Always fully diagnose the problem...

My replacement hard drive arrived today, and I opened the case on my Mac Pro, pulled out the drive sled, screwed the drive on, and tossed it back in... I opened up Disk Utility since I wasn't getting the usual pop-up to initialize the disk, and I see what I should have seen last week...


That's right... figuring out which hard drive had failed was as simple as loading up Disk Utility and having it stare me in the face. What I still don't understand, though, is the S.M.A.R.T. status of that drive still checks out as "verified" and does not throw up an alert. Why is this? This SMARTReporter app in my menubar isn't quite so useful if it doesn't alert me of something like this, now is it?
Well... at least now I know my RAID is secure and does what I wanted it to do- protect my home folder in case a drive fails by having a mirrored copy of it. I placed an order for a replacement 1TB drive and hopefully that'll be here in the next day or so and I can get this all behind me once and for all...

Failing Hard Drive...

On Thursday afternoon while working, I noticed that I heard a few short instances of a slight clicking sound coming from my computer. Having heard the "click of death" from hard drives before, this sounded eerily familiar, but not quite the same. Frighteningly, at the same moment, I noticed the active application (at this time, Adium) froze and I received the beach ball of death. Wondering if it was just Adium acting up, I tabbed over to Firefox, but received the same result... and the same with Finder. Crap... This lasted maybe around 10 seconds or so, and then the beach ball went away and everything caught back up. This happened twice over the period of about an hour. I checked the S.M.A.R.T. status of my internal drives and all checked out, but I was still concerned. This is my primary computer and since I work from home, it would be enormously inconvenient to have the system down.

For the sake of completeness, this is a Mac Pro. I've had it for about a year and a half with no hardware issues at all. It includes the default 250GB drive that came with the machine, which holds the operating system and my applications folder. Additionally, I have two 1TB drives in a mirrored RAID that holds my home directory- this includes all of my preference files, documents, music, etc. I have a few external drives for data and Apple's Time Machine backup utility, but they're not important here. I'm led to believe that it's the primary boot drive that's the problem, as when I heard the clicking, applications froze. I wasn't actively accessing data from my home directory, so I don't see a reason why the RAID drives would be at fault.

My first priority right now is replacing the drive before it's too late. I want as little downtime as possible, because as I mentioned, I need the system to work.. and going from a machine with multiple monitors to a small laptop screen is inconvenient, to make a gross understatement. I immediately began price checking hard drives to see what I should get as a replacement. I tend to prefer Seagate simply for their awesome warranty- 5 years. That's the longest available for any hard drive manufacturer, and I really like knowing I should be able to get it replaced if it fails within 5 years. Also, I mentioned having a RAID... the two drives in the RAID are Seagate, and they've been performing wonderfully.

Since my computer is running 24/7, I want a drive that not only is covered, but will be resilient and not break down due to continuous use. Seagate has what they call to be an enterprise-class drive, the Barracuda ES series. This is what I used in my RAID, and I think it's what I would prefer for my new boot drive. The drive Apple put in was a standard Seagate (kind of disturbing, but we'll see if I can get it RMA'd) with an 8MB cache. The ES drives have a 32MB cache, which should be quite an improvement. I was going to go with 250GB since that's plenty for a boot drive, and the cheapest I found at the time was $87 shipped. I was about to place my order, when I decided to check the prices on other capacities... what I found was quite interesting. I could double my capacity to 500GB for the same-class hard drive for only $13 more. Wow... why WOULDN'T I do that? Sure I'm looking to spend the least amount of money possible, but this is quite a bargain when you consider what you're getting... plus I'm a firm believer that you can never have too much hard drive space. So within a couple hours my 500GB hard drive was ordered and I expect it to be here early to mid next week.

Once I get the drive I'll get it swapped out and hopefully all will be well. I haven't witnessed anymore problems since Thursday, but I'm not about to take a chance... if the drive turns out to be fine, then at least I'll have a spare. Next week I'll post an update with my procedure involved in making the hard drive replacement as painless as possible. Assuming all goes to plan, this will be incredibly quick and simple and my downtime should only be as long as the length of time it takes for a system reboot.

iPhone Case Review: CapsuleRebel

As you may or may not know from a previous dealnews podcast, I'm the proud owner of an iPhone 3G. Yes, I stood in line on launch day to obtain it, as did a good 250-300 other people at my "local" Apple store ("local" because it's an hour away). To keep this piece of technology in pristine condition, many people opt for a case to put on it so if it falls it won't scuff or break. Me, on the other hand... I like the feel of the iPhone without anything on it, and I don't want to cover it up. However, I wasn't totally opposed to the idea of a case, and when I saw SwitchEasy's CapsuleRebel, I finally found a case that I thought looked fairly cool and that I could live with. In particular, the "Arctic" color, which was supposed to be mostly transparent so you could see the iPhone inside. As we'll find out, this wasn't really the case.
So anyway I bought it, and while overall I do really like it, it's still not for me.... Here's why...


