Best T-Shirt Ever

I ran across this the other day and thought it was so funny. I'm a big fan of Mozy! Been using them for a long time to backup my stuff.

Kia ... Again!

Some time ago I posted about the new Kia Optima I bought. In fact, its coming up on 2 years next month since that post. I'm very happy with my Kia. It's performed flawlessly for 2 years. Its not real flashy and certainly not expensive, but its doing a great job and the price was right.

We had another piece of junk we needed to jettison because of continuing maintenance problems and high costs. We shopped around and Kia came through again, offering us a Borrego for about $7,000 less than a comparable Toyota Highlander. I'll be the first to admit that a Kia and Toyota are not in the same class of vehicle (when I say comparable I mean the same basic vehicle size and style), but the Kia gets the job done with a great warranty and for way less money.

Once again, Randy over at Hagerstown Kia treated me right. He gave me top dollar for the Chrysler trade-in (he gave me twice what I was expecting to get from that thing) and handled everything professionally. It was a pleasant experience without a doubt.

Comcast vs Verizon

Well, it's been 7 months since I switched from Verizon DSL to Comcast. As you can read in my original post, Verizon pissed me off so much that I jumped ship for both DSL and voice. In that post I said, "I have to admit that I'm a bit worried about the reliability of Comcast. Verizon was rock solid. Only time will tell if Comcast is as reliable." Well, it's been 7 months tomorrow since I made that statement and I have not had a single glitch in my service. Internet is blazing fast (as you can see over to the right) and voice quality and reliability could not be any better! I'm loving Comcast!

Expedia.com - How bad can it be?

I booked a flight and hotel through Expedia.com several weeks ago to attend a training seminar in Texas. I live in the DC/Baltimore area and we had one of the top 10 snow storms of all time come through here on Saturday, Feb 6, 2010 (just 2 days ago). I was to leave on Sunday around noon to head to TX. On Saturday night I check the American Airlines web site and it said the flight was cancelled. BWI was closed, and from all the reports I could find they would be closed until mid-day Monday! We called AA and asked them what options we had and they said the earliest they could get us out of BWI was Tuesday. Our seminar starts at 8am Monday morning and we were told that if we can't be there on time Monday morning then we can reschedule for another seminar they'll be having in May. AA was kind enough to refund 100% of our money.

I hop onto Expedia's web site and cancel my hotel. They tell me that I will be charged one night's fee for canceling the night before I am to arrive. I said OK and cancelled. The fee is about $89. Then I get to thinking that this kind of sucks, since this is an extraordinary circumstance and my flight was cancelled, airports are all closed, etc, so maybe Expedia would give me a break. I submitted a form on their web site for customer service. I receive an email the next day (Sunday) saying they can't help me via email and I should call to talk to them. So I call today (Monday) and explain whats going on and ask if there is some way I could get the $89 fee waived. She basically told me if I had called them Saturday night that I could have gotten it waived then, but its too late now. They're able to check with the hotel to get it OK'd if I call on the phone. She was saying this fee was a policy of the hotel (which I found out later is not true). She was looking into it for me. Then she hung up on me!

So I'm getting a little pissed now. Its not the $89 really, its the way Expedia is handing my customer service. So I send them an email again, asking if they would please look into this for me because I called as requested and you hung up on me! They reply with a friendly email saying they're sorry they hung up on me but I have to call them again.

I called the hotel in Texas and they were very pleasant. She put me on hold and checked with the general manager and said that she sees my cancellation in the system but can't do anything to help me. The fee is an Expedia charge she said, and I have to talk to Expedia about that. She suggested in the future that I book directly with the hotel chain since that allows them to do a lot more to help me out in these situations. I had called the hotel a few weeks ago before booking (it's a Fairfield by Marriott) and they were just as nice and helpful back then. Must be that southern charm.

So, I called Expedia one more time. I got one of the most useless customer service reps I have ever encountered. I gave her my "case number" and she spent some time reading the case information - probably about 2 minutes - while I waited on the phone. About the time I figured she'd probably read my case info and understood what was going on she begins to explain that she doesn't see a hotel on my itinerary. I explain that's because I cancelled it. She asked for the cancellation number. I told her I was looking at the email that I got confirming my cancellation and there is no cancellation number on it. She says that's impossible - there has to be a cancellation number. I told her there are all kinds of other numbers on the email, but no cancellation number. She says there is no record of my cancellation or the $89 charge. I told her I was done with Expedia and would never be dealing with them again. She asked if there was anything else she could do for me, I said no, and we hung up.

So be aware that Expedia prefers that you work with them over the telephone via voice instead of using their web site. I find this kind of strange since they're described as "an Internet-based travel reservation website" here on Answers.com, they were started by Microsoft and they describe themselves as "the world's leading online travel company". They have a wonderful web site, which is why I always used them for my trips. But this is the last time I'll be using Expedia, Inc for anything. I can get the same hotel and airline rates going just about anywhere else, including directly to the hotel or airline. I always knew this, but used Expedia because it was nice to have all my bookings in one place and their site worked so well.

I am stunned by how bad Expedia's customer service has been. Once I got to the end of this blog entry I decided to search around for other people's experience with Expedia. Boy did I find a bunch of pissed off people! I found ratings for Expedia on Rate It All and was amazed at how similar these people's experience has been to mine. One person said, "Never use this company, their customer service is the worst I have ever come across." Boy, I could not agree more!

