Why I will never again order anything from TigerDirect

Two weeks ago did it to me! I have gone the way of the dodo from ordering anything at all from TigerDirect, ALL my recommendations in the future will also never be TD ever again.

I have been using TD for years, about 10 to be exact (maybe a few more). Heck they were one of the first companies on the forefront of web computer purchases, I mean they blazed the trail for everyone else! But alas it all went to their head it seems.

Two weeks ago, maybe 3 now I would have to check, I ordered my new media PC hardware from TD. I ordered a bunch of stuff, totally just under $200. I figured I would build myself and it would save me some cash and I could get a small voltage CPU that barely uses any power. I did, I purchased a brand new ATOM 64-bit CPU board that runs on a 12V power supply that is 150Watt. I mean the thing is fan less and beautiful!

But that's not the point. I made my order, first thing's first. I am currently in Guatemala, so I have everything shipped to my PO Box in Miami, but my Billing is of course in Ohio. So the first thing is they suspend my order for further verification. Crap, I hate that, we live in a global world now a days and companies don't get it that people order and have shipped to different places, come on people get a clue! I had this problem months ago with Autozone.com and I refused to ever use them again also, I now use OReilly because they don't make me double confirm my orders and cancel them without warning to me.

So first they suspend my order, so I tried calling and was on hold for 30 min.! I got mad and hung up, opened a live chat. Was on hold there for 20 min., finally someone answered. I told them my problem they said they couldn't help and I needed to call in, crap. So I closed the window and called back, this time I was on hold for 45 min.! My GOD!

Finally someone answered, then they told me my order was on hold because I was shipping to another address a state away from my billing. Fine, what do I have to do to confirm. Then they proceeded to ask me "Publicly" available information on the web through their upstream security company. Question's like; "What street did you live on when you were 6?", "What color was your house on that street?"

WHAT! First off that's stupid, I can't remember that far back. Secondly how is it that publicly available information that's on the web supposed to protect me?! ha ha

Ok, so I answered his question's, problem is one I didn't even know and I am ME!! So he asked another stupid one that I guess I answered correctly.

Now that is done, he says ok we will process your order now (two hours later). So I waited, and waited, and waited some more. Finally a day later my order shipped, now the fun part. First off one of the items was on backorder, their site never said this till the order was done processing and shipping. Fine, whatever it happens.

Now the fun part, I can't emphasize this enough, so I will try. EVERY SINGLE ITEM ON MY 10 ITEM ORDER SHIPPED IN A SEPARATE ORDER!!! So that means I got 10 separate UPS tracking numbers. And the worse part is when they all got to my PO Box!

Since these are 10 separate shipments I got charged separately by my PO Box company to bring them to Guatemala!! Over $100 in shipping and import duty costs accrued by TD!! Leave that aside, TD charged me $15 shipping ;)

So do you think I can contact a manager in sales or marketing to chew them a new hole to breath out of? Nope, not a chance! One hour on the phone and still on hold. Screw it, I got a review email from them a week after, great! I gave them a review they will be wondering about for months, if anyone ever reads it ;)

In the end of the review I told them I would never ever again order or recommend TD to anyone in my life, they have lost a loyal customer that in 10 years had recommended them to over 20 people worldwide.

That same day I ordered from TD I also ordered a small set of two things from Newegg.com. GREAT!! I have found my new company.

Two things, totalled $10 from NE, they didn't charge me shipping NOR taxes at all, no shipping for two items that cost me $10! EAT YOUR HEART OUT TD!!

Only $5 in PO Box shipping and taxes!! WOOHOO!! (The more expensive an item is the cheaper it is to ship)

NE never suspended my order for using separate shipping and billing, they never made me call in, the order was made, confirmed and processing within 30 min., shipped by the next morning! WOW!

So it's fair to say I have found my brand new company. So I need a new 1.5TB hard drive this week, cable and an external enclosure. GREAT, let's test out NE!

Once again, I make my order, at the end I decide to see if they have any Momentary Pushbutton switches since I need one, they are cheap and if I am ordering I mise well. So I found one $2, added it to the cart and went to checkout. Before I ever went to checkout it told me that the switch was coming from another company, MTD (or something like that) and that it would be a separate shipment from AK. Of course they weren't going to charge me shipping but it was a separate package! WOW!

What can I say, I removed it of course, $2 ain't worth it. But they told me!! I love it!

So after removing the switch I finished checkout. This was this morning at around 3AM California time (I was up early cause I couldn't sleep), at 3AM my order processed in 10 min.! It is now waiting for shipment!

So, they processed my order in 10 min., aren't going to charge me shipping nor taxes and it's a single shipment! WOW!

