SquareTrade has recently published the results of a research about laptop reliability. The conclusion is that reliability of today’s laptop is very dependent on the manufacturer. The research results are very similar to my laptop experiences based on my own purchases and repair requests from my clients.

In the research, ASUS comes out to be the most reliable brand with only 15.6% malfunction rate over 3 years. This is why I always prefer to buy ASUS laptops. I have owned 3 ASUS laptops over the last 6 years with my newest purchase of the ASUS UL30A. The last 2 laptops are still working perfectly as of today.

On the other end, HP is the least reliable with the highest malfunction rate of 25.6% over 3 years. That is 1 out of 4 HP laptops would likely to break after 3 years lifetime. It is also consistent with my experiences where most of the laptops I fixed were from HP. And the most common problems I have seen are overheating issues and broken USB ports. I always have a feeling that there are some problems with the internal design of their laptop chassis.

A little surprise from this research is that Apple only ranks forth. Apple’s products always seem to be high quality products to me and I would expect it to rank in the top three. Nonetheless, 17.4% is still way better than HP’s malfunction rate.

If you are planning to get a new laptop during this holiday, you should really look into ASUS as they always provide high quality and sleek designs. You can read about the full report of laptop reliability here.

After leaving this blog on its own for over a year, I have decided to blog again. The first thing I have done was to upgrade Wordpress from version 2.6 to the newest version 2.8.4. I simply followed the 3-steps suggested by WordPress and the upgrade was done successfully. I then have chosen a new theme (currently using it) to give it a more professional look. All of these were done within an hour.

Stretched Visual Editor

When I was writing the first couple sentences of this post, I realized that the Visual editor has been stretched so wide such that it went under the Publish box. After quickly googling for the problem, I found that it was due to the TinyMCE Advanced plugin that I have installed when I first started this blog. The Visual editor is back to normal after deactivating the plugin.

Looking Back…

Looking back at the traffic statistics for the past year, I am surprised about the consistent amount of visits per month it has generated even when it has not been updated for well over a year. I am even more surprised that some of my posts got ranked in the first page in Google for certain keyword combinations. For example, searching for “telus modem” in Google and my post is showing up in the first position. I think this is one of the cool things about blogging as you can get lots of visitors all of a sudden with just one weird post.

Do you have your own business? What do you do if your business partner is not putting in as much effort as you? What makes you to yell at your partner? The following are some reasons why I can no longer partner up with a person in a business.

1. Lazy – If you are a lazy person, then you should not start your own business. For a business, laziness means failure, loss, bankrupt, closing up, etc. You will never succeed in a business if you are lazy and not willing to work overtime.
2. Disorganize – To start your own business, you must be very organized because when starting up, there’s only you and your partners doing all the work. Most of the time there are not enough man power. If you are not organized, then very likely you will miss a lot of tasks and getting blamed.
3. Not Showing Up – Do not think that since your are one of the bosses, you can then not show up to work without notice. If you are really not able to show up at work because you need to meet with clients or have lunch with them, then you should inform your partners about these events.
4. Ideas Without Action – No matter how many ideas you have, if you are not putting them into action, then there’s no point to bring them up in meetings just to impress your partners. It will just make you look worse.
5. Over Exaggerate Your Words – Sometimes, it is necessary to exaggerate your words in order to overcome the customers. But if you over exaggerate or if you are doing it every time you talk, then it is going to hurt your business because the customers will soon realize the inaccuracy. Customers are not stupid. Stick to the truth!
6. Not Living Up to Your Words - If you said you would do something, then you better do it. If you don’t think you can complete it, then at least you should give it a try. You can always learn something from the experience.
7. Cheating On Customers – Don’t cheat! If you charged your customer more than what the amount should be, then you better refund it or give your customer a discount on his next purchase. It will hurt your company’s reputation if the customer found out that you cheated.

These are some of my reasons why I don’t like my business partner if he is such a person. To be honest, it is fine to me if you are my friend with these characteristics. However, for a business partner, these characteristics are not acceptable. If you have talked to your partner about the problems listed above and he just give you a bunch of excuses in response, then it is time to leave, either you or your partner.

What are your reasons? (or excuses?)

I am using Telus’ High Speed ADSL Internet at home but it has been down for 6 days now. Therefore, I am not able to write my blog and setup another website as I planned. This down time is unacceptable. My internet plan included 5 hours of dial up connection but this is absolutely not enough for 6 days (and maybe more) of down time. I am now only using my spare time at work to blog about this matter.

No Excuse

I called Telus’ technical support and they told me that there is an outage in my area. They said there is something broken and they had once sent a technician to fix it but not successful. They needed to send a technician down to fix it again but there is no estimated time of when it will be fixed. Why didn’t they test it throughly after the first attempt? As a computer technician myself, I always think testing is one of the most important stages because it allows you to find out what has really been changed and fixed. Testing allows you to find out what you didn’t plan for.

More Spare Time

So without internet at home, I now have more time to play games on my PC and XBox 360. I am currently playing The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion on my PC (yea, its getting old but I don’t think I can finish the game) and NHL 08 on my XBox 360. I was able to “fix” my NHL 08 disc so that the game does not freeze any more. If you want to know how I fixed it, please read here.

So how long is the longest internet outage for you? I am expecting for the worst case and may need to change ISP if necessary. Anyways, it’s time to get back to work.

I guess many of you have received a parking ticket sometime in you life penalizing you for exceeding the time limit. Have you wondered how they actually check which car has violated the rules? Do you really think they would actually write down your sign-in time, license plate number, and the spot number when you park your car?

What happened?

Two days ago, I parked my car in the parking lot at the shopping plaza where I go to work. During the day, I kept moving my car to different spots every 2 hours or so to avoid violating the 3 hours limit rule. At the end of the day, when I got back to my car, I realized a ticket was sticked on my windshield. It said I have violated the 3 hours limit. I was in shock.

The Evil Act

The next day, I saw a patrol in the parking lot holding a long stick and walking around the parking lot. I was curious about what he was doing so I observed him for a while. I finally found out how they check on the cars. On one end of the long stick, there was a chalk. The patrol was marking the tires of every car in the parking lot. Three hours later, the patrol came back and gave a violation ticket to those cars that had a chalk mark on their tire. It didn’t matter whether the car had left the parking lot during the 3 hours or moved to a different spot. The patrol would just think that your car stayed at the same spot for over 3 hours. This is outrageous! This is cheating!

So if someone wants to park in the same spot for more than 3 hours without getting penalized, he can simply erase the chalk mark on the tire before the patrol comes back. If I don’t like you, I can just mark on your tire and you will automatically get a ticket. The 3 hour limit is rubbish! For a shopping mall, this kind of patrolling will just force the shoppers away.

Thanks God

Fortunately, the mall management is willing to write off the ticket for me. But I still think the way the patrol uses to check on the cars is inappropriate and not following the procedures set out by his company. This patrol should be fired and money should be credited back to the innocents.

By the way, the evil patrol is patroller number 70 from the Imperial Parking Canada Corporation.