) and they aren’t cheap at all — I wonder why!

In fact I don’t think J2ME is mainstream anymore, or is it?. Seeing as how most iPhone apps go for a few bucks (which I find rather interesting) I can’t believe whoever wrote these tools actually pretends people to buy them just like that!

Theres a common misconception that certain professionals ought to be able to afford certain overpriced tools / services just because they’re, well, professionals. But the truth of the matter is, most EEs here in Argentina end up fixing TVs in a shithole rather than designing your next cellphone at Apple. More…