Link Sharing

As you can see from the article below, I’m trying something new.  Instead of spamming everyone via instant messages, I thought I’d consolidate into one place.  No idea how well it will work, but we’ll see.

More Gaming

As you can see from my gamertag below, I’ve definitely been playing with the Xbox360 more and more.  Unfortunately, that’s only really been from two games, PGR3 and CoD2.  I haven’t even started in on NFS:MW, which looks crazy fun from what I’ve seen Aaron play.  It’s crazy, there are days that I really want to just sit down and play, but when I actually can, there really isn’t enough time.  Between work, working out, Erin, and Everything Else™, I can’t say I have that much time to just play.  However, I am on the last section of CoD2, which means that if I ever finish it, my gamerscore should increase quite a bit (I’m playing it on Veteran, the hardest difficulty, the first time through).  Plus I just purchased a 12 (+ 1) month subscription to Live!, so I can play online, which when I actually did it in PGR3, was quite fun.  And then there’s more cool games that are coming out, like Alan Wake, Burnout Revenge (granted it is just a re-release), and others.

Oh yeah, and the D-Day invasion on Veteran mode, is, well, frickin’ hard.

Emigrant Direct

Currently, I use ING for my savings account.  Their interest rates are at 3.8%, but I’ve always been tempted to sign up with Emigrant Direct, since their rates are always higher (currently 4%).  A month ago, I decided to take the plunge and sign up.

To begin with, their signup is a lot more complicated with ING.  Good or bad, it just takes a lot longer to actually start making money.  Anyways, you can open an account with no initial deposit.  Being that you can’t demo the system before you sign up, I figured this would be a good way to make sure I actually liked what they do, and that I wasn’t jumping into something I didn’t want to be in. 

After signing up, you have to attach it to an account so you can get money in and out, and they can authorize the account.  Not a problem.  Since I was going to transfer money out of my ING account to begin with, I put in the account and routing details for it.  I then waited 3 or 4 days until two deposits were done, and then I signed back in to Emigrant to authorize the account.  Unfortunately, that’s not the last step.  Turns out to be able to sign into the account online, you need to wait for your first billing statement to arrive.

So, I wait.

On the 22nd or so, I finally get a statement from them, so I proceed to sign in.  I get a strange error message while signing in, but figure it’s just a glitch since it refreshed on its own, and was gone.  So, after I finally get signed in, I get a “General Error” when I attempt to view my account.  They have a message center, so I fire off an email to figure out what’s going on.  The reply follows.

Dear Customer,
Thank you for your Inquiry.
According to our records, your American Dream savings Account has been closed effective 12/15/2005 due to an initial deposit of “0.00”. After 10 business days of the account at a “0.00” balance, the account will be closed.
However, In order to reopen the account please mail in a check to the following address.
Mail in a check made out to EmigrantDirect for at least one dollar with your EmigrantDirect account number

Please mail the check to the following address:
EmigrantDirect
ATTN: Communication Department
13 Croton Avenue
Ossining, New York 10562
Thank you for banking with EmigrantDirect
-Shahara H.

Let’s point out what’s wrong with this email, shall we?

  1. My name is not “Customer.”  Is your system so archaic that you can’t retrieve my name from my login ID?
  2. How was I supposed to fund the account when it took > 10 days to receive my mailed bank statement?
  3. Why does your sign up process inform you that you don’t have to fund the account, when you, in actuality, do?

Ok, so those last two weren’t actually part of the email, but it’s implied based on what was offered to me during signup.  And don’t you worry faithful readers, I emailed back Shahara and let her know how assinine this policy is.

I haven’t yet sent off an check to them, because after looking over the interface, it leaves a lot to be desired.  I can’t even add additional accounts to automatically fund an account.  Or at least, I can’t do that from any of the menu’s I currently have available.  Maybe someone who has a functioning account can instill a little bit more confidence, but as it stands, I think I may not do anything with Emigrant. 

