Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

I was asked recently if I would look at a Dell laptop that was not recognizing a new battery. The new battery looked well made, fit perfectly in the Dell but was not recognized. I put the old battery in and got a message stating that the battery is at the end of it’s life cycle and buy a new battery. Here comes the gotcha! If you buy a Dell brand battery it is three times as expensive as the off brand. Now I didn’t have a new Dell battery to test but my guess is that the Dell brand battery will be recognized by the Dell laptop. The 3rd party vendor insists the battery will work if you follow their instructions which involve updating the bios, the CMOS, yadda yadda. Dell support simply said it isn’t our battery. Tsk Tsk. Third party people provided a bunch of busy work that did nothing. I also found it interesting that the Dell bios upgrade could not be done with the third party battery installed. I had to put the old battery in before it would update the bios. Interesting...

You know what is incredibly scary, truly frightening, sweaty palm, shortness of breath terrifying? The number of people who have bitched and moaned about what is going on in the world who won’t pick their butt up out of their Barcalounger and get out and vote. The voting age population for the last presidential election (United States Election Project for Nov. 2004) was 221,256,931. The estimated number of voters in the 2004 election who actually voted was 122,294,978. This is just shy of 100,000,000 people who were too damn lazy to cast a ballot. The homily that you get what you deserve seems to be appropriate for our nation. All our citizens have the franchise. Our women can vote. Our people of color can vote. Our religious preference has no impact on our right to vote. There are many places in the world where that just isn’t true. I was lucky enough to be the Director of Kids Voting for Southeast Pennsylvania in the 2006 election. I was astounded at the willingness to work of my 1,...

Halloween The scariest thing I can think of is a hard drive crash with no backup. Are you sure you’re Backed Up? Businesses Today, most of us in business, have our entire business running on computers. In the event of a catastrophic failure, applications can be re-installed, hardware can be replaced but DATA that isn’t backed up is gone. Gone, as in, disappeared, never to be seen again. Even those of us who do back up: When was the last time you verified a backup? When was the last time you checked to see if there is any data on your backup? When was the last time you did a test restoration of your backup to see if it really works? “If you haven’t verified your backup system, then you may as well not bother backing up.” And even if you do verify, you may still have other issues. The following scenarios are based on real life occurrences. Timid Tim was instructed by his supervisor to change the backup tape every day. Tim did this until the day the Tuesday tape became stuck in the tape d...