Author Archives ⇒ Brandon Hann

PhoneDetective.com Review

· Brandon Hann

My friend had some issues with a random caller on her cell phone, so I decided to try out one of those reverse phone lookup services online to see what, if any, kind of information I could find on someone. Of course, all of these sites allow you to search any number for free, but if you want more information, you must pay.

Anyway, this site touts the availability of all this information:

Search results include:

  • Owner name and address
  • Phone type – landline or mobile
  • People search results
  • Household members
  • And more

At any rate, my intention in this operation was to at least get an idea of who might be behind these calls, so I opted to pay the $14.95 (I believe the site changes its pricing often because right now its saying $9.95). Here’s what I got for my fifteen dollars.

tracer-report
I’ve blocked out the “sensitive” information, but you can get the idea of what kind of information I got. Now, since running this report, I’ve gotten more information on the caller by simply talking to my girlfriend about it and I must say, the person who was on the other end of the phone does not match the person that showed up on the report! Also, the links you see only point toward more services you can pay for. These come in two flavors: a one-time, one-search charge or a monthly, unlimited searches charge.

I also want to point out that the report listed three addresses from persons with the same (or similar) name. To me, this was nothing more than a name search you’d do in the white pages of the phone book. In other words, useless. Imagine how long the report would be if the person’s name was John Smith?!

In conclusion, I didn’t particularly find any useful information from this website and I’m sure no others would be better. However, the site does NOT guarantee any amount of information you’ll get on the report, so I can’t complain too much. It was a crap shoot to begin with. This ‘review’ isn’t intended to sway you one way or another on using PhoneDetective.com or any similar site–I just wanted to share my experience.

Good luck!

Last words: Aside from you being a private detective where you might actually get some use out of the unlimited searching membership, I doubt you’ll get any real value from these services.

Wine+MacBook=no fun

· Brandon Hann

My drunk roommate decided that she hadn’t had enough wine so she leaned forward and attempted to grab her glass that was still half full from the table we were sitting around and just as I had imagined it happening, it happened. I watched red wine fly through the air and land right on my MacBook! There’s not much more devastating than seeing wine start to seep through the gaps in the keys on your $1500 (in October 2008) investment.

Fortunately, by nature, I’m not a person that panics and I’ve been through a similar situation with electronics when I was pushed into a swimming pool holding two cell phones. Anyway, because of this, the first thing I did was turn off the computer by holding the power button. I was smart enough to NOT push any of the wet keys for fear of shorting something out.

Right afterward, I removed the battery and began my decent into the computer’s internals in hopes of cleaning out every drop of wine. I was up until 3am removing many, many, many tiny screws to open this bad boy up. For those who have ever taken apart one of those new aluminum MacBooks, you know what I’m talking about. Here’s the gallery of pictures during the cleaning process.

I knew there was no way to get all the wine out by simply blowing air into the keyboard, so I had to completely submerge it in water by washing it in the sink. After I washed all the layers of the keyboard in water, I blew them dry to get the majority of the water off and then let them dry for 1 more day.

Meanwhile, I washed off everything else that got wine on it and when I was at work the next day, I bought some Monster screen cleaner and I must stop and tell you that that stuff is amazing!! If it wasn’t so expensive, I’d wash my car with it!

In the end, I was able to salvage my MacBook and give it a massive cleaning from the inside out. Everything is still working great and it’s not sticky nor does it smell like alcohol.

Disneyland Today

· Brandon Hann

I happened by Disneyland today between a split shift of mine and came upon the taping of Disney’s Christmas show for ABC. The musical performance was done by Stevie Wonder. I didn’t get in very close because I didn’t even know what was happening until right before he came out on stage to start the taping.

At any rate, I captured just about five minutes of the opening. I couldn’t stay long because I had to go back to work, but if you want to watch the part I captured (from a distance), check it out now:

My favorite décor

· Brandon Hann

I was just admiring this drawing and remembered what a wonderful feeling I get every time I see it. It’s easy to think how nice someone is just because they created something for you, but in this case, it’s more than that. It shows a depth of attention paid to the smallest details.

