The customer service of new AT&T for Bellsouth customer

After AT&T took over Bellsouth at the beginning of this year, we can see a lot changes now. Not only the company name, sign we can see the change, so do the customer service representative we have to deal with. Today, I decided to call Bellsouth or AT&T to complain my DSL modem charge and it took me longer than I thought.

Right after the merge, I could not wait for AT&T's $10 per month deal then I ordered at-that-time Bellsouth DSL service for $32 per month. When I was ordering, I was told I could get the DSL modem for free after mail-in-rebate if I signed up the service from the web. But after nearly half year, I did not see any rebate form showed up in my mail box but $7.5 charge for the modem showed up for my every month's bill statement. I called the "BellSouth" a couple times, and each time the rebate specialist told me he/she would put my rewarding in the system since I was eligible for this rebate, and it would take 6-8 weeks to process. But after a few month's waiting, what I received were two postcards saying that they could not give me the rebate because I did not purchase the Bellsouth FastAccess service. What?

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Review: Buffalo DriveStation Combo Hard Drive - HD-HC500IU2

I ordered this Buffalo DriveStation from Frys(Outpost.com) a couple days ago with the lowest price $119.00 I could have ever found for a 500 GB external hardDisk. The other reasons I ordered were that it has 3 connection interfaces (USB 2.0, Firewire 4 pin and 6 pin) and the shipping fee is free.

It arrived at my house 3 days later after I ordered which was amazing considering the shipping was free. I opened the package and was satisfied with the size of this hardDisk. It is not too much huge as what I thought at all.

......

I put the included CD in and the setup wizard is very straightforward. First time I chose the Firewire 4 pin as the connection method, and it just took a few seconds from my computer recognize it after I plug the firewire cable in. Then I checked the disk information, and I found it shows as Samsung driver in my computer. No wonder I was told Buffalo only products external driver case not the disk itself.

Since I saw the format was FAT32 and the disk space was 465GB, I decided to format it before I use it. But when I opened the included Disk Formatter program, and selected the HD - Samsung driver (Be careful, the external disk is not the default selected one, do not format your internal disk by mistake), I could not click the format command button since it was in gray. I saw the Physical Format button on the top, and I clicked it. After two warning messages, I got another error message as the below to fail the physical formating. (Another fact: I learned the meaning of "aforementioned" from this error message)

I checked the manual CD, and could not find the reason but I saw the manual uses USB connection as the example. I guess I had to use USB instead of Firewire connection.

I then unplugged the firewire, and connected the include USB 2.0 cable. The set up progress was quick too, and my computer found and show this Buffalo driver very quickly.

Since I got a chance to connect two connections, I did a speed comparison. I dragged a 935MB file from my internal disk to this external driver in both connection methods. Both of them only took less than 1 minute to finish the copy progress, but in 4pin Firewire took longer and initially showed more than 2 minute on the progressing status bar. Since I do not have 6 pin Firewire to test, I drew the conclusion that USB 2.0 connection is faster than 4 pin Firewire.

With USB connection, I clicked the Physical Format button and everything went through. But I am very regretful now, since it will have to take more than 4 hours to finish this physical formatting. It is running when I am typing this blog after my dinner, oh, my.

Other than that, I am very happy about this external disk so far. Oh, I did not mention that it is very quiet with fanless design and auto power on/off with the computer on/off.

Recommend it if you are looking for a cheap medium space external hardDisk.

Full production name: Buffalo DriveStation Combo Hard Drive - SATA, 500GB, 7500 RPM - External Hard Drive

Technorati : Buffalo, External HardDisk
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How to download YouTube videos to your local machine

I like YouTube since I can share my videos with my family and friend from everywhere the world on it. And I also can watch a lot of interested videos uploaded from everywhere the world. But sometimes I just want to watch some video offline. So how can I download video from YouTube?

Well, there are a simple way and a complicated way as well.

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How to input Chinese without installing any IME software on your computer

Anyone using English or Non-Chinese version OS has to install something on PCs to input Chinese language. Before we had Windows 2000 OS, we had to install some software like NJStar. Now with Windows 2000, XP, we can install IME from Regional and Language Options in Windows's configuration. But it will not easy for anyone to install IME on the public computers. How can we input Chinese anywhere without installing IME software?

Well, after searching on Google, I found an alternative way to input Chinese which is Web IME. You just go to a website, and launch the IME webpage. What next for you is to just input ABC and the accordingly Chinese characters will appear. After you select the right character, these Chinese can show in a textarea box for your copying and pasting.

The first one and best one I tested is Cari website from Malaysia. Not only you can input Chinese online, you can also download its program and put on your portable device to use it everywhere. So I just download all web pages, and put them on my own forum site. You can access and test yourself on http://webime.chinatownbbs.com.

Now you do not have any excuses to just input English instead of Chinese on some Chinese blogs.

WEBIME URL: 网上中文输入法

Technorati : IME, Online IME, WebIME
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How to fix issues of sending email in ASP.net 2.0 with localhost Microsoft SMTP service

With the upgrading to ASP.net 2.0, I decided to change all my sending email codes too. Basically I am going to use system.net.mail instead of system.web.mail or traditional CDONT. I thought it would be an easy task, but I still encountered some issues.

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How to forward traffics from my blogger to the same post on my WordPress blog

Before I moved all my blogs to my own WordPress blog platform (http://eblog.lichao.net), I was using blogger (http://lichaonet.blogspot.com) to write articles. I like my wordpress blogs now, but I still want to keep posting new articles on the blogspot site. First, I can use it as my backup or mirror blog sites. Second, I personall think that the blogger is better on Google search than wordPress blogs. But it is very difficult to manage multiple blogs on the same topic. One of these challenges is to centralize all the comments on only one blog site.

Since the wordpress one is my main blog site, I try to collect all blog comments on this blog. What I need to do is to 1) disable all comments feature on other mirror blog sites; 2) create a link to forward all visitors on mirror sites to my main blog for commenting.

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