Lee.org

Every 6 months never fail a friend tells how sad they are that their hard drive crashed. When your hard drive crashes, what will you lose? Your kid’s pictures for the last ten years? Your taxes? That story you were writing? Your customer database? Your source code?

What if your building burns down? Or if someone steals your computer? What will happen to your data?

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Seriously, it’s not a matter of if your hard drive will die, it is a matter of when. They last only so long and then they die!

For example, Google maintains about 100,000 hard drives. They treat them as nicely as possible. Google analysed their drive usage patterns  (local archive).  Every year, there is about a 1 in 14 chance that an individual hard drives will die. It doesn’t matter if it’s a brand new drive or well worn, 1 in 14 chance every year! It’s 50/50 whether a drive has died after 7 years. Maybe you can get the data off it before it dies for good, maybe not. Do you feel lucky, punk?

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Ask yourself: How do you know when a hard drive is about to fail and needs replacing? Answer: You don’t. It just fails! There’s a system called SMART that tried to predict failures but it doesn’t work. From the Google report, “Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no  count in any of the four strong SMART signals… in other words,  models based only  on those signals can never predict more than half of the  failed drives…”

No one repairs hard drives. When it breaks, you throw it away, along with your data. You could take it to DriveSavers  to recover the data for about $2,000, but that’s    about it.

These cold truths have been around for decades but people still (inappropriately) blindly trust that their hard drive will keep their data safe. Gawd, I sound like some amateurly written ad copy for hard drive snake oil or something. It sounds hokey but all this is true!

Here’s what I tell my friends when they tell me their hard drive just broke:

• Spinrite might recover the drive for $90 – I sometimes offer them use of my copy.
• Drivesavers probably can recover the drive for $1-3k, you can get a discount with my reseller code: DS14221 – everyone balks at the price, but if you need the data, they are the best.
• Crashplan would have prevented the tragedy and stress completely. I recommend Crashplan because I use it, it’s inexpensive (it can be free even!) and I love you. I don’t work for them or anything, I just don’t want you to lose your beloved photos or taxes or anything!

More about Crashplan:
For $4/month, you can back up any amount of data to their servers. In practice I’ve found that since it takes time to upload stuff, it’s best to limit it to around 400 gigabytes with my DSL connection.

Or, for free you can swap backup space with a friend. How cool is that! No, your friend can’t peep at your data. Heck, call me and I might swap backup space with you. You could backup your work computer with your home computer and vice versa!

I have Crashplan set to back up 400 gig of my “important” data to Crashplan Central and to my aunt’s house in Florida. Another copy of everything (about 750 gig) is backed up to an external hard drive.

Darn it, it’s even HIPAA compliant.

But no matter what happens, know that I love you and desperately want you to make offsite backups!

I tried Fungavir for my persistent toenail fungus yuckiness. It’s “too good to be true” claims are too good to be true. The website offers vaguely worded claims that it has special ingredients that get under the nail where other products fail. It does not.

It works about as well as any other topical antifungal I’ve used, but it’s more expensive and the advertising is shadier. Don’t buy it.

I’ve written a lot over the years about anti-fungals, take a look. Short form: Most topicals keep the infection at bay but none get under the nail to the root of the problem. Prescription orals sometimes work, sometimes don’t. There’s no reliable cure for nail fungus, this is especially true for topicals. Oral medicines work from the inside-out so you’ve got a better shot at a cure but they aren’t reliable either.

Fungavir’s website is filled with weasel words and hot air. Read some of their ad copy with that in mind:

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There are many discussions about nail fungus going on on my blog. Search my blog for the word “fungus” for more.

I’ve found a couple really great apartment hunting tools:

Craigslist.org. It is the go-to.

Housingmaps.com – an aggragator of Google Maps and Craigslist

Padmapper.com – a great aggragator of several sites (including Craigslist) with a good map and good selection criterion! Charlotte used this November 2011 to great effect in Seattle.

I just had a hard drive go bad on me so I had to buy a new drive and reinstall Windows. Here’s the software I put back on my computer immediately, the essential software that makes Windows XP useable for me:

WizMouse – lets you scroll a window without you having to give it focus. Brilliantly simple and useful.

Crashplan – I would have lost data if not for this online backup tool.

EditPad Pro – my text editor of choice. It also comes in a free version that’s fine.

Autohotkey – giving me keyboard controls like Ctrl-Alt-C for Calculator and “..4” to automatically type my phone number.

Google Chrome  – the best, fastest, easiest to use, prettiest browser.

