Home Improvement Tool and Toy Reviews

I am one of those procrastinating people like most. Because of that I  have lacked a backup of my important files. The most important thing on my computer are actually all the photos of the my kids. Since we hardly ever print the photos out if my hard drive got hosed we would loose a ton of memories.

I had looked at online backups several months ago and had decided that I was going to use Carbonite since I had read so many good reviews of them. I even told a coworker about Carbonite and he said he was going to use it also - neither of us did.

Recently I installed Vista and was extremely disappoint so I wanted to try the whole OSx86 thing to get Mac OS X running on my Dell. Because the install deals with messing around with partitions (when dual booting) I did not want to take the chance with all of our pictures. Therefore I restricted myself to having a complete backup somewhere in case things went bad.

The first thing I did was check out what people were saying about Carbonite (blog search rocks!). Some people were not-so-happy with them and had mentions Mozy. Another quick search of Mozy found that people were generally happy with their service.

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I see the RSS feed from digg.com several times a day due the the fact that I have it setup on my Netvibes homepage that is my browser home page.

It is funny to see an interesting article that someone had dugg and then try to go to the actual site itself. Almost 50% of the time the site is down due to all of the traffic that it is getting. This is known as “The digg effect”. The have a service called the digg mirror that usually takes a snapshot of the the site and stores it on a different server in case the original site goes down.

That got me to thinking - what if I got dugg? If that happened there is not doubt in my mind that this site would go down - and quick. The reason for that is that I have budget hosting and it just cannot handle the type of traffic that a dugg site will get.

I have looked around at other hosting companies and have checked out their forums to see if their service is any better. I see the same thing over and over again - web server outages, MySQL outages, DNS issues - it is not pretty. I was looking to switch until I saw this at so many other places.

Isn’t there a good hosting company out there?

Technorati Tags: Web Hosting, Jodo Host, VIP Hosting, Reseller Account

The other day I was working on my home computer and had a message pop up from my antivirus software telling me that it was expired. I had not been too happy with the software I had and had already decided that I wanted something different.

I started searching on the internet for something that I could download right away. I can accross antivirusdownload.com which had Norton Antivirus downloads that you could download and install right away. I wasn’t that sure about which version that I needed for my computer and fortunately they have a comparison chart that gives the specifics of each version.

I you are in the market and/or have expired antivirus software you want to get protected right away.

Technorati Tags: Anitvirus Software, Norton Antivirus, Mcafee

The was a live press conference that stated that James Kim’s wife and children have been found via helicopter.

I guess James left 2 days ago to get help.

The police are currently looking for James.

My prayer are with James.

Technorati Tags: James Kim, Cnet

I have another tip to add to my post - The Ultimate Guide to Doing Nothing but Looking Busy at Work - it is from one of my favorite blogs - Lifehacker.

This is the tip. You take a screen shot of your desktop with the project that you are working on and then make it your desktop background. They when someone comes to your cubical minimize all of your windows and it will look like you where working.

Brilliant!

Here is the original Lifehacker article - Look busy with a fake desktop background.

Technorati Tags: Lifehacker, Looking Busy, Seinfeld, Work

I have tried many blog editors out there to try and make my life easier when it comes to blogging. In fact I did some extensive reviews of

Desktop Blog Editors over at my idano.net blog. When it was all said and done none of them really worked out.

What has ended up working out for me the best is the combination of the Firefox 2.0 and the Performancing Plugin. The reason for this is that Firefox 2.0 has a built in spell checker which I really need. Then the Performancing plugin allows you to post to your blog from a simple interface. This works better for me since I do not have to log into each individual blog that I post to in order to write something.

I definitely recommend it if you blog on a regular basis.

Firefox can be downloaded here.

The Performancing Plugin can be downloaded here.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blog Desktop Editors, Firefox, Performancing, WordPress

It is no secret that my eyes are not getting any better. I was trying to look something up on my laptop last night without my glass and I could just not see the screen clearly. I had to go get my glasses in order to finish what I was trying to do. The thing is that I do not like to wear my glass all the time and am notorious for scratching them.

A while back my wife suggested that I try contacts so the last time I got my eyes checked I asked about them. The eye doctor told me that because of the astigmatism that I have that contacts were not the best option. Then he suggested Lasik surgery. No I have to admit that I am pretty squeamish any time blood, needles, or surgery is mention therefore I shot him down pretty quick. (more…)

So I have been subscribed to Napster for about a month now and I have to say that I am liking it a lot. The main reason for that is the fact that I can look up any music that I want and listen to it. Then if I like it I can download it and put it on my laptop or my MP3 player.

Speaking of the MP3 player it is cool, and small and a really good price. I really haven’t used it yet because most times I am sitting in front of my laptop. Not to worry though it will get plaenty of use. I will actually start stuyding for school next week so I will be listening to it then (no studying for this week since I do not have my book yet.

Anyway, Napster rocks and my MP3 player rocks. I will have to see if I keep the subscription after the 3 months is up though.

Technorati Tags: Napster, MP3, MP3 Player, Music

Speedtv.com is having an all day marathon of their TV show PINKS all day on November 23rd which will be followed by the premiere of PINKS All Out.

The TV PINKS is about guys who literally race each other for pink slips. The video below shows what people go through when they engage in that type of racing.

Below are some Drag Racing Clips from the show.

I have done some racing in my day but I could never imagine racing for a pink slip. Imagine if you lost? I have no idea what I would tell my wife.

*This post sponsored by Speedtv.com.

Technorati Tags: PINKS, SpeedTV, Racing, Drag Racing

When we moved to Texas my wife needed to get a job since she was not able to transfer from her job in California. My wife had never really needed to look for a job before since she was hired by the company she left in Cali right out of school.

To look for a job my wife did what everyone usually does - she went to the usual job boards and submitted here resume. She was instantly slammed with recruiters and bogus job opportunities which got in the way of here finding a real job.

GetTheJob.com eliminates this waisted time of recruiters and spam by becoming a virtual spam filter of the all the popular job boards. GetTheJob.com also engages the “hidden” job market of the 70% of jobs that are not found on the standard job boards.

My wife and I are not looking for new jobs at the moment but when that times comes GetTheJob.com will be the first place we look.

Technorati: Jobs, Job Board, Career, GetTheJob.com