Also, if you’ve ever been an artist, or even known one, you understand the sentimental connection they get with their creations and, short of being offered a truckload of money, they dare not part.

Put simply, when I look at it, I remember just how important I must be to someone. And for me to acknowledge that fact is just shy of remarkable.

Late night ramblings

· Brandon Hann

After I wrote my status a few minutes ago, I decided to write a bit about it. Earlier in the week I had mentioned that I was pretty sure that I had the best girlfriend ever and then the week ended on a low note. When bad things transpire and ultimately get resolved, I always say I learned a lot about myself, but how can that be if I already knew what I “learned”? Well, sometimes you know it, but you forget it until it’s too late.

With that said, I did learn one thing this week: trying to always be right and/or attempting to force someone into thinking along your lines does nothing for the situation except make people wonder what your true intentions are: either to force change on people or to make them feel bad enough about themselves to want to change.

Most people in these situations would run for cover out of a natural human response of needing to protect one’s self. As it turned out, she did run…but to the park; and took me with her.

It was thought that an everyday lunch appearance would not suffice and so there we were; lying on the grass, playing a game I hadn’t seen in over ten years, just enjoying the afternoon air. The only thought I could rustle up was “Why?” Why, after mistakes I made, is she the one making things better? This, my friends, brings me to my point.

My previous statement was: “I’m pretty sure I have the best girlfriend ever! Anyone who wants to argue, I’m game.”

I am retracting it and replacing it with: “I absolutely KNOW that I have the best girlfriend ever and you will lose any argument saying otherwise!”

My two cents: it’s the small things that are worth so much more than anything money can buy.

Club 33 Tomorrow!

· Brandon Hann

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been sooo busy, but I thought I’d drop in to say that tomorrow, I’ll be getting my first experience at Club 33!! I should have plenty of pics and hopefully a great story or two by the end of tomorrow night!!

New Domain news!

· Brandon Hann

Well maybe it’s not that new, but it’s new to me! I don’t know how I missed it, but it looks like ICANN just announced that they plan to release the previously registered single-character domains back to the public. The only thing standing in the way is how they’re going to do it.

You can download the PDF here: http://gnso.icann.org/drafts/icann-synthesis-on-sldns-27feb08.pdf and read the official article here: http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-16oct07.htm

Goodbye Analog!

· Brandon Hann

Today brings the end of a industry standard. Ever since television was first broadcast, this technology has existed. For me and a lot of people out there, the change to all digital broadcasts doesn’t have any effect on us. This is because we’ve all been using some type of cable or sattelite tv source for many years.

But for those unlucky few, they are either forced to upgrade their source or simply buy a convertor box. The good thing about having no more analog tv is that it frees up that spectrum for other uses such as emergency communications and wi-fi technologies. Maybe now AT&T can get their act together with a new, faster 3G network to support the faster speeds of my soon-to-be iPhone 3Gs!!

Anyway, I just wanted to share YouTube’s current logo bidding a fond farewell to analog tv. I decided to post it here in case it disappears one day.

Goodbye analog tv YouTube logo

Conan's on a roll!

· Brandon Hann

So far, Conan O’Brien’s into is first week of the new Tonight Show and already he’s scored two guitars from musical guests! First, Green Day performs and after they’re done, Billy brings him a guitar case. After the final commercial break, you can see the new guitar on Conan’s desk. Then tonight’s show (June 5th) has Chickenfoot playing and when they finish their song, Joe Satriani gives Conan the guitar he was playing! This guitar, like the one Green Day gave him, is white, but contains a Chickenfoot logo on it.

I’ll post pictures online when I get them.

So busy

· Brandon Hann

Wow, it seems like forever that I’ve posted a new entry here! I’ve just been so busy with work and school and everything else, I just haven’t had time to really get on here.

I also wanted to point out that do to the popularity of my Verizon FiOS receiver article, I plan to revise everything there and actually start a new section that will hopefully provide some answers on how to really get your standard receiver box to become a DVR. So stay tuned for that.

I’ll be back on here probably next Monday, so for now, laters…