A Businessman's View

I'm sure this doesn't fall under the "quality blog entry" concept that I mentioned two entries ago, but I'm also not one to shy away from pointing out the good and the bad in customer service either. Here's the Executive Summary for you, which I am sure will hook you into reading the rest: I lost a hard drive that had no backup; recovered it completely using freeware ; fried my motherboard in the process of permanently installing the previously lost hard drive; replaced the motherboard and the CPU (just in case); and now have a working computer again 4 weeks later. How all of this happened is something I can't explain. (Well, maybe I can. More on that later.) Three years ago, I bought an external, 500G USB 2.0 Fantom drive from MicroNet . The reviews on NewEgg were positive overall; the price (at that time) was very good; and I was running out of disk space on my internal drive so I bought it. About a month before the really bad stuff occurred, the ...

I have had many (older) good friends pass away during my life, and invariably during the memorial service someone says that this is a time of joyful reflection and not mourning. It is okay to be sad at their passing, they continue, but we should be thankful that they are reunited with God. On this ninth anniversary of September 11, I'd like to think of this as a joyful occasion then. I am not talking about those who passed away on that fateful day, however; I am talking about those who survived that day, whether they were in the area on the day itself or had some relation to the events of that day. It is not my intention to trivialize the deaths of the many who were lost. Like you, I mourned them, even more so since I worked in the South Tower up until the year prior. In fact, on that day I was on the 31st floor of the tallest building on the lower East Side (save for those in the Financial District) and had a clear view of the events as they occurred including the planes'...

Quick note: last week I didn't write an entry here - it was intentional. I keep writing about the same nonsense, news articles, and I am starting to become hypersensitive to the fact that I sound like a broken record. So I wanted to step back; write less frequently; and write about more quality topics. My oldest daughter visited last week. As I am wont to do, I took the opportunity to help her increase her vocabulary as we spent time together. This visit, the words of the day were vernacular , diction , and colloquialism . (I also explained the difference between a clutch and a klatch since she is a fashion minded social butterfly, but I digress...) To explain vernacular I used the examples of borough vs. boro , doughnut vs. donut , and light vs. lite . To hone the point, I essentially described the latter word in each pair as an expression (pun intended) of laziness in communication. In fact, I said, so many people were lazy in their desire to communicate that these ...