Finally, no distractions

Posted on July 11, 2010 by cgonyea

It is rather odd to say that it is now July and this is probably my worst season of watching the Red Sox. It isn’t even close. Between the Bruins having a nice run in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Celtics making it to Game 7 of the NBA finals, and the World Cup, it feels like I am completely worn out watching sports. There were days I just did not feel like watching the Red Sox or just couldn’t due to too many other important games on.

That is going to change for the rest of the year. I am looking forwarded to having the game on and being interested again. I feel like I have missed out on enjoying a team that has really fought hard despite a huge amount of injuries to key players. Let’s hope they can continue to play well as reinforcements arrive back from the DL.

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In search of the perfect bank

Posted on July 11, 2010 by cgonyea

Something I have been seriously giving thought to this year has been to switch to a different bank (or credit union). Currently I dislike the fact that I am with Bank of America, but they are getting the job done at the bare minimum. I have yet found the perfect replacement though.

Bank of America has one thing going for it: tons of ATM’s. I am pretty sure to find an ATM anywhere I travel in the United States. It also has a basic iPhone application that allows me to do banking on the go if I need to, which has come in handy.

My requirements to switch from Bank of America are quite simple (so I thought):

  • Free checking and savings accounts (willing to take a minor interest rate drop for this).
  • Lets me write paper checks. I have to pay condo fees with paper checks, so this is a requirement.
  • Either entirely free ATM access or willing to cover for a certain amount of ATM fees.
  • Easy to use web site and an mobile application.
  • Scan checks for deposit. Bonus points if you can do this with an iPhone. It is the 21st century and we have the technology to do it.
  • Great customer service. Doing customer service myself as my day job, this is a major requirement if I am going to have my finances with you.

So far, I haven’t found any bank that can do all of these tasks.

  • Local credit unions: Two of them, Granite State Credit Union and St. Mary’s Bank, are on the same street as my work, which makes deposits easy and have that local friendly presence that gives you that warm fuzzy feeling. They have a large ATM network shared with other credit unions with free access. Mobile efforts are either non-existant or very limited. Only GSCU offers ability to scan checks at your home computer. Closest to what I am looking for in the sense of a traditional bank/credit union, but so year 2000 in online technology.
  • ING Direct – I have a savings account with them and they seem to be a very solid online bank. Decent ATM network available. Biggest knocks for me: lack of a good mobile application, no ability to have an actual checkbook (you can only mail paper checks via their site), and no check scanning for deposits.
  • Ally Bank – Web site looks fantastic, at least the front page. Free accounts, free checks, free ATM’s after reimbursement, reports are that they offer great customer service. Utter lack of actually taking the next logical step and offering a mobile app and scanning checks for deposit prevents me from going there today.
  • USAA – There has been lots of great reports about how USAA is awesome. I even opened an account with them just for kicks to see how it is and I have to agree, looks like a great bank. Refunds up to $15 in ATM fees, free checking, savings, web site has a good design, great iPhone app. However, unless your parent(s) were in the military or you are/were in the military, you do not have access to the best feature: check scanning with your iPhone or computer.

Banksimple looks promising, but it is clear vaporware at this point. I would need to see what they actually launch with to see if it matches my criteria.

So far, no bank offers what I want. Still searching for a way to leave Bank of America.

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Disabling zoom with scrollwheel on Mac OS X

Posted on July 9, 2010 by cgonyea

Ever since I have switched to using spaces on my Mac, I have had a maddening intermittent problem that I couldn’t figure out a solution to. Occasionally when I switched spaces using control-arrow on the keyboard, my screen would zoom in and I couldn’t figure out why.

Turns out, I apparently sometimes move to fast on the keyboard while at the same time, not moving fast enough! That sounds confusing, but let me explain. I would switch a space with control-arrow, lift up on the arrow key, but manage to sometimes to keep the control key press long enough for me to use my  mouse’s scrollwheel.

For the longest time, I couldn’t connect all of these dots, but I finally found the preference to turn off the control-scroll zoom feature. Open up your Mac’s System Preferences and click on Mouse. You will see an option  for the zoom on scroll feature at the bottom of the window. Just uncheck it and you are all set!

