When I bought my MacBook Pro over a year ago, I also got AppleCare - it came highly recommended. Well, after a year of just dealing with the high-pitched buzzing sound, I decided to send it off for repair. I scheduled an appointment with the local Genius Bar, walked in, and they took care of the rest. I also had a problem where the battery wasn’t lasting more than 45 minutes, so they said they’d take care of that too. They received the machine on Tuesday, had the new Main Logic Board (MLB) ordered, received and replaced by Thursday and it made it here today.
I must say - I’m impressed with the level of service! This is my second Apple laptop, but that was the first time I actually had to take it in for service - and it was a very easy and quick process!
Technorati Tags: apple, applecare, service, mlb, genius bar, buzzing
Published 1 year, 1 month ago
in Blog.
My friend RBChallenger from Lightning-Alley.com informed me that jbctech.com is worth around $19K on the LeapFish Domain appraisal site. Well…I don’t know about that, but I can tell you this: if anyone offered half that much for the domain, I’d be a fool not to accept! Here’s some other interesting ones:
Microsoft.com — $132.6M
Yahoo.com — $1.5B
MSN.com — $1.8B
Google.com — $898.5M
Netapp.com — $5.3M
IBM.com — $283.1M
Technorati Tags: domain, appraisal, leapfish
Published 1 year, 2 months ago
in Blog.
Well, everyone - I apologize. It’s funny - since I moved to North Carolina, I’ve had a hard time keeping in touch with people. When I do get time to catch up, they always mention the blog - and there I go not updating it. I’ve been so incredibly busy lately at work that I haven’t had much time to update this. As a matter of fact, I was showing someone something on the site the other day and it didn’t even work. So, today I went through and fixed all of the little quirks that the site had. Everything seems to be functional again - and I finally got a chance to moderate the 44 pending messages for review (most of which were spam, of course). However, it’s good to note that Akismet once again saved the day - my total count is now up to over 48,800 messages caught as spam by that thing. That’s incredible!
I’ll try not to take so long in between posts this time… 
I am currently at this year’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles, CA. I arrived here yesterday and have had a chance to check out the Expo Hall, attend the keynote presentations by Bill Gates and Craig Mundie, as well as attend a few of the technical break-out sessions.
It’s been very exciting - it’s awesome to see what all of the leaders in the industry are working on. As far as storage - there’s plenty talk about Solid State Disks (SSDs) and Hybrid Disks, which are quite impressive. I’ve still got a couple full days of technical sessions to check out, but here’s some press articles from WinHEC:
Gates to Tout First 100 Days of Vista at WinHEC
New Windows Home Server Hardware and Software Partners
Microsoft Announces Windows Rally Technologies
Vista Sales Near 40 Million, Gates Says At WinHEC
PLX Technology shows off USB Duet-enbled UMPCs
Fujitsu UMPC concept resurfaces at WinHEC, this time with specs
Technorati Tags: winhec, windows, conference, winhec2007, microsoft, umpc, ssd, lacc, losangeles
Published 1 year, 4 months ago
in NetApp.
Well, after a couple months of not blogging anything, I figured it’s about time to make another attempt. I’ve been extremely busy at work lately working on our next multipathing product for Windows. But, in my copious free time, I joined the NetApp RTP softball team. On Monday, we had our first game. We played a team called WMD and ended up losing 20-13. It was one of those games where one inning decided it all….they got the bases loaded and just kept hitting over and over and we weren’t able to stop them. It’s all for fun - and I had a blast.
Here’s the schedule:
Town of Cary - Coed C TB/MC Schedule
Technorati Tags: cary, softball, netapp, rtp, north carolina, coed
Published 1 year, 7 months ago
in Blog.
Since this is a personal blog, I thought I’d go ahead and make the domain name match as such, so today, JamesMBurke.com went live. It may take up to 72 hours for the DNS entries to resolve for you, but the site is still accessible via jbctech.com. I’ve used the jbctech.com domain for a number of years, but have been wanting to switch to something a little more personal.
I also fought with some server troubles tonight with the launch - apparently the hosting provider encountered a hard disk failure and had to move servers. When they moved my data over to the other server, there were a couple of corrupted files, and it took me about a half hour to get that all resolved. Luckily, all of my SQL databases were intact. Ahh the joys of local disks…wouldn’t it be nice if it were on a NetApp SAN.
Published 1 year, 7 months ago
in Life.
Traveling. That’s how I would describe these two days. We left Honolulu on December 29th at around 9:00pm HST, and arrived in Lubbock at around 11:00am (Central) on the 30th. Another horrible experience — it took the Lubbock Airport a little over an hour to get our bags…anyway, we then spent an hour or so with Rebecca’s mom and sister, having lunch and then departed on our long drive back home. We stopped in Dallas to have dinner with my Dad and his brother. We then left at around 8:30 to see how far we could make it. We ended up stopping in Shreveport, LA after about a 520 mile drive from Lubbock.
The next morning (New Year’s Eve), we woke up at 8:00am (Central) and headed to Raleigh. I drove until we hit Vicksburg, Mississippi. Then, Rebecca took over and drove until Birmingham, Alabama. Determined to make it to Raleigh as close to midnight as possible, I then took over and continued driving until we hit Raleigh at around 12:45am (Eastern). That drive covered 1000 miles and took us about 16 hours.
It was definitely nice to be home. We had Daisy (our dog) with us, and she was happy to be home too.
Published 1 year, 8 months ago
in Life.
Hawai’i!! We woke up early and took a ride to the Lubbock Airport for our flight to Honolulu. This was definitely the single longest flight I’ve ever been on. I’ve never flown abroad, and after this — I’m not sure I want to. :) It was really uncomfortable and of course the anxiety of going to Hawai’i probably had something to do with it.
When we arrived, we forgot where we rented our car and didn’t really have anything printed out — so, after some phone calls, we got our rental car — a Pontiac Torrent. Actually, having a rental car isn’t that useful when you stay in Waikiki – but I didn’t know that ahead of time.
I’ll spare the day-by-day details of the trip — but our hotel was awesome. We were in an Ocean View room on the 23rd floor of the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort and Spa. It was gorgeous - and there was SO much to do within a short walking distance.
Some of the activities we did in Hawai’i (O’ahu):
I have some pictures that I’ll try to post soon… Rebecca mentioned that vacationing is hard work — I agree. We were up at 8am every day and were dead tired by 8-9pm every day.
Published 1 year, 8 months ago
in Life.
The wedding went extremely well. There were no major problems whatsoever. You ask why I mention that? The entire morning, I worried about messing up something — why would I worry about that? Because that’s how I am - I worry about everything! But, it went very well - short and quick. My buddy Daryl, whom I haven’t talked to since his wedding back in the summer was also present. It was great seeing him along with other close friends and family.
Afterwards, all of our close friends went out to eat at one of my favorite restaurants - Olive Garden.
Tomorrow, it’s off to Hawai’i.
Published 1 year, 8 months ago
in Life.
Today was the day of the rehearsal. We went to the mall in Lubbock to pick up a few items, and then went to eat at Fuddrucker’s. Richard wasn’t able to make it to the bachelor party last night, but he met us for lunch. After that, we went to the Men’s Wearhouse to try on the tuxedos and then went back to the hotel to watch some Dave Chappelle. The rehearsal went very smoothly - my dad had food catered there, and well, we had WAY more than enough. It was Blackened Chicken and Brisket - the leftovers were donated to feed the homeless.
After the rehearsal, we all went bowling. Not to brag or anything, but I was the high scorer for both games. (Sorry, Clay - I had to do it) My second game was a 179….not too bad for a noob.
