Delboy’s Blog

I have now had my iPhone 3G phone for a few days so I think its time to write about my experience so far.

I decided that this year I would line up on Friday morning for the iPhone, I got a bit of luck in that the weather in Chicago on Thursday night was very bad rain so when I got to the AT&T shop at 7am there was only about 20 people in line in front of me. As there were a number of techy people in the line the time flew by. At 8 the store opened and the 1st 5 people were allowed in. 8:45 must have been the time that the systems started to go down and it was then the line started to move. I was in and out of the store with in 30 mins and back up by 9:30.

I was not happy when I got home, after the AT&T store telling us it was the “Store’s” computers that were down, to find that it was Apple yet again letting everyone down. At about 3pm on Frinday I finally got my new Phone working and it wasn’t until 10am on Saturday morning that my Voice Mail was working.

So how am I enjoying the new iPhone, well first the bad news.
The Battery – I have found that the battery is not as good as my old iPhone even with 3G turned, I have found that I need to charge my phone at least once again, my old phone was every other day.
The Camera – Although I believe that the camera takes a better photo its still only a 2Mb camera and this could have been a lot better especially with the New Apps and location services. Also still no Video.
SMS & MMS – Still no multi media messages and you are still unable to forward text messages.
IM- Still no IM apart for AIM that only works when the App is open, although this is to be fixed in September we are told.
Crashing – I have noticed that the iPhone does now crash at least once a day I am hoping this is going to be fixed in a future update.

Now the good!!!
GPS – This is one of the best parts to the phone and all the Apps that are now using location services is great, the fact that I can take a picture and upload to flickr and I can see a map of were it was taken is great.
3G – This is a definite plus to the phone and the Internet is faster when using 3G. I do however thing that there is still work to do as when I use 3G for calls I do get some dropped calls.
Push email – Push email is good but not great as only about 80% of my mails get pushed I guess this is more to do with Apple’s lack of infrastructure for MobileMe and will improve in time.
Apps – The Apps are one of the best things about iPhone 2.0 and I will cover this in another blog.
Settings -  I do like the fact that I now have more control over what I turn off when in Airplane mode I can now have wifi ON something I really wanted.

All in all I am very happy with the new iPhone, Apple still has a lot of work to do but I am sure this will be done soon. I hope so!!!

OK so a couple of weeks ago, just before Terri went in to labor,  we received an email from Babies ‘R’ Us  informing us that the 2 cribs that we bought from them had been recalled and we should come in to there local store and they will do everything they can to replace the crib with an equivalent model.

The night of the email we decided to go to the store where we bought the cribs and ask them what we should do. There first reaction to us was Contact the manufacturer. I explained to them about the email that we had received and that I bought the crib from them and I would like to only deal with the store. After a small argument they agreed to deal with the problem and told me I had to bring in the side of the crib with all the codes on and they will replace it in the store.

Two days later we returned to Babies ‘R’ Us with the side of the first crib I wanted to return. I explained what I was told to do to a new assistant manager and she told me no problem and took me back to the furniture department, this is where the problems started. The manager of the furniture department told us that they did not have any cribs in store that are Cherry and in the same price range we said no problem we found a crib online that we liked and could they order us one. NO was the answer online is a different system and we can’t do that, OK is there another Cherry that they can order for us. Again NO we were told the only cherry crib the store now carry’s is $200 more but we are more than welcome to pay the difference. I did not like this answer as I liked my current cribs and it was not my fault that they are now faulty and I didn’t see why I should have to pay another $200 per crib.

After more questions to the furniture manager she turned round and said to me “Well you get what you pay for” a great attitude I thought, funny when we bought the cribs we were told they were a good crib. The manager then told me she would try and put the value on a gift card and then I can order the cribs from the online store. When the manager returned she told me that she could not give me a gift card, and tried again to sell me another crib. This time she told me that she can give us 15% off so we would only have to pay about $100 per crib. Again I said NO I don’t want to pay more money. Then I was told that I could buy 2 new cribs off from the online store bring in the receipts and they will refund me. Again I didn’t like this idea and I was told “What’s wrong its only $600 just put it on a credit card” What great service I thought.

