the end

After 4 1/2 years of marriage, my wife and I have decided to part ways. In the end it boils down to her bipolar disorder and my inability to handle it. Despite all the bad things that have happened, I still love her and care about her. Maybe, hopefully, we can stay friends after the divorce is finalized and all the emotions die down.

who knows...

home again

I'm back home in Jacksonville. We're staying with my dad until we can get back on our feet. I have no idea how long that will take but I hope it's soon. We are still basically living out of suitcases. I'm forced to use my 6 year old 12" PowerBook G4 for my daily computing which includes job searching and communications. It's rough, but I'm getting by. It took a few weeks to recover from the actual move and start to feel better. I'm trying to fend off boredom but luckily the weather is wonderful and I've got my bike out of storage so I can get out and enjoy the weather as well as get some exercise so I can lose this excess weight I've put on. I've had a very promising job interview, but I will have to wait a while before I'll find out anything. For now, I'm just glad I'm back home in familiar surroundings and the stress of the past 3 1/2 years is behind me.

windows phone 7 ads are pretty dumb

How do you interpret the Windows Phone 7 ads on TV? What do the ads say to you as a consumer?

To me, the ads say "Our phones arent as exciting and enthralling to use as the other guys'. Our phones are boring." Their ads might as well be pushing my Motorola RAZR phone. I do one or two things with it and put it back in my pocket. I use my iPhone a lot. I play games, I have utilities that help me with my work, I surf the web, I do LOTS with it. MS tells me in their ads that "boring" is what they are going for.

it keeps getting piled on

So we finally found a buyer for our house. The problem is that with the repairs they want done, my wife's bankruptcy, and moving expenses I will be flat fucking broke by the time I get back to Florida. I will be in a worse situation than when I got out of college 17 years ago. I will truly be starting all over again and this is not the economy to be doing that.

gassy lady

Guys, if your lady has really nasty gas there is a way to make her stop. Just tell her she looks fat when she farts. It works!

ain't

Why ain't "ain't" in the dictionary, but "dis" is?

I'm not trying to be funny. It is an honest question that I would love to get an answer to.

Dis has only been in use for the past 20 years introduced and maintained by the rap music culture. I've found it in several different dictionaries and none of them seem to complain about it being poor English. From what I've been able to tell, "ain't" has been around since the 18th century and it still is treated as a plague.

Ain't seems to only be referred to as very informal with notes that it should never be used. You can say "dis" in everyday conversation even in formal surroundings and you'd be perfectly immune to ridicule. If you said "ain't" at a dinner party, people would look at you like you had 3 heads.

Every year there are news stories about now the English lexicon keeps growing with new words added all the time - including the famous "D'oh!" uttered by Homer Simpson. THAT'S BARELY A GUTTURAL UTTERANCE! yet it deserves a permanent place in the dictionary. "Ain't" is a 200 year old word that actually has an etymology that explains the word's roots.

I just don't get it.

infinite theories

Many people think that the symbol for infinity ∞ means that you go "round and round this crazy loop forever". OK I can see that but I have a much more rational explanation for the symbol. To me the symbol looks like an hourglass tipped on its side. With the hourglass tipped on its side, how long will it take for the grains of sand to fall through? Until infinity!

You can learn more about the concept of infinity here: http://www.sixtysymbols.com/videos/infinity.htm

fair-weather friends

I am a computer guy. That's who I am. My skills are focused on fixing, maintaining, and configuring computers and servers. Not only is it my chosen profession, I'm good at it and I like it. Unfortunately my profession comes with a built-in people repellant.

When a user has a problem with their computer, they call "the computer guy" and all chummy and chatty wanting to be your best friend. The computer guy comes with a smile and reassurances that the end of the world is not upon us. The problem is fixed - sometimes better than new. The computer guy has served his purpose. The user is done with him. If it is a business relationship, monetary payment is received in exchange for an invoice. If it isn't a business relationship - friends and family and other acquaintances - then the payment might be beer or cookies (if you're lucky) or a hearty "thanks Computer Guy!"

