Category: Etcetera

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Avoid Grande Harvest Wines

I just love the feeling of being taken advantage of. The store in question is ‘Grande Harvest Wines’ situated within Grand Central Terminal in New York City. I was in a rush to get home and stopped into the liquor store in question to pick up a couple of items and save some time driving around when I got home. I picked up a bottle of ‘Balvenie Double Wood Scotch’ and a bottle of ‘Bushmills 16yr Single Malt Irish Whiskey’. When I was rung up I thought the price was really off and inquired about the pricing on the individual bottles. The bottle of Balvenie was $66.95 which I thought was really off since I buy this regularly elsewhere. I chalked it up to my mind playing tricks with me and I figured it was only a couple of dollars off. The price kept nagging at me all the way home, so I stopped at a local liquor store anyway. To my amazement the Balvenie bottle was priced at $49.95, thats a 30% markup. I then looked up the pricing online and found stores in close proximity to ‘Grande Harvest Wines’ with the same lower pricing and the bottle of ‘Bushmills’ going for 68.94. So it looks like they charge a 30% markup across the board compared to other local retailers. I could have walked 2 blocks from Grand Central and saved nearly $40.00. Is that worth the convenience, hell no. I guess they are relying on people in a rush or not know their pricing, so they can get over on them. This was enough to warrant a call to the manager to ask for explanation. When I informed the individual who answered about the huge discrepancy in pricing to his nearby competition. I was basically told that’s our price and we won’t do anything about it. I then politely told him it would be the last time I would ever shop there. The next time you happen to be in Grand Central and need to purchase a bottle of liquor, wine or champagne, I would avoid ‘Grande Harvest Wines’ unless you like giving money away. If that is the case just give it to me. 🙂

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The State Of Me…

It’s been a while since I posted here and it is long overdue. I usually travel to California for the holidays to visit with family and unwind from a year’s worth of stress. To do this I have to make sure I have everything in place to handle an emergency should something go very wrong with a client’s network. This chews up a lot of my time starting about a month before I leave, thus the long hiatus.
So, how was my year? In a nutshell, hectic, painful and lighter. I work very long hours both on site and remotely from my home-office. I am fortunate enough to have all of my clients configured so that I can basically do about anything I need to do on servers and workstations remotely as if I were physically there. It’s a blessing and a curse at the same time, working remotely like that makes it difficult to shift from work time to my time or family time. But it helps when your 3,000 miles away and the proverbial crap hits the fan, as it did this last vacation. It interfered with my vacation but at least my family understood this is my business and I need to make sure my clients are happy. Luckily my clients understood the sacrifices I made over the holidays to service their problems and appreciate what I do for them even more.
Painful? Those of you who know me, know I live with constant back pain. I was seeing a pain management person to deal with the pain which involved pain killers and shots to my spine. I am now in the care of a Neurosurgeon that has me still taking pain killers but also seeing a physical therapist. The physical therapy should help but I didn’t get a chance to go much since it was right smack in the middle of my preparations for the holidays.
Continue reading “The State Of Me…”

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Time For A Change

Well the fall is here and I decided to make several changes to this site and my office. Firstly, I am positioning myself away from using my pc-doc.com domain. I really don’t do much on PCs any more other than for work. The majority of everything I do, I do on Macs and Macs only. the PC-Doc name just doesn’t fit me any more. So I will be moving my site and emails to my TechUnplugged.com domain. While I am making this major move, I will be redesigning the site as well. Secondly, I just finished redesigning my computer room. I needed a change badly, so I redesigned my computer room with lighter colors and less clutter. As you can see in the photo the redesign opens the room up a lot. I also got hooked on Japaneses anime figures, as you can see them plastered all over the wall and my desk.
You can view a Flickr sideshow of the redesign: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pc-doc/sets/72157607814525967/show/

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Regeneration Tour

I am at Jones Beach enjoying a great concert. It features some of the groups I listened to while is was in college during the 80s on Long Island. The following are tonights acts (in order of appearence):
Naked Eyes
Flock Of Seaguls
ABC
Belinda Carlisle
Human Leauge
These are groups I listened to 25 years ago, boy am I getting old. Did I say this concert rocks!!!!!!?
BTW this post was posted with my iPhone using the wordpress app. So forgive the lackluster photo.

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Designing A New Site

I am in the beginning stages of designing a new website. The site will be Mac related. It will be focusing on news, reviews and video tutorials for beginners. It will also provide more advance tutorial as time passes and the end user’s skill increase. I will update everyone once I am further along and supply the new domain name associated with it.

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Mac Convert

It is official I have completely transitioned myself away from Microsoft (Personally). I think Vista was the final nail in the coffin for me. Back in September before my Vegas trip I purchased a Mac Book Pro, under the assumption I would run both OSX and Windows on the notebook. I found myself more and more using the OSX side until I no longer had the need to run Windows. Believe it or not, everything I needed to do could be done under OSX. As far as my client’s servers, I could manage them all remotely with the Mac version of Remote Desktop. This past weekend I replaced my workstation with a Mac Pro. The only thing left was my Windows server and my wife’s workstation. Moving away from my Windows servers that were handling my network file sharing (running raid for data protection) as well as Exchange and Blackberry services would be the hardest, so I thought. I wound up moving my domains to Google Apps for email and used T-Mobile’s services to connect via IMAP and forward my email to my Blackberry. I am purchasing a Drobo to handle my network file sharing as it runs it’s own version of raid for data protection. Continue reading “Mac Convert”

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Sea Otter Footage

Last night I decided to pull off some footage off my DV from my trip to California over the Christmas holiday. I just put a clip of some Sea Otters I saw while I was visiting the aquarium in Monterey, California up on YouTube.
Enjoy

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MacBook Airs Arrive

CorAirs.JPGSetting up a number of MacBook Airs that arrived today. After holding one of these I can say it is way cooler than any commercial can display. Well off I go to load on the VPN software needed to connect these to the corporate LAN and hand them out.

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Ha, Ha, Who Told Ya!!!

My NY Giants win the Superbowl as I predicted weeks ago!!!!! Alright I was off by 3 points, who cares. All the experts wrote off the Giants from the beginning, now go eat crow! See you guys later I have an appointment with a fine bottle of Scotch to celebrate!
Ciao

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©2008 Larry Miller