After this I asked for her managers number and the number for corporate. I called both numbers that night, I left a message for the regional manager. I did speak to a corporate help desk person who told me if I buy the cribs online the store CAN NOT refund me unless they carry the cribs, They didn’t so I am glad I didn’t agree to that.  I was also told that they have been told to tell people NEVER to put there kids in the cribs again, I said I would love not to but I have no other crib.

Later that night Terri went into labor and we all know what happened there, Caroline was not well and rushed to Loyola.

While in the hospital I received a call from Babies ‘R’ Us corporate I told them the whole story and just how I was treated at the store to my surprise the girl from corporate told me to contact the manufacturer and it was nothing to do with them. I told her I bought the crib from them and they emailed me and they would fix it, again I was told it was nothing to do with them and to contact the manufacturer. For what its worth the manufacturer’s web site tells you the new crib would take about 3 weeks and in that time you have to send parts of you old rib away so you are without a crib for 3 weeks. When I told corporate this she told me to buy a new one and they would refund me when the manufacturer sent me a voucher (3 weeks later).

Later that week the regional manager phoned me up and I told him my problem it was then I decided to tell him that due to the argument in the store my wife went in to labor early and my baby was rushed to Loyola Hospital, it was at that point that he told me he would take care of it and with in an hour he emailed me a gift voucher for the cost of 2 new cribs and shipping so I could order from the online store. The cribs are now ordered and should be delivered later this week.

I would first like to thank the 1 manager at Babies ‘R’ Us that realized how to fix the problem and how to treat a customer properly. After this experience I will never shop at Babies ‘R” Us again and I would recommend everyone thinks twice incase there is a problem with anything they buy. I would also like to point out that 1 of these cribs was just 6 weeks old.

Well after a very, very long week Caroline has arrived home from the hospital and is doing well. As you can see in the photo I don’t think granny will put her down.

I would like to say a very big thank you to all the doctors and nurses at Elmhurst Hospital and Loyola Hospital.

Late last night I received the following email for Tom Metge of Mozy.

“I’ve been postponing an answer until I’ve had something concrete to give
you.  My apologies for the silence- unfortunately, we’re still buried in QA.
Anyhow, until you get back on your feet, there’s no point paying for the
service.  I’ve taken the liberty of refunding your last payment… That will
hold you out until 5/28/09.

I do have some good news for you- from your last log, I can see a number
connection errors and other network interruptions, but Mozy seems to be
plodding along, getting the job done.  You have 1.1TB backed up right now,
which is no mean feet

Hopefully the refund will help us keep things moving.  I’ll try harder to
keep you up-to-date as we get a fix out on this.  Believe me, we’re making
it a priority.  As soon as I’ve got even an alpha build of a client that
addresses this, I’ll fire it off to you.

Nice blog post, by the way.  Let me know what I can do to help turn your
opinion around.  We have nearly 1 million users, so I can’t say I’m
surprised to hear that you’ve found people having a few problems.  What may
not have come across (and that is my fault and I offer my apologies) is
that, regardless of the number, we have a vested interest in solving every
single one of those problems.

Let me polish this off with a personal promise- until we have this fixed,
you won’t pay a penny to Mozy.  That refund stands and will stand until May
of next year, at a minimum.  As we work through this, I will also make sure
that your help is appropriately rewarded, beyond the refund.  Helping us to
push the boundaries of what Mozy can and was designed to do is enormously
valuable to us.

Thanks again for the help and the patience.  Once more, I offer my apologies
for the silence.  My intention was to have a solid answer for you.  I hope
the refund and renewed commitment will stand until I can hand that solution
to you.”

I now feel that Mozy has done the correct thing and does care about me as a customer. I will continue to recommend Mozy as a god backup option as until this problem I had no issues and I now believe that Mozy IS doing everything they can to fix my problem. I still do have an issue with the current version but I am able to get some backups done using an older version of the software. I would like to thank Tom for the update and I will update my blog once I get the new version of the software.

