Today I got a call from one of my clients asking me to check stats with him as he is seeing certain discrepancies in Overture reports. We went in and figured that the number of clicks reported by Overture roughly 3 times larger then what is being reported by AWstats. Upon contact, Yahoo/Overture issued a statement that basically says “your software is badwe know better”. Alright, we thought, and ventured to check on Google. The result was astonishing – the difference was 0.6%. Either Google is very good at serving ads that are traceable, or Yahoo/Overture isn’t being honest. Or both.
Category: annoyances
Last week I ran out of second hard drive space. My laptop (IBM/Lenovo T60p) is equipped with two hard drives (instead of hard drive and DVD-RW) – main (80GB) and secondary (60GB). Pretty much all work resides on main (that is – e-mails, contacts, client’s data, software, etc.), part on second (temporary data, raw documents/files, etc). Plus, as usual, some music, movies, small game or two to busy myself on the trip.
Total rough estimate of my E-mail archives + client’s files + other files including raw files that I believe should be available within reach is about 30GB. In other words, 30GB is the amount of data I would like to be able to back up at least weekly, preferably online – so that I will be able to grab them from any place.
There are a lot of online storage options available – ranging from AOL’s Xdrive and hosting services like Rapidshare.com to various dedicated business solutions. However, they all seem to have one problem in common: in case of a “disaster” the process of recovering 30GB of data off of the internet storage would take me much much longer then fetching a hard drive from home. Now, I’m not saying online storage is bad and is being (ab)used only by illegal software distributors (it is heavily used, though). Unfortunately, most of our internet connections don’t allow us to take full advantage of such services.
Obviously, people who only need to save couple of spreadsheets and contacts database (no matter how important they are) would think different, but as important those several megabytes of data to them, as my 30GB are to me. The difference between our options, however, is tremendous.
Categories
Traveling Willberries
As I was traveling to Arizona for New Year holidays, I discovered a great trick-in at Pointe Hilton in Phoenix. It’s easy – build a hotel in such a way that cell-phone reception is hardly present, charge $10.00/day for limited internet access and $24.95/day for true high-speed broadband and voila – you get even more money then if you tried to trick guests with those $2/minute phone charges.