Needless to say after this great experience I am never again going to use TD and I am never going to recommend them. NewEgg.com is my new computer company!

Great service NewEgg.com and kudos!

My First Post from VIM

Today this is my first post from inside VIM and my Ubu CLI! I have been wanting to for a long, long time to get away from web pages for daily thing (the irony of it since that's what I do for a living ha ha) and all the load time and get to doing more and more thing's inside VIM. Well today I finally did it!

I'm now posting to my blog from inside VIM by using GoogleCLI tools freely downloadable to post with and using a simple little bash script.

So we will see how it work's but I have tested a few times and it's working so it seems.

In case no one has noticed yet I LOVE VIM and the Linux CLI! I try to do everything I can think of from it, Mutt for email, VIM for programming now instead of Geany.

I even went 5 days ago and setup a Plex Media Server to serve my huge 10 year long DVD collection. I'm tired of having a DVD case in my living room and looking ugly. All my TV's for my house and the ministry have Roku's and I am tired of friends in the ministry that are on the same network as me borrowing DVD's and bringing them back scratched ha ha.

So I've gone the next step and setup an Ubu 12 server with Plex as a Media server completely. I currently have 3 computers converting 4 DVD's at all times during every day, I currently have 101 DVD's done. Should be done converting by the end of next week.

This is awesome since it allows me to share everything I have in the way of DVD's with everyone here in the Ministry who has a Roky or Media box. I am also going to sell my entire collection of DVD's and the wood case to store them in, this sale will come out to about $130 in the end which will pretty much pay for the Media server.

Now, no more scratched movies, no more people asking me to borrow them!

I will post again on this in a couple weeks when I get the new hardware that I ordered for this specific purpose, right now I'm just using an old AMD system I had laying around as the server.

But I am loving more and more using CLI and VIM. Makes life so much easier than anything else. Thought I would post just to test out the brand new posting features to see how it works ha ha.

VIM as Mutt Email Editor

So after using mutt for quite sometime as my MAIN email program, this week I decided to up the anti and start using VIM for my email editor and composer. Now I "WAS" a nano fan for quite sometime now. But I have to say that after switching to VIM I am now a VIM convert full-time I think!

It was kind of hard I have to say, to get used to VIM as an editor. The keyboard part wasn't hard, it was memorizing all those special key-strokes that always made it hard for me.

The first thing I did was find a way to make saving and exiting real quick, since I do it alot and don't like having to type a lot to do that simple function. So I re-mapped a few keystroke's so that I had F1, F2 and F3 right at the forefront to Quit without saving, Save and quit real quick and Save and continue editing (Respectively). I wanted to switch to using VIM as my main code editor, I was using Geany which I love. So the F3 save and continue is a must.

So that was first stroke, gotta make it easy. And F key's are easier than Ctrl this and Esc-:-whatever as normal vim work's.

So let's stick to what I did to make it WONDERFUL for an email editor, later we'll talk about Code editor ha ha.

First off I love Mutt so much I downloaded newsbeuter instead of lifearea as my newsreader, I love Mutt! ha ha

First thing I love (and first edit) about VIM is it's ability to auto spell check. The newest version 7.5 comes with a built in spell checker and it's own dictionaries.

But I write email's in both english and spanish. So, first thing's first. Firstly you have to tell Mutt to use Vim, and to turn on spell (default :))

set editor="vim \"+set nonumber\" \"+set insertmode\" \"+set spell\" +/^$/ +9"

That way I automatically use Insertmode when I start so I can just start typing, go to line 9 since I use header's internally and no line number's since it's default in my vimrc file for code editing.

So now spell work's. So second thing I did was setup map keys to F5 and F6 to change spelling language from English to Spanish or visa-versa. First time you switch to spanish "es" it automatically asks you if you want to download that dictionary! Wow! For a console app! Wow!

Work's great! I love the fact that I can edit an email, and while editing, IT auto highlight's mispelled word's, all in terminal! Go to the word that is spelled wrong and hit and it auto pop's up a small window to show me suggestion's! I seem to be loving VIM!

So next thing's next. I always hatted the time Mutt took to lookup an address using Goobook (gmail address book), I would write a new email and hit tab and man it took forever to find it in my Gmail contact's.

So then I changed my header's to in my email editing using:

set edit_headers = yes
set autoedit

So great, now when editing an email I have my To and CC field's right there. Now the real trick, get VIM to lookup those email's. I found a real cool script and I posted it to Pastebin, that basically does the same thing that the spell checker does where it pop's up a window instead of a bunch of replacement's, which take forever.

