“This the season to be jolly!” Wait a minute! In the midst of the global economic downturn, how can anybody – except of course for those top-level corporate executives with hefty bonus packages – be “jolly” this season? I personally know of people – including myself – who have lost thousands of dollars in investments.
Ironically today, my PDA reminded me with its yearly recurring alert to beat the Christmas rush and buy presents early.
Hooray for even more expenses! I hate to be a Grinch, but it’s hard to even think about gift giving in this economic crisis.
Cut Corners with eBay
But, you’ve got to make do with what you’ve got, right? Some people will turn to plastic. However, with the financial scare, there will be less credit to go around. Therefore, since many people will be paying with actual money, it’s imperative that they get the best bang for their buck. eBay is the perfect place for that. Think about it. On-the-side eBay sellers will emerge from dormancy and start listing items to supplement their income. Even better, there will be fewer buyers in the market because they’re holding on to their money … except smart people like you! It’s a great scenario of supply and demand where potential buyers win!
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Many people reading this are lone bloggers or – as I like to call them – “armies of one.” You manage the server, design the site, code the template, write posts, network with other bloggers, and market the blog. If you’re like me, grammar is kind of on the backburner. Since, I can’t really afford the price of hiring a full-fledged editor/proofreader or the time required to reread my articles an indefinite number of times, my dependence on the grammar check function is a bit more than recommended by most college professors.
The Problem with Plain Copy & Paste
I know many lone bloggers who write and format posts on Microsoft Word just for the spell/grammar check function. After they finish an article, they port the post to WordPress using copy/paste. However, with this method, the formatting gets either skewed in the visual WordPress Editor – since the original formatting is in Microsoft’s rich text format – or lost in the plain-text HTML WordPress editor. Trust me, its not fun ALT+TAB alternating between Word and WordPress windows trying to synchronize the formatting. Because of this, I personally prefer to write my posts in raw HTML. I think it’s a control issue. 🙂
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So then, you have the 6-chanel RAID PCI card that you bought off eBay and a couple of old, horded hard drives. Stoked, you’re ready to create your very own super hard drive with one terabyte of disk space! You install the hardware and boot your computer waiting for the BIOS to finish the POST. Suddenly, the Windows (or Linux) boot screen displays when you are expecting the controller card’s BIOS to kick in to configure the RAID drive. Maybe it was a mistake. You restart the computer hoping for the best. Alas, the RAID setup option doesn’t appear again. Too bad you bought this brand-less card from China (eBay) without any documentation. So then, what now?
Has this scenario ever happened to you before? The BIOS does not recognize the hardware but the operating system does after the power-on-self-test. This problem is kind of like a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma. I mean, its only great that Windows recognizes the controller card if you’re booting from the motherboard’s integrated disk controller. But what if you want to boot from a hard disk that is connected to a secondary controller card? This exact scenario happened to me a couple days ago. It literally took me two whole days of research, agony, and forum scourging. But I finally found the answer. Who’s to blame for this bug?
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