Usability

Mozy is a solution for personal and professional computing backup. They will install some software on your PC to back up your machine using their remote location. I’ve had Mozy for nearly two years, and honestly, I hate it. There software brings my machine to a crawl. The backups take forever. They presets for backups don’t cover everything I want. Not to mention their desktop software just randomly stopped working. When I try to remove and reinstall it, it sill doesn’t show up. I’m sure I could spend more time looking into what is going on with the install and fix it, but honestly, I pay for this service and it should just work. I haven’t done anything crazy. ...

Today I decided to create a Facebook account as woodside’s cheerleading coach. The benefit of this account is that it keeps its distance from my personal Facebook network, but still allows me to create events and groups for Woodside cheerleading. Anyway, I wanted my name to “Coach Zack”. Facebook rejected the name. So I tried to create ‘Zachary “Coach” Cohen’, again, Facebook automatically rejected it. Now I have been a big Facebook fan in the past, but of recent, I’m more dissapointed with them. I feel like they have started to remove the “fun” aspect of the application. Facebook used to be more about the network, and it is has turned into almost a twitter status message board. I’ve gone from checking Facebook twice a day, to checkign it once a week, if I get an email. ...

In an amazing post on Daring Fireball John Gruber quotes the technology directory for a public school in Massachusetts: However, even iLife has its drawbacks in an educational setting. It simply hands so much to the students that they struggle with software (whether Windows, Linux, or even pro-level software on the Mac) that isn’t so brilliantly plug and play. Yes, iLife rocks in many ways, but the level of spoonfeeding it encourages actually makes me think twice about using it widely, especially at the high school level. ...

I’ve been trying very hard to post a new photo every week day to the Photo of the Day category. It’s not always easy deciding what I want to post, so sometimes I miss it. Today I spent about 30 minutes looking through my photos trying to decide where I wanted to go today. I finally found a photo, went to upload it, and boom: SmugMug is Down. While this post is dated yesterday, I can only assume that this is the issue still persisting. ...

This is just a brief aside, but it occurred to me today that often times I will pick which restaurant I like based on the quality of the chopsticks they offer. Safeway, for example, gives out really bad chopsticks that never break cleanly. I end up with one huge nob at the end of one stick, and the other stick is a mini stick. The chinese food restaurant, on the other hand, gives out great chop sticks. They always break cleanly and are of good solid build that feel comfortable in your hands. Many of the Japanese restaurants also have good chop sticks. ...