UPS Courier (UPS, they did it again)

I am currently waiting for the results of a UPS trace investigation after an NCIX.com order went missing. (I am waiting for a new 320gb 7200rpm hard drive for my laptop) Apparently, it was delivered to the wrong address. When I first checked the UPS tracking info link provided by NCIX, it said the package had been delivered and signed by somebody I had never heard of at this office. (I have most of my packages delivered to me at work.)

They said it was delivered to a different address and they would have the driver pick it up and deliver it here. The next day there was still no package. I called UPS again and they said the shipper would have to initiate a trace to find the package. I called NCIX and they said they would contact UPS to do a trace.

Personally I don't think it will ever show up because 1) the address UPS claimed the package was delivered to doesn't exist as far as I can tell and B) it was delivered to the wrong address as well.

I do understand that UPS, Purolator, FedEx etc, ship millions of packages a day and drivers deliver hundreds of packages a day, but it still sucks. The way I understand it, is that the drivers don't even look at the address on the box, there is a number on the shipping label that tells them the destination, which makes some sense. You don't want to rely on a dozen different people who handle the parcel on it's journey to be able to properly read a shipping address, so it is done once when the package is first received and then on it is identified as a number.

I was hoping to have this for the Christmas break which starts tomorrow, but traces take between 2 and 8 days. We'll see if anything turns up.

Wiring The House for a Network

Shortly after we moved into our current house we finished part of the basement which soon became my office. With my wife's computer upstairs and mine downstairs I could either go wireless on one or more of the computers or run cables. I decided to run cables since I had access to large amounts of Cat5e cables and running the cables wouldn't be particularly hard by using the cold air return as a wire chase.

I don't know of any problems with running network cabling this way. It seemingly should be pretty safe. Since it's cold air returning to the furnace, there won't be any temperature issues and it should be isolated from any other electrical interference. The only difficulty may be getting into and out of the return. I'm not sure if it's really allowed by building codes, but the cable I am using does happen to be plenum rated.

If you are not aware, plenum rated cable is designed to run in the ceilings (plenums) of offices. Normally used to circulate air in a building, plenums should contain cables that are designed not to give off toxic fumes if it were to burn. Of course the wire cost more and personally I don't think it really would make a difference as there are plenty of other materials in the typical building to give off toxic gases other than network cables.

We are looking at buying or building another house hopefully in another 5 years or so and I think I would also go with a wired home. I would go with Cat5E or Cat6 and if needed throw a wireless router onto the network for any laptops.

Home Theatre PC

As with anything I do lately, money is a big issue, so when I wanted to put together a home theatre PC, I decided to do it cheaply. I had most of the parts, so all I needed was a motherboard and RAM. It's a pretty basic system stuffed into a small form factor case. As the rest of the home video equipment is still connected to the TV, I didn't put a TV tuner card or DVD drive in it. I download most of the movies and TV shows from the Internet on my office computer in the basement and copy it to the home theatre PC through the home network. For a front end interface, I'm trying MediaPortal, an open source application. I've just been using it, but so far I highly recommend it. And it's free!

Heart Touching

We just got in a new motherboard here at work to upgrade one of our machines. Looks pretty nice.

I don't know if Asus is trying to change their image, but in addition to Asus motherboards being Rock Solid, they are now also Heart Touching. I thought I was the only one who felt that way when they got a new motherboard.

Network Cabling Tips

At my workplace I run cable off and on when needed. I thought I'd share some tips I've learned throughout the years.

- Document all cabling - Keep diagrams of where cables are being run in walls and ceilings. If you have a CAD layout of your workplace, even better. You should have a spreadsheet of each of the wires, patch panels, switches and hubs so you can quckly track down a particular wire to a specific location and port.

- Label the cables - Invest (I say invest, because it takes time and some money) in labels for the cables themselves. You can buy specialty sheets of laser labels made for cables or a Brother type label maker. In many cases we pull out the cable in a hallway to label them on the floor before running them in a ceiling.

- Cable management - Use zip ties, velcro and whatever else is needed to keep the cables tidy and neat. In the ceilings, use cable hooks or trays. Try not to have any cables laying directly on suspeneded ceiling tiles. Try to keep wires grouped together as long as possible before it branches off to a particular room. By that I mean don't take shortcuts with cable to save a few feet.

- Avoid interference - Try to stay away from light fixtures and wires carrying power. I once heard that if you have to cross over a flourescent light fixture, do it perpendicular to the ballast.

