I really like Blogger.  It was simple and easy to setup a blog on their service.  If you want a simple blog, you can’t go wrong with them.  That’s the strength of blogger and other blog hosting service.

That simplicity starts to get into your way when you want to add in your own content.  It is difficult to create other pages when you handed your domain name to those blog hosting service.  I have reached that point and I decided to switch to my own host.

USB Flash Drives certainly have become very popular in the last couple of years. I have read in various places that I need to use the safely remove hardware device feature in Windows before removing the flash drive. My expectation was if I were to yank out the drive without going through the safely remove hardware device feature, the worse that could happen was the file I worked on becoming corrupt.

Boy was I ever wrong.

Today, when I plugged my USB Flash Drive to my computer, I got a very unsettling message explaining that the device is unformatted. I was shocked: how can this technology be so fragile? I have some files on the drive that, while not irreplaceable or very important, took me time to put together. Long story short, I found a forum message that suggest someone with a similar problem to mine to try a software called TestDisk. It is a software “designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again”. It’s also free!

With a text-based UI, while it’s not the prettest software in the world, I was able to easily use it to recover the missing FAT16 partition on my USB Drive quickly without any trouble.

USB Flash Drives may be convenient, they are also surprising prone to corruption. While ideally, you would want to use the safely remove hardware device feature every time, sometimes things happen and TestDisk may be able to save your files.

Microsoft has announced the discontinuation of Microsoft Money. Now, I understand that they have been reducing investment in Money for some time now. They don’t even make versions for Canada and other countries anymore. Still, I originally chose Money based on the (mistaken) belief that Microsoft will support it and not leave me out in the cold. There’s also the issue of Quicken (back then) being extremely annoying in an attempt to get people to upgrade.

I wouldn’t say I miss Microsoft money. It has never been super convenient. It doesn’t automatically download transactions from any of my banks except ING Direct. I know Microsoft Money still works fine as is, but at some point, I will have to move on. But what choices are there? Quicken? Mint.com? GnuCash?

Live is a Microsoft brand name that is applied to products or services that are web enabled. Services such as Windows Live Mail, Xbox Live, and Windows Live Account are examples of such. Unfortunately, Microsoft also applied the brand name to non-internet enabled products such as Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Those products were split from the operating system and bundled together as Windows Live Essential. Presumably, it is so Microsoft could updates those software independantly and respond to competitive threats. I think with a little work, the Live Essential bundle can be good enough to have its own brand name similar to Apple’s iLife. Perhaps they should call it Windows Entertainment Pack, Windows Nifty Pack, or just Windows Essential.

Google Maps has a really useful feature that provides driving direction between two locations. The feature, through, is rendered essentially useless in Vancouver, BC by the route data. I don’t know what’s going on with Tele Altas, the provider of the map data. City of Vancouver classify roads into primary arteries, secondary arteries, collectors streets, and local small street. From what I can tell, the map shows all secondary arteries, collector streets, and random streets in the road network as local small streets.

East broadway, one of the busiest East-West street in Vancouver, is apparently shown connected by small street. I didn’t know small streets have 2 lanes + a dedicated HOV lane for bikes and buses in each direction.

And here we have a highway apparently being routed directly onto Oak Street, represented by a small street. Oak Street has 3 lanes in each direction.

Same problem in Richmond, BC. On the other hand, it’s easier to visually identify the major road.

Those of us who live locally knows about the road network better, but anyone attempting to use Google Map for local navigation will be driving longer than the necessary.

This is a very well done sub of the ‘Downfall’ video clip. It very neatly summaries the events leading up to this Real Estate bubble. I especially enjoy how it identifies the arguments used to justify the price of Real Estate before the bubble bursts.

Years ago, a double roll toilet paper (Wikipedia calls it ‘toilet paper’, and ‘bathroom tissue’ just doesn’t sound right) has 400 plys. Somewhere along the way, some clever person decided to reduce that to 351 plys, saving 12.5% of material. Today, I was horrified to find that Purex (R) is now selling double roll toilet paper with 280 plys. This represent a further decrease of 20%. Are people going to miss such a decrease? Or are they just increasing the price by 20% in a stealth way?

I am now looking forward to the day when the old single roll (with 200 ply) would be equivalent to the new double roll. Two more changes, and we’ll be there!

The rise in the price of rice has hit the retailers. A few months ago, the same rice cost $20.

LG, apparently in a mad desire to cut cost, decided to cut in the wrong thing. LG makes pretty nice LCD monitor, and they are shipped with a courtesy VGA cable. The problem? The monitor itself is capable of displaying in 1680×1050, but the cable is not capable of displaying a stable picture at the native resolution. Instead, I see rolling lines on the monitor that would cause most people to believe the monitor is cheap/defective. This is not a good way to make a good initial impression. Furthermore, the average user probably wouldn’t be swapping cables to try to fix it.

Someone is clearly not thinking when they decided to bundle a thinner than normal VGA cable.

Infowave Software announced that they are going out of business. I guess they couldn’t make enough money in this field with mostly professional service and maintenance revenue. My heart goes out to those who will lose their job as a result.

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=789467

I believe the company’s business registration will survive through this due to the accumulated tax loss.