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Back on the Road to MCSE

I’m sure everyone remembers my praise of Microsoft Certification Tests from last time I talked about them, but now I come with new found knowledge and an external pressure (having to get it done fully certified in one year).  For those of you that don’t know, I’m now an MCP (yes Nick and Jason, I can do the dance/handshake now).  Actually, I’m closer to being an MCSA than MCP, but who’s counting. 

Now, this may come as a surprise to those that I have worked with before, as I don’t hold the tests in very high regards.  This is mostly due to the people were MCSE Certified, and the messes they left me to clean up.  Plus there was the horrible taste in my mouth after I took my first test under a year ago.  Not to give myself excuses, but looking back, that first test wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be.  Yes, I don’t doubt that I should’ve passed, but just reading the book without taking any sort of practice test probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do.  Granted, I did pretty much the exact same thing this time, with minimal (read about 30 mins before each test) review for both the Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.  Honestly, I don’t think it has anything to do with the amount of review time I put towards it, and instead how much I’ve actually used the product. 

Now after I’ve completed both of those tests, looking back, I realize it is a fairly decent test.  It shows if you really know the material, I guess.  I think the last time I took it, I was just so nervous, and when I started seeing the complex questions I paniced more than anything.  This time around, I knew that I knew the material, so it was much easier, and quite painless.  However, at the end of the test it was still hard to push the completed button. 

I’m just hoping the other tests I have go just as easily.  I know, though, that I’m going to have to spend more time on each of them instead of just flying off the cuff, as I don’t know as much intricacies with AD, networking, etc.  Actually, I tried with the Networking I test, and amazingly didn’t do that bad.  Unfortunately, much like the first time I took the Windows 2003 test, though, I failed, but by such a small amount that I’m sure if I would’ve taken it the next day I would’ve passed.  Oh well, such is life.

Four more in 9 months.  It sounds like a long time, but going home and studying is not what I call a fun time.  Hopefully I can mash out a bunch within a week to keep me from spreading it out too much.

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Daily Humor

I saw this over at BoingBoing, and couldn’t resist sending it to everyone one I knew.  However, I realized, there’s some of you I may have missed, so I introduce you to the Coyote Hat.

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Categorized as for fun, life

ESX Networking

This is just a quick update with something that I finally fixed two nights ago.  If you happen to run VMWare ESX, *DO NOT* share a NIC between the console and Virtual Machines (VMs).  This was how I had been running my system because I only had one NIC at the time.  However, I had purchased a new dual port Intel gigabit NIC about a month ago, but I just hadn’t had the time to actually update the system to utilize it.  Well, two nights ago, I set the original NIC to only the console session, and then put ports on the dual port NIC on a virtual switch used by all the virtual machines.  Therefore, I theoretically get 200 Mbps to the virtual machines. 

Holy crap, talk about an improvement.  Transfers between the VMs and my NAS used to be dog slow, but now they are where they should be.  I just need to get a gigabit switch with jumbo frames to use everything to fullest extent.

Snowfall

Last night was our first, what I’d call, large, snowfalll of the season.  It looks as if we got around 6” or more.  What made it funny was that it started before close of business, and by the time 5PM rolled around, there was probably a couple of inches or so.  I’m just glad that I didn’t have to drive anywhere last night.  I leasurely walked to the Blue Line, and then walked from my stop to my apt.  It probably took me about 5 minutes longer than normal, just because of having to walk in the snow.  However, as I walked over 90/94, traffic was stopped.  The freeway then remained a parking lot until after midnight.  It took Erin 45 minutes to go about 10 miles last night after class.  Good thing I sat at home and played CoD2 and PGR3 all night with Binford.  :cheese:

In fact, last night was the first time we tried out Live.  Unfortunately you can’t have two players signed into one Xbox360 and play, but we did have a lot of fun trading off the controller.  Overall quite fun, we both sucked, but enjoyable none-the-less.

Oh yeah, and one more thing.  Be sure to check out my updated Live stats with my Gamercard over there on the right.  We didn’t know that we could both have an account on one box, so we had been using Binford’s, hence why I have about nothing.

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