Mouse preferences screen on Mac OS X

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Maintaining my Internet presence

Posted on July 7, 2010 by cgonyea

Yesterday I wrote about my plans to transition this site over to gonyea.com in the near future. Yet an event today reminded me about something I have been thinking off and on about for the past few months. Why should I run my site on my own server?

This afternoon I was doing my usual after work routine online, catching up on my e-mail, RSS feeds, and Twitter. I happen to go to my site ready to jot down a few ideas for a blog post. Eventually my web browser times out connecting to this site. I try my other sites on this server, nothing happens.

I groan, as I know immediately what the problem is. My server (running Ubuntu 9.04), despite several rebuilds and reconfigurations, will randomly spike to 100% CPU usage and become completely unresponsive. Cannot SSH into it, cannot even serial console into it. I have to do a hard shutdown of the server then power it back on, hoping that I did not corrupt the database in the process. Who knows how long the server was down, could have been hours.

This gets me thinking. Is there really a need for me to run the latest WordPress on my own server? Do I have the time and energy to keep this server secure, up-to-date, and with as close to 100% uptime as possible? Do I really want to troubleshoot obscure issues on an OS I know very little about?

My gut says I want the power of WordPress so I can eventually unveil my awesome web site that I keep promising for years, that this server is a great learning experience for not only hosting my own site, but making sure everything just plain works.

My head tells me that I have been promising that awesome web site since I registered chrisgonyea.com, which was 8 freaking years ago. Point the DNS records to Tumblr for chrisgonyea.com and begin fresh there, with a simple blogging platform that does the few things I have ever done with this site. Let Tumblr worry about uptime, security, and providing an awesome site for me. Maybe it will make me write more.

As I ponder this, I did some tweaks to my Apache installation since I did find some log entries that suggest the server ran out of memory. Let’s see if this fixes the problem. If not, I may press the kill switch on self hosting WordPress.

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The plan to move to Gonyea.com

Posted on July 6, 2010 by cgonyea

A few months ago I acquired Gonyea.com from a domain squatter. I haven’t done much with the domain due to time restraints, but I am edging closer to at least begin working on moving over my online presence to it. Here are my initial plan:

I have signed up for Google Apps for the domain. The free version does everything I need, whether it is e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc. I do not need to worry about running a mail server and I can use Google Apps on any device I own.

In one sense, moving e-mail over to Google Apps would be easy. Setup a filter on Gmail to do all of the hard work and that is it. Yet it really isn’t that easy. The perfectionist in me would require that every online account I own be immediately switched over, which will take hours to do all of the updates. Then again, do I really want a bunch of web sites to know about my new e-mail address?

My calendar right now is just hosted on my home computer and isn’t synced in the cloud. I will use this opportunity to move everything over to Google Calendar.

I plan on configuring my iPhone and my iPad to both use Gmail & Google Calendar via the Google Sync feature. Instantly I will have over the air calendar and contact updates, plus push e-mail.

I am almost certain I will just 301 redirect chrisgonyea.com to chris.gonyea.com. I just have to setup the proper .htaaccess rules and setup WordPress on chris.gonyea.com.

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Preparing an iPhone to be sold

Posted on June 27, 2010 by cgonyea

With my wife and I both upgrading to the new iPhone 4, we decided to sell both of our old iPhone 3G’s to Gazelle.com. No hassle and nothing to worry about with scammers.

This made me to wonder, what is the safe way to securely wipe an iPhone? I do not want any of my personal data on the old phone to get in the wrong hands.

EverythingiCafe.com has a great article on how to do this. It essentially boils down to doing a restore of the iPhone and then using the “Erase All Content and Settings” setting on the newly restored iPhone to securely erase all of the data on it.

