Category Archives: Technology

ServerBeach: In their own little world

I noticed yesterday that ServerBeach billed me. I initially thought that was a little odd, since I remember I used to be billed around the 5th of the month, which was a much more convenient time to be billed $149 for me.

I checked into things and noticed that the billing date has been drifting backwards since I opened the account. Here are the billing dates for my account since I opened it: 2005-02-06, 2005-03-06, 2005-04-05, 2005-05-05, 2005-06-04, 2005-07-04, 2005-08-03, 2005-09-02, 2005-10-02, 2005-11-01, 2005-12-01, 2005-12-31, 2005-01-30. Yep, they’ve been billing me every 30 days.

It seems like that fact is evident on the bill, in the form of this line:

Sub-Total (30 Day Charges) $149.00

I opened a support ticket asking about it, and they confirmed and closed my ticket with this:

The ServerBeach billing cycle is a 30 day cycle instead of a monthly cycle. Due to the 30 day billing cycle, your payment date will vary by a day or so every month. We do not have monthly billing at this time.

Come on ServerBeach, join the rest of the world… hire a competent programmer to figure out how to bill monthly, and get that added. I love ServerBeach for every other reason, but this fact I absolutely hate. Ugh.

I’m Hot

Rob and I went to “The Tech” Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose on Friday. It was okay, but mostly oriented towards younger kids than ourselves. There were still lots of fun toys to play with, though. There are various places where you can create web pages, have your picture taken, etc., and with a wave of the RFID tag they supply you, you can get to it later. I saved this nice picture of me taken with a videotherm camera.

Biking with a GPS

When I’m out biking, I almost always bring my GPS. It makes life so much easier… I can always tell where I am, at least relative to home. In addition, one of the best features is that I get real-time statistics about my ride, such as current speed, average speed, maximum speed, and trip odometer. As a bonus, you also get your current position as latitude and longitude (not too useful on a bike), elevation (very useful), sunrise and sunset times relative to your position (don’t stay out too late!), and a “compass”1.

I use the Garmin eTrex Basic with the bicycle mount accessory. Pros: It’s waterproof, has good battery life, plenty of features for biking, and is relatively cheap. Cons: It doesn’t have a pause button2. If you use multi-mode transit (e.g. bike-train-bike) it’s difficult to get statistics for only the bike portion.

1  Not really a compass, it’s not magnetic. You have to be moving for it to be useful.

2  Does any GPS have a pause button? Leave a comment if you know of one…