I used to be big on using pirated software.  But I work in the computer industry.  I don’t want people pirating my work.  And so I’m 100% legal software these days.  But now I feel like I am being pushed back to piracy again.

I build my own computers.  And when I built my last one, I purchased a legal OEM copy of Windows 7.  A little while ago, I zotzed out my motherboard by doing something so stupid that I’m not going to tell you about it.  Take it as played that I did something really stupid. It short-circuited several of the ports on the board.  For awhile I was doing work-arounds but this past week I got tired of that and went out and bought a new motherboard.

One day after getting the system up and running, I get a message on screen that I need to reactivate my software.  Okay.  I type in the license key.  After a few minutes, back to screen 1.  So I type it in again.  Again, nothing.  So I select the option for using the automated phone system for activation.  Then the screen spits out at me nine six-digit numbers.

I call the phone number.  I punch in all 54 numbers.  I get a message telling me that the software has previously been activated and I get switched to a person.  I explain the situation to the person and, unfortunately, I was honest.  She tells me that since I have the OEM version and since I switched motherboards and since the motherboard is a different brand and model from the previous motherboard, I am screwed.

I say to her, as calmly as I can, that it’s the same CPU, same memory chips, same hard disk, same case, same user.  She says maybe they can make a “special case” for me.  I have to email in my information including, get this, a photo of the label with the product key.  They will get back to me in one day to let me know if they can make a “special case” for me.

Let’s see what happens next …

UPDATE:

Yes, I know, it’s just a coincidence, but just minutes after sending my email to Microsoft, I received this in my inbox:  ”Your email has been awarded Ł750,000 for being a regular user from microsoft/msn PROMO 2011 in London.”

If only life really worked that way!

UPDATE UPDATE

So this morning Microsoft emailed me a new activation key.  But this whole experience just goes to show how customer unfocused Microsoft is.  Probably a bit more on this later, might do a post on the Steve Jobs book soon since I’ll finish it today.

I’m a member of the Hong Kong Computer Society though sometimes for the life of me I can’t figure out why.   They almost never have any event that I care to join.

Every email they send has this footer:

“Best view with IE6.0″   Really?  Aside from the grammatical error, IE 6?  What year is this?  How long has even Microsoft been telling people to get the hell off IE 6 already?

Why is this there?  The answer is probably simple.  No one cares.  No one looks at it.  Who cares if it’s wrong?

Anyway, the latest mailing offers free tickets to the Hong Kong Computer & Communications Festival 2011, to be held from August 19th through 22nd at the Convention Centre.

And since it says “40 complimentary tickets” I figured I’d better click now and decide later if I intend to go.  So I click, I register, and I check my email for the confirmation, which comes from the CHKCI.

CHKCI is “The Chamber of H.K. Computer Industry.”    Well, first off, these nimrods don’t know how to set up a domain so that you don’t need to type the “www”.  ”chkci.org.hk” doesn’t resolve.  What year is this?  These are computer professionals?

And here’s the header on the confirmation email they sent to me.

They got the date of their own event wrong!  The message header says it’s 19 July to 22 July.  Who makes mistakes like that?  Gets the entire month wrong?

Here’s a clip from their web site:

Can you see the tiny print on the bottom?  It reads:

Notice:  My friends email me all the time with ideas for improving Gmail.

It’s not a link or anything, it’s just text on the screen.  What the bloody hell is that?  I’m guessing it’s a placeholder someone put there when the site was first set up and no one ever looked closely enough to see that it needed updating.

Last and least (at least for now), when you select English from their menu bar, here’s what the body of their home page looks like after it reloads:

Just splendid.  I’m so rushing to pay the HK$1,800 annual dues for this esteemed group.

I’m in need of a new laptop.  Maybe “want” more than “need” but even so ….

Despite my love for iOS devices, I remain something of a Windows person, even though I’m a bit reticent to admit that.  The few times I’ve “switched” to Mac in the past were never quite comfortable experiences for me.  But the times have changed – so much of what I do on a computer now is in a browser window that the OS starts to pale into insignificance.  Except that Mac manages memory better than Windows.  And I love the multi-touch gestures on the Mac trackpad.  (No, I’m not interested in Linux.)   I don’t see any serious hardware competition on the PC side for Macs at the moment.  Samsung is about to come out with a light weight notebook that will be serious competition for the MacBook Air but the base price will be US$1,700.

I do have a 2 year old MacBook (not Pro).  A year ago I gave it to my gf and I think if I tried to get it back I’d risk losing a hand (or worse).