Check out these other sites too:

• Victims of Expedia.com
• I hate Expedia.com
• Expedia Unconfirmed Flight Sucks!
• Expedia Dot Scam
• Mouthshut.com - Expedia.com Reviews
• Expedia.com Refusal to assist with emergency travel change

I know you could search for about any company as popular as Expedia on the internet and find lots of people that are pissed, but when you find their experiences mirror your experience then you have to believe there are some problems over at Expedia.com. Good luck!

Free Antivirus... from Microsoft?

Microsoft quietly introduced a free antivirus program this summer - Microsoft Security Essentials. I heard about it at a Microsoft event recently and decided to try it out. It seems to work pretty good. It does the job anyway, and is something you can use if you don't want to pay for an antivirus package.

Why did they quietly release this? I suspect it is just so they don't piss off the 3rd party vendors who make lots of money off antivirus software. Symantec, McAfee and a bunch of others make a killing off antivirus products. But when you think about it, Microsoft really has to provide some level of protection with their OS. They have basic backup software, so why in the world wouldn't they provide antivirus?

By thw way, the backup software in Windows 7 is very nice. I am almost ready to stop using Acronis True Image because the Windows 7 package is so nice.

The Headset Buddy

I have a nice Plantronics headset that I have used on my cell phone for a couple years. It has a 2.5mm plug. My new cell phone has a 3.5mm plug. How do I plug my old headset into my new cell phone? The Headset Buddy has the answer! You would think that finding one of these adapters would be easy. Well think again. The only adapters I could find (and I found hundreds of these things) only support the audio output of the phone; it does not support the mic. These are targeted at MP3 players (iPods, etc). But The Headset Buddy has them, and for a decent price too.

Problem #2 - I have a headset that is use on my PC. It has two plugs on it; one for the mic and one for the head phones. How can I use this on my cell phone? Again, The Headset Buddy has the answer! They offer a Y-adapter to merge the two plugs on the PC headset into a single 2.5mm (or 3.5mm) jack that plugs into the cell phone.

If you're searching for these two products then head on over to The Headset Buddy.

Windows 7

My PC was about 4 years old and was a pretty basic PC from the beginning. I had bumped up its memory so I could run some Virtual Machines but that's about it. I was happy with Windows XP. I actually loaded Vista some time ago, but then went back to XP because of a lot of little problems I had trying to do things, particularly in the area of software development and database work. I have Vista on the family's laptop and it has worked great for that purpose.

This summer I decided that when Windows 7 came out I was going to upgrade the hardware and go to Windows 7. I built a PC, buying all my parts from NewEgg.

• Asus P7P55D motherboard
• Intel Core i7-860 Lynnfield 2.8GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor
• 6gb of memory
• Western Digital 7200RPM "green" hard drive
• I'm not a gamer so I went with a relatively low end video card - GIGABYTE GV-R467ZL-1GI Radeon HD 4670 1GB 128-bit DDR3
• Nice 750w power supply
• Nice aluminum tower case
• Windows 7 64-bit

I'm really happy with this configuration. Setup and install was easy, and Windows 7 has run nice and not caused me any (major) problems. There are some small things about Windows 7 that annoy me, but over all I'm really happy with Windows 7, its stability and speed. I had to upgrade a few apps to work with Windows 7, but most of my 32-bit apps work fine.

Explorer Context Menu - some 32-bit apps don't display their context menu items in the Explorer right-click menu. This drove me nuts when trying to use WinZip 9. I paid for WinZip and thought I would have all future versions, but apparently they stopped offering upgrades to those of us that paid for the product somewhere around v10. Although WinZip 9 installed and ran fine, it didn't display anything in the right-click menu in Explorer (WinZip KB article on this issue). I don't know about you, but that is the only way I ever use WinZip; I almost never open the app. I've used 7-zip before so I looked at their site and they have a 64-bit version for Windows 7. So I loaded it up and I have all the functionality I need, right-click context menu and all. Good-bye WinZip!

Sharing a Printer - I have only one problem right now with Windows 7 that I cannot seem to figure out. Although I have a work around, the problem doesn't make any sense to me. I can't use the Home Group stuff because I don't have any other Windows 7 PCs in the house. So I shared my printers as normal, but my users on Vista could not use them. They could see them, but would get an error when trying to install the printer. I found that I needed to add their account to my Windows 7 PC, with the same password, then it works fine. They can install and use the printer without any problems. This work around is OK, but I don't know why I have to do that. I did all the stuff I could find on the internet; such as turning off the need to have a password to share things on the Windows 7 PC, but nothing worked. It just bugs me that this doesn't work like it's supposed to work and I have to create accounts for every person in the house that uses the Vista laptop and wants to print.

I'm a little worried about the extra (electrical) power that this system requires, since I leave it running 24x7. The Intel i7 uses 95w max, which is much less than many other processors in its class, but that's still a lot of power. So I'm using some of the sleep and hibernate settings to shut down the system in the middle of the night after my nightly backup is done.

I'm happy with my early Christmas present to myself. Now I got the Windows 7 bug, so I guess I'll be buying it for the other PCs in the how too.