All I do is go to the to field and start typing, when enough is there I just -, with this wonderful script, that was very hard to find, I got VIM to auto lookup AND pop-up a window showing me email addresses!

The greatest thing is, it took 1/3 the time that mutt took to use goobook!

I'm in love with VIM, real simple :)

The script is here:
http://pastebin.com/tR08XHbF

Copy and paste entirely into your vimrc file and your good to go!

You could even make a shortcut key that worked off of tab if you wanted only on To: CC: and BCC: field's if you wanted.

But I didn't, well haven't yet :)

I have to say I am loving VIM immensely! I don't know why I didn't switch sooner!

For writing email's at least it is awesome. With the added feature of auto highlighted spell check and integrated address book it makes creating email's in VIM an experience.  It was like when I moved from Thunderbird to Mutt for email, the change is so drastic I don't know how I used to use other software!

I thank you to all those Blog post's out there of people who made the switch and praised it!

So I have been using Ubuntu full time now on my work PC, Home and Laptop for a little over a month now.  I don't regret it once!  Granted I am using 11.04 of Ubu instead of 12, I am part of that choosen few of Ubu user's that just refuses to upgrade until two thing's happen, one Canonical stop's bloating a perfect system, and they also start letting me downgrade Gnome 3's worthlessness to Gnome 2 as Debian does.  Once this happen's then by george I will even upgrade! ha ha

So how has my user experience been.  Well I've been using Linux OSes for a number of year's mostly as server's, so I'm used to it, I'm also in love with the Console! :)

So it hasn't been that bad of a change.  I have started to use more and more the console and bash script's now that I am a full time user.  But other than that not much of my daily work and life have changed.

I must say though I am never in my life going back to the worst OS on this planet called Window's.  I have been redeemed you could say and I love Ubuntu! It just makes life so much easier, an app make's problem's, great, let's drop into console and kill it! :)

So what have I been using in my Ubu Experience.  Guake for my console, I love being able to hit F12 on my keyboard, which I'm using all the time anyways since I'm a programmer, and see my lovely little console dropdown. It's so quick and painless. I use to use Yakuake, but it, like KDE, was a bit bloated, so once I found Guake OMG! What a relief it is. Sure there's a way in Window's to use Console2 and AutoHotkey to do the same thing, but it's a bit bloated also.  Plus the Microsoft's CMD is worthless!  I can't do anything there.

It makes my life so much easier, a server has a problem, great, I F12 SSH to the server real quick using my pre-installed key's and fix. Exit out and F12 to get back to work! It's wonderful, why didn't I do this sooner.

So Guake I use, I use LibreOffice since I hate Microsoft, have since Word 6!!! Just kept getting worse and worse, heck even in window's I never made the upgrade from office 2000 to anything else :) ha ha

When I was still a window's user I switched about a year ago to using Mutt for my email, both gmail and Google App's for my business email.  Though Cygwin's version of mutt is kind of old and to compile the newest version it's a pain! I got by, I used it during the day instead of thunderbird to save memory and resources.  I could quickly check email, erase and go back to work.  Couldn't do much else though.

Now I am fully MUTT compliant!!  People believe me you switch to Mutt you will love Email again! Now an email notification comes in, like just now did, I F12 to my terminal (which consequently has mutt already open and ready), find the message and done.....Consequently so everyone reading know's, I just dropped out, found the new email (it was spam), erased it and came back in less time than it took me to write this sentence! ;)

Life is great using the keyboard, everything is one letter away! Now that I am in Ubu I have full access to the latest mutt.  So I can even write my email's in it! I have Goobook installed which allow's me full access to query my Google contact's while writing an email in Mutt.  So I drop into mutt, press "r" on the keyboard, type 3 letter's of the person's name (like in Thunderbird), hit , I am then presented with a small list if there are more than one, hit enter and Boom I'm writing my message!  Once done I just ctrl-x and then y and it's sent!!!!  That's quick! I love Mutt, I hate that all these GUI program's are now more bloated than ever. Heck this morning I didn't even open Thunderbird to mess with email, I went straight for Mutt!

I don't ever write email's in HTML so it's no problem. I am a web developer, so as most of us agree HTML is meant for the WEB, not email's.  Email is text, period! You want to write HTML make a web page.  I have one client who actually write's their email's in Word, then hit's send from it! Word then send's with all it's HTML and personal HTML junk through Outlook! What a mess when I get email's. Word is for writing letter's people, not sending email ;)

I hate HTML email's, with a passion. This is why I use mutt, I have yet to find a way to get Mutt to filter HTML out of email's though, there's still hope ;). If I ever wanted to see that HTML crap I could make a key macro to open it in a browser, but why! I hate HTML in email's, hence I love Mutt! :)

So what else has changed you ask?  Well I use grep, find and sed a lot more than before. I use to use them on server problem's a lot, but since window's didn't have them and getting them to work with cygwin at times was a bit of a hassle, I never did. Now that I am full time Ubu I use them all the time and don't know how I lived without them in web development. I am currently re-doing a site for a customer, there was a lot of problem's in the code and hard to find at times. No problem, just GREP it! :)

Once found if there are a lot to replace either use "replace" or "sed". Took minutes what before would take me a lot lot longer.

I am also using Ubuntu One Cloud now. Yes of course I could of used Dropbox in Window's, but the problem with that is that a lot of program's store their crap in so many different place's on Window's that it's hard to find junk. In Ubu it's all in my Home! :)

So I have synced between my Work PC and laptop my Mutt profile and everything mutt related, my SQLYog profile, my filezilla profile, my putty profile, liferea profile, and my Geany editor profile. That way what ever change I make while working when I get to the laptop it's there just as if I was on the other! I also have my project folder and all my NetBeans project's synced.

So life is so much easier! See like the putty stuff I couldn't sync using dropbox on Window's since putty store's all it's info in the stupid registry in Window's. So it never would have worked as good.

So in short, it's been a bit more than a month, and I am loving it! I am in love with the console and wish I could switch to using Lynx as my web browser ha ha ha

I recommend this switch to most everyone!

My FULL Move to Ubuntu

So for years I have been a Windows for work user, not by choice but because 80% of all the software I used was for Windows :(

So a few years ago I started moving all other computer's at the house and work to Ubuntu.  Now all computer's are Ubu, but my work PC that is.  And for 2 years things have been awesome, all the PC's at work and house have been trouble free, no worries everything just works!  No more problem's with freezes and other such things.

Even my personal laptop has been Ubuntu for a few years, I loved it.  I just couldn't pull myself to move, too much software I would miss.

So a year ago I started making a decision to start moving off.  I started with little things, moved from office to LibreOffice.  I also changed a couple other things.  3 months ago I made a move from UltraEdit to Geany!  That was what did it since I don't do much Flash and design work anymore as I use to, that was the big problem back then.  I moved software over like from my movie collector program to Griffith, and stored the DB on my server in MySQL, much better ;)

So last week I got back from a long trip, when I got back someone gave me a new laptop to replace my old one.  The new laptop was 6 months old.  So the first thing I did was move my Ubu from the old system over to the new, it took me and hour and a half, that even includes the apt-get install download of 300MB!

All I had to do was an export to a text file of all installed apps using aptitude.  Then insert my 8GB flash drive in the old laptop, copy the home directory of my user and that exported file.  Then install Ubu on the second new laptop (crashing and removing Win 7 ;)).  Once installed I started up, ran apt-get install using a cat and xargs of the old file with the list of my installed apps.  It downloaded and installed all apps.  Once done I drop back into console (Ctrl-Alt-F1), service gdm stop, and copy the home files from the flash drive to my new home directory.  Once done shutdown -r now from console.  BAM!!  It boots up into my "old" looking Gnome desktop, as if I had never left my old laptop!

Ubu is great!  It took me one hour and 30 min. including all downloads!

So that was at the beginning of the week.  I took the rest of the week off of work and still enjoyed my vacation ;).

So I went back to work on Thu. to finish out the week, the first thing I noticed was my Windows XP system was deadly slow! :(  It had been 8 months since my last crash, wow that's bad. My laptop has gone 2 years since I installed Ubu! ha ha

So after a full day of working in XP I was angry and tired.  So I spent yesterday crashing, the whole day!  I had to make a list of the software I wanted installed, make a backup of all my setting's of certain program's.  That includes looking through many folder's, local settings-App settings, App settings etc etc.

This took a long time.  Once done backing up, I crashed window's and re-installed.  Then the long process of installing all software and copying all the setting's back in.  This took me until 5PM!!  My Lord come on!

Once done I copied my Desktop back and copied the backup I made of Stardocks Fences.  Wouldn't you believe it that their software doesn't backup icon location, just the fence names and location's!  So now I have to manually figure out where I had 30 icons at on my desktop!  Even software for window's is as stupid as window's itself! ha ha

So sitting last night I figured, you know this sucks!  I decided never to do it again.  This morning I migrated 100% to Ubu on my Desktop work system!

It took me an hour :)  Same process as before with the laptop.

Now after working all day on Ubu on my Work PC I think I am not going back.  I am going to try hard not to touch that old XP system and boot only into Ubu, this is an experiment that I hope goes well because I hate, hate, hate windows!

Whew, I feel relieved.