Switched our home insurance

You know how you get tons of junk mail and before you even bother opening it, you instinctively just toss it into the recycling bin? It's that time of year for us to renew our home insurance policy and much to my dismay, our rates have steadily increased over the years. This week I got an offer mail from Western Mutual home insurance and I almost tossed it out. Glad I didn't. They seem to have have decent ratings (and a few bad ones) and good feedback from A. M. Best Company and the Better Business Bureau . At the worst case, Western Mutual has much better ratings than our old insurance company. Long story short, I felt comfortable and made the switch to Western Mutual today. With even more coverage, our home insurance dropped by more than 50% from our old insurance company. I had no idea we were overpaying that much.

The one caveat is that they don't cover "rentals only." They require coverage of a primary residence as a pre-requisite to covering rental properties. So I am working out a solution for that right now.

But man, once in a blue moon, you actually can get some useful junk mail!

Curse you Seagate!

After two WD drives failed on me several years ago, I poo poo'd WD drives and switched over to Seagate. I then had a 320GB Seagate die on me but received an RMA (the 5 year warranty came in handy) and wrote it off as bad luck.

Last night I couldn't boot up my PC all the way. I checked my BIOS several times and my Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive would just not be detected. I then placed the drive in my SATA USB drive and it was also not detected in my laptop. I know my SATA USB drive works and is a good validation that my Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive is a bum drive because I have my back up Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive in it and it tested fine as of last night *knock on wood*.

So then I did some research on the forums and it turns out there is supposedly a known FW issue on the 7200.11 generation of Seagate drives. My symptoms mirror the OP's spot on. The issue seems to be the most pervasive on 1TB drives but 500GB drives are affected as well . In fact, if you go to the general Seagate internal HDD forum, there are a staggering number of complaints and still no clear resolution despite the issue being known for at least several months now. So if you're reading this and in the market for 1TB drives, beware of the Seagate 7200.11 drives!

So what are the options now?
1) I could RMA but I think there is a real risk I could get a drive with the same issue again. It doesn't seem like Seagate has formally acknowledged the problem yet. Besides that, I don't think I can be without my computer working for the time to process the RMA.
2) Try 7200.12 generation - Too new. Not enough user feedback yet. And I'm not exactly Seagate's biggest supporter at the moment.
3) Hitachi Deaths..I mean Deskstar? No confidence.
4) Make peace with WD ? I might actually go for the 300GB VelociRaptors now. But as a stop gap, maybe use a WD10000LSRTL 1TB drive. There aren't many reviews yet. Still too new I suppose.
5) Samsung? Newegg reviews on HD103UJ 1TB are OK but not great.

So it looks like I'll have to pick my poison here. If only SSDs were more price competitive at this point!

Gonna be a landlord

Starting this summer, we'll be looking to rent out our home. Off and on and I have been reading "Propery Management for Dummies." I finally got through it and I was surprised by the number of good tips and gotchas. It was a good read and eye-opening. It would appear that if you really want to cross your T's and dot your I's there are a lot of forms to be signed,

- Lease agreement
- Addendum to Lease agreement
- Rental Application
- Holding deposit agreement and receipt
- Statement of rental policy (given at the time of rental application)
- Rental application verification form
- Guarantee of Lease or Rental agreement
- Notice of applicant denial
- Policies & Rules aka House Rules
- Smoke detector agreement
- Pets agreement
- Notice of Tenant intent to vacate

Some feedback I've received from the real estate investing gurus at my work is that out of the above, the forms you mainly need are

- Application
- Lease
- Move in report

and the rest are not as critical. I think because it's my first time going through this that I may choose to use a bit more.

Blind buys

I try not to blind buy anything anymore because I use to do it for DVD and I ended up selling a fair number at a fraction of my purchase price. Blu Ray is even more expensive today so it's even riskier. But even today there are temptations. Those darn sales!

First the good news. I normally don't buy anything that can be seen on TV but my co-worker is a big fan of BoB and we have similar tastes in films. All reviews seem to be consistent in that "if you liked Saving Private Ryan, you'll LOVE Band of Brothers.." so it seemed like a safe bet. Amazon and BB have a great price on it now so it was an impulse purchase for me. I was skeptical that because this was a HBO television series, the production values would be low. Not true. There is a high level of authenticity and it does not feel low budget at all. The battle sequences are pretty intense and there is always a feeling of tension. With 10 episodes, you really do get to know the characters. I was also skeptical that because this was a HBO television series, the picture and sound would be lacking. Again, not true. The 1.78:1 widescreen VC-1 encode looks great. Nice & gritty with flatter looking colors that is appropriate for this type of genre. This guy posted some great screenshots (possible spiloers). It's getting harder and harder to resist a nice 1080p front projector! What surprised me more is the DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix. Dude, it rocks. The battle sequences have deep LFE and make good use of your surrounds. At the same time, you can hear dialogue very clearly and the quieter scenes with outdoor sounds/distant gunshots/etc. sound great.

The not-as-good-but-not-super-horrible-but-still-kind-of-embarrassed -> I did in fact blind buy Hitman because it was on sale and I wanted Amazon free shipping. I knew the movie was not highly rated but there was enough good feedback on the action sequences that I decided to take a chance on it. For me the film has uneven pacing and the action sequences are good but not as stellar as I was led to believe. PQ is good but the saving grace is that the DTS-HD MA track is impressive as you would expect from this type of action film.