Apparently in Florida here, or pretty much anywhere there are drivers, there are idiots. This guy must think that it is his ‘God given right’ to be in my lane when he has two more miles left in his before he has to make a decision to merge or turn right.

Here, I drew an intentionally shitty image to show you what this guy did.

Now, I didn’t hit him, after he cut me off going thirty five in a fifty five lane but I did slam on my horn for a good thirty seconds behind him. I blew past him as he called me an asshole, and then I proceeded to brake til I was at his window again and could yell back “Learn how to drive FUCKWAD.”

I find that people think anyone who blows the horn is an asshole. Maybe if you don’t do stupid shit you would not get the horn, but I like using my horn to inform people they are wrong and an idiot. I love being the asshole with a horn.

Seems  a lot of people were happy when I posted the Pantech UM175 driver on the website because of Verizons mindset. Well I was setting up another card yesterday afternoon and this was a UM150. Well this time I had the CD and decided to just zip the files up and post on the site here.

If the driver helps you, please take the time to leave a quick comment. Thanks.

I can no longer handle the file bandwidth load these two drivers require, but from visitors comments, I have tested and the phone number 000-000-0000 does work to download the drivers. You can find them all on the VZAccess Manager website: http://vzam.net.

  UM150 Driver (29.1 MiB, 1,878 hits)
You need to be a registered user to download this file.

Just working out a few things here in the office, and I get an email from my boss asking if this laptop is good for one of the higher up executives for their daughter. So I start looking over the email and specs and such, and it’s not a bad machine for the price they want. I’m not very informed on the Mac side of things but the hardware looks good and some of the reviews were nice.

What really got my attention was at the bottom, a little slogan type sentence stating:
“New design. New features. New technologies. All engineered to standards that don’t even exist yet.”

Reading that, I leaned back, and just thought of all the things wrong with that statement while I laughed. This is impossible. This is one of the reasons we follow standards in a world so reliant on computers and technology. You should always follow a standard, and if there are no standards to follow you really did not look for a standard at all. Saying that it does not even exist seems to me that you threw a bunch of shit together, and called it a day.

Now they might not be talking about standards, as in XHTML, XML and such. They might be talking about customer service and a high satisfaction rate from their customers. The problem is, that levels of very high satisfaction do exist, and that I assure you, Apple does not meet them.

So last Friday (May 1st, 2009) I was asked at work to upgrade the hard drive in the CEOs laptop. Alright no problem, we go to the closest store and pick up a new two hundred and fifty gigabyte hard drive to put in the laptop. I get the new drive and decide to make sure the old drive has no errors before I image the disk over.

I run the usual Windows `chkdsk` commands and it finds some stuff and fixes it quickly. I put the new drive on a small external USB adapter and throw in the TRK Rescue disc to run a `dd` on the drive. The program completes, and I put the new drive into the system. The new drive boots up and all is fine. I can resize the partition later when I have more time.

A little later I get a phone call saying that there are no folders in the CEOs Outlook Pane. “Alright.” So I walk up and take a look, sure enough no folders under the six PST files that were mounted from the local hard disk. I close the Personal Folders and then remount then in Outlook. Nothing. “Alright…”

So I browse to the My Documents folder where the files are kept and I search around. I find the six PST files. Looking over them, file size: 0 bytes. Yeah, zero bytes. Three of these files were over two gigabytes (2GB) and the other three were in the range of eight hundred megabytes (800MB). Now, we have a problem.

I come to find out that the `chkdsk` run found something wrong with these large files and marked them as zero bytes in the file table on the drive.

So I quickly take the original hard disk down to my system here and throw it on the USB adapter and start running a simple undelete utility on the files. It finds them, but still as zero bytes, and only restores a zero byte file. Now we have a larger problem. So I start searching around the Internet for some utilities that will scan the disk and reconstruct the damaged or missing PST files.

I come to find a program called Office Recovery by DiskInternals. The program installed, and I had it scan the disk. This took forever on my little machine but after many hours found the parts and displayed them to me. I was able to save the mail to a PST file on my primary hard disk. But still a problem, all of the new messages had their times erased and most of the messages have the `From:` field replaced with their Exchange counterparts /O= and /OU= stuff.

I need to recover the files themselves, not the contents. So a little more searching and reading up and I find out that a program I found a long time back can help. So I installed X-Ways Forensics, and had it scan the external disk. Following some bits and pieces of information around the Internet I was able to do a File Recovery by Type. This scans the entire disk for any files with the particular header, looking for PST files you need to search for the header: `!BDN` in hex of course. It found the files, so I told it to grab four gigabytes (4GB) of data starting from the beginning of each PST file. This of course pulls tons of useless data with it, but does get the information that we need.

