"The car key." - A short story.

Here's a little short story with a not-so-good ending:

Last weekend, I saw my car keys in the garage on the floor near the door where our boys take off their shoes before coming in the house. I passed them several times throughout the day, as I was going in out of the house doing various things. I didn't really think much of them because I hadn't planned on going anywhere. Finally, Sunday afternoon as I was picking up (man, I'm such a good husband aren't I?), I finally lifted those keys off the floor only to discover the key to our new GMC Acadia was snapped in half!

Well, seeing the car was pretty new, I didn't want to just run to the hardware store and get some generic key made. I wanted to 'keep up appearances' by geting a factory GMC key. So during a lunch break during the work-week, I went to the local GMC dealer just down the road and showed them my dilemma. I was shocked to hear that the only way I could get a replacement key was through them or another GMC certified dealer ! They said the key had some ant-theft chip built into it so a normal hardware store made key would not have worked anyway. "OK.", I thought to myself before I took a bracing breath, calmly realizing I was at their mercy. I proceeded to asked, "So what's the cost of replacing it?". My heart sunk as the gentleman said, "$49.33 with tax". "Wow.", I thought to myself as I proceeded to open my wallet and hand over my credit card.

To this day, I don't know how that key was broken. I may never know.

The End.

Feel sorry for me? Leave a comment to help cheer me up. ;)

Drobo

Check this out, it's called a Drobo and it's now handling all my backup needs here at home! After nearly losing my main server/drive about 3-4 months back,  I've been keeping my eye out for a easier, simpler and better backup solution. Before, I had 2 tandem external USB drives; one was was for daily, primary use, the 2nd external USB drives was used to backup the first. Backups were done on an irregular basis via a script I put together utilizing Microsoft's Robocopy (a tool part of the Windows 2003 Server Tool kit). Sure, I could have taken it a step further and automated the Robocopy script to run on a daily schedule or something, but I've heard some cool things about the Drobo ( through some of my favorite podcasts Isuch as Tekzilla and Macbreak Weekly). So when I heard the price dropped on the 1st generation models, I scooped one up!

Data Robotics, Inc has put together a nice looking yet power piece of of technology. This is much more than a simple hard drive enclosure. The Drobo can take up to 4 independent hard drives and accumulates the storage capacity along with allocating proprietary space for data protection. The idea of this is you load this up with normal, everyday 3.5" SATA drives that you can get everywhere theses days (like Best Buy or Target) slide them in the drive bays and virtually forget about it the rest! If a drive gets full or a drive dies/fails, simply pull it out and replace it with one of equal or greater size and your good to go, you don't even have downtime when this happens!

It's a bit spendy but still reacheable for most households (It's about $350 bucks). If you want to learn more, just let me know. I definetly recommend this for anyone that wants to store their digital photos, music and/or movies!