We are still trying to overcome some bad habits that have developed over time and simply because we didn't know better in the early years. Improper cabling techniques will cost time and money, so try to do it right the first time. (or at least from now on)

Bad Batteries - Part 2

I've been shopping around for a second battery for my new camera. I bought a Canon XSi digital SLR. It came with one battery, but I'm trying to get a second one as backup.What I'm finding is that these batteries are very expensive. The original OEM battery for my camera runs about $80 Canadian. Once I found that out, I checked out eBay to see if I could find a cheaper one. There seem to be only a few compatible batteries offered for about one quarter the price of an actual Canon. According to some posts to photography forums, some users have had good luck with third party batteries and others won't touch them. Also on eBay are original OEM Canon batteries for about $15 each. They do say they are Canon, but for that price, who knows. (They are being sold from Hong Kong, but I guess that doesn't matter as counterfeit batteries can come from anywhere.)
Here is a good link with more info on how to spot a fake. Unfortunately you normally can't tell a fake battery until you actuall have it in your hands.
http://www.chrismak.com/ebay_images/counterfeit.htm
Counterfeit batteries have been known to explode in your camera and of course it would not be covered by Canon. I might go with a third party compatible battery and see what happens.

Bubbling Batteries

Our server room at this site is pretty small, so we have only 9 UPSs for battery backup of important servers and equipment. Most are 700 to 1000 VA APC brand UPSs. It seems as if we are constantly changing the batteries for our UPSs. Apparently the life of a sealed battery is 3 years or less. When the replace battery indicator comes on, and the audible alarm sounds every 6 hours or so, we usually find batteries like the ones pictured above. The swelling happens when the battery will no longer take a charge from the UPS and the overcharging generates hydrogen gas which causes the battery case to swell.
It's a little scary looking, but we've never had any kind of 'spillage' as the UPS alarm usually gives us a heads up.

Multimedia Workouts

I was instructed a couple of years ago to get more exercise by my doctor. (You know, the high blood pressure, high cholestorol, excercise if you don't want to die sort of crap.) So we bought a treadmill and I get on a few times per week. It's a pretty decent NordicTrack unit. Working out is pretty boring when you're not doing anything and just looking at a beige wall.
I decided that I wanted to watch TV or videos while I exercised. I have a lot of music videos on the computer as well, so I was going to build a home workout entertainment centre.
I had an older 2 ghz computer with a DVD drive and bought a Hauppauge (I have no idea how to pronouce this.) WinTV PVR-150 tuner card from NCIX.com for about $39 on sale. I hooked it up to a nearby cable TV connection and mounted a 22 inch LCD monitor to the wall. I had first looked at MythTV which is an open source Ubuntu application which works like a PVR. I had tried for several weeks to get MythTV to run without much success even though there was quite a bit of support for it, so I fell back onto good old Windows XP.
The WinTV card came with tuner software to watch and record broadcasts. So I can watch TV, DVDs, video clips (AVI, Mpg, etc.), listen to MP3s and actually do work on the computer if I could figure out how to run and type at the same time.
It's been working pretty well and the time goes by a lot faster and it's almost fun to workout. (Just kidding. It still really sucks.)

Computers and Viruses (of the Swine kind)

Our IT department, of which I am a member, had a pandemic meeting this morning. This is obviously due to the H1N1 virus (swine flu) which is going around. At our head office location, a city of about 200,000, there have only been 5 cases of H1N1 found.
What does H1N1 have to do with computers? Not much really. The meeting was just about how to protect ourselves from the virus and procedures to follow if we do think we have it. We'll be getting a couple bottles of Purell (waterless disenfectant) anyways.
I do come in direct contact with quite a few people during the course of the day, (and many more indirectly through their contact with computer keyboards that I touch). At this point it's unlikely we have very much to worry about in regards to this flu, athough experts say computer computer keyboards carry quite a few nasty bugs.

Going green isn't easy

At work we've been struggling with how to dispose of our old computer equipment. (I mean really old stuff that we wouldn't even be able to donate) These are mainly 286 level computers. (Don't ask why we even still have these - If you're a packrat like me, you understand) During the past 15 or so years, we've been leasing computers so disposal wasn't a problem as they would have to be returned to the company at the end of the lease.
While cleaning out the back of one of the storage rooms, we've decided to be environmentally friendly and not just toss the old stuff in the compactor.
We checked with the local government to see where we could drop our load of computers. They told us to just put it out with the garbage. The city's E-Waste recycling program has been 'temporarily suspended due to declining markets'. I guess there isn't enough profit in saving the environment at the current time. A call to the Salvation Army Thrift Store came up empty as well. We were told only stores in larger cities will take old equipment. (Unless it is a working system that they can sell.) The local Staples store will, for a limited time, take your old computer. (But, only 3 computers per day.) We currently have about thirty or more systems to get rid of. "Say, weren't you guys here yesterday, and the day before?"
So it appears that unless you live in a larger city, (more than 60,000) you may be out of luck when it comes to going green.