I then had six four gigabyte PST files sitting on my primary disk. Alright, lets try this. I loaded Outlook and File -> Open -> Personal Folder, I selected the first of the PST files and clicked OK. Nope! Outlook threw out some horrible errors and told me to fix the corrupt file. But for once… Just once, it told me how to do this. I then located `scanpst.exe` which comes with Office and using the utility chose to fix one file at a time. This reduced the file size to an acceptable level and I was able to import them into Outlook successfully. Once in Outlook, I created a new Personal Folder and moved the contents into the new folders so I was sure they would not be corrupt. After working on this for eight hours, I decided that was probably the best I was going to do, and the most data I was going to be able to recover.

This morning I put them back on to the CEOs laptop and for now she is happy. But this entire problem would not have been so huge if we were allowed to make backups. We have on many occasions, multiple times a month gone up with external drives and blank DVD’s to help back stuff up, and we are never given time to do so. She does not want her data stored on the multi-thousand dollar SAN we have setup for such things.

How do you tell the CEO to use the technology we have for the company to store data, that is protected for her access only and strictly monitored? You want data protection and backups and security, yet will not allow us to back it up, blow off I.T when we want to help you back up from your local machine.

Either way, this could have had a much worse outcome, I think she will let us take backups and give I.T the time it needs to do so as well.

This is really how I feel at work sometimes, it is not a new Dilbert animation but it gets the point across. I am trying to get a project complete, or something else done and all I have are bosses over my shoulder telling me what to do instead of the current project. Then question me why the project on hand is not complete and what I have been doing instead.

Okay, so this morning I decided that I will go ahead and read through some of the new happenings over at MP3Car.com and such, see what people are talking about and some new ideas. Yet after going through the articles on the front page, there are no new ideas just a large compilation of articles on commercial products and features and how to connect your iPhone / iPOD to your vehicle or even to your custom carputer.

Honestly, what is the point of connecting your iPhone or iPOD to your carputer if you want to play music? Did you spend time and money creating a unique system for your vehicle and didn’t think of a way to play music from it? Could you not find a way to connect OBDII to your carputer, and instead need your iPhone to do it for you? Simple maps and GPS on your iPhone instead of your carputer?

Really, what the fuck people? If you wanted all that, don’t even install a custom computer in your car, just use your iPOD / iPhone in your car with the cables to connect to the head unit. I am not angry about using your iPhone instead of a full fledged computer system, yes it’s smaller and easier and quicker to install. But why would you install the computer and then use the iPhone to fill in the gaps you never figured out or put enough time and thought into to make the computer do the work instead of more and more devices.

Some articles on the front page are even talking about the death of the carputer and migration to the iPhone. Fuck. That. Some people do not want your fucking shitty iPhone. I hate phones, I hate them with a passion. I would never get an iPhone, to use as a phone or a ‘replacement’ for my carputer when my carputer is completely free, open source, I can configure it to do anything, work anywhere, and not need special programs or unlocking hacks and such. I want a reasonable sized LCD touch screen monitor that I don’t -need- to look at while driving to know where to press to change music and play lists. I want one device to do everything in a simple manor without going from screen to screen. I want an -integrated- computer in the vehicle to make a complete feeling!

So I was asked to visit the CEOs house today to work on a small network problem and get her printer up and running and such. After all this was done, she brings me her son’s laptop with a Verizon USB Cellular Modem and asks if I can install it for her. I have no real problem doing this so I load up the laptop and it has the software already installed! Alright, so I execute the software and it asks me to plug in the device, I do so and then it asks for a driver.

…What? Alright the software was installed, but there is no driver? Fine. I visit Google, type in Verizon UM175 Driver and all I get are shitty websites trying to get me to buy something, fill out my email, put in a credit card number to download the driver. Hm, no.

Well I come to find out that you can only get this driver directly from Verizon’s Website. Fine. I visit, search for UM175 and it comes up. I click to download and it asks my Operating System, USB or PCMCIA, and then it asks for the Cell Phone number of the card. Why? I just need the fucking driver. So I have to call up the corporate office and speak to our telecommunications guy, I give him the serial and he looks everything up and gives me the phone number, which was nowhere to be found on the USB modem itself.

So I put in the number and the driver downloads and that’s really all, it works fine. My point is, why is it so difficult to get a driver for this device? Phone number to download? Why, do you need to make sure it’s your card to get this generic driver? Odd since even Pantech’s website does not have the driver. Anyway, just to piss anyone off at Verizon or Pantech I have the driver available to anyone here, hopefully you will find this site before you dig around and have to call for help.

I can no longer handle the file bandwidth load these two drivers require, but from visitors comments, I have tested and the phone number 000-000-0000 does work to download the drivers. You can find them all on the VZAccess Manager website: http://vzam.net.

  Pantech UM175 USB Wireless Card Driver (15.5 MiB, 6,428 hits)
You need to be a registered user to download this file.

This is what happens when you have a LAN party in your garage and everybody needs to get out and get some fresh air. Office chairs are fun to roll down the driveway in and run into each other, knocking each other off the concrete into the grass. Yeah, stupid shit.

  Chairwars (41.6 MiB, 192 Downloads)