Next time, I'm paying with a chicken

I take pride in the fact that I am very organized and have great control over all aspects of my life, especially my finances. So many people today have no clue what they're doing when it comes to money and no grasp on correct priorities when budgeting it. They waste their entire check each week and then realize they might have wanted to pay some of their bills. Some of these people just never bother to pay them at all (such as this asshole), leaving someone else to have to pay it, and when that person's finances crash and burn, it all ends up on someone like me. Luckily, I have things under control. I don't overspend, always keep a buffer, don't let anyone have access to my account but me (including my personal ban on auto-payments), and keep an intricate group of spreadsheets updated with my monetary adventures. Still, every once in a while, the numbers don't add up... and I become irate.

When I'm going through my spreadsheets and cross-referencing them with my bank account, I can normally compare a recent balance with a balance in the banks record and call it a day. When I can't find a match, something is amiss. Perhaps a check hasn't come in or I've incorrectly entered a value from a receipt. I always assume I've made an error. However, recently, it is very rarely the case. What seems to be happening more and more often is retailers are changing the amount of a purchase after the transaction. How can they do this? I'm not talking about the temporary hold gas stations put on your account when you pay at the pump. I'm talking about how I make a purchase, have a printed receipt or receipt in my email with one value, and then a few weeks later, my bank statement shows they have increased their take by $1.38. It especially annoys me when I make a payment through PayPal, PayPal presents me with a value to confirm, and the retailer still gets more. I did not authorize the extra money! Why are you giving my money away, PayPal? Do you just think I won't miss it?

This kind of crap couldn't happen in the old days with the barter system. Imagine you were trading your bull for someone's horse, and when they came to your house later with the horse to pick up the bull, they took your daughter too. Do they just think you won't miss her? You'll miss her, and I certainly miss the money I'm being repeatedly nickel and dimed out of and the time I lose backtracking through my well kept records to correct things after they've been molested. I hope people are prepared to receive chickens. I think I might be changing my currency.
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute

Norton Ghost... you're dead to me

As a tech, I have used many software applications over the years, some bad, some good. One that I had always liked was Norton Ghost. I used to use it all the time to image drives as backups before OS reinstalls, old content onto new, larger media, and various other activities where I wanted a solid undo in case of catastrophe. The last version I'd used was 2003, and it worked pretty solidly for me. However, that was most recently in 2006 or 2007, as I've been more involved with software than hardware these last few years and have not needed to image any hard disks.

Tuesday I was in the processes of preparing for some OS reinstalling, and thought I'd dust off the old Ghost. My mission was to image the contents of a spare 250GB 2.5" SATA HDD to a file on my 1.5TB 3.5" SATA HDD on my main tower. Once I'd done this, I could image my laptop HDD to the spare HDD, repartition and reformat my laptop HDD, and install Windows 7 (because I no longer want that abomination that is Vista on any of my machines). My main machine didn't have Ghost installed, so I dug up the old 2003 disc and installed it without fail. I hit Live Update, quickly got the response that everything is up to date (which I did find odd), and was ready to image. Seeing as I no longer had a floppy drive nor disks, I just decided to use the Windows interface for this quickie job. For those of you who have never used Ghost, the Windows interface basically sets up the task, and then it reboots your machine to PC-DOS and performs it before returning to Windows... at least, that's how it's supposed to work.

After the reboot, Ghost began to load, but never finished loading. It hung. I wasn't bothered too heavily by this. I figured I'd just image it another way. I powered the machine off and back up, but instead of going to Windows, it loads to PC-DOS. Hey! It gave me options, one of which was return to Windows. This sounded like what I wanted. However, after selecting it, the reboot hung at a blinking white cursor. Rebooting a few times duplicated this result. This is not good. Google!

After thorough searching, I came to find out that this was quite a common problem... in 2004. When you use the Windows interface, Ghost creates a virtual partition and the system will boot from that until Ghost says otherwise. So, wouldn't FDISK /mbr fix this? According to the general consensus, no. The method for repair was to use a Ghost boot floppy, and use the command ghreboot. If that didn't work, you were supposed to use gdisk to manually delete the virtual partition and set the boot partition back to active. My problem lied in the fact that I had no floppy drive, nor floppies. My first instinct was to make a boot CD, but the straightforward process to do this using Ghost somehow still requires a floppy disk. Wonderful...

What I ended up doing was creating a virtual floppy disk for Ghost to write a boot disk to, and then copying that data to a USB flash drive and making it bootable. I figured I was on the gravy train with biscuit wheels at that point. I booted to PC-DOS with my flash drive, tried ghreboot... no improvement. So, I ran gdisk. Upon listing the partitions, no virtual partition was there. I went ahead and set my boot partition active again, and went ahead and rebooted. Imagine my excitement when I saw the XP loading screen...

