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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The LOST finale

Posted on May 24, 2010 by cgonyea

Last night my favorite show of all-time aired its last episode. LOST was finally done after a mind bending six season. I have been organizing my thoughts regarding the entire series and its conclusion all day. As sad as I am to see it go, it was time. I first started watching between season 1 and 2 and became immediately hooked.

Never have I watched a show that incorporated so many genres, whether it was drama, sci-fi, mystery, comedy…it was all there and all well done. It was certainly a show that required people to think and that was the best part about it. I knew I wasn’t going to stumble across a casual LOST fan, those people simply did not exist. You either were all in or all out.

One thing is for certain. There will never be another TV show like LOST. Thank you.

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Lock your screen in OS X

Posted on May 14, 2010 by cgonyea

For some odd reason, Apple doesn’t by default give you a quick way to lock your screen when you step away from your computer. I have used the hot corner to activate screensaver option, but here is a cool way courtsey of Art Of Geek to lock your Mac with a simple key command. All it requires is creating a service using Automator that runs a shell script and mapping that service to a keyboard shortcut (ctrl-option-L in my case). Took me 2 minutes to create it.

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Shopping around saves money

Posted on May 11, 2010 by cgonyea

I decided to take a 4 day weekend due to my 28th birthday today. It is the first time off I have had since September. Part of my yearly routine around my birthday is to get my cars registered and inspected, just like millions of others in the USA. It also becomes an important lesson on why it is important to shop around.

Seeing that one of my cars is just 10 months old, for the first time that I can remember I had no anxiety about a car passing inspection. That was easy. The other car, the recently paid off 2002 Subaru Forester, is another story. It is starting to show its age but seems like it is in overall good shape. The Forester passed inspection fine, but the garage I had brought it to (Firestone) said that I would probably need new struts real soon, which costs $1300.

Given that they weren’t necessary to pass inspection, I passed on getting the struts replaced right there. I knew I had to shop around and just get an idea if that is a good price. I wasn’t even thinking at that point whether I actually needed the struts replaced.

One thing I haven’t found since I moved to Manchester, NH is a car garage that I could trust. Looking around online and asking some friends, I stumbled across Brutus Auto Repair & Service. I gave them a ring and the nice guy on the phone told me to bring the car in today and he will take a peak.

I am so glad I shopped around. He put the car on the lift, showed me what he could see. He said he saw no reason to replace the struts right now, the back struts look in excellent shape for their age and the front ones could go at least another year. Firestone lied to me. Right there, he saved me $1300.

What he did see is I should probably get new front brakes soon as they are close to being worn out. He said it was close enough that he could see an argument for the brakes failing inspection. Looking at them and him showing me the various parts of the brakes, for the first time I felt comfortable with a car garage in Manchester, as he clearly explained what was wrong with the brakes. While it would cost several hundred dollars to replace the brakes, given that I once lost my brakes before, I wasn’t taking any chances with that. Plus they were probably the original brakes on an 8 year old car, they are probably about due for replacement in any case. I signed up for the work to be done on Friday. He also is going to fix an annoying loud rattle I could hear when the car accelerates.

Lesson is, always shop around and find someone you can trust.

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Purchased Gonyea.com

Posted on May 1, 2010 by cgonyea

A couple of years ago, I noticed that someone was domain parking gonyea.com and trying to sell it for an absurd $999. I kept checking back every now and then to see if the domain had expired, but it kept getting renewed.

Finally I decided to place a low ball bid on the domain. The seller and I began to negotiate, finally settling on a price we both could agree on.

I am proud to be the owner of gonyea.com now, the domain transfer over to my employer DynDNS.com finishing the other day and WHOIS being properly updated. I am starting to brainstorm what I will do with it. A few ideas bouncing around my head include:

  • The main gonyea.com site is probably going to be a showcase of my brother’s and I’s various projects online. This is something we have thought about off and on for years, so it will be cool to finally get this taken care of.
  • I plan on moving my personal e-mail address from my Gmail address to a gonyea.com e-mail address.
  • genealogy.gonyea.com is almost certainly going to be created to focus on my genealogy research. I will probably let gonyeahistory.org expire since I haven’t done much with it yet and I would like to simplify the amount of domains I own.
  • I will still own chrisgonyea.com, but undecided on what I want to do with it. My personal e-mail address on that domain hasn’t been officially used in years, it is just a spam collector at this point. I may shut that e-mail address down. As for this blog, I may let it live on chrisgonyea.com or setup a redirect so I can move it to chris.gonyea.com. Haven’t decided yet.
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Interop Las Vegas 2010

Posted on May 1, 2010 by cgonyea

Just returned last night from a week at Interop Las Vegas 2010 convention as one of the people representing Dyn Inc. What a wonderful trip it was, got to speak with lots of customers and had lots of fun with my co-workers. Completely exhausting trip though, I am totally wiped out right now. Glad to be home.