Caroline Dianne Carter was born today at 7:44am. She was 8 pounds 4 ounces and 19.5  inches long.

Mother and Baby are doing just fine and should be home soon.

You can see the first pictures taken here http://gallery.mac.com/delboy.carter#100580&bgcolor=black&view=grid

******Update 6/29/2008******

Not long after writing my first post Caroline had a problem with eating her food, it was making her choke and stop breathing. This problem happened twice yesterday and she was moved to the intensive care unit in the hospital. Earlier today after we thought Caroline was getting better she had a third incident and it was decided that she should be moved to a new hospital. Caroline has now been moved to Loyola hospital one of the best baby ICU’s in Chicago land. I will update people as and when I know more.

******Update 6/30/2008******

We have just got back from the hospital and Caroline is looking better today. She has managed to eat and so far has had no more episodes so this is good news. The specialists tell me that the test went well and they think they have found the problem. They still have test to do but so far so good.

Over the last 8 weeks I have been having a problem with Mozy the company I use for my online backup’s. Even though the problem is still not fixed I deiced to blog about the problem so far.

About 8 weeks ago I noticed that I had started to have 2 problems with my Mozy Home client. The first problem was a MozyServerError6 problem, the second was I noticed that my client was send more data than was being encoded, this was a real problem for me.

OK the first problem was easy I emailed Mozy and they told me that this was an error with there server’s and would be fixed very soon. I was told that my client would reconnect and this would not be a problem. This may not be a problem to most people but when you have 1.3Tb backed up to Mozy it can take a good couple of hour to restart a backup. 8 Weeks later I am still having the same problems with this first error which makes me wounder just how good are the server’s back at Mozy or how good are there engineer’s.

The second issue has been a far worse problem to try and get fixed. After speaking with a number of Mozy engineer’s over a 2 week period it became clear to me that none of them had a clue what they were talking about. Over there chat option I was told that this is not a problem and my data was being encoded and being sent to Mozy, over the phone I was told that this was an issue and to upgrade to the latest version. When I told him I was at the latest version he didn’t know what to say (I would have asked for the version number first). After more investigation at my end I now know that the client is not sending any data and has crashed just saying that it is sending data, it just sticks on the same file, that is until it crashes out with a MozyServerError6 problem.

After 4 weeks of fighting with Mozy about this problem and getting nowhere fast I was leaving for Microsoft’s TechEd. Imagine how happy I was when I came across a Mozy stand at the EMC Booth. It was here that I met Tom Metge who told me he was a lead engineer for the Mozy client, great I thought. I told Tom of my problem and explained to him how I was getting no support, Tom told me he was fully aware of the problem and how the help desk didn’t really understand the problem. Tom told me that there was another version getting ready for release to fix this exact problem and asked if I would like to be a beta tester to be sure the problem was fixed, I agreed. I had a number of emails back and forth with Tom showing him my log files and the error’s I was getting he told me one of his engineers to email me with a link to the beta version and all would be good. I spoke to Tom a number of times during my week and TechEd and all looked good.

A week after returning from TechEd and I still had not received the beta software and so I emailed Tom and surprise, surprise no reply. I have now emailed Tom a number of times over the last two weeks and as yet no reply, another sinning example of Mozy’s great support.

Yesterday I received a follow up call from my time at TechEd from Mozy, so I told the poor girl just what I thought of the company and the support they have. She told me that she will arrange a call with Mozy corporate to get this issue fixed but so far I have herd nothing. I will update this post if anything happens.

As of today 8 weeks after my problems started I have managed to backup just 10Gb in that time (I used to backup about 7Gb a night) I am no further forward and still no fix insight. In the whole 8 weeks I have only had 1 good call to Mozy when and egineer called Josh extended my subscription by 3 months as I have been unable to backup my data, but still no fix.

