Technology: June 2008 Archives

Apple is known for they're aesetics and marketing for their products, so I'm always disappointed with they go with something that looks good, but sucks. In this case, I mean the earbuds which come with iPods. My girlfriend and I were watching a movie on my iPod Touch during our flight out of Montgomery. She was using her Apple supplied earbuds (retail $40) and I was using a pair of Phillips foam earbuds (retail $10).

She was getting frustrated by how low I was keeping the volume, until she finally took one of my earbuds. Then she suddenly realized that the reason I was keeping the volume so low was that I could hear everything just fine. Her earbuds were so bad at blocking the ambient noise in the plane that she was basically stuck reading the subtitles to follow the plot.

The iPod got a lot of press a year or so ago for the poor quality of their earbuds, and they deserved every bit of it. Considering the premium that is paid for Apple products, it's disappointing that they have to include one of the poorest quality accessories I've ever seen with a high-quality product.

I've been hosting with Beachcomber Creations (BCC) for the last seven years. It started out as a cheap solution to my desire to post various things online hosting my domain. Over the last couple of years though, BCC has slowly accumulated strikes in my experiences with them. Then in the last year they've finally driven me away.

First, they made a change to my mail server configuration without prior notice, resulting in all of my email bouncing for a weekend before I found the error and fixed the configuration. Then, for a second time, they moved my account to a new server and lost 6 days worth of my email. When I contacted them to get the mail moved to the new server, they took the stance that it wasn't their responsibility, and sent me some info on how to access the old server and move the data myself.

Quite frankly, this isn't the level of service that I'm willing to put with. As someone who works in IT infrastructure, I would never tell a paying client that it was their responsibility to deal with the data loss from an unannounced server migration. So, I've restructured my hosting solutions.

First, I've migrated all of my email domains to Google Apps. Probably a long time coming, this lets me continue to use IMAP for Outlook, but also integrate chat and calendaring with my friends who already use Google.

I've also migrated this blog and my other web content to GoDaddy hosting. I'm looking forward to an improved hosting experience with a provider that is a large-scale and well-managed environment.

While the vast majority of the site content should now be migrated and looking more-or-less the same, you may encounter some broken links. I'll try to get things cleaned up and maybe migrate to a newer site design if I get time.