First of all, when I placed my order, the next day I was refunded my money (via PayPal) and told that this case was not in stock yet in the US and was held up in customs in Canada. They asked me to replace my order 3 days later when it would be in. This seemed odd... can't a company keep track of what orders they have and which haven't been fulfilled yet instead of requiring me to stay abrupt on their availability?

Hmm... anyway, I did as they requested and placed the order again a few days later on a Thursday, albeit very hesitantly because I had been given more time to think twice on the purchase I was unsure about to begin with. When I placed my order, the image to the left is what was depicted on their website as what this color choice looked like on a black iPhone 3G (which is what I have). Over the weekend, however, I noticed that they updated their product page with the image to the right (click to enlarge to see the text at the bottom). This was quite shocking as you can imagine. I've gone from believing I'll have a transparent case to seeing that it'll in fact look more silver in color in reality. Well, that's not what I ordered, now is it... I've heard really good things about them having great customer service, however, so I decided to let it go on and be shipped to me and see what I thought.

I received it the following Monday and noticed right off that it did in fact have a sort of silver tint to it, but not quite as much as in the product shot (but at this point that's clearly a 3D rendering and not to be taken seriously anyway). I opened it up and put it on the phone and found it to be a very solid case. It covers everything except the front screen, silent switch, speaker, and mic. It even has a little plug for the dock connector at the bottom, which I thought was awesome. I've noticed pocket lint and the like getting in there and that concerns me somewhat. It didn't add much bulk to the iPhone, but it did feel a bit slippery in my hand, and suddenly I became consciously afraid of dropping the phone while using it.... I never felt this way with the caseless phone, even though it's pretty slick as well.

I left the case on the phone over the period of maybe 3 or 4 days until I finally decided to remove it. One major drawback for me was that I spent the $29 for a dock when I bought my iPhone because I liked being able to simply dock it instead of fiddling with a cable. With the case on the phone, it simply would no longer fit in the dock. Granted, the case did come with a universal dock adapter so the phone can be docked while in the case, but this requires you to own a universal dock...which would cost me *at least* another $30 or more, more than the case itself. And I'm sure you can't sell these regular docks on eBay for what you paid for them, let alone any profit. It simply wasn't worth the hassle.
With the case off, I've found myself realizing just how slim the iPhone 3G is, and wondering why I ever put a case on it to begin with. Afterall, the glass screen is totally scratch-free after more than a month of use and residing in my pocket, and the back casing only has very tiny scratches that are invisible until you polish the back and allow light to hit it just right to expose them. The only use I could have for a case would be to protect it if it fell to the ground, but I'm not very clumsy with my electronics. Plus, if it does tumble to the ground, I have insurance on the phone... something to be discussed for a later post.

Conclusion? The CapsuleRebel is indeed a fantastic case. The build quality is top notch, and if you like the color you choose, you're in for a real treat. The dual-layer case design works incredibly well and makes the case almost feel like it's part of the phone. It even includes screen protectors to put on the screen if you so desire (I kept mine off). If you're looking for a case I would highly recommend it, as it includes a nice handful of accessories (universal dock adapter, stand, 2 screen protectors, cleaning cloth) and is under $30 shipped- very nice price in comparison to other sub-par cases.
Below are a couple pictures I took of my iPhone inside the case, but the coloring of the case is slightly off due to the flash (although I used a make-shift softbox to avoid direct flash)... in normal use, it does resemble the updated rendering pictured earlier, but it's not *quite* as silvery as that leads you to believe.

Shopping at Kohl's is like playing the lottery

I don't shop at Kohl's very often, mainly because it's not too regularly that I'm buying clothes or general items for around the home. (I work from home... how often is it that I actually *need* to wear clothes anyway?) I do have a Kohl's card, however, because around Christmas time it came in handy to get the extra 15% off you're granted with when you get a new card with them.

