Well OK not the best ever but Michael Bay is totally the coolest director ever and a guys guy. This guy knows where it’s at in the movie industry. And yes I know a lot of you are complaining because he does a lot of quick cuts and fast action, it keeps the mind active and interest in the movie. He’s not doing it to hide bad special effects cause seriously Transformers had no bad effects. It’s his style and I for one love it. Keep up the good work I can’t wait for Transformers the Sequel.

Posted in 3D/Animation, Personal, Reviews | No Comments »

Well I have been running Windows Vista 64 bit for a week now and all the bad things that I heard from people when I decided to switch have not happened. The system runs very efficiently all of my software works well with it and even games are running smoother and with less video glitches.

Problems that I have found to date are as follows.

1. SyncToy from Microsoft does not work on x64 bit vista but there is a work around that I found here.
2. PCI Simple communications Device driver not found but after uninstalling the device and running diagnostics when it was found on reboot. I was directed to a link to an Intel download that corrected the problem.

Windows is recognizing all of the RAM installed in the system currently 4GB with the other 4GB en route. Overall I am very happy with how well vista 64 is running and there is no conflict with any of my applications. Install time was just shy of 15min from boot to reboot after install. Adobe Master Collection CS3 installed in a very short time compared to installing it on the XP system.

64 bit OS’s are the future and if you are building a new system then I highly recommend Vista 64. If you are worried about certain applications not running in 64 bit environment then you can just run them in compatibility mode. 16bit applications won’t run on 64bit but seriously there is not a reason to run 16bit applications in todays world.

Here is a great site for tweaking Vista and learning more about how to speed up the OS at pcstats.com.

Well thats it for now folks. If you have any questions or want me to test things feel free to drop a comment.

Posted in Business, Computers, Reviews | No Comments »

Anyone else out there miss the 80’s, specifically TV and Movies from the 80’s. I just grabbed an old DVD off the shelf a remastered version of Iron Eagle a really far fetched flying movie from the 80’s. Fun music, hero tale and a really good watch.

While watching I can’t help but to reminisce about the late 80’s when movies where corny and unbelievable nothing was based on reality. We had shows like the A-Team, Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Magnum PI, the list is long. Movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day off, Iron Eagle, Lawnmower Man, Ski School, Ski Patrol, Adventures in Babysitting, The Labyrinth, The Last Starfighter and a HUGE assortment of  other great 80’s flicks not to mention all the horrors series like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elf Street, the list is endless.
Modern movies are technologically advanced and getting better with some of the newer stories based off 80’s television/film. The  Transformers was a master piece using the greatest cartoon of the 80’s Era. Modern TV needs to take a page of the movie industry book and look to the 80’s for stories to immerse our selves into instead of living vicariously through the morons in so called reality TV programs.

Well thats my rant on Reality TV again. Feel free to give input there is nothing like a good old fashioned online debate.

Posted in Personal, Rants&Thoughts, Reviews | No Comments »

Ok well after a few months of hell with webserve.ca hosting I have had to bite the bullet and switch to a new hosting company for my business, clients and personal sites. Consider this post a review of the shoddy service provided by this filth that masquerades as a hosting company. Where do I start?

Customer Service:
This topic is unknown to webserve as they don’t actually provide any. Anyone you can actually get on the phone is actually an outsourced call center you are just glorified human answering machines that take a message and send it off to “someone” at webserve who if they actually exist will choose to ignore the message and not get back to you.

After months of hassles, a 7 day stint with no service I opened a Better Business Bureau complaint which webserve chose to ignore also. After a few months someone from the company finally contacted BBB to inform them that they had just credited my account 2 months. WOOHOOO two more months of crappy service and downtime.

Service:
Well were do we start? There were weekly downtimes where the server was down for 15mins to 4hours at random intervals. There was a 2 day downtime when a RAM module went. There was 1 week downtime when the OS got corrupted. Most recently there was a week of downtime when the server got hacked, when they finally got the server online again they disabled the ability for anyone to log into blogs, forums, CMS or anything with a submission field. Did I forget to mention that this was all within a 6 month period. Here is the best part my home IP address yes MY IP ADDRESS was put on a black list because I accessed multiple sites on the server via FTP, and HTTP, POP3 and logged in to my forums and blogs. Is there any web developers out there that can manage 9 websites on one server without showing you IP accessing the server multiple times. Oh and doing all this without checking email. On numerous occasions I was not able to upload files to the sites because the HDD was full however my allocated 12GB of space was 10% used so how could the HDD be full. I never used more than 2GB of the 1TB of allocated bandwidth, I never even came close to using the allocated 12GB of storage for the RESELLER ACCOUNT that I had with them. I did not even host all of the 10 allocated domains.

Tech Support:
OMG here is where it gets interesting, these incompetent outsourced glorified answering machines using scripted messages to send you when you open and ticket or god forbid actually get a rep on live chat. They don’t know anything either other than to tell you:

“We are Sorry for the inconvenience caused”

“The issue should resolve within few hours”

“We are aware of this situation. Unfortunately [SERVER OR SERVICE] is down but we are working to resolve this issue ASAP. As with any service we provide we realize it must meet the expectations of our clients. Rest assured that we do take the business of hosting people’s websites seriously and are constantly upgrading our systems and services to address any points of failure within our control. We also review all service interruptions and outages for ways to prevent such problems in the future. Again I do apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your business. Our technicians are working on the issue but at present we do not have an estimated time to repair. Your patience and understanding is greatly appreciated.” - This particular blithering ID10T did not even have the common decency to choose an option SERVER or SERVICE before pasting this script into the chat window.

The Worst part of all:
I opted to upgrade to a VPS account after finally talking to a director in the company. Yah I know stupid me why stay with them? Well I have 9 websites all with CSM and or complex MySQL Databases and settings/permissions. I figured a VPS would cure all. I asked to have my accounts transferred over and was told they would. The account comes with 5 IP addresses but they only alocated 1. I had a domain transfered over to webserve and asked that it be added to my billing account DUH not rocket science. Well 3 months later I still have 1 IP address. The only domains on the VPS are the 2 that I managed to make the time to transfer myself and the original server is spending more time out of commission that actually up. And I cant find the billing information for the domain transfer anywhere. I did remind them on a dozen occasions that these simple processes needed to be done.

Conclusion:
BEWARE OF HOSTING THROUGH WEBSERVE.CA FOR ANY REASON THIS COMPANY GUARANTEES 99.9% UPTIME BUT DELIVERS NOTHING CLOSE TO THIS. THEY HAVE NO CUSTOMER SERVICE OR TECH SUPPORT AND REALLY DONT CARE ABOUT THEIR CUSTOMERS AT ALL. OUT OF 10 I GIVE THIS COMPANY A RESOUNDING 0 A COMPLTE WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY DONT’T EVEN CONSIDER THEM FOR ANYTHING LARGER THAN A PLACE TO MAIL YOUR MOST TREASURED FINDS IN THE KITTY LITTER!

Posted in Business, Rants&Thoughts, Reviews | 4 Comments »