admin's blog

Mckenzie Management Sucks

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:24:23 -0700

Hello World,

I wanted to share a little story of an unethical company who's business practices leave much to be desired. This company's name is McKenzie Management located in La Jolla, California. Their website is http://www.mckenziemgmt.com

The reason for this article is to warn any future techs who may come in contact with this company not to do business with them. This company has a history of using a tech, running up a bill and not paying them. I was a little sketch about working for them because I was taking the account over from another computer tech. I spoke with the tech and asked him the question, is this a good client to have? After a long pause, he gave me a somewhat grudging and disconcerting, "uhh ya there ok..." Not listening to my better sense, I went ahead and proceed to give my professional recommendations to them.

No Support for Beryl from ATI "Official Driver"

Sun, 27 May 2007 22:08:21 -0700

I was trying to get my $300 ATI card to work with beryl. Yes its possible to do if you want to use the open source "slower" driver but since i'm also a gamer and wanted to keep my framerate at top speed I attempted to install beryl with the fglrx driver that is supplied with ATI. After several hours of reading and trying different things I finally came across this http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=26907

Basically it says that they don't support beryl...have a nice day.

XO FLEX PRI

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:37:07 -0700

XO FLEX PRI

A Few Experiences that i would like to share.

1) The Flex PRI is not a true pri its an IP/PRI. This has some limits on what your t1 can do, such as being able to set you out going caller id and some advantages that a normal T1 can not do, split your t1 channels dynamically into bandwidth or voice channels depending on what you need.

2) Out of the 3 months that the t1 has been active, i have only been able to use it for about 1/2 that time. Now this is not entirely XO's fault. Its just that they had no experience in making it work with asterisk. I think that by the time you read this, their customer service may have improved. This was due to XO blocking my calls. They changed a setting on the pri to not allow any calls to go out unless i had my caller id set as one of the numbers they assigned to me. After calling XO about a dozen times, having them send a tech out to my location (who said it was working fine) and then opening a service contract with DIGIUM to make sure that my settings were correct. No one could figure out why this was not working. In fact all the XO techs i spoke with couln't see anything wrong with their equipment. By chance one day i figured out that If i set my caller ID to be that of one assigned to me, the call WOULD work. It only took me 3 aggravating weeks of troubleshooting and hair pulling to figure out that little gem.

Need credit repair? I do...

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:47:22 -0700

Well, i'll be honest,

I have sucky credit. Its not because i don't pay my bills, nor do i go around screwing people out of money. My credit problems come from the fact that I am self employed, unmarried, and don't own a house. When i first started my company, i was tempted by the offers to get services and products, when i didn't have the cash flow to support them. As a consequence, i ended up paying alot of bills late, waiting for my customers to pay me. Some of them even were sent to collections. Now, even though all my debt is long ago paid off and settled, the negative items remain on the report. I have personally written the credit agencies and have recieved nothing more then stall tactics and no real results. Finally, I decided to try a credit repair agency. After looking around, I chose Lexington Law as the first agency to try.

Who has the cheapest bandwidth?? Please Post!

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:34:01 -0800

Are you a computer tech that is wanting to find the best deal on bandwidth? Well, so am I. So far, i have found out a few things about bandwidth and here they are, please post any killer deals on bandwidth you know about please

Complex Drive, San Diego, 200 / meg blended bandwidth. Nice people, a little over worked it seems as i have tried to get quotes from them a few times and they never have time to get back to me.
A full cabinet is about $1000 / month. They will hit you for overages pretty quick if your not carefull. They have a really nice facility with raised floors, the whole nine yards.

Permissions Changed

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 14:09:16 -0800

Due to all the "Fake" posts by bots, we have changed the permissions to only allow authenticated users to post. Sorry for the trouble!

We need to keep the quality of the content to the highest level possible!

--Admin

A very cool streaming music site.

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 23:56:40 -0800

Someone sent me this link the other day, and i found it to be so cool that i had to share it with everyone. http://www.pandora.com/

The aim of the site is to create a personalized radio station baised on a starting point such as a song or artist. I typed sublime and it started streaming music that was similar to sublime. You can rate the music like or dislike and it morphs the online music database with your vote counting in the future for everyone who uses the same playlist.

