Deal Alert for Nashua, NH

Best Buy does not have the advanced Motorola cable modem which supports 3.0 protocol. If it did, the price is $99 or more.

Target has the same thing in stock for $89.99. Go to the electronics section.

Stuck on Boot Screen during OSX Lion install?

I waited for 3 hours - nothing.

Pressed the start button, let the computer turn off, and then started it.

Now, it shows the "Install Mac OS X" screen. Weird!

This is an older MBA with SSD.

What happened to TodayAmerican?

As I had mentioned a few weeks earlier, all servers are in transit. And I went on a vacation outside the country for a glorious, refreshing 4 weeks!

Now, I am back, the servers are en-route to the east coast. In the meantime, I am exploring Windows Azure for future hosting needs.

Let us see how things work out. The code base is on the servers, so unfortunately, I have to wait for everything to come over.

Till then, you can see my updates to the today american twitter account where I keep posting interesting news...

Started with Windows Azure

I have started making baby steps exploring Windows Azure. Here is a good start-up guide:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jeffwids/archive/2010/03/02/getting-started-with-windows-azure-part-1-setting-up-your-development-environment.aspx

AT&T and the 3G Microcell

I moved to NH recently and find that there is no coverage within my home although there is a single bar outside. So, I had no option but to go for the 3G micro cell, because I anyway have a family plan and I tried verizon + android, but came back to AT&T + Apple.

Remember - the chances of the 3G microcell activating is rare especially if you are not within a major city, or live at an apartment.

AT&T customer support have no idea of customer support...

I was getting error code 103 and as the forums say, it was because of a mismatch between LAT & LON and the address of the place. So, I used Skype over iphone for a few days...

Then I found my location using the maps application, and found out that the address which the map says is totally different than what the real address is.

I set the google maps address as the active location and voila! - it just activated in a few minutes...

Nice...

Installing the XFX Radeon Graphics card

BestBuy has a sale going on where you can get a pretty good dual DVI card from XFX for less than $70 (without taxes).

I got one. But it does not work straight away and does not even recognize 2 different monitors. Trying to install the radeon drivers from ATI caused a windows blue screen of death in 2008 server r2 x64 (equivalent to windows 7 x64).

The solution is to register with XFX and install the drivers from then, reboot and voila!!

Everything works fine!!

Improving laptop performance

My laptop was dog slow even though it was Dell E6510, with Intel Core i5 and 4 GB RAM. To make it run in an acceptable manner, I just went to Dell Support and installed the newer BIOS version A09. Now, it works much better and consumes lesser RAM than before, while using more RAM when required.

Huh!

And I was thinking of getting an SSD or 8GB RAM.