Welcome to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Kara and I just returned from a seven-day trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We stayed at Royal Decameron Costa Flamingos all-inclusive resort which had fantastic scenery and was reasonably priced at $1700 for the week including all meals, unlimited drinks, taxis to and from the airport, and airfare.

The best part of most vacations is being able to relax and we sure did. Most days went like so: wake up at 10:00; eat breakfast; get in the ocean until 12:00; swim until 1:00; eat lunch; swim some more; get ready for dinner and eat it; take pictures and enjoy one of five bars. Awesome.

We did venture out of the resort once on foot in an effort to go downtown but were too frightened by our surroundings so we promptly turned around after walking for about 10 minutes. After that we decided to book a snorkeling tour instead which was great because the taxi picked us up right in front of the resort.

My only complaints were lack of air conditioning everywhere except the rooms and mediocre food. But Kara and I quickly found a work-around by making reservations at the on-site Piccolo restaurant which was enclosed (cooler but not air conditioned) and had food at least three times better than the other restaurants we tried so therefore we ate there three out of the seven nights. Even so, a quick trip to Applebee’s when we returned was in order to get some decent dessert. For some reason only flan and nasty, hard cookies were supplied.

On-site Restaurant Rating (best to worst):

1. Piccolo (Italian)
2. Rodizio (Brazilian Grill)
3. Wok (Thai)
4. Buffets (each night the theme changes)
5. Mexicano (Mexican)
6. JapJap (Japanese)

The bars were numerous (5) and inviting. My favorite drink was the mango margarita followed closely by what they called a frozen brown cow which was simply Kahlua and milk.

Enough rambling. Enjoy the pictures!

See the rest of the pictures!

Posted in Amazing, Entertainment, Food, Life, Reviews, Vacation | 2 Comments »

How to backup your website

Connect to your box via ssh and run the following commands to create a backup of your site.


cd ~
mkdir Backup
nohup zip -r Backup/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.zip www/ > backup_log.txt &

(Replace YYYY with the 4-digit year, MM with the 2-digit month, HH with the 24-hour format of the hour, and MM with the 2-digit minute)

cd ~ navigates to your home folder

mkdir Backup creates the backup directory in which the backups will be stored

nohup is short for no hangup and allows processes started by users at the terminal to continue running even after the user logs out

zip is a program which combines many files into one and compresses them to make the end result even more portable

-r tells zip to burrow into all subdirectories in order to grab all of the files

Backup/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.zip is the path to the backup file

www/ is the directory to backup (it may be html, htdocs, httpdocs, etc. on your box)

> backup_log.txt redirects all output from zip to the backup_log.txt file so you can review the file later

& tells linux to run the zip program in the background so that you can logout or perform other tasks without killing the process

Now all you need to do is download that zipped file. Use your favorite SFTP client to login to your box and snag it. I recommend FileZilla Client for all platforms. If you’re looking for an FTP server, FileZilla Server is perfect.

Posted in Backup, DIY, Hosting, IT, Linux, Programming, Software, Technology, Web Development | 2 Comments »

That’s the last time I buy from Dell

Regrettably, Dell has canceled your recent order for a Dell Nuvi 275T GPS or Nuvi 265WT GPS

Dear Customer,

This is to notify you that, regrettably, Dell has canceled your recent order for a Dell Nuvi 275T GPS or Nuvi 265WT GPS. Due to our error, the system was shown online at an incorrect price and was far below the correct price for that product, Because of the large difference in price, we have not reinstated your order, but we invite you to visit www.dell.com to re-order this item at the correct price.

As specifically noted on our web pages, catalogs, ads, and customer order documentation, Dell reserves the right to cancel any orders resulting from such errors.

We truly value our relationship and reputation with our customers, and we realize the negative impact from these types of errors.

Please be assured that we are working hard to try and prevent these problems going forward.

We are sorry for any inconvenience that our error may have caused.

Regards,
Dell Employee and Education Personal Purchase Programs

Thank you for being a Dell Customer

I think they mean ex-Dell Customer.

When companies make this mistake, they need to stand behind the company and stand up for their customers. If companies realized how much future business they lost from stupid mistakes like this they would honor the deal in an instant.

In the last five years I purchased two laptops from Dell for a total of $4,000. That’s $800/year that Dell will not be getting from me. Think about how many other loyal customers Dell ticked off with this stupid customer disservice move. I would wager that Dell is revoking this deal for at least 1,000 of their customers. Let’s assume that 10% of those customers spend as much as I do on Dell products.

10% of 1,000 is 100 customers. $800/customer/year * 100 customers = $80,000/year that Dell has lost to its competitors.