• Google Voice Extension  – Along with my Google Voice account, it’s easier to dial a call with this than picking up my phone
• Screen Capture Extension  – an excellent browser screen capture tool
• Speed Dial Extension  – the best homepage for a browser ever

CCCP – the Combined Community Codec Pack lets Windows Media Player play most every video format automatically

Freecalc – by Moffsoft, a better calculator than the built-in Windows one. Easy, clean.

Picasa – the best home picture viewer

Teracopy – replaces windows file copy… the best feature being if a copy fails, I see what happened and can recover, unlike Windows copy

Rename-It! – lets me rename files en-mass

PureText – strips text formatting when pasting.

Put  Windows Explorer in the Quicklaunch toolbar and change the startup options target to “%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,c:\aaa”. More examples.

Set Gmail to be the default email client in Chrome

Disable Windows Search When Searching Windows Explorer

Truecrypt – keeps my passwords safe on my computer.

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The second round of essential software

KFC – Kill Flash Cookies
Filezilla
UltraVNC

The Sysinternals tools are amazing. Filemon to see what is slowing down my hard drive, Pagedefrag to defrag your pagefile.sys. Several tools to help find malware

DVD Decrypter (local archive)

Cleartype – absolutely essential for good text quality on Windows XP! You’ll have to run the page using Internet Explorer to install it.

The Clipper Card website wants to be useful and good… but it isn’t. It has lots of ridiculous text like this which is in alarmingly red print:

When you first set up Autoload, change your Autoload setup or update your Autoload funding source using a credit card, it may take up to 3-5 days for your new Autoload order to take effect. If you use a bank account, it may take 5 to 10 business days.

That could have been said far clearer with 60% fewer words:

Any changes to Autoload may take up to 5 days for credit cards and 10 days for bank accounts to complete.

Despite there being very few functions, it is hard to find what you’re looking for. For example, to turn Autoload on, you go to, straightforwardly enough “Set up Autoload” off the main menu. But to disable Autoload, you go to… ugh, I forget, I wandered the site for 5 minutes looking for the button before finding it. I think it was under “Check card value”

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Ah, but the reason I’m writing. Here is a tidbit I got from Customer Service that isn’t on their website anywhere:

My query:

I have autoload on the card and I have some Clipper Cash. I have noticed that the Clipper Cash never gets used, instead, the card autoloads from my credit card when it gets low. How can I used the Clipper Cash on my card?

And the response:

my paraphrasing:

Autoload supersedes Clipper Cash. You need to disable Autoload to use any Clipper Cash on your card.

Their overly wordy response:

In order to use the Clipper cash on your account, you will need to temporarily disable the BART HVD on your account. BART will not deduct from your e-cash balance as long as your autoload is available on the account. If you disable your HVD, BART will continue to deduct from that until the HVD balance is depleted, and then they will begin deducting from the e-cash balance. Once the e-cash balance on your account has been reduced, you may re-activate the BART HVD autoload.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Clipper Card Customer Service Center at 1-877-878-8883 (TDD/TTY 711 or 1-800-735-2929).

Update 2-15-12: Read my full review of Fungavir.

Text in bold italics below are updates.

I had written a scathing post about Fungavir, calling it a scam. I’ve removed this post. I now think I was a little too aggressive in my wording. I spoke with one of the owners of Fungavir a couple days ago and they  have begun rewording their web site and changing some of their practices to be more realistic. made a couple tiny changes to their site but the vast majority of the weasel words and scammer language remain. The ingredients in Fungavir are somewhat effective at fighting toenail and fingernail fungus, but there is absolutely nothing special about it. They charge 10 times the price for ingredients you can already find at your local pharmacy.

I was introduced to Fungavir by a comment spam that appeared on my site, which is not an auspicious start.

The wording on their site had some is full of scammer language:
* testimonials that seem too good to be true
* lies. For example, “Fungavir has double the amount of Undecylenic Acid than any other nail fungus treatment”. It does not. 25% is the legal limit for non-prescription strength and they have 10%.
* vague promises with meaningless copy like “double action” and “killing the fungus while working to heal the affected area” and… well, most of the words on the site.
* product images such that look like product only exists in Photoshop
* Site icons with no substantiation like “Green Certified Site”, “GMP”, “Made in an FDA Registered Facility”, and “Google Checkout” (they don’t use Google Checkout)

The ingredients appear to be just a collection of all the topical anti-fungals mixed into one bottle. Yeah, that might work, but I’m guessing it’ll work as well as well as any other topical, which is to say, “It might work but don’t hold your breath.”

The guy at Fungavir has said he is going to change their website. I’m going to give him the chance. But if he doesn’t since he didn’t come up with more realistic language on his site in a month or so, I’ll be reposting my original article and then some.

For more info on nail fungus, read the several posts and followup comments on my blog about nail fungus.