If you keep up with Kohl's at all, you'll know that right now they have a "sale" of sorts (though, doesn't Kohl's always have a sale anyway?), where if you pay via your Kohl's card, you can save "30, 20 or 15%". I've never quite understood what they meant by that until yesterday.

My family and I were out and about and ended up stopping by and bought some stuff. The whole time I'm of course preaching to them how we could have bought the stuff online and saved 30% and gotten free shipping by using my Kohl's card. Plus, save gas to boot. We notice the signs around the store touting this "30, 20 or 15%" savings, and since I'm accustomed to seeing that on their website when they offer 30% off, I thought "cool... we'll still be able to get 30% off since I've got my card on me." Needless to say, it wasn't quite that simple. When we got to the checkout, the lady at the register asked if we had any coupons. We said no, but were going to use the Kohl's card so that should get us 30% off. However, she had other plans for us.

The lady stated that some customers received coupons in the mail (I have no clue if I had or not), but for those that hadn't, they had scratch-off cards that you could use to see which of the 3 discounts you could get that day.... Seriously?..... We scratched it off, and as I figured, it only said 15%, so she quickly began entering that into her register. We paused and were like "we could have gone online and bought this same stuff and gotten 30% off, what's going on?" She had a blank look on her face as if to deny that this was the truth as she continued to ring up our merchandise. We looked at one another puzzled, not really being able to believe what was going on.

We ended up just going on with the 15% off so as to not cause a scene and hold everyone up, but I still feel very abused leaving that store. Don't throw 30% off in my face if you're not going to give it to me. Why would I go into the store and only get half the discount that's possible if I were to order online? The woman was totally unwilling to offer any help or let us have another go at the discount lottery, and I have a firm belief that all of those scratch-off cards said 15%.
The receipt had a survey request on it, so I whipped out my iPhone in the car to fill it out, hoping there'd be an open text field to leave a comment so I could at least let the company know the sheer stupidity of this, but alas there was none to be found. Sigh... maybe I should have started throwing a fit until they offered me even more than 30% off for my troubles. I'm just not that kind of consumer. I'll remain behind my computer to make my purchases, thank you very much.

Building My Finances

Ever since I got out of college I've really become financially aware and have wanted to make the most of my money however I can. One of the first ways to do this is to watch your spending habits. Although I have a few credit cards, I make a conscious effort to keep them under control by not carelessly spending money on things that I know I would immediately turn around and regret buying. For the things I do need or really really want to buy, I make every effort to NOT pay the retail price. Part of this comes from my own bargain hunting, but a bit also comes from keeping an eye out for sweet deals that we post over at dealnews.com. After all, you never know when a deal will pop up on an item you don't realize you really want or need until it's staring you in the face. But then that's where the restricted buying habits come into play and I have to fight a lot of urges.

One of my main concerns now is putting money aside in a savings account. I have my main account at Bank of America, and as I've quickly discovered, the APY (annual percentage yield) pretty much sucks. After some quick research, I found that online savings accounts are the way to go for this sort of thing, and I settled on Emigrant Direct. At the time, they were at 5.1% APY... much better than the <1% with BoA's standard savings account. As the fed has cut rates, however, my yield at Emigrant Direct is currently down to 3.0%, which is a bit depressing. So I've started looking elsewhere... and little did I know, but my mostly dormant account at my state's SECU (State Employee's Credit Union) actually is quite handy. I recently opened a Money Market account there at 3.2% APY, which is slightly better than Emigrant Direct, and it's not requiring that I open a totally new account- it's just a new account within my existing account at the credit union.

This isn't the whole story, though... in fact it's just the beginning. I'll be discussing more of what I've discovered in later posts, as well as how I'm managing to move all of this money around multiple accounts and keep track of what's what. Stay tuned...

Mobile blogging test

Just a quick test of mobile blogging via email....

[Sent from my iPhone]

New Blog

Hey there.

So I've decided to start up a blog of my own. You may be wondering what it could possibly be about... well that's simple. Pretty much anything... Actually, I'm thinking of keeping it narrowed down mostly to tech, personal finance and some photography. And, of course, if something happens to strike my fancy that doesn't quite fit into these categories, it may very well show up too.

So sit back and watch this blog's developments. I think it will prove to be useful, and maybe even slightly entertaining.