The deal was for a Garmin Nuvi 265WT which retails on Amazon.com for $217.84 (at the time of this post) and was being sold on Dell’s site for $130 + tax. That difference is $87.84 and at 1,000 customers that’s $87,840. In just over one year, Dell would have broke even by honoring this deal and now has lost many valuable customers.

What a stupid move. Way to go, Dell!

Posted in Annoying, Bugs, Customer Service, Deals, Depressing, GPS, Hardware, Money, Ridiculous, Technology, Toys, Web Development | 1 Comment »

It pays to be pink. At least Garmin thinks so.

For my mother’s birthday I purchased a TomTom One 130. The updated maps had the other half of my road, so I was happy it could navigate more efficiently. Tonight I stumbled across a new site called DealWaiter. I plugged in “Garmin Nuvi” and it had a few results but also had a link to buy it immediately on Amazon.com. I’m sure that link is purely platonic, right? Hah! It turns out the Garmin Nuvi 250 comes in two colors: pink and silver.

I was blown away by the price difference:

Amazon.com - Garmin Nuvi 250 - Price comparison between silver and pink versions

Silver: $109.99
Pink: $471.99
——————–
Difference: $362.00

The difference alone could purchase
3.3 units of the silver model!

Garmin isn’t the only company who discriminates based on color. Want a black Mac? Better have some “I’m rich!” money laying around. Apple used to have both black and white MacBooks and the typical difference was $100+.

What ridiculous discrepancies have you found?

Posted in Amazing, Annoying, Deals, Depressing, GPS, Hardware, Money, Ridiculous, Technology, Toys | 1 Comment »

How do you watch your television shows?

Midway through Heroes: Season 3 I realized how quickly video streaming technology has evolved in the last few years. Think about the multitude of ways you can now get your fix.

• Regular old TV
• Digital Video Recorder (DVR): TiVo, MythTV, cable box DVR
• Hulu
• YouTube (and other video-sharing sites)
• NetFlix’s Watch Instantly
• Networks’ websites (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, etc.)
• NetFlix and Blockbuster DVDs to your door
• Video rental stores
• Red Box (at grocery stores and various other locations)
• On my iPhone using NBC’s mobile player.

EDIT:
Loren brought to my attention another category which I left off entirely, which is software/hardware combos for consuming the aforementioned services:

• Boxee
• Apple TV
• Roku Digital Video Player
• Xbox 360
• LG Network Blu-ray Players
• Samsung Network Blu-ray Players

Just 15 years ago that list was a lot smaller: TV, video rental stores, VCR.

What’s your favorite viewing service?

Posted in Amazing, DVR, Entertainment, Google, Hardware, Hosting, Software, Technology, TV, Web Development | 1 Comment »

Vote for The Celebrity Apprentice

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Posted in Entertainment, Polls, Reviews, TV | 1 Comment »

Search on Walmart.com: What’s the point?

My back yard is full of bare spots so I thought it was time to re-seed. Since Walmart is usually cheaper than the competition, I check there first when I need something. I searched for “grass seed” on Walmart.com and got results that couldn’t have been more off.

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Posted in Annoying, Bugs, Depressing, Programming, Ridiculous, Software, Technology, Web Development | No Comments »

View Source of HTML Email in Microsoft Outlook

For some reason, Microsoft decided it would be fun to make it nearly impossible to view the HTML source of an email in Outlook.

Below are the convoluted steps to make it accessible. Most of the steps are for the initial setup which makes a new icon available from the quick access toolbar. After you set that up it’s fairly straightforward.

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Posted in Annoying, Depressing, IT, Microsoft Outlook, Ridiculous, Software, Web Development | 2 Comments »

Use Google As a Crutch For Your Cheap Website Host

Almost every site I create nowadays relies heavily on JavaScript. Having to load in all those scripts can really bog your web server down. Instead of serving those static files yourself, why not use Google? It provides a free service called Google AJAX Libraries that hosts all of the popular JavaScript libraries.

Google makes this very easy by providing a dead-simple API.

Here’s a quick example of how to load jQuery 1.3.2:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");</script>


If you don’t want to use Google’s loader, they provide a direct link to the script for each library.

Using this service in parallel with Amazon S3, my Bluehost-hosted site now runs significantly faster at almost no additional cost.

Check out Google’s available AJAX libraries.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Keep getting kicked off Windows XP after you log in?

Viruses can be tricky. Even if your anti-virus software is kept up-to-date on a daily basis it may not catch the newest threats. What would you do if a virus infected your computer? That depends. Can you run a virus scan? Can you even login? I ran into that problem and came out victorious.

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Posted in Annoying, Depressing, IT, Software, Virus | No Comments »