I am in a unique situation where I mostly work from home with the occasional on-site visit required for those particularly difficult problems that can't be fixed via remote control. The problem is that working from home AND being 550 miles from friends and family is a VERY lonely existence. I don't have an office to report to every morning where I can have chit chat with co-workers and compare our thoughts on last night's football game or discuss the minutiae of our day to day lives. All I have is an AIM buddy list that seems to be getting populated less and less with each passing day. I also have Facebook where I can keep in touch with lots of people, but it just isn't the same as face to face contact. We've lived in Knoxville for over 3 years now and we haven't made any friends here. My wife at least had co-workers when she was employed.

Most people make friends through shared experiences like the workplace. I don't have a workplace as such. So I end up spending my work-from-home days staring at the walls in my office and waiting for someone to sign on to iChat.

While I was pondering the subject matter I realized that some of my friends back home are just like my clients except they usually don't have to pay me with money. The beer and cookies are fine, but that's the end of it. I don't hear from a friend in weeks or months and when I do hear from them, 99% of the time they are having a computer problem and want my help. I try to have normal conversations with them. I ask about their lives and offer tidbits about what's going on in my life. I comment on the popular culture of the day and the conversations are good. But once the computer is fixed and I've been given a plate of cookies i'm shown the door and told "oh I have a thing to go to with a bunch of friends."

But really... who wants to be buddy-buddy with their plumber or electrician or the guy who replaced their roof? Those people have a particular skill that is only called upon when something is broken and the presence of the repair person is just a symbol of bad circumstances and the emotions that come from it. The sooner the plumber is out of your house the better, right?

I'm not very skilled at meeting new people socially, but I do try. The conversations usually take this turn:

...

Me: so what do you do for a living?

Person: I'm an office drone at MegaGlobalConsolidated.

[... 20 minutes of conversation about their job ensue...]

Person: Well enough about my boring job. what do you do for a living?

Me: I'm a computer guy

Person: oh...[awkward pause] ok.

If the person doesn't turn around to talk to the person on the other side of them, i MIGHT get:

Person: oh, ok. Hey, my computer is making this noise when I turn it on. what could be causing that?

I've tried using any of the other job descriptions I'd only use on a resumé like System Administrator or Mac Engineer but inevitably the question will follow: "What's that?" and instead of trying to describe the technical details of what the job is, I just fall back to "I'm a computer guy".

I've tried talking about some of the strange things I've encountered in my job. I've tried changing the subject to anything else. It doesn't matter, it's too late. The cat is out of the bag. I'm a "Computer Guy" and even though in the 21st Century "Geek" is supposed to be cool, we are still on a low rung on the social ladder. It's a caste that is only slightly higher than plumbers because of more intellectual nature of the job.

It makes me feel insignificant. It makes me feel like the only reason people want to be near me is so they can use me. I don't know that there is a solution. I've thought about changing my vocation, but there's not much else I can do without tons of schooling that I can't afford right now.

Oh well.

F**K YOU

I love this song! Too bad it won't get played on the radio.

Thoughts about "iPhone killers"

For a little background, read a little of this sitehttp://aaplinvestors.net/stats/iphone/iphonedeathwatch/

There have been Apple Haters for as long as Apple has been in business. Through all the successes and failures, the core of the company has pretty much remained. When Steve Jobs returned as iCEO in 1997 he got the company to retrain their focus back to the core principles that made them what they are. The iMac, OSX, the iPod and everything that has grown from those products are results from that focus. The results may not be immediate - most times it takes a couple revisions for the brilliance to shine through. Apple has rarely ever released a product and then just dropped it after it failed to meet their expectations. The Newton was a product of the darker days and it was an unfortunate casualty of the refocusing... however it always drifted around the halls of Cupertino. It was the ghost that refused to pass on. The G4 Cube's only sin was to be overpriced, but it still lives on in spirit in the MacMini today.

