Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

The  Droid Razr Maxx I got from Verizon is great — except for two things:

1. The phone was always warm. Whether it was charging, surfing, talking, texting, or sitting on the table, it was warm. Considerably warm. I even took it out of my pocket at times because it was uncomfortably warm on my chest.
2. The battery life was very short. Sometimes I would get six hours out of a charge. Sometimes I would get less. What? This is the Razr MAXX — the one that was supposed to hold a charge longer than the plain Razr.

You can read all over the net that Razrs run warm, but it just didn’t seem right to me, so after about 10 days I went into Verizon’s local distribution store (although I had purchased online) and said, “Is this phone too warm?” The sales person said it was and helped me set up an exchange. There’s some kind of worry / hassle free exchange period for the first 14 days.

Yesterday the new Razr Maxx arrived and it’s cool. I mean, literally, cool.  I am sure the original Razr had a defect that used the battery to heat the phone. Not a bad thing to have if you’re hunting Pennsylvania white tail on a cold December day, but there are better handwarmer options out there. 😉

Lesson learned: Razrs should not be running warm. If yours is, get it to a store before your 14 day exchange period is up.

OK — you’ve gotta be backup-crazed to do what I am suggesting, but having lost too much data, starting with cassette tapes being eaten when I was using the Radio Shack Color*Computer, I am backup-crazy.

Dropbox is a great backup solution. (If you want an invite, which gives you and the inviter extra storage space, let me know at the email below.) And recently, Skydrive from Microsoft, has pretty much caught up with Dropbox. The down side of Skydrive is the old Microsoft ideology that they need to shut out competing technologies — it won’t work with XP, even. MS wants you to have Windows 7. Still, Skydrive has great value to me, in that being backup-crazy, I can backup my dropbox there.

Yeah — I am backing up my backup.

Initially, I was just copying my Dropbox contents to my Skydrive folder on my Windows 7 machine. Skydrive loaded it onto the cloud invisibly. That was great. But then when I wanted to do that again, Windows, naturally, wanted to merge the contents. That’s not what I want. If I delete a file  from my Dropbox folder, I don’t want it on my Skydrive. I want a mirrored backup.

My solution? Download and install my old friend FreeFileSync.

In the settings area…

I chose MIRROR.

Run freefilesync and mirror the Dropbox contents to the  Skyline folder. Then Skyline completes the backup to their cloud.

I know — I am backup-crazed.

EDIT: One note — you might want to EXCLUDE your Windows Skydrive from Windows 7 search index. Otherwise, you may accidentally edit a file in your skydrive and then preform the mirror of your dropbox to skydrive and overwrite the edits. You can learn how to exclude a folder from Windows search here.

Again, if you want an invite to dropbox, email me. Being invited gives you greater storage space than just signing up.

Yesterday, May 7, 2012 — a Monday — I noted an alert in the upper right corner of my Yahoo mail screen. When I clicked it, I was taken to a page that looked like this.

There are several things that confuse me about this. First, why does Yahoo think May 5, 2012 is a Tuesday. And second why does yahoo think 10.xxx.xxx.xxx would be an internet IP?

In any case, I changed my password.