XEAI: The accident at the crossroads of art and technology

I bought my first HDTV (I’m up to 3 now) at one of the big retailers. I probably didn’t get the best price but they did offer a lot of extras like installation, no-interest financing, etc. I suspected that I needed to buy cables separately but the sales person never mentioned it and in the whirlwind of purchasing an HD DVR, a wall mount, and maybe something else, I promptly forgot.

It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The store price for an HDMI cable was around $150 bucks! A component cable was $125 (at least those have come down in price at the stores to a mere $70)!

When the installer showed up and asked me if I had cables I could only shrug and ask me if he could provide them. Of course he happily sold them to me for the aforementioned outrageous prices and then ran them through the wall.

I stewed about the cable prices for a few days…especially the component one since I already knew that component cable is little more than an RCA cable with different colored sheathing. I figured that since the signal is digital, this extra expense was not worth it!

Finally, and with steadfast determination, I yanked all the cables from the wall, cleaned the drywall off of them and took them back to the store for a full refund which I happily received. I then went onto eBay and bought similar cables for about $30 each.

The big chains are counting on people being stupid. It seems logical that if you just bought an expensive HDTV it requires a likewise expensive cable. “I just paid 2 grand for my television of course I want the best cable there is…” It’s all baloney!

Since the narrowly-averted gouging, I have been sharing my story of inexpensive cable purchasing with anyone who will listen. Anytime someone mentions they are going to buy a flat screen I can’t help but burst out with my story.

So, to help people out, I decided to make a website which sorts through eBay and finds the best priced HDMI, Component, and DV cables them lists them automatically. You can check it out at http://cheapvidcables.com

Now I can just point people at my site and I don’t have to bore them with my long-winded story…though it’s much more animated and expletive-filled in-person.

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I have been doing offsite system back ups at a safe deposit box for years…and it sucks a lot. First, I never have time to go during banking hours. Second, even with double-density DVD-ROMs I never get around to backing up as much data as I should. Lately, I haven’t been doing much of anything except talking about offsite back up.

Anyway, a friend referred me to Mozy which gives you unlimited system backups for like $50/year…and if you don’t feel like paying you can get 2GB of back up for free. (The backup is incremental so you aren’t bogged down doing upload all the time.)

Here is the site: http://www.mozy.com

Day 1: Free Sign Up. Trip to safe deposit box postponed.

I signed up for it…backing up 108GB automatically…better than burning disks and never taking them to the safe deposit box.

Day 2: The back ups begin!

I have it set to back up every 3 days. The big thing is your upload speed plus the amount you are backing up… The former needs to be fast! So far, I’m a believer but I just started with the full system plan last night.

Day 5: Still backing up…

Slowly upppplooooaaadddddinnnngggg…. My upload speed is about 400kps I am starting to wonder if it is a kilobit

Of course this is a function of my connection rather than the back up system. I had been happily backing up 2GB for the past 6 weeks or so but now I am pushing 108GB.

Day 20: Fourth Try is a Winner!

I had a couple of false starts because I tried to back up EVERYTHING at once… over 100 GB. I also didn’t notice that I had my upload speed set to cut back during the day. I spent a two weeks uploading then Microsoft did an unhelpful auto-update + reboot which screwed up the data xfer!

Since my maiden backup was interrupted and didn’t complete, Mozy didn’t remember any of the stuff I uploaded. Once you’ve backed up your files, Mozy does incremental backups.

After bottling my frustration…I try again.

Basically on the first upload you need to establish “checkpoints” by having successful uploads. You can do this by backing up in smaller increments. There wasn’t any documentation on this– just my trial and error. Now I am backing up in 5 – 10 GB increments by adding a few directories after each successful upload.

Now that I have figured it out, I am very happy! Granted, it took me a few tries to figure it out…but it is all good now. You can learn from my experience…it will be more than you learn from Mozy’s site. If you want to try it out, you get 2GB free and you don’t have to give a credit card or anything. If interested, click the link below to sign up:

2GB Totally Free Online Backup! Compliments of Mozy

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