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The future of computing: iPad review

Posted on April 4, 2010 by cgonyea

I am writing this review tonight on my brand new 32GB iPad while watching the Red Sox and Yankees opening night game on TV. For the rest of the week I am going to try using the iPad as my home computing device. How much can I do of my normal home computer routine without pulling out my MacBook?

I suspect much of it. The iPad is that good.

Browsing through my Google Reader feeds is effortless on this device and quick. Reading and responding to email is quick and easy. Browsing and using the various web sites I often go to is like literally touching the internet with my fingertips. Watching a video, whether it is on Youtube or streaming Netflix is amazing with this screen. I can get the latest best selling book or a classic public domain book. The text rendering is great and I haven’t experienced any eye fatigue.

All of this without an overheating and clunky laptop on my lap. I instead just have an insanely thin and solid device to work with. A touchscreen that is a joy to use. Absolutely beautiful applications. This is what a computer should be: easy, fast, and enjoyable. Years of supporting people who don’t get all of the arcane computer concepts shows me this is a device for them as well as us geeks.

I can honestly say that I can see this device replacing a laptop for many people. Right now I am wondering if my next computer purchase should be a desktop. It is that good. There are times when a laptop is still called for. I know I wouldn’t want to type a book on this. I know I can’t do my job on this device. I know that it has limited multitasking. I sure wouldn’t want to rip a DVD if that were even possible.

Man it is fun to use though. When I am home, I just want a fun and efficient computer to use. This does that perfectly. The future of computing is now.

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New genealogy site

Posted on March 15, 2010 by cgonyea

I am experimenting with using a Tumblr blog to write about my genealogy research. You can check it out at gonyeahistory.org.

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Why I pre-ordered the iPad

Posted on March 14, 2010 by cgonyea

Friday morning (after a slight hitch with a gift card) I ordered a 32GB iPad (Wi-Fi only). I am sure some of you are wondering why I threw down $599 on a tablet device that maybe 30 journalists have touched for 15 minutes apiece. Here are my reasons.

As far as cost goes, it actually costs me out of pocket not that much. I had a gift card from my employer that covered the vast majority of the purchase. How I had the will power to not spend it to now? Even that amazes me.

The light went off in my head after the iPad was announced on exactly the type of scenario where I would use the iPad heavily. Every day when I come home from work, I usually sit down on the couch and catch up on any RSS feed reading I hadn’t done during the day, catching up on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Right now I either use my iPhone or I grab my laptop. With an iPhone, it is much more suited for quick tasks not for a hour of reading and surfing the Internet. The laptop however is overkill for this task: short battery life, very little need for a keyboard in most cases, hard for me to be comfortable using it. I also typically only do one or two tasks at a time during this time period anyways, barely multitasking.

I held a book roughly the dimensions of an iPad to see how it may be for these types of situations. Was I comfortable? Could I easily do the touch motions that I can do on an iPhone? It truly seemed perfect.

Speaking of books, another reason for this is I really want to do heavy reading again. One of my big skills is how fast I can read, I have been known to finish 400-500 page books easily in one day. Buying books results in lots of clutter in our small place. I also will be doing some traveling for work reasons this year, so I want a device I can easily carry with some books for these trips. Consolidating these books onto one small device sounds perfect to me. I could also see an argument for not bringing my laptop along on some trips. Depends on where I am going, but it is certainly a possibility.

Finally, obviously I have 100% confidence in the UI. Apple almost never messes up the UI, especially lately. Their development tools do a great job at getting 3rd-party developers to follow along with their UI design. I am exited to see what applications are created for the iPad. I can’t wait for example to see what someone pulls off with a genealogy application. That could be stellar for research purposes.

I am really looking forward to April 3rd. Hopefully it goes as I think it will!

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