A cool project indeed.

Check it out. Let me know what you think!

Downloading (the usenet method) and the Joy owning a mod'd xbox

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 01:18:51 -0700

Have you been struggling to get the newest software, movies, TV shows, games, emulators over a peer to peer network such as Kazaa, Emule, Lime wire, or even using a Bit Torrent tracker to get your fix? Well Stop! Your wasting your time in a serious way. There is something out there unknown to the general public. Its been around since the dawn of the internet and due to its complexity and learning curb, is out of reach of the simpletons on the internet. But we are elite right? That’s why we use Newsgroups. Oh btw, this may not be legal in your area to try this, because we all know your not supposed to get free software, or movies, and games. Also, I would suggest that you only do this for research purposes. But on the other hand, sometimes, your customer has a valid license for some software, movie or game, but they just lost the disk, well here is how you can get them another copy. As a computer tech, you need an edge!

A Good Computer Techs First Responsibility is to Protect the Data

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 21:13:42 -0700

It is my opinion that many computer techs greatly under estimate the importance of protecting vital data of their client that that serve. To this end, I have created a method to give your clients a SNAPSHOT of their data based on the day, so that you can recover some document that was overwritten easily and quickly. This snapshot can then be used to backup the data while it is in use.

SNAPSHOT SCRIPT

call the file mondaybackup.bat


xcopy "c:\home\" "c:\backup\monday\" /e /c /y /d

xcopy "c:\src2" "c:\backup\monday\" /e /c /y /d

.....copy this as you need to.......



Rules to follow when starting your own computer tech business
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 21:04:04 -0700
Well this is my last day in beautiful Maui and I was thinking back to all those hard learned lessons that got me where I am today. I thought I would list a few of them out for you and hopefully you can avoid some of the mistakes I made. 
So here is some of the practices that I will follow that seem to work for me. Take it as you see fit
Note there is no order to any of this stuff...
1) Save yourself some gas, have your residential customer come to you. I have found they will always be willing to do so you don't have to go to them unless they specifically request it. I usually say something to the effect "looks like I will need to get that in my shop somehow..."


Backup that data (online)
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 20:56:17 -0700
Well here I am preaching the data backup principal to the choir but I have been rudely reminded recently to the importance of backing up your data on a very regular basis. Ok I admit it, I'm writing this article in Maui on my blackberry phone (oh what a wonderful invention but another time) and it couldn't be better out here. Today was filled with learning to snorkel in the surprisingly warm Hawaiian waters. Oh what a great time I had checking all the fish, eels, coral reefs going on at the bottom of the ocean. Oh what a terrible time I had when I was through. My laptop, camera, and wallet were stolen. Shocked, disbelief, anger, blame, depression, acceptance. All of these emotions were rapidly swimming through my head upon finding the items missing.


Firefox 1.5 Released and Reviewed, Get a Built in FTP Program!
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 20:11:50 -0700
So by now you must have seen or heard about Firefox, the web browser that I use because of its enhanced stability, security, and extra features that it offers over Internet explorer.  Well up to this point I have been using the stable 1.06 version but now I’m upgrading to the 1.5 version that was just released on http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/ 
The installation went with out too much trouble, I did get an error message letting me know that all of my extensions and add-ons that I had installed before the upgrade were no longer compatible with the new version of firefox.  Ok so lets go back to the page where I got my handy built in ftp program.  Search google.com for "Firefox FTP" or visit http://fireftp.mozdev.org/


Setting up a referral based business (and some advertising hints)
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 19:37:52 -0700
Today has been busy busy busy on the techie side for me.  Where am I getting all this business you may ask?  Advertising? News Paper? Radio? TV? None of the above!  I get all my business through word of mouth.  
As a new tech, I used to run lots of advertising thinking it would help boost my business.  This is true it did but the types of people I was working for were not all that great.  When working in any service based industry, there are two types of people, those who respond to advertising and those who respond to referral based business.  You would much rather be dealing with the latter trust me.


Site Opening
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 19:39:55 -0700
This is the grand opening of Computer Tech Union website.  We are creating this site with the purpose of giving free information to computer techs and creating a united computer tech force.  Please post any feedback on how I could make the site better.