Jerks at The Bike Rack DC

I won’t go into detail, but be warned to not do business at “The Bike Rack” in DC on Q St. NW.  I have been in the middle of a billing dispute with them and they called to have me return my bike.  They sounded nice on the phone and after holding the bike in my apartment for 5 months not using it, decided that even though the last time I was over, they were unaccommodating, that I would be nice and deliver the bike to them.

I get over, and one of the owners says…. “What is wrong with the bike?”  I said “Nothing, I explained the situation to the credit card company.”  He said “You lied.  You told them it was defective.”

Let’s just say they are jerks and they DO NOT HONOR THEIR STATED RETURN POLICY!

YES I had a BAD experience, but I am not the only one…check out Reviews at Yahoo Maps

Best Bike Shop?

CITY BIKES by far is the best bike shop in town!  If they carried Giant, I would have purchased the bike from them.  

Why they are the best….

  • They give WABA members discounts on both bikes and accessories. (Bike Rack does Not)
  • They give you 30 days to be sure that the bike you purchased works for you. (No other bike shop does this.  Kind of like how few car dealerships allow you more than a test drive.)
  • They have friendly and knowledgeable staff.
Check out City Bikes online.

Leopard vs Tiger

There are some good enhancements in Leopard…

  • Time Machine
  • Spaces
  • Transparency and Dock Reflection (Okay..not necessary, but cool.)
There are also some issues I have discovered….
  • Wireless seems to drop and the status icon says “Scanning”
  • When restarting, presumably after waking from sleep, Finder is not able to quit the running apps and ultimately I must hold the power button down to turn off the machine.  This is something from my windows days that I really dislike to do.
When I recently installed a new drive and installed from my Tiger restore disks, I would not have upgraded to Leopard, but…. The latest release of Delicious Library, a cool personal movie database and lending system, does not work with Tiger.  Big bummer!  So I decided to upgrade to Leopard chalking my issues up to corruption.
I was wrong, the same problems I had previously are happening again 🙁  While I have not found a solution to the “Application failed to quit” preventing normal restart/shutdown/logout.
Solution to Airport Issue!
I will keep my fingers crossed, but a suggestion to disable the status icon for the Airport has seemed to work!  While I have no way to check when I have connection issues if indeed the “scanning” is occurring, I have not noticed any lag in website response which was a tell tale sign of the issue.

Menu Meters

Having used a pc for a very long time and being used to my pc freezing, I missed the hard drive activity light.  Thankfully there is a freeware utility called Menu Meters which works for both Tiger and Leopard which does just that.  So if you want to be sure your Mac is working, this utility is for you.  It places indicators that you select in your top menu.

You can select any combination or all of the following:

  • CPU (Graph or Percenage of each or combined cores)
  • Hard Drive Activity
  • Memory Usage vs. Available
  • Network Activity

250 GB of 7200 RPM Speed

After disk space warnings and numerous issues with Leopard since I upgraded from Tiger which shipped on my Macbook, I decided to reformat and pop in a larger drive.  This was my intent when I purchased my Macbook last year.  Get the baseline Macbook and replace with a reasonably priced 7200 or 10000 rpm drive.  $99 from Newegg and I was sold!

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