What does this have to do with iPhone killers? The whole process of Apple's R&D is more than just "what's gonna make us money?" and "let's make sure it doesn't cause blindness in laboratory rats." Some ideas go through more internal iterations than you'd believe. Many never make it farther than the scribblings on a note pad. The physical product is only one part of the grand picture. If you looked at all of the really big successes Apple has had, you'd see that there's an unspoken quality that gets overlooked by the mainstream media and can't really be showcased by some glossy PR still photos. The original 128K Macintosh in 1984, the Newton, the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone all share something their competitors just don't seem to get - and probably never will.
When the original Macintosh hit the scene, there was something about it was was different from anything else that was on the market at that time. Other than the unique, small, all-in-one form factor and the famous 1984 "Big Brother" commercial, there was a buzz about this machine that truly revolutionized the world. The operating system was unlike anything else seen outside of research and development labs in Silicon Valley. In 1984 it was years ahead of its time. There have been many competitors to come and go all claiming to be Mac killers but the only serious threat to stick around was Microsoft's Windows operating system. Sure, they gobbled up 95% of the market but their success had absolutely nothing to do with product quality as much as it had to do with shrewd business decisions.

The Newton had a rocky birth during the Interregnum between Steve Jobs' departure and return to the company. It was revolutionary device that introduced a new term to our vocabulary: PDA. Before the newton, there was no such thing as truly portable computing. The portables of the day usually weighed in excess of 10 lbs and you needed a luggage cart to carry it anywhere. The first Newton MessagePad had "quirky" handwriting recognition built into it. Jokes were made about how it would misread what you wrote even if you had perfect penmanship. But when you compared it to other devic... oh wait... there weren't any competing devices at the time! It was awesome and flawed at the same time, but in subsequent revisions of the software and the hardware it was greatly improved. During the Newton's lifetime the only real competitor was USRobotics' Palm Pilot. The main reason it won the PDA war was because they made their product small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. Other than that, the Palm operating system required that you learn a new way to write in a way that was hardly intuitive. Once again, Apple was trumped by actions that really had nothing to do with the quality of the products.

In 1997 Steve Jobs comes back and hires Jonathan Ive as a designer. His first major product is the iMac. It brought back memories of the original 1984 Mac with its all-in-one design yet it was still nothing like anyone had ever seen before. However, Apple managed to take the lead and not just sit back on their laurels. The iMac introduced USB ports to the world and killed the floppy disk (which incidentally Apple spearheaded on the original 1984 Mac). Built-in Ethernet and modem meant that this computer was built for the internet. There have been many copy-cats to come and go and all have failed miserably because even though they might have had bigger screens or faster CPUs or bigger hard drives, they still didn't quite "get it".

The birth of the iPod in 2001 really kicked Apple into high gear. MP3 players already existed at the time but they were unremarkable and had limited capacity and sorting your music was a pain. Although the iPod had a hard drive for storing thousands of music files, that wasn't really what made it the most popular gadget since the Sony Walkman. It was the user experience. Transferring music from your CDs to your computer to the iPod had never been easier and was a very pleasant experience. Then once you got the music on your iPod, it was a piece of cake to operate the thing. The user manual was very minimal because the whole thing really was surprisingly…. "DUH EASY". The menus, the buttons, the iTunes software - it all really was self explanatory to do what most users would use it for. When I worked at the Apple Store I saw people come in with their and ask about these new-fangled gadgets. They admitted that they were barely computer literate but they were able to figure the iPod out with out my assistance. When Apple expanded iTunes to also be a place to buy your music the experience was, once again, far and above anyone else's efforts. No other portable music player has ever come close in any way to the iPod. Microsoft's Zune music player was touted as the iPod Killer. I think after 3 years, Microsoft sold 3 million Zunes... Good luck with that, Microsoft.

The iPhone has been available for 3 years and has done very well for itself. Its success can be explained by Apple building on top of the things that has given it great success in the past. Over 30 years of R&D have contributed to the iPhone that we see today. The thoughtfulness of the physical appearance is nice but not gaudy. The operating system keeps the user in mind. The interface between the iPhone and your computer (iTunes) is very polished. The multitude of competitors who all claim to be next in line for the crown may have a couple nicer and better features over the iPhone, but no successful gadget is just a collection of electronics. Successful products are greater than the sum of their parts. That's where Apple succeeds and everyone else fails miserably. OK so what if your Android phone has a higher resolution camera? So what if your Windows Mobile phone has more memory? So what if your Symbian phone has a physical QWERTY keyboard?

Sure Apple stumbles from time to time and it is inevitable that they will be usurped by an adversary - that's just normal American business. But today Apple is the target of everyone's envy. In the foreseeable future, those companies trying to tarnish Apple will all fail miserably because they just don't get it. It's the whole package that counts. In their rush to try to be the iPhone Killer, all these other companies have failed to see exactly what it is they are trying to kill. They add bells and whistles and flashy knobs and buttons to their products only to say "We have this… the iPhone doesn't! so that means we are better!" They are aiming their sights on a single gadget and not the very fabric of what makes Apple unique in the technology world. As long as the culture of THOUGHTFUL innovation exists within the walls of 1 Infinite Loop, Apple will be successful. Long live the iPhone.

[as for Apple's draconian practices on the App Store and other questionable practices… well I'll save that for another post while I gather my thoughts]

brainteaser debunked

There is an old brainteaser that's been around a long time. I figured it out when I was a kid and I read it in the back of Discover Magazine. There's even a variation in the movie Labyrinth. It goes something like this:

You're in a room with two doors. There's a guard at each door. One door is the exit, but behind the other door is something that will kill you. You're told that one guard always tells the truth and the other guard always lies. You don't know which guard is which. You are allowed to ask one question to either of the guards to determine which door is the exit. What question should you ask?

The generally accepted answer is:

Ask either guard what door the other guard would say is the exit, then choose the opposite door.
If you ask the guard who always tells the truth, he knows the other guard would lie, so he'll point you to the door leading to death. If you ask the guard who always lies, he knows the other guard would truthfully show you the exit, so he'll lie and point you to the door leading to death.

There is a problem with this solution. If the scenario were truly a binary one (Door #1 or Door #2) then asking the question as phrased would work. However, the liar is a variable you can't predict. As a result, there are THREE possible answers that either guard could give: "Door #1", "Door #2" or "I don't know".

If you asked the liar what the other guard would say, he, being a liar, could answer "I don't know"

If you asked the honest guard what the other guard would say, he honestly doesn't know because he knows the liar could answer with the wrong door or just simply answer "I don't know". So the honest guard would also answer the same.

I don't know that there is a true solution to this brain teaser, but I do know that the generally accepted answer is wrong.

that's it. I'm done with tennessee

Well a few weeks after my wife lost her job I discovered that my boss posted an ad for my job online. The automated job search bots I've got setup at several job sites emailed me with this really great job that was right up my alley. It was MY job with MY employer. We aren't busy enough to justify hiring another person. The only possibility was that he was looking to replace me soon. There are no jobs here for either of us. I'd rather be jobless with friends and family than jobless in a town I hate with no one around me. I took a pre-emptive strike and approached my boss to tell him that since my wife lost her job, our lives have gotten worse and we decided to move back to Florida to be with friends and family. I told him the process would take a few months and I should still be here to help him find and train my replacement. This gave me control to exit when I'm ready and not have the rug pulled out from under me.

We're now in the process of packing and sorting our stuff for a garage sale and to put the house in sellable condition.

This Tennessee experiment is over. We're going home. Now I just hope we can do this quickly.

tickling satan's testicles

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse... my wife lost her job on Friday. We are fucked.

This is a deeper level of hell than I could ever imagine.

return to shit

I knew it was too good to last. I'm back to barely working more than 25 hours a week. And all the other aspects of my life that I thought were getting better are also back to the same horrific shitty status they were before. Nothing has changed.

feast or famine

I've actually been BUSY since 2010 started. In fact, my last paycheck was the biggest I've gotten since moving up here. Two 40 hour weeks plus overtime on both weeks. This week has slowed down a bit, but that's OK. It gave me time to go to the accountant to file our taxes and run some errands.

I'm glad that I've been busy but I do have complaints.

1) it's not predictable: there is no way to tell if this is just a blip on the radar or the beginning of a trend.

2) a lot of it is unnecessary: I just wish people could evaluate their "emergencies" with a little more objectivity. Having to drop what I'm doing at one location to go help a frantic user who didn't know to click on the OK button (he couldn't read the non-alert message to me over the phone) is wasting my time and everyone else's.