So the question then becomes what to buy.  MacBook Pro – heavier duty specs than the Air but how heavy duty do I need to get?  I’m not a gamer, I’m not crunching huge spreadsheets, I’m not writing code.  The Pro line is rumored to be receiving an update next month, to Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processor.  Nice.

But weight is really important to me.  As in LIGHT weight.  That would seem to indicate the Air is a better choice for me than the Pro.  But which Air?  For size and weight, obviously the 11 inch model is the winner.  But the 11 inch only comes with a 1.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor – this can be upgraded to a 1.6 GHz if one chooses the 11 inch model with the 256 gig solid state drive.  The base on the 13 inch is a  1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, which seems like it ought to be noticeably better.   (That in turn is upgradeable to a 2.13 GHz processor, again only if you get the 256 gig SSD.)   Base memory is 2 gigs of RAM but you can get a unit with 4 gigs.

What am I going to run on it?  A browser.  iTunes.  MS Office.  Maybe Drupal.  Adobe Lightroom – that’s the one that has me concerned.  How does it perform on a 1.86 processor?  Also planning to tether my DSLR to the laptop.  Nikon makes great software for that and there’s even a third party app that allows you to connect via iPhone or iPad once you’re tethered to the laptop.

Yesterday I actually dropped into a couple of places in Wanchai.  None of them had the Air in stock with 4 gigs of RAM; one shop told me there’s a two week waiting period at the moment.   I did think about doing some shopping in Central or Causeway Bay or Mong Kok today but the weather’s just too crappy.   Monday, Monday ….

Hmmm, just found this:  ”Working with large RAW files on the ’Air is definitely not recommended.”   Yikes.

Backblaze is telling me that it “may not be for you.”  Even after excluding all my mp3 and avi files and excluding most of my external drives, it’s still looking to back up 643 gig.  It reports that it will need 132 days to finish the initial back up.   Yes, I’ve moved the slider on the control panel to the fastest setting.   I just did their bandwidth test and my upload speed is 0.4 mbps per day, which certainly would explain things.  Download speed is 3 mbps – I have an 8 mbps connection, which I believe is the fastest one can get where I live – and then there is the issue of physical distance from their servers in the US, latency, etc.

So should I move to get faster internet?  On HK island, in some places, you can get a 1 gig line for US$26 per month.  That’s almost ludicrously cheap and only possible because the density of HK Island (and presumably most of Kowloon?) makes it relatively inexpensive to wire fiber optic.

I’m thinking about moving anyway.  The long and expensive commute, all the times I go out after work and can only drink coke because I’ve got the car, the notion of wanting to try some new restaurants but not wanting to drive an hour each way (or spend HK$200 each way for taxis) just for dinner isn’t appealing, won’t need a car if I’m in a more urban area and so on.  Not to mention the fact that any time my maid needs to go grocery shopping, I have to pay for taxis.  Any time my gf is going out without me, she’s gotta pay for taxis.

Big problem I suppose is my two dogs.  If I move to the concrete jungle, there’s nowhere green to walk them, nowhere they can run off leash, unless I’m spending time on the weekends to take them to places like Sai Kung.

And then there’s the issue of wanting what I consider to be a decent sized flat and not a shoebox but stuck on a limited budget.  ”Mid Levels West” seems to have some stuff that would be a fit.  Maybe Tin Hau or thereabouts.  And a friend who just moved to Prince Edward Road on the Mong Kok/Kowloon City border tells me he’s got 1690 square feet for $31k per month.  I like the proximity to Mong Kok, though it’s still quite a ways over to Cyberport.

Wish that Kennedy Town worked for me, but it seems the only flats there over 900 square feet are in The Belchers and go for $40k per month.  And I may be a belcher but do I want to live in a place with that name?   Pok Fu Lam is very expensive, very close to the office but isolated from everything else.

Fortunately I have some time to think about this.  I just hope that rents haven’t shot up another 20% while I’m trying to make up my mind.

Thanks to all for the suggestions posted here and on Twitter.  Right now Backblaze is looking like the one I’m going to try first.  US$5 per month for unlimited storage definitely fits into my budget.

Which leads me to wonder … if I’m backing up everything to the cloud, will I still need to have 5 RAID drives?  Do I need to have a local back-up if I’ve got a cloud one?  There is the thought that if I convert all my RAID1 drives to RAID0, I’m going to be left with enough spare disk space to last me forever … or at least till next year.

…. and you always learn the lesson the hard way.

