Hello there.

Floating about posting this into Podrush from Livewriter Beta running inside a Windows7VM on my 2nd Gen Intel MacBook Pro.
First impressions are that this is actually usable, which is a great start. Vista was not I'm afraid, and if this is the Beta, bring it on. |This is the most stable beta I have ever used. Ever.

It boots from cold in about 45 seconds and resumes from hibernation in the VM in moments.

I am running it in unity mode which means I have a single documents folder on the mac which I can use and save into from the Win7 VM. This means that not having to run a parallel documents folder is a huge benefit. This is the most stable beta of any product never mind OS that I have ever tested. I am a fan.

What's not to love?

The failure rate for Lacie devices is quite extrordinary. I cannot believe that they can actually make money from a product that spends a large amount of it's time whirring around the RMA cycle or indeed whirring noisily in it's death throes. Working in the film and video sector one encounters an endless stream of poor users that have consigned their data to a Lacie, only for it to quite predictably and inevitably fail. Why?  It is the HEAT that is the killer.

If you guage the temperature that these un cooled enclosures reach in a cool room and they run hot! Now put one of them hooked up to a machine via its USB or firewire port around the back of a rack in the machine room and you will find the drive cooking at well over 40 degrees plus. Or in a typical office it will be simmering away under the desk, or on top of a machine until it dies or directories and data disappear.

below is a classic leaf out of a book of someone else's experience:

Extremely high faliure rate  (you can follow this link for the pages of user reviews)

User Rating

Product Experience
1

Strengths: great looking, excellent box design

Weaknesses: reliability, quality

Summary: I work for a design firm and we bought about 10 of these drives over the past year or two, nearly all of them have failed. I thought it could be due to mulitple users, heavy workload or general misuse. Well, unfortunately, the LaCie 250gig drive I bought for home use died as well. I used it solely for music, 3 to 4 time a week, well taken care of, sat on a shelf, adequate ventilation, very light use. This was the second time in three months that it died. The first time, I reformatted the drive and it worked. This time I wasn't so lucky, the drive just died. No disc utility could repair it. I was cautious of these drives from my experience at work so everything was backed up. But I will never buy another product from LaCie, we switched to another manufacturer at work and we have had no problems.

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Is this the only one? No there are hundreds, nay thousands of cases like this. This post may seem non scientific in pointing out how poor this product is, however you don't need to be a scientist to percieve a hugely disproportionate failure rate. As a solutions provider, support dude and integrator I see more than my fair share. You know what is good and what is not.

Be kind to yourself and your data. Don't buy Lacie!

I didn't take many pictures of last weekends waves...I wish I had.

After a glassy morning session, the evening push had a bit of onshore and became a bit lumpy...That is when this picture below was taken, I was just about to hop in for another hour or two. Sunday morning however saw an off-shore wind and aribrushed perfection, with a couple of extra feet on the swell too. It was fab. It was onshore and horrible by 3pm Sunday arvo, and I drove home. Surfed out for a change, and a stupid grin on my face.