Imagine my horror when it blue screened with a STOP: c000021a error when it tried to load the Welcome screen. Rebooting reproduced the error. I booted the Recovery Console and ran fixmbr. Error remained. My next move was to repair install XP. The repair install seemed to be going fine until, STOP: c000021a. Well... thanks for destroying this partition, Ghost. I really appreciate that. I conceded that I just needed to reinstall the OS, but I wanted to recover the data on that drive. Seeing as I had a brand spanking new Ghost boot flash drive, and knowing that working from a boot disk was tried and true, I figured I'd image the affected drive to that spare drive, thus letting Ghost redeem itself to an extent. 16 hours later, Ghost finished working. I shut off the machine, pulled the spare drive, put it in an enclosure, and plugged the enclosure's USB into the laptop... just to discover that the drive was blank. Ghost had spent 16 hours doing nothing... nothing... 16 hours... blank disk... yeah... f*** you, Norton.
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Big Cray: Accept no Substitute

I tried to give Facebook a chance

It's no secret that I have a long running dislike for Facebook. I hate the interface, poor search functionality, and vanilla plain look. However, since MySpace is running off all their users with the hideous and non-functional, Facebook wannabe 3.0 make-over, I decided to re-evaluated Facebook and give it another chance.

I updated my ancient Facebook profile with fresh information, began to participate, and was almost to the point where I could tolerate Facebook. Then, this morning, as I'm riding shotgun in a vehicle headed for Terre Haute, I thought I'd log in to my Facebook to show someone something. I loaded up the main page in the Bolt browser on my Bold and entered my username and password. Then, to my surprise, Facebook gives me a message saying that since I'm logging in from somewhere different than usual, I would have to go through extra security steps to log in. What? That's retarded! Why isn't a correct username and password sufficient? Ridiculous!

First, it required I solve a captcha, which is no big deal, but does nothing at all to help authenticate my identity, so it is utterly pointless. Secondly, they want me to answer my secret question. Uh oh. I never put real answers to my secret questions because that actually decreases security, and since I have the ability to never forget my username and password, I should never need to answer this question. Facebook disagrees.

So, as a fallback, I decide to log in to Facebook's mobile site instead. When I correctly enter my username and password, Facebook tells me there is a problem and I need to log in with a computer. Unbelievable. I'm locked out of my account because I attempted to (gasp) log in to Facebook from somewhere other than my home computer. I don't think I can verbalize how idiotic and inane this is. Since when are social networks tethered to your PC? If I have the correct username and password, I should be able to log in from any computer or device anywhere without having to jump through extra hoops. It's the user's responsibility to not be a retard and let their username and password be attained by others. Why should the incompetence of morons cause the rest of us to be subjected to this kind of overbearing and misguided security?

This experience may have exhausted the one chance I was going to give Facebook. I'm just glad Blogger doesn't act like that.
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute

[Update, 12/29/2010]: I got on my computer and unlocked my account today, but, because Facebook thinks my account was "compromised," they forced me to change my password. I didn't think anything of it, and changed it, thinking I could change right back to the old one that I wanted to keep, knowing it was never actually compromised. No. When I tried to change back to my old password, Facebook told me I cannot use that password. They enforce a password history? Couldn't they at least give me a means by which to reset this password history? My hatred for Facebook grows.

New name, content the same

Long time readers may have noticed that today, the name has changed from the classic The Geudelbuoy Experience to The Big Cray Experience. I apologize to anyone who enjoyed the novelty of trying to say "Geudelbuoy," or just liked the uniqueness of it. The name change is just a necessary step in the addition of this site as the cornerstone of BigCray.com (which happened yesterday, by the way). You can expect the same cynicism you've always gotten without any increase in Ninja Andy-esque narcissism due to the title having "more Big Cray."
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute

Whoa, when did I install Silverlight?

I like to consider myself a safe web surfer, as I am very knowledgeable about computers and use safe surfing habits, but I was just shocked by something that occurred a short while ago.

During a normal run around the internet, nothing too out of the ordinary, I popped the start menu to grab the calculator for some quick mathematical assistance, when I noticed, at the bottom of my list was Silverlight. Now, I knew that wasn't there earlier, and I have been avoiding Silverlight since it's inception as it is completely unnecessary software. I have Automatic Updates set up to simply notify me when there are updates available, and I pick and choose which to install. I had not updated anything recently. I had not installed new applications recently. I checked the shortcut properties to see when it was created, and was shocked to see it was made a mere 4 minutes ago. I was just surfing the internet then... in Firefox no less... how did this happen? I checked the event viewer and saw two related entries, 4 minutes before. One said

Product: Microsoft Silverlight - Update 'Microsoft Silverlight 3.0.50611.0' installed successfully.

The other (clocked at the same second) said

Product: Microsoft Silverlight -- Configuration completed successfully.

What?

Regardless, I uninstalled it as quickly as it had mysteriously appeared, but am still a little unsure of my security. Comodo didn't even peep at me about it... and it even peeps when Defender gets updated definitions. Has anyone else experienced drive-by Silverlighting?
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute