Important note: once you cancel your account, you can never use that same email address for any other AdSense account. You will have to use a different email address next time you create an account.

To cancel your account, you need to go to the AdSense account cancellation form here:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=request_cancellation.

This form has some questions it asks to verify that you are the owner of the account. Listed below are some of the trickier questions and how you can find the answers to them. Note that to get the answers to the questions you need to have access to your account.

AdSense Cancellation Form Questions and Answers

Q: Contact email address?
A: Use the email address that you log in with.

Q: Publisher ID?
A: Log in to your account. Your publisher ID is shown at the top of the page on the right-hand side directly below the log out link. I recommend copying/pasting the ID so that you do not have any typos.

Q: Date your AdSense account first registered impressions?
A: Log in to your account. Then click on “Report” tab and then on the “Advanced Reports” subtab (if it was not already selected). Change the “Choose date range” drop-down menu selection to “All time”. Click the “Display Report” button. The report that loads will show your AdSense “impressions” history. Find the oldest date that shows a non-zero number in the “Page impressions” column. If you have multiple products listed in the “Choose product” drop-down menu, then you’ll have to do this for each of those to find the report with the oldest date in the “Page impressions” column. The oldest “Page impressions” date is the answer.

Q: Number of impressions registered on your first day?
A: See the previous Q/A above – the answer to this question is the number of page impressions shown for the date you found on the previous Q/A above.

There are a few other simple questions to answer, and then you are done. If you account has less than $10 of earnings in it, then they will send you a follow-up email within a few days saying that they can’t cancel your account unless you click on a link and fill out another form forfeiting your < $10 balance. I had a $0 balance and it still sent me this forfeiture confirmation email.

I had performed many searches trying to find the solution to this, but could not find any answers that worked for my situation. By fortunate chance, about a week later I fell upon the answer.

What is the problem, you ask? Google Custom Search. I have a Custom Search account, which apparently associates your email address with an AdSense ID so that it can display ads with your search results. I didn’t create that AdSense ID; the Custom Search account must have done it automatically without asking me first and without allowing me to access the AdSense account.

If you have this same AdSense problem and have a Custom Search account, then go ahead and check this out to see if it is the same as mine:

1. Log in to your Google Custom Search (http://www.google.com/cse/) that is associated with the email address that you are trying to use for AdSense.
2. Go to the main page that shows a list of all of your existing custom search engines.
3. Click on “control panel” next to one of the custom search engines you have created.
4. On the left, click the link named “Make money”.
5. The page that loads will show the message “Your search engine is currently associated with the following AdSense id: ####”, where #### is your AdSense publisher ID.

I found this unexpected link between Custom Search and AdSense only because I logged in to my Custom Search account to change some settings, decided to browse through all of the available settings out of curiosity, and stumbled upon the assigned “AdSense id”. That was how I realized why Google thought I had an AdSense account already.

This auto-generated account was never activated for me because it never sent me an email asking for confirmation of my email address. This also means that if you log in to you normal Google Accounts page, then AdSense is not listed as one of your chosen products (nor will it let you choose it). The solution to this problem is to get Google to “resend” the confirmation email (even though they never sent it to begin with). To do this, do the following:

1. Make sure you are currently logged OUT of your general Google Accounts page.
2. Go to the password retrieval page for AdSense (https://www.google.com/accounts/forgotpasswd).
3. Enter the problematic email address with which you have been trying to create an account.
4. Click the “Submit” button.
5. It will bring up a new page with a message saying it can’t reset your password because your AdSense account is still being reviewed and is waiting for you to confirm you email address per the instructions in the email it originally sent you (i.e., the email that it actually never sent you). It will ask you if you want to resend the aforementioned email confirmation message.
6. Enter your email address the box and click the “Submit” button.
7. An email has been to your address. The email includes a link that, when clicked, will confirm your email address. Click that link in the email.
8. Clicking the link will take you to an AdSense page thanking you for confirming your email address and stating that you should now receive a response to your AdSense application in 1 to 2 days (although it could be up to a week).

Congratulations! You have redeemed your account from limbo and now only need to wait for approval or rejection of your account. I am currently at this state in the process – waiting for the response. Looking back on this now, this solution (reseting the password) should have been more obvious to me from the beginning. Oh well, it does appear to be a bug in the system (or at least the repercussions of a old bug back from when I first created my Google Custom Search account) that I have a hunch affects a lot of other people.

Narrowing the Choices
The two backup services that appear to be the largest and most stable are Carbonite and Mozy (I list Carbonite first because I tried it first.) They both feature unlimited storage, sleek user interfaces, and plenty of other options. You can go to their web sites to find out more about their features, which I think lists them fairly accurately.

Other choices exist, but they tend to be limited to business-type offerings (very robust and expensive) or relatively small and new offerings (i.e., they haven’t had time to prove themselves, so I would be hesitant to trust my data with them.)

The Findings: Carbonite vs. Mozy
When I was doing my initial research, Carbonite and Mozy were definitely the top two services used. They are really cheap, too. Mozy offers a 2 GB plan for free, or an unlimited storage plan for around $60 per year. Carbonite does not have a free plan, but offer a free 15-day trial (no credit card needed) and their unlimited storage plan is $55 per year. Discounts are usually available from both companies. The pricing is almost the same, and from the research I did, it seemed that their services used to be fairly neck-and-neck. However, I tried both, and right now Mozy’s service definitely outperforms and outsmarts Carbonite. I went into this with an objective view (I just want my files backed up), and honestly I was initially drawn to Carbonite because I thought their name was really cool and hoped that would reflect the wit and and ingenuity of their service. However, after trying both, I was frustrated and could not have peace of mind with Carbonite, but it was easy to like and trust Mozy.

With both, an initial file evaluation is performed and then they run in the background very transparently, backing up files without any user interaction. My findings for both services are described below. Since both products are quite similar on the surface, I will not post a full review (you can look up their features at their respective web sites) – I will only mention the differences that I found.

Carbonite
Observed pros:

• Effortless to install and get running. I was pleasantly surprised how it would immediately begin backing up data without any input from me (other than email address and password.)
• Small colored dots are overlayed on file and folder icons to show if they have been backed up (or if they will be backed up.) I found this kind of useful, but other people think it is annoying.
• Cool name (you can tell your friends you store your files in carbonite; if you don’t get this Han Solo reference, then you should go watch Star Wars.)

Observed cons:

• It made my computer stall for 10 seconds every time I opened “My Computer.” This happened even when I had backup disabled. I think it was trying to rescan the folder for changes or something. This problem went away after uninstalling Carbonite.
• If you select a folder to back up (e.g., a folder that holds all of your camera pictures and videos, or an entire hard drive), then it actually does NOT back up everything in that folder. By default, it wont back up a lot of file types. I found a web site (http://www.tomkirkham.com/node/109) that lists the file types that aren’t backed up, but even that list was significantly incomplete. You have to manually go look at all your files, find out which file types aren’t getting backed up, right-click on one of that type of file, click properties, choose the “Carbonite” tab, and tell the program to back up that type of file. I immediately found close to 20 types of files that I would want to back up (and that were the main reason for my desire to find a backup service) that weren’t backed up unless manually selected. It left me always wondering how many more file types I had missed, but wouldn’t find out about until it was too late.

Mozy
Observed pros:

• There was no noticeable impact on my computer’s processing performance.
• The GUI allows you to adjust the internet bandwidth usage (or stop or unlimit it) on the fly.
• The status window shows how complete the current backup is, and allows you to on-the-fly increase or decrease its computer resource usage.
• My internet service provider allows me to upload at rates up to 5 Mbps, and Mozy’s backup speed was consistently over 4 Mbps (I have already backed up over 70 GB in the past 36 hours.)
• You know it is backing up all of the files in the folders you selected, no exceptions. You feel a lot better when it bars nothing from backup.

Observed cons:

• Installation was also very easy and started working immediately; however, I would bypass the “Mozy found these types of files that should be backed up” prompt, and instead just go select the specific folders or drives that you want backