Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Blonde Roast?!

It's "new" at Starbucks. It's coffee. Lighter roast, they say, as if that means something about flavor.  I guess they mean it's not burned in the roaster.  But they don't mean that their other roasts are burned... so, how is "Blonde Roast" better?

Toasting is to bread as roasting is to coffee.  The flavor of toast has mostly to do with the bread (for example, wheat vs. rye), unless you burn it.  Likewise with roast and coffee.

So what do I make of Starbucks' term "Blonde Roast"? It's only marketing. And while Tall, Grande & Venti translate to small, medium & large, "Blonde Roast" translates to confusion.

Friday, February 03, 2012

Mozy Hassles

Based on positive reviews by a number of independent web sites, I recently selected the Mozy Pro online-backup service for a small business client. Getting this set up has been a lot of hassle.  Here's what I mean:
  • Starting at the Mozy website, I was given the choice of Home or Pro. I choose Pro, and then I was given the choice of a Workstation or Server license . Turns out if you want to backup files on mapped network drive, you need the server license for a workstation. But there is no information on the website to guide you to the correct choice. So, I installed the workstation license on a workstation and found that I could not backup files on a mapped drive.
  • Having unwittingly made the wrong choice, I sought technical support. That was an ordeal. For some reason, I had to create a salesforce.com account to get to Mozy live-chat, online tech support. That dumped me to a page that said "there was no such forum."  
    • Now I am getting spammed by salesforce.com.
  • So, I submitted a form to get Mozy "email support" about my issue. A couple of days passed before someone from Mozy phoned me (not exactly email support, but I'm not complaining). The guy was helpful and explained the situation to me and upgraded the license I bought. I then had to uninstall the workstation license and install the server license on the workstation. 
  • But the backup software was still not ready to backup the mapped network drive. Back to tech support. (I found a phone number and called them.) They told me that I had to manually add the mapped drive to the file system tree in the Mozy software.   Really?!
Everything seems to be working now, but getting it set up was way too difficult and time consuming.  For now, those good reviews are definately misleading.