Never enough disk space

Throughout the year I will be watching the prices of hard drives, particularly 2 terabyte drives for my home computer. I currently have a pair of Samsung 1 TB SATA drives in a RAID 1 array. I am using the the RAID controller built into my ASUS M2N-E motherboard, but may look into a better controller.

Currently 2 terabyte drives are about $350 Canadian. I paid just about $100 each for my 1 TB drives late last year. We'll see how long it takes for the 2 TB drive to get down to $100. Hopefully by early 2010. 1.5 TB drives are currently about $150 and seem to be steady for the moment.

I'm pretty paranoid about losing my data, so in addition to the RAID array, I have another large internal drive, as well as an external drive for backup.

Next time I have to rebuild my system, I'll make a Ghost image of the basic drive (less programs and data) and store it on DVD or portable drive. I use Symantec Ghost Suite 2 at work and it seems to work great with network or local backups.

Getting back to hard drives, the worst part is that these new drives seem to generate a ton of heat. I bought a pair of Noctua 120mm case fans to keep my system cool. This is in addition to the power supply fan, the CPU heat sink fan and the graphics card fan. The Noctua fans at $20 each weren't cheap, but were some of the best around. All of my fans were purchased with noise level in mind. Maybe one day when I have more time and money, I'll try to build a really quiet computer.

GPS shopping

I've been shopping around for a new GPS recently. We had bought one a year ago, similar to the one pictured above. A very nice LG unit. Large screen, all the bells and whistles. We had it for about two weeks before returning it. It was on sale at Sears. The problem with it was that LG was no longer updating any of the maps for that unit. I found this out as we were planning a trip to Niagara Falls. While mapping the route through Hamilton, Ontario, one particular highway was not shown. I knew the highway was less than a year old, and checking the LG website, I found out that updated maps were not going to be made for my particular model.
We used the GPS on the trip, and as we drove down the new highway, the GPS showed us offroading through hills and valleys constantly telling us to turn towards the nearest road. The next GPS we buy will be updateable and probably a large name brand like Garmin or TomTom. I'll keep you updated.

Eneloop Slow Discharge Batteries

A week ago I picked up these batteries from Costco (I stole this pic from the web). They are Sanyo Eneloop Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) rechargable batteries. The package was $39 Canadian for 4 AA, 4 AAA a home charger and car adapter. I also picked up extra batteries (another set of AAs and C and D adapters). We'll be going through a ton of batteries in the near future as we picked up a Nintento Wii and I need some for my camera equipment as well.

The Eneloop are supposed to keep their charge even when stored for long periods of time. Sanyo claim the batteries will lose 15% of their charge in a year, compared to 1% per day for other similar batteries. I'll be testing that as I have a set in my camera flash which I seldom use. It seemed to be a good deal and we may get more for our AV remotes around the house.

Where to get computer stuff

Since I mentioned my newest toy. I should say I bought it at a Tigerdirect store in Toronto. They have five stores in the Toronto area with a lot of cool computer stuff. If you're in the Toronto area, look them up at www.tigerdirect.ca. I've also purchased from their website a few times for work. We get a good deal because we're a large company.

For the the best mail order prices in Canada, I buy from either NCIX, www.ncix.com based in British Columbia, or their sister company (more like the same company) DirectCanada, www.directcanada.com. Both have great deals and weekly specials. Since I don't live in BC, I save on the provincial sales tax, and sometimes I think they ship from their Ontario warehouse.

That being said, I also try to shop at my local stores when the price for an item is anywhere in the neighborhood of the mail order stores. I have been trying harder lately to support the local stores with the economy in the dumper.

Not quite digital TV

Okay, I'm probably the only one left that doesn't have a nice large LCD/Plasma digital TV. Even my parents have one. Money's is a little tight this year, so I bought a pc to tv converter from a TigerDirect store.

This is a KWorld PC to TV convertor which connects from a pc/laptop video port to the video port of an analog tv. Although the maximum resoultion was 1024 x 768, it worked fine and the AVI movie I downloaded from the internet looked good on our old 27" CRT TV. It cost about $56 Canadian. I did have to buy an adapter that went from the headphone jack of the laptop to the audio cables (not included) that went to the TV. Until we get a nice digital TV and a home theatre PC, this is a good temporary fix for playing downloaded videos.

