Abusive Telemarketer

For at least 6 months, my family has been harassed by one very persistent telemarketer. I have received postcards, letters, and flyers in the mail. My wife and I have received calls on at home, work, and cell phone numbers (home number registered with the Do Not Call Registry). Most recently, they somehow got my son’s cell phone number which was just activated with a brand new number less than a few months ago. The cell phone was intended for limited use by family and for emergencies and we haven’t given it to anyone. That means Verizon Wireless either sold the number to them or they are war dialing known wireless exchanges (most likely the latter).

The amazing thing is that I was not able to get the company’s name until today. They are using an automated system to call and play a message informing you that your automobile warranty will expire (it’s always the 2nd and final notice) and you should contact them to secure a renewal right away. If you listen to the message, you are given an option to talk to a representative or have your number removed from their records. If you choose the second option, the call immediately terminates (and obviously doesn’t remove your number).

Both of my vehicle’s factory warranty expired some time ago and I have an extended warranty through my credit union. I have no need for their services, but I have talked to a rep numerous times to find out who they are and why they won’t stop calling. If you talk to a rep and start to inquire anything about who they are, they hang up on you. If you ask them to remove you from their list, they hang up on you. If you ask to speak to a supervisor, they hang up on you. If you say you want to buy their service they ask for make, model, and VIN number and have no idea who you are otherwise. If they are supposed to be renewing an existing contract, why don’t they ask for my name or other information to lookup my account?

The calls started out weeks apart, then became several times a week, and now they are several times a day to different numbers. I recently had another run in with another telemarketer who wanted to give me a free cruise which followed the same pattern, but after yelling and screaming and threatening lawsuits they have finally stopped calling (so far). The numbers which show up on caller ID are always bogus - if you call them back, it’s a disconnected number.

The rep my wife talked to today apparantly wasn’t informed that he was supposed to hang up on anyone who asks what the company name and/or business location is, because he actually gave it to her after giving him enough fake information to make him think she was really interested. They are National Auto Warranty Services out of St. Lous, MO.

It would appear that National Auto Warranty Service is already in a bit of trouble with the Attorney General of Missouri for calling people on the Do Not Call list, providing misleading and false information, and failing to honor requests not to be called. It would also appear that things were going so well in Missouri that they have now branched out nationwide. You know it’s bad when people leave comments on your company’s job postings.

If they’re sales and marketing tactics aren’t bad enough, I’m sure you won’t find it any surprise that even if you do buy one of their warranties you may have trouble getting your claim paid or cancelling your policy.

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Graduation

(Click on the photo to view the larger version or here to view the album)

The Case of the Missing Professor

As if finishing up my final semester of grad school wasn’t stressful enough, the professor for my Capstone class went missing around the beginning of March. He posted our mid-term exam on March 5th with the due date to be prior to the start of Spring Break a week later.

At the same time, we had two major assignments due - a research paper due on March 31st and a case study on April 16th. Students had plenty of questions about both assignments, but professor wasn’t responding to e-mail or questions in the (online) classroom. He did post an announcement on the 30th that we could have a deadline extension for a week and the Powerpoint in the syllabus was optional and required only for the face to face class. WHAT? Why couldn’t we have known that before we did it?

As the deadline for the next assignment started to get closer, the students were wondering why we hadn’t been assigned a case study to work on or assigned to groups. The assignment was supposed to be a group project and we’re supposed to be assigned a case study to bring up to date. The deadline for the assignment came and went with no word.

Finally, this week we heard from the professor that he was on an emergency business trip to the UK and Ireland and he had no Internet access. That’s a relief that he’s okay and that he’s back now. I just curious how this will all be resolved. As it stands, I have no graded work so far in this class and the final us coming up in a week or so. Am I passing? Am I failing? I don’t know.

I wouldn’t be so worried, but I’m flying out to Maryland for the commencement and I’d really like to know I’m going to walk the stage.