I will keep this blog up dated as to when or if I get my problem fixed.

******Update******

Please see this blog post for the latest update http://delboycarter.wordpress.com/2008/07/03/mozy-redeem-themselves/

This has to be one of the coolest pictures that I have seen this year. I found it on the BBC website. “Corporal Scott Robertson snapped this view from the cockpit as military planes flew over Buckingham Palace to mark the Queen’s birthday.”

Well I am back from TechEd and although I had a great time down in Orlando I have to say I feel a little disappointed with Microsoft. This was my first ever TechEd and due to the fact that I am working in the virtualization space I decided to go to as many Hyper-V sessions as I could. Now we all know that Microsoft are way behind VMware when it comes to virtualization but I think someone should inform Microsoft that it is just them that are behind. All week I found that I was attending different sessions and looking at the same slides. This became the running joke of the the week that Microsoft only have 2 slides on Hyper-V this was always followed up with, “We can’t say when this will be released as we are waiting for other’s in the company to release there code first.” Maybe the different parts of the same company should start talking to each other.

Although Microsoft had a number of different levels depending on how technical you are they still just showed you the same slides and give you the same information. Even when I went to speak to the engineers at the different booths I always felt that I was getting conflicting information depending on who I spoke to. When it comes to Hyper-V I really don’t think that I am any better off than I was a week ago, I will have to wait for the DVD’s to arrive and review more of the information that I was given and hope I never see the 2 slides again. As for Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) I really can see a future for this tool especially in an environment that has a mixture of ESX and Hyper-V servers and hopefully XenServers in the future. There are a couple of things that I didn’t like about it and I still have a few unanswered questions but at least I managed to learn something in this space.

All in all I would hope that Microsoft will improve there content for Hyper-V for future events however I have a feeling that I will be attending TechEd next year for the same reasons as I did this year looking for more information on Microsoft’s plans for virtualization. 

Away from the sessions TechEd was great, it was great to meet new friends and even better to meet up with old ones again. Who ever organize these events for Microsoft did a great job in moving so many people around Orlando and the event party at Universal studio’s was a fantastic evening.

Pictures from my TechEd week can be found here.

OK so this week I decided to move my Internet connection back to Comcast. I did this when I herd that Comcast now have a 2Mb Up load version. The package I now have is 16Mb Down and 2Mb Up, or is it.

When the engineer turned up and tested my line he told me that he had never seen such a good connection and I should get some good speed from my line. As you can see from below I get far better than I am paying for. Thank you Comcast.

Oh yes that’s 25Mb Down and nearly 3Mb Up. Again thank you Comcast.

OK so I have had my Wii Fit for a week now and I have to say I love it. First off let me tell you if you are fit and go to the gym on a regular basis then this is not for you, at least to get you fitter, but it could still be fun.

For me the Wii fit is great for getting the not so fit off the sofa and moving not only that but due to the graph’s and measurements it makes you want to do more. For me I have been out walking more and riding my bike more in the last week just to I can add more exercise into the Wii fit.

As for the Wii fit I never thought I would enjoy Yoga but I have really enjoyed it over the last week and I find that any free moment that I have I am reaching for the Wii fit to do Yoga. The aerobics to start with are basic but once you start to unlock some of the other ones it starts to get good the advance hoola hoops is very good fun and the advance step class is fun and tiresome that has to be doing me some good. The balance games are more games that for fitness but they are very good fun, being a snowboarder I never thought I would enjoy a skiing game but they are both good fun. I have not tried the strength training exercises yet but I will get round to them.

I can see that the board itself has a lot of potential and I can’t wait to see what games are released for the board in the future I am looking forward to some snowboarding game now that will be fun.

As for Nintendo and Wii fit games I can see that maybe the next one will be a training bike and a Wii fit bike game now that would be fun.

I think the one big plus with the Wii fit is that it is really good fun to exercise and try and get your Mii to loose the fat as well as yourself. A big plus for the Wii fit so lets see if I can loose some of the weight over the summer and prove that it works.