Here is the Fungavir homepage on 10-9-11:

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There are many discussions about nail fungus going on on my blog. Search my blog for the word “fungus” for more.

I recently got a washing machine for my apartment, a Haier HLP021-WM. It’s! So! Awesome! I got it used on Craigslist for $100, you can get them new from Walmart and other places for under $250. It is a 0.97 cubic feet washer.

I had been looking at more well known brands like Kenmore but with a retail price of $760 for their portable machine and favorable but mixed reviews, I had all but given up. I thought, “If an established brand can’t make a unit that is fairly similarly priced, the cheap one is probably junk.” Wrong was I, young Skywalker!

I just did yet another a load of laundry this morning and it was so easy. I dread going to a laundromat. I dread running out of clothes, having stinky clothes in the closet, letting stains set for weeks on end, spending 3 hours doing a stupid task, but most of all I dread hauling 40 pounds of laundry out of the house and into the car just so I can bring it back a few hours later. Those days are gone. It’s such a simple thing but it makes me so happy.

Oh, and the other essential thing I got with the washing machine from the lady on Craigslist was a small dryer, a Hamilton Beach Quick Dry Garment Drying Station. It works like a champ. It takes 2-8 hours to dry a load of clothes but it’s small, cheap to run (it’s just a fan), convenient and I don’t have piles of drying clothes hanging all over the apartment. She threw it in for $20.

I don’t like smelly laundry soap. I absolutely hate Tide laundry soap. Tide burns my nose in a way not unlike ammonia. I’ve had clothes washed in Tide that after a few hours I had to take off, they were so awful and distracting and headache inducing. There is a guy at a previous job that used Tide (hi Matt Gr!) and if he approached my desk slow enough, I my nose would burn that characteristic Matt Gr smell before I could see him.

I’ve found 2 soaps that I like. Trader Joe’s powdered laundry detergent and All Small & Mighty Free Clear. The liquid soap works better in the Haier washing machine because if the powdered soap has clumped, some of the clumps stay on the clothes. I fixed this problem by straining the powered soap (which I often leave in my clump-inducing humid garage), but I’d rather not have to do that.

(Subject line hat-tip to Scarlett O’hara)

I went to the “Foodia is Chocolate” event Friday night with Erika. We tried chocolate from Fearless Chocolate, Madecasse, Vice Chocolates, and TCHO. The clear winner: Fearless Chocolate’s Cherry Bomb gnosh (ugh, how do you spell that?). The taste experience was like watching Macho Man Randy Savage and Hulkamania duke it out on a terrific roller coaster… on the moon… in 3-D… In. My. Mouth! Awesome.

And their basic chocolate bars all had a vivid, sharp taste that had us wanting more!

Madecasse: too much of a heavy cream action in all their samples
Vice Chocolates: I don’t recall, there was something not perfect… (sorry)
TCHO: a solid stand-by

I wrote and sent this off today:

Mystic Pizza Food Company
PO Box 427
Mystic CT 06355

Dear Pizzapeople,

Fantasy

I bought a Mystic Pizza 3 Pack Mediterranean Style from Costco in San Francisco on about May 1st, 2011. It reads “Best if used by Dec 24 11 12:40”
I wanted to enjoy your pizza, but I’m sad to say it was very disappointing.

The directions say to bake for 10-12 minutes at 450. Clearly a pie this thick won’t be done in 10 minutes. We were further surprised that the pie still wasn’t cooked through after 24 minutes. After all that time, the bottom still wasn’t brown or crisp, and the center of the pie was still gummy and underdone. My oven is well calibrated, it was cooked on the middle rack with no cookie sheet under it.

Reality

The toppings were spread very poorly. The comments from my roommate say it well, “The vegetables are all lumped in a frozen pile in the middle. Who wants lumps of soggy spinach on their pizza?” One slice had a pile of peppers, another slice had a pile of olives that should have been chopped more. None of the toppings were mixed in with the pizza, they sat on top in great heaps. My roommate and I differed about the feta cheese; she enjoyed it but I thought it tasted and had the mouth feel of cream cheese, which does not belong on a pizza.

Maybe it was just the poor toppings, but after a few bites, I wanted to go out and buy some real pizza to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Keep trying!
Lee Sonko
San Francisco, CA 94110

I’ve never been much of a wine drinker. I always get a headache before the glass is empty.

I like riesling, my home made (hooch-like) mead, chianti and now….. retsina.

Call me a sweet tooth. Done. Call me pedestrian. Done! But what matters is what I like.

The retsina discovery came when I went to Carmel a few weeks ago with Binka’s relatives, Senta and her mom. We had dinner at  Dametra Cafe in Carmel. They have, by the way, the best moussaka ever. And Senta’s recommandation of retsina was perfect!