Point 1:  The electricity supply in Hong Kong village houses is somewhat antiquated.  Any time there’s a thunder storm and lightning comes down out of the sky somewhere in the immediate vicinity, the main circuit breaker pops and my house loses all electricity.  The circuit breaker is outside the house and of course it only needs to be reset when the rain is coming down in buckets.  For various reasons, it’s not always possible for me to shut my computer down when a storm is coming and I know this could happen.  Or I suppose I could bring in some electrical contractor to redo the wiring or to modernize this stuff.  Except that I only rent the joint and I expect to be gone next year and I know my landlord wouldn’t pay for it.

Point 2:  I keep my important data on RAID 1 drives – two identical drives, one mirroring the other.  One drive fails, the other is okay and you don’t lose anything.  Or so you are told.

So, thunder storm.  Power goes out.  Power gets switched back on and one of my RAID boxes, 750 gig X 2 drives by Buffalo, indicates that drive 1 ain’t doing so well.  I switch off the box, switch it back on and it starts rebuilding drive 1.  A few hours later, it all seems good.  Except it wasn’t.

Some of the files are missing.  And some are now just 0 bytes.  I keep two kinds of data on this drive – my iTunes collection and all of my photos.  I start going through iTunes – I start at “A,” checking every file to see which ones are gone and which ones are still there but are now “nothing.”   Of course I can’t finish this in one sitting because I have almost 45,000 songs sitting in iTunes.  And when I come back the next day, some of the files that were okay the day before are now also screwed.  Some of the files that I re-added the day before are gone again.

The problem would seem to be that the power surge (and yes, I do have this plugged into a surge protector, albeit a cheap one) has damaged the drive controller.  Which then screws up the directories and file systems.  And the files are fucked.

I got a new RAID box, copied over everything copy-able from the old drive.  I’ll smash open the Buffalo box, rescue the two hard disks (which I can reformat and reuse) and toss the box.

The iTunes stuff can all be restored – it’s just really freaking time consuming.

The photos?  Actually, I’m too scared to look right now.  I don’t want to think about what might have been lost – and 95% of them can’t be recovered if they’re gone.

So, now … back-ups on two separate physical devices?  Off-site storage?  Seems like “the cloud” is a possible answer but since I’m talking at least 100 gig here, I don’t know if there’s any solution that falls within my meager budget.  Suggestions?  Recommendations?

Sigh.

I tagged so many items today in Google Reader that I wanted to share but tonight I just don’t have the time.  Sorry.  I will mention briefly that if you have an iPhone or iPad, Electronic Arts is having a huge sale of their iPhone games (some are “iPad compatible”) in the US iTunes store (don’t know about other stores, you can check).   Check this link here for a list of games – some of them are regularly up to US$6.99 and all the ones on the list are on sale for US$0.99 – for 48 hours only.

The Samsung repair guy came to the house today – almost exactly at the promised time.  He replaced the power board and the inverter on the monitor – no charge.   So that’s all good.

And have just installed the Gigabyte Nvidia graphics card and that seems to be working fine and dandy too.  1 gig of RAM for video, HDMI output on the back, all okay so far.  Probably won’t have a chance to test with Lightroom till the weekend.

So now some stuff is working – but the car goes back to the repair shop on Friday for them to hopefully fix the things they couldn’t get to last time.

And just wanna mention that Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden have an album out, just the two of them, called Jasmine.  It’s a selection of somewhat lesser-known pop tunes from the 30s and 40s (I think).  Recorded in Jarrett’s home studio 3 years ago, it is just beautiful.  Nothing showy, nothing fancy – and yes, you have to put up with Jarrett’s noises while he plays – piano and bass, laid back, solos in service to the songs, their love of the material and their respect for each other comes through loud and clear.   In the liner notes, Jarrett advises you to put this on late at night, in the dark, with someone you love.  Sounds like a plan.

Well, the iPhone iOS4 upgrade went smoothly, though I haven’t had a chance to try much out on it yet.  A minor quibble:  your wallpaper now shows up on home screen as well as the lock screen but, unlike the iPad, you don’t have the option of choosing a different image for each.  The image that works so well on my lock screen (a pic of my gf, naturally) is extremely distracting sitting behind all the app icons.   If you’ve got an iPhone, have you upgraded yet?  If so, any problems?  What have you noticed so far?

So now do I feel confident enough to upgrade my blog to WordPress 3.0?  Maybe later today, maybe this weekend.  Any of my readers-with-blogs do this upgrade yet?  Anything to share?