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Twitter Explained

I’m pretty active on Twitter (mostly lurking anyway), but it’s taken me a while to really get into it. For example, tonight we had a large storm come through the area. I’m also a ham radio operator and I’ve been to weather spotter training, though I haven’t volunteered. I prefer to stay home and listen to the other spotters on the ham radio. So, tonight I decided to twitter what the spotters were saying since I knew a few people from the area had started following me on twitter.

It was a really cool experience to interact with other people in the same area and having the same experience. Afterwards, I noticed that I gained several new followers all from this area. Maybe I’ll do more weather spotter twittering in the future.

My biggest challenge has been explaining to friends, family, and co-workers what Twitter is and why they would want to use it. Fortunately, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com has done a better job than I ever could. Have a look.

Beginner’s Quick Start Guide and Tutorial to Using Twitter

Get Infected

Infected Novel

Pinewood Derby

2nd place and voted strangest shape

Originally uploaded by craig010101

Congratulations Brock on the 2nd place finish in the Pack 348 Pinewood Derby! He also won the honor of the most unusual shape!

Being Old in America

This was posted on a forum I read regularly. Sorry, I don’t know the author.

Being Old in America
ALL ABOUT BEING BORN BETWEEN 1930 and 1980….

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drankwhile they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue-cheesedressing, and tuna from a can. They didn’t get tested for Diabetes and there are no Ultrasound photos of us in the womb.

We slept on our tummies, in baby cribs layered with lead-paint. We had no child-proof medicine bottles, doors or cabinets.

We rode in cars as infants and children with no car-seats, booster-seats, seat-belts or air-bags. We got older and rode our bikes without helmets. We even…hitch-hiked! No one drove us toschool in an SUV. A special treat on a warm, summer day was to ride in the back of a pick-up truck. We never fell out.

We drank water from the garden hose, not a plastic bottle. We shared one soft-drink with four friends, and we all drank from the same bottle. No one actually died from this.

We ate white bread and real butter. We drank whole-milk and Koolade made with ‘too much sugar.’ But we weren’t overweight because we got plenty of exercise playing outside. School recess was mandatory, twice a day, and always outdoors.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day — as long as we were home before dark.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We spent hours building our go-carts out of scraps. We’d drive down a hill, and would be surprised to find there were no brakes. We ran into the bushes, and learned how to solve the problem…by ourselves.

We fell out of trees, got bruises and cuts and broken bones…and we lost teeth. There were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate mud-pies and worms. The worms did not live inside us forever.

We kicked-the-can, made up games with an old tennis-ball and a stick. Contrary to what we were told, we never put out someone’s eye.

We had Little League tryouts, and not everyone made the team. Those who weren’t picked, and their parents, learned to ”deal with” the disappointment….And it was unheard of for a parent to bail us out of jail. If we broke the law, they actually sided with the law.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendos, or X-Boxes. We did not have 150 cable-channels, or color-TVs, or VHS, or DVDs. Nor did we have CDs, Walkmans, surround-sound, personal computers, Internet, chat-rooms or…cell-phones. Instead, we went outdoors. We rode our bikes, or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door, sometimes just to talk.

There are more ”things” for children today. But we had the most important thing a child can have. We had the freedom to fail….We are generations of risk-takers, problem-solvers and independent thinkers. We have created an explosion of ideas and innovation. We learned “to deal with it all,” perhaps because as children we didn’t “have it all.”

Thanks and a hat tip to my friend in Hammond, Indiana

Also, I would add, that I survived having my feet xrayed in the shoe store, even thought it was fun!

Merry Christmas

Here’s a little Christmas video I put together with some help of some friends.

Mozy

I’ve always had a huge problem when it came to backing up my personal data - it costs too much to do it right. Every time I buy some “system” for backing up, it’s always woefully inadequate. I’ve purchased tape drives, optical drives, and external hard drives in the past and it’s not possible to keep enough backup media around to ensure you can recover from a bad backup with the rate at which hard drive sizes are growing. Unfortunately, I’ve had an urgent feeling (call it geek’s intuition) the past few months that I really need to backup my data somehow. Enter Mozy, an online backup service for Windows and Mac (beta) acquired by EMC in October 2007.