3) real emergencies piled up and surfaced at the same time: If people had let me do the maintenance I recommended to them 6 months ago, their computers wouldn't have gone belly up today. I can't manage my time when everyone has emergencies all on the same day (real or imagined)

4) "feast or famine" isn't an exaggeration: I'm either sitting around with my thumb up my nose waiting for the phone to ring or I'm busting my ass so much I don't have time to eat or take a shit. I need some stability in my life. Is a little bit of predictability too much to ask for in my life?

That's the nature of the business though.

sick of haiti news

I am so sick and tired of hearing about the earthquake damage in Haiti. EVERY news category has some mention of Haiti.

SPORTS: some athlete can't find his family

ENTERTAINMENT: some actor can't find his family

TECH: people are using text messages and Twitter to donate money

BUSINESS: tons of donations to Haiti

POLITICS: US government aid to Haiti

LOCAL NEWS: local people with family in Haiti, Businesses donating services

I DON'T CARE! I get it... a bad thing happened to a very poor country. They are poor because of their own corruption and inability to run their own country. Every other Caribbean country seems to do OK, including the Dominican Republic that shares the exact same hunk of land in the ocean.

How many times do we need to be told that buildings fell down because they don't have building codes? How many times do we need to see the videos and photos from the area? Can we just move on to the other things happening in the world?

I certainly will not donate a penny to any charity for Haiti. Charity begins at home. Have people forgotten that there are millions of people suffering here in the USA?

this is real customer service

Better make an appointment. I hope they can squeeze you in. Tax season will be upon us soon!

2012 for dummies

One scientist put it a good way: My calendar stops at Dec 31. does that mean that's the end of the world? no

The other thing people dont realize is that the way the mayans calculated their very overly-complex calendar, Dec 21, 2012 just happens to coincide with 999999999 in their calculations. The mayans didnt say that's the end of the world... that's just as far as they wanted to calculate then go out for cappuccino and scones.

I'm paraphrasing here.

a plea for help

The economy is still kicking me in the teeth... HARD. Xmas is going to be the leanest ever. I'm struggling to get over 20 hours a week. I had to replace the 13 year old water heater this week and that hurt a lot, but it wasn't something I was willing to skimp on. If it wasn't for my savings, I wouldn't be able to pay the mortgage. If there are any more emergencies I will have to talk to the bank about a hardship case. Maybe I should stand out by the interstate off-ramp with a sign begging for money.

I am desperate. please help me. I'm not too proud to beg.

big bang theory

I've recently discovered CBS' The Big Bang Theory I remember when it was first announced in the Fall lineup a couple years ago and I liked the premise. I never watched it on TV because I just knew that it was going to get pulled off the air for being too cerebral. I didn't want to get too attached to the show only to have it cancelled a few episodes in. The fact that the main characters are dorky physicists with poor social skills was my first clue that it wouldn't be on the air too long (see also Futurama). The jokes are almost all very smart - How many TV shows can make 3 Schrodinger's Cat jokes in 2 episodes and still be funny? Well the show starts its 3rd season soon. Whoda thunk it?

I really love the show because I can relate in a huge way to all 4 of the main characters. Obviously most of their quirks are exaggerated for TV, but those quirks are based on reality.

- Sheldon is the alpha geek & former child prodigy. He was treated differently as a child and he doesn't have a clue about the real world. Sarcasm is lost on him. Accuracy in everything is important to him.

- Howard is a hornball. Plain & simple. He has no idea how to woo the ladies but he keeps trying because, statistically, he's bound to score at some point.

- Raj literally can't speak to pretty girls unless he's drunk.

- Leonard may be awkward but he has a slight grasp on reality - sometimes more so than his buddies. He has the hots for his attractive "normal" neighbor across the hall. He tries hard to get on her good side but ends up being the "nice guy" far more times than should be allowed.

yeah I can relate to these guys. :-(

deep thoughts...