The upgrade on my video card did NOT go well.  I chose a Gigabyte card using the ATI chipset.  Removed the old card, installed the drivers and my PC refused to boot (under XP, didn’t try with Win7).  It would either reboot halfway through booting or do a memory dump.  Have gone back to the old card for now and will return this to the shop and probably swap out for an Nvidia card.  If it’s good enough for Macs, I assume it’s good enough for me.  I don’t play video games on my PC so I don’t need top of the line here, just something good enough for the photo stuff I do.

Meanwhile, my monitor has gone kerblooey.  Samsung 24 inch monitor, slightly under 2 years old.  It may be the power supply.  I went to the Samsung HK web site to look for the address for their service center.  No address, just a phone number.  I called and it turns out they will come to me.  How long will I have to wait?  They can come tomorrow!  What will it cost?  Even though the monitor is 21 months old, it’s still under warranty.

I don’t really want to buy a new monitor.  At this point, with all the PC problems I’m having, if I have to replace the monitor I’m really on the verge of just dumping the whole thing and switching to a Mac.  But even though I know that the PC-only software I’ve got will mostly run *okay* using something like Parallels or VMWare, there’s the heavy $$$ stuff that I’d want to run natively – in particular Photoshop and Lightroom.  I can’t imagine that running PC versions of that on a Mac under Parallels would be recommended and I don’t particularly want to go out and pay to upgrade to the new versions at the moment (even though I’m one version back on each of them).

Then again, a 24 inch Dell with IPS is going for $3,600.  The 27 inch with a VA panel is $5,500.  (Someone told me IPS is better than VA?)  But as long as the Samsung remains under warranty, let’s see if it can be salvaged.

More later ….

Well, it’s June 21, first day of summer, and Apple is supposed to be releasing the latest version of their iPhone OS today.  It’s a few days in advance of the release of the iPhone 4, presumably to take some load off their servers now.  It’s 7:30 AM in the US, east coast time, but as of now the download’s not available (I’m on the US iTunes store).

I’m also seriously thinking about an iMac.  I don’t think I need the power of the Mac Pro, though the upgrade-ability of certain components inside the box is definitely appealing to me.  So a 27 inch iMac – though the choices of Intel Core 2 Duo or or a pair of Intel i5?  While the Mac Pro has the Intel Xeon Nehalem chip.  Also the Mac Pro comes with an 18X SuperDrive vs. the 8X drive.  Decisions, decisions … the fact that the Mac Pro is double the price makes me stop and think … and stop.  At least for now.

7:30.  Still no update.  Is it available in the HK iTunes store yet?

I’ve given my gf my MacBook and gave her her first lesson on it just now.

Why a MacBook?  That one’s easy.  I’ve got one.  My company provides me with a laptop and, considering I already have an iPhone, an iPad and a Kindle, I won’t be using this any more.   It’s 18 months old and not a “pro” so I’m assuming that the pleasure she will get from using this will far outweigh the few thousand bucks I might receive from selling it off.

Of course in a first lesson one doesn’t want to present an overwhelming amount of information.   So an overall introduction and then digging into the browser (in this case Chrome).  Lesson #2 will have to be what she’ll find if she goes to an internet cafe – which means the differences between Mac and Windows, differences between browsers and so on.

It was one of those moments of clarity though.  Everything she will do on a computer, she will do in a browser.  (At least for the foreseeable future.)  And so, in essence, the computer’s OS no longer matters.   Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever – all she needs to know is how to turn it on and figure out how to launch whatever browser is installed.

Even if they last for another 50 or 100 years (which they probably will, especially if they get rid of Ballmer), Microsoft has truly lost one of the Wars That Mattered.

(Although, sigh, my business laptop remains a Windows computer.  Because we’re using Microsoft Project.  And while I will dig into this soon, I have no idea what it’s like to run Project on a Mac via VMWare or other software and don’t really have the time to learn.)

As for the title, at first I thought about posting this on Facebook or Twitter (in much shorter form, obviously).  I couldn’t decide where.  And then asked myself, why post this at all?  Thinking about the “why” gave me almost all of the content above excluding the first sentence.  And this time, that made the blog the obvious choice.   Sometimes you need more than 140 words.  Some of you may still be asking “why?” but I can live with that.   I promise there won’t be daily updates on this but if I come home in three days and find her coding Java, I’ll be sure to let you know.

And now?  A well-earned nap while she’s busy finding out how much more one can do on Facebook through a browser as opposed to their iPhone app.