Pet Peeve of the day

From time to time we run network cable around the building. It's normally Cat5e Plenum rated. This is 8 conductor specially coated cable (for the Plenum-the airspace in a building used for air circulation) This is supposed to give off less toxic gases when burned.

Anyhoo, the last couple of boxes of cable were from our head office and to put ends on a wire or to punch it down, you need to strip off an inch or so of the insulation and untwist the 4 pairs of wires. (green, green stripe, blue, blue stripe, orange, orange stripe, brown, brown stripe) Well these last boxes (AMP brand), you could hardly tell the striped wire from the non striped. It's very easy to lose track of your wires if they colors are very close. More than once, I've had to cut a new end to find the correct pairs.

This picture above is from a good wire brand.

Oh yeah, and another thing since I'm venting is that this wire doesn't have any length marked on it. By this I mean, one end doesn't have 0 feet and the other end 1000 feet. You need to keep track of how much wire you pull off the roll and figure out how much is left for the next job. Come on, how easy would that be to do at the factory? Thanks for listening.

Distributed Computing for a Cure

For over a year now I've been using my free CPU time to help to find cures for diseases. Stanford University is studying protein folding and misfolding. (Don't ask me what it is -0 the link below explains it.)
Using Distributed Computing, data can be processed on multiple computers over the internet. The Folding@home project uses thousands of volunteers (actually their stats show over one million 'donators')to process data which would otherwise require supercomputers.

The 'folding' program running on my computer runs in the background using free CPU cycles when I'm not doing anything else. (Which is often. Just kidding)

Check out their site to see how you can help their research.
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Main

New Toy of the Week

This week's new toy is the EZ-Swap hard drive enclosure. What you get is a portable enclosure for a 2.5" SATA hard drive and a 3.5"/5.25" drive bay for your computer along with necessary cables and carrying case.

You can use the drive by itself connected with a data cable to any computer's USB port. There is a power cable (another USB port is required), but I have found that this is not needed, (with an 80 gb drive at least) as there seems to be enough power from the USB data cable.

If you mount the drive bay in a desktop computer, you now have a hot swappable hard drive. We use it around the office for quick re-imaging of computers.

Very handy, compact and fast.

Network Cable nightmare

Found this picture on my hard drive. This is the back of a set of server /patch panel racks. It looks real, but how could any company ever let it get this bad. Hopefully it's a 'before' shot.

Athlon64 x2 6000+ upgrade

Just recently upgraded my home computer. Nothing major since I'm on a budget. Upgraded to a Athlon64 x2 6000+ (dual core 3 gigahertz). According to Asus PCProbe, the CPU was running very hot. (about 50-60 degrees Celcuis) The stock heatsink should have been okay, (but wasn't) so I've had to upgrade to a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme heatsink with a Scythe 120mm fan strapped to it and temps are now in the 40s. Picture to follow.

Found this picture from the HardOCP website. Good site for computer hardware, games etc. It shows cable management trays with a ton of cables running through it. It looks like phone cables. Wild.

Burning Movies to DVD - Episode I

Okay, I downloaded some movies from the internet. (won't say where or what kind-;) ) and I am trying to burn them to DVDs.

The downloaded files are MKV format videos. Play fine on the PC once I got the correct CODEC. (I am using the CCCP codec pack currently) I'm still working on it, but here are the steps.
1. Got MKV playable clip on PC
2. Nero can't use MKV files to make a DVD
3. Tried AVI2DVD. No good - errors I couldn't resolve. (error 57 - tempsox.wav)
4. Tried to use VirtualDubMod to convert to AVI to put on a DVD - no good, errors
(yes, after the error message I spent a good deal of time searching the internet for solutions)
5. Now trying AllToAvi program. I got the MKV converted to to an AVI. Plays but no sound. I think all the problems have been CODEC issues I cannot resolve.
6. keep trying things. Stay tuned

Woo Hoo! First Blog!

Okay, here it is, my first blog.

I've been in the IT field for some 23 years now and this is my first foray into the world of blogging. (either reading or creating) Why am I doing this now? Not sure. I guess I want to share some of my projects, problems and solutions with others. (If anybody manages to find this blog.)

I won't post too much info on my personal life on the internet (and you shouldn't either!), except to say that I've been in the IT (information technology) field for 23 years (from programming to network admin and finally now in more or less a help desk role)

I'll try to keep updated every few days, but who knows, maybe I'll tire of this and this may be my first and only post. We'll see.