Meet Me In Montana

I booked a cabin in Montana this week. No, I'm not going to become the next Unabomber, my family is going there on vacation in June. After browsing every area web site, I finally selected the Apgar Village Lodge as where we'll stay. My parents and my sister are going to meet my wife and I there, and hopefully we'll be bringing my grandparents along with us, if they can get away from the farm for a week. We're also going to do some whitewater rafting while we're in Montana, possibly here.

Don't trust me

According to a recent study at the Unniversity of Minnesota, I'm a member of the most distrusted minority in America. I said that to a co-worker just now, and he said "You're Jewish?".

Bad Service

I had some abysmally bad customer service from Gateway yesterday, I only wish I was able to save the transcript of the online chat session I had with one of their techs. I was helping a student who had to reinstall Windows on his laptop, and Gateway didn't have the drivers on their web site for his network card. He'd managed to lose the Restore CD for his laptop, but had purchased a copy of Windows XP, so this should have been no problem, right? Wrong. Even though I'd already said that I had the wireless drivers working (which are on their site), the tech insisted twice that those were the network drivers I needed. After I made it clear that I was after WIRED networking drivers, he tried telling me that the only way to get those were off the restore CD. So, I asked what chipset was in the laptop, and after 10 minutes he came back and told me it was a Marvel-Yukon Gigabit PCI-Express chipset. I said "I guarantee to you that this laptop does not have that chipset". The laptop wasn't ancient by any means, but it was more than a year and a half old, and sure enough, while the tech was insisting I was wrong, I found that the laptop actually used the Broadcom 4401 chipset, and downloaded and installed those drivers with no problem, though the tech still insisted I was wrong...

Needless to say, "Simon" got a negative rating in the feedback section from me...

Important TiVo News

TiVo announced yesterday that they're going to be eliminating Lifetimeservice as an option next week, so if you've been meaning to buy a TiVo for someone you know, or a second one for yourself, now is the time to do so, as after that, you'll have to pay a monthly fee as long as you use the service. This has always been the best way to buy a TiVo, as $299/12.95= 23+, so you break even vs. the monthly fee after 24 months.

Amazon has the 80 hour units for $69.99 after rebate.

Or you can pick one up at Best Buy, and TiVo just added Radio Shack as a partner too, so they may have them in their stores soon.

Remember, the Lifetime goes away on March 15, so act quickly, and don't forget to list my e-mail (seth.bokelman@uni.edu) as referring you if you do buy another one, I need a few more referrals for those nifty Bose headphones... :)

If for some reason you find the new pricing methods preferable, they're now including the box in the service plans, but the price varies depending on how long you want to be contracted for:

* The price for a TiVo box and a one-year service commitment is $19.95 a month or $224 prepaid * The price for a TiVo box and a two-year service commitment is $18.95 a month or $369 prepaid * The price for a TiVo box and a three-year service commitment is $16.95 a month or $469 prepaid

I'm not really a fan of this pricing model, but since I'm not planning on replacing my box anytime soon, it doesn't really affect me too much...

Nasty Safari security problem on Mac OS X

SANS links to details of a nasty security problem affecting the Mac OS X browser that will automatically run shell scripts linked to from web pages. If you're reading this via a Macintosh, do the following ASAP:

The best immediate recourse against such an attack is to deactivate the option "Open 'safe' files after downloading" in the "General" section of Safari's preferences. Alternative web browsers such as Camino or Firefox do not support the automatic execution of files. These browsers can be prompted to automatically download a file by using the refresh command in the HTML source code of a web page. However, the file will not be executed. Since the Finder selects the icon for a file based on its extension, users are advised to verify that the OS is using the proper file type. This can be done through the information window or in column view.