I found this list of “Alternatives to Mozy” on their website. It’s funny because I’ve done most of them.

• Burn a new CD or DVD every Sunday night and store it at your brother-in-law’s office.
• Pay $200/year for an online backup service that uses old, mediocre software.
• Buy a $200 external hard drive and hope your office doesn’t burn down.
• Do nothing and don’t worry about backup. (We suggest closing your eyes, plugging your ears and repeating “I’m in my happy place, I’m in my happy place.”)
• Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend’s server over his DSL line.

So how does it work? Using the Mozy software, you define what data you would like to backup by directory, file type, last modified, etc. It even comes with a very comprehensive list of backup sets already defined. Once you setup a regular backup schedule, Mozy takes care of the rest. In the background, it will encrypt your data with 448-bit Blowfish encryption and send it to the Mozy servers via 128-bit SSL. You can either use the default Mozy key or supply your own, but if you lose your key your data is lost forever since no one will be able to decrypt it. If you use their key, they will not view the data you backup or sell your information (see privacy policy).

Once Mozy does the initial backup, it works in the background (set it and forget it) to detect files which have changed and sends only the blocks which have changed over the network. This will save storage space on their end and time and bandwidth for you. The good news is that both the CPU time used for encrypting and the network bandwidth can be throttled easily and flexibly. The Mozy software can even backup files which are currently open (locked) and backs up Outlook files (.pst files). Essentially, the whole thing is a block-level continuous incremental backup.

I initially signed up for the free MozyHome service with a 2GB quota just to try it out. It’s perfect if you just had a few files that you wanted to keep safe like your most important documents. However, I quickly found out that this would not be enough since my wife has 26GB just in digital photos she’s taken. The initial selection of files from the default backup sets came up to 89GB (I was able to trim this down to 69GB with some additional filters). Luckily, there is a MozyHome plan which is $4.95/mo per computer (you get 1 month free if you pay a year in advance and 3 months free if you pay two years in advance) for unlimited storage space. Yes, I said unlimited.

So Mozy’s been running in the background for a while and disaster strikes. How do you recover your data? If you’ve just accidentally modified a file you didn’t intend to, you simply right-click on the file in Windows Explorer and select “Restore Previous Version” and you can restore any version within the last 30 days. You can also access the “MozyHome Remote Backup” virtual drive in windows explorer and browse the files on the Mozy servers before restoring. If you need to restore files to a computer which doesn’t have the Mozy software installed, you can use the web-based restore. Finally, if the ultimate disaster strikes and you need a copy of all of your files and don’t want to download them, you can request that your data be burned to DVDs and shipped to you overnight. There is a fee for this service, obviously.

I already have an increased peace of mind knowing that my most critical documents and folders were backed up when I was trying out the 2GB quota. Now that I’ve gone to the unlimited, I will feel even better knowing that all of our family photos, music collection, and home videos will be safely stored with a company that is an expert in data storage.

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Tags: backup, online, emc, mozy, mozyhome, privacy, unlimited

CMG 2007: Day 5 and 6

Things are winding down here at CMG and I took most of Thursday to work on an assignment that is due this weekend. It’s been a fun week despite being sick, but I’m ready to get back home.

Millicomputing: The Coolest Computers and the Flashiest Storage

This talk was presented by Adrian Cockcroft and discussed the idea of using very low-power technology such as that found in cell phones to build a cluster of lots of servers in a very small space. Each individual device use less than a watt (milliwatts) so hundreds of these things can be packed into a very tight space.

The other advantage is that these device would use flash storage which has very good transfer speeds with no seek time and no rotational latency. The only disadvantage is the number of writes are finite so these devices would have to be used for most read-only applications.

In terms of cost, the average device can be purchased for less than $100 and a 6GB high-capacity high-speed SD card only costs about $75. For the cost of a typical full-sized server you can purchased hundreds of these things.

Consolidated Capacity and Performance Reporting

This is my session which is starting in about 30 minutes. Wish me luck!

Then it’s off to the airport….

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Tags: cmg, cmg2007, millicomputing