... By Jack Handey:

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

In reality, my dad's medical plan consisted of Pepto Bismol and 'walk it off' treatments. Somehow I survived. Hyperextending my knee: walk it off. Falling off a poorly constructed bicycle ramp onto my chest and most likely cracking a rib or two: walk it off. Vomiting and high fever: Pepto and go to school. Urinary tract infection: Pepto. That's pretty much it. There was a period of time when we were dirt poor and had no insurance whatsoever, but there were times when at least an X-ray would have been prudent.

more of the same

Things are still very difficult for me in Knoxville. The job hours seem to be getting fewer and fewer which means a smaller paycheck. The job search for even part time work has resulted in nada. Pretty soon I won't be able to afford to stay here and I won't be able to afford to move.

i can coast for a bit now

The SummerJam VW show was this past weekend and I won 1st place in the Under Construction class. Even though I didn't enter the show to win anything, it was still nice to get recognition from my peers for all my work.

I still have to wait for the carpet kit and tweak a few things here and there, but essentially the body is done. I still have to plan out an engine and save up some money to go toward that. I SOOOOO want to get it back on the road again! But I will have to take my time since money is the biggest factor now.

mad dash to the show

Well it's been a couple months since I set my goal of getting my Bug ready for the upcoming VW show in Knoxville. I am *ALMOST* ready. I'm still waiting on several parts that have been backordered. I'm having to formulate a Plan B in case the parts don't arrive in time. The part that sucks the most is that I am totally alone in this. I don't have any local friends or family who can help. My wife is a lump of flesh at this point and can't help me with even the smallest things without complaining.

I've put out a plea for help from the VW club and have gotten a few responses, so I'm looking forward to them helping me this coming weekend. In the meantime, I'm waiting for the aforementioned backordered parts as well as my bumpers to come back from the chrome shop. The bumpers should be finished by the 17th and I'm planning on picking them up on that date.

I have 2 weeks to go...

a goal for myself

I've been making progress on my Bug recently.  I've decided that I'm going to try to get some of the loose ends tied up and then enter the car in a Bug show in July in the "Under Construction" class.  I've been getting some good feedback on how it looks now and it's motivated me. I think the car show sets an interim goal or milestone that I can work toward. It'll make me feel better about the progress I'm making and maybe it'll kick start me into finally finishing it soon.  The main barrier to finishing it ASAP is the lack of money. :(

I ain't too proud to beg 

catching up

Well last week my step-mother died. She's who pretty much raised me from a toddler to about 9 years old when she and my dad divorced. I drove down to Florida to be with my dad and my brother.  She had been ill for quite some time so it wasn't totally unexpected, but as I learned from the death of my own mother, just because you expect it, that doesn't make it any easier to take.

Now I'm back in Knoxville trying to get caught up on work that I missed. Yesterday I had a full 16 hour day driving to a client's office 2 hours away and replacing a dying XServe and transferring all the files and services to the new server. What made it especially bad was that I had just driven 9 hours back to Knoxville on Saturday and had only sunday to rest and get out of bed at 4:30 am monday morning for a 2 hour drive.

ugh

Arlington National Cemetery

100_0577
Originally uploaded by mcclint

When we went on our honeymoon in 2007, we went to Washington, DC because neither of us had been there. One of the first things we did as tourists was to go to the Arlington National Cemetery. We have a weird curiosity about cemeteries. We like to see the different kinds of headstones and other grave markers in really old civilian cemeteries. Sometimes we try to think of the stories behind family plots with dates of death that are all very close together. This was definitely different. Nearly all the gravestones were the same. Nearly all the stories were the same. Neither one of us knows anyone who is buried here. Neither of us knew anyone who fought and/or died in a war. But it was still a very emotional thing for both of us. You'll just have to go see it for yourself if you've never been. And it is different seeing it in person than on TV or in movies - trust me. When we left there and planned the rest of our visit in DC, we wanted to go see the Vietnam War memorial, but we decided we couldn't do it that same day. It would have been too much for us. Toward the end of our visit we decided we still couldn't do it. It would have been way too much sadness for us to handle during our honeymoon. It's not that the Arlington visit was a downer. We were glad we went. There's just so much you can handle in one visit.
When we do go back to DC (one of these days) we've decided that we will definitely go see the Vietnam memorial.

lacie sucks

For the past year and a half, we've encountered many large capacity (500GB+) LaCie external hard drives suffer from power supply failures at various client locations. At first we thought one or two bad units is to be expected. Then we thought maybe there were some storms or other power events in the area that may have zapped some power supplies. Then, as more of these things died, we began to think there was a bad production run on these LaCie power supplies. At this point LaCie tech support began to blame APC Battery backups. They told me that if a LaCie power supply is plugged into an APC brand UPS, the power supply would eventually die. There was no further explanation other than it would happen. This sounded suspicious to me since 1) not all the dead power supplies were plugged into APC units 2) we have many other devices - large & small - plugged into APC battery backups of various models and absolutely none of those devices have had any problems at all.