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Updates to the blog

Posted on June 19, 2010 by cgonyea

A few updates to my blog:

  • I am now using WordPress 3.0 on this blog.
  • I have switched to using the new default theme in WordPress 3.0.
  • Given the lack of discussion on almost all of my posts and the amount of comment spam on old posts I see despite several comment spam plugins, I have decided to experiment with turning off all comments on posts older than 30 days. I am interested in seeing how this turns out.
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How fragile life is

Posted on June 19, 2010 by cgonyea

On May 7th, which was just over a month ago, my wife and I were riding on a commuter rail heading to North Station in Boston. We were attending Game 3 of the Celtics/Cavs series and this was my surprise birthday present. We were very pumped, looking forward to the Celtics game. In truth, it was a bad night. The Celtics laid a complete egg that game, with a humiliating loss. Yet that wasn’t the worst thing that happened. Before the game started, we found out my wife’s aunt had a very deadly form of lung cancer.

We would hear reports occassionally on how she was doing. Just a week ago, we heard she was starting chemotherapy and she seemed very upbeat about the whole thing. We hoped that it was a positive sign and maybe she could beat this thing.

Today, just 44 days after that horrible news, we were traveling back from Portsmouth when my wife got a phone call. She started crying almost immediately. I knew it was bad. Her aunt passed away.

In just 44 days her aunt went from living a relatively normal life (she had health problems to begin with) to succumbing to cancer. Heartbreaking to say the least. Yet she lived a full life and had a wonderful family. As her son said today in a Facebook post, “we lost a saint today.”

Next time you talk with someone you care about, realize that in as little as 44 days, they could be gone.

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New AT&T data plans

Posted on June 6, 2010 by cgonyea

Last week there was certainly lots of talk about AT&T’s new data plans across the Internet. The reaction seemed to fall into two camps from what I could see: 1) heavy data users that absolutely hated the plans or 2) people who would save money and appreciated the plans. After doing some comparisons, I think I fall under #2. Here is my thought process behind it.

A quick look at my data usage shows that my wife and I could easily live with the 200MB data plan. Below is my data usage:

The next is my wife’s data usage:

The closest I ever got to the max that a 200MB plan would allow is 170MB. Closest my wife got was 143MB in one month and usually averages below 100MB.

We now have three options here:

  1. My wife and I could both drop down to the 200MB plan. Our phone bill drops about $30, which results in a $360 savings over the course of a year.
  2. My wife drops down to the 200MB plan, I use the new 2GB plan with the tethering option selected (for work and traveling reasons, it would be very nice to have). Her drop to the 200MB plan saves $15 a month, plus my drop to the 2GB plan saves $5 a month for a total of $20 savings. Then with tethering for me costing $20, we break about even with what we pay now.
  3. Keep our current “unlimited” data plans.

I am leaning towards option #2 here. I am not losing anything, since I never went near the “unlimited” data plan’s max of 5GB a month. I am gaining tethering and end up paying about the same monthly bill.

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The backup strategy

Posted on June 2, 2010 by cgonyea

For the past few years, I have been using an Apple Time Capsule to have an complete backup updated hourly of my Macbook. It has worked very well and has saved me several times when I deleted files by accident. Luckily I have not had to call upon it in the worst case scenarios such as hard drive death, fire, lost, stolen, etc. I needed a solution to have my backups offsite as well.

I initially thought I could do the old keep a hard drive off-site at all times with a whole backup. That however would require me to remember to do it, which I have proven time and time again I could not. After all, for years I had a hard drive on my desk, but never manually ran the backup.

I decided finally that I should give the online backup companies that have sprung up the past few years a chance. I haven’t heard any downright horror stories involving them. In fact, most reviews I have heard were very positive. Their prices are quite reasonable: $50-60 a year for unlimited backup per computer.

Right now I am trying out Backblaze, which seems to have gotten great reviews from what I can see, has great Mac support, and has a wonderful option of paying to have a hard drive shipped to you with your data. Mozy does not have this option outside of DVD’s (great a stack of 100 DVD’s should be fun to restore) and Carbonite doesn’t seem to have any option outside of download restores.

I am currently finishing up day two of the initial backup to Backblaze. So far so good, I have about 25GB of 99GB backed up, which works out to just about 12-13GB a day. At this pace, I should be backed up completely in about six more days. After that, from what I understand the service continuously backs up any file changes and only the parts of the files that actually change, so future backups should almost be instantaneous.

I will report my experiences with this service as time goes on and I get to use it. Hopefully I will never have to test how good the restore process is.

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