Dave Lachapelle

So – last post was at christmas time, I know that has been quite a while since christmas, however, I’m now more or less back. For those of you who don’t know, I started a new job in the first week of January. I’m now working as a System Administrator for a company called MRX Associates (who are directly tied to the CFL and specifically the Hamilton Ticats). I’m still keeping myself super busy, as you all likely know, so don’t hold your breath for updates.

In other news, I finally got around to working on my LVM guide, which you’ll find in the guides section of my website.

Hopefully I’ll have some time to write something a little more substantial later.

Merry Christmas!
written on my new iPod!

Well, it certainly has been a while since I have published anything to my blog, sorry for those two or three people who are checking it occasionally. I’ve had quite the busy last few weeks, and now that things are getting more settled, I’m going to start blogging here a bit more.

Okay, just came across this, this morning and had to share it with everyone. Its about 5 min long, but freaking hilarious. Make sure you have audio.

Okay, just came across this hint this morning…

You can make Time Machine work on any network volume simply by opening a Terminal Window and typing:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I’m not at home or else I’d start doing a full backup, but it appears to at least let me select my network drive mounted over the interwebs. If anyone tries it, let me know how it works.

Further to the article I wrote yesterday, which has garnered a lot of traffic for my site I might add. Thank you to MacSurfer for linking that to me. I happened across a story in the Globe and Mail today regarding Rogers’ pricing practices and the iPhone (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071106.RIPHONE06/TPStory/Business). As we all know by now, Rogers is out to physically maim their customers with bills. Not a cool thing to do, but when you’re a monopoly, you can kinda do what you want. This led me to think about my recent experiences with Rogers Billing department and note that they really need to be fixing a lot before they can carry any kind of Apple products.

*Incoming Rogers Billing Rant

I believe the billing issue is the only real reason why Rogers already doesn’t carry the iPhone. The very large corporation seems to be well aware of their own price gouging and isn’t going to be doing anything about it anytime soon. At the end of every month, without fail, I get a Rogers bill in the mail, most of the time its relatively accurate, and by most of the time I mean about 50% of the time, and by accurate I mean not getting charged $100 extra for random stuff. My most recent experience with Rogers involves their billing department “misplacing” my bill payment.

After I recently moved, it would seem that Rogers somehow managed to create multiple “accounts” for me. And so, about a month ago, when I got my bill, I paid it as I always do. About a week after it was due, I started getting phone calls, every day at 11am on my cell phone from a blocked number. I typically don’t answer blocked calls, but the frequency and accuracy of the time every day caused me to become curious and answer the phone. Lo-and-behold, its Rogers automated billing system reminding me to pay my overdue bill that I already paid. So, okay, sometimes things don’t go well, I check my online statements, and the money is definitely (note, I spelled it right this time) missing from my checking account.

I then proceed to call Rogers Billing Department, who say they probably just haven’t processed payment yet and to disregard the calls. So, about 3 days pass, I’m still getting the calls, wasting my cell phone minutes they charge me for I might add. So, every day I start calling Rogers, complaining that they’re harassing me, yet they can do nothing about it (or so they say). After about 4 days straight of calling them at different times of the day, I finally get through to someone at Rogers Billing who speaks english and not engrish and can understand my problem. He calls around to the other departments for me to try and figure out what was going on (left me on hold for half an hour, but occasionally came back to let me know he was still working on it). Turns out, they were crediting my money to an account that is no longer active or even tied to my account.

In the end, they agreed to waive the overage fee and apologized, but this is just an example of the things that they’ll have to fix in order to be able to actually successfully host the iPhone on their network. Not many people would actually put up with the crap and chase after them to fix their billing mistakes.

* End of rant

Well, you may or may not notice I’m now running WordPress 2.3 on my site. The upgrade went very smoothly, and I’m hoping it fixes my theme problem I’ve been having. Only time will tell, as it apparently is random, if it happens again, I’m going to go hunting for the source of the problem. I’m really hoping it doesn’t though, as its going to be a pain to diagnose.

I’ll have more to write about later on a small project I’ve undertaken (and no, it has nothing to do with computers for once).

Okay, so, recently I’ve been having this really annoying problem, where my wordpress homepage would just come up blank. I kind of ignored it, but I knew it had something to do with themes causing problems. For some reason, every now and then my blog’s theme gets set back to “default”, I’m still not 100% sure why, and after spending a good amount of time trying to “fix” it. I just ended up removing the “default” theme and doing a symlink from my theme’s folder to the old default folder, that way I can at least keep my blog up.

I’ll definitely keep hunting around to try and figure out why, and post here when I do find out.

In terms of life stuff, been super busy, as per usual. I think I’m going to be donating a bit of time to helping out my new guild on Norgannon with their website, but thats another story for later. For now, its back to work.

Welcome to my new and improved website.  As I’m busy currently studying for finals, I don’t really have time to do too much to it.  I intend on adding more content and changing the theme as time progresses, if anything is broken, feel free to let me know.