 The other day we had yet another power supply die. This time I contact APC to see if there is any possibility of any truth to the allegations made by LaCie.  Yes and no. Here is what APC said:

A BackUPS will provide stepped approximation sine wave as output when it is on battery, few electronic equipment will not with stand with this type of output as they require pure sine wave AC current as input, which may lead to the issue as you have mentioned. This can be resolved by using higher end model UPS like Smart UPS which provide sine wave as their output.

I called tech support and got further clarification on this. They said that the only kinds of devices that would complain about a stepped sine wave power input would be devices that are sensitive to the frequency of the incoming power such as medical devices or even high end video editing equipment and maybe even some super-high-end server equipment... certainly not a consumer-grade external hard drive. AND remember to take in the fact that this step sine wave only happens when it is running on battery power. AND EVEN THEN, we ARE using SmartUPS units at a couple locations that have experienced LaCie failures!! AND many of these drives have died outside of any known power events like a blackout or power surge from a storm in the area.

I threw the ball back in LaCie's court and here is what they finally said: 

The problem with APC/UPS backup systems is that they are generally designed to support much larger devices than our drives; such as entire computer systems. As a result the power variance that they consider to be "acceptable" can often still be enough to cause damage to our power supply units. In many cases, having a unit like this on the same electrical circuit as the drives can cause problems, even if the LaCie drive is not plugged directly into the APC system.

So now LaCie says that as long as there is an APC battery backup hooked up in your building and you just happen to be on the same circuit as that UPS, you're gonna have a LaCie power supply failure!!

I realize that I'm not an Electrical Engineer and we never got that deep into electrical circuits in my Physics classes in college, but this smells fishy to me. If there was something that caused THIS much trouble and had the potential of zapping an entire circuit in a building just by being plugged in, wouldn't this device have been blocked by Underwriter Laboratories before being released for sale on the market?  

Out of all the electronic devices we use or encounter on a daily basis, LaCie is the ONLY one that can't handle "normal" power variations.  HP inkjet printers hold up well. Maxtor external drives work well. Macs, PCs, speakers, stereos, routers, cable modems, LCD panels, scanners, iPod chargers, DVD players... they all hold up just fine when plugged into APC battery backups.  I will never purchase LaCie drives again and I'd recommend you don't either.

gonna get worse before it gets better

  The other day I got word that 2 of our biggest and oldest clients have started laying people off and asked to cut back on our services.  This couldn't have hit at a worse time for us. We're slowly trying to get out of the massive debt we found ourselves in and we started going to a Dave Ramsey class. For me, the Dave Ramsey class is mostly review and confirmation that I've always managed my finances wisely. Some of it is new info for me like different ways of handling the budget. It's not that I've done things wrong but I think my way works best for me alone. For a married couple, modifications have to be made.   I really hope a lot of this sinks in for Deb. 

 Because of the client layoffs and cutbacks, my hours are cut back and my paycheck is smaller.  Deb's work is getting on to all the underwriters to do something to raise revenue, but they are having a hard time doing that when the truckers and trucking companies they underwrite are going out of business. You can't get blood from a turnip!

This is all getting very scary. It's going to be harder to get out of our debt when we're faced with possible layoffs ourselves.

i'm not sure what to make of this

I went to the doctor and they poked and prodded and ran some tests and gave me a prescription for some prilosec (non-OTC).  I heard back from the doctor a few days later and they said all my tests came back negative. I want to curl up in the fetal position some times and just sleep until all this shit just passes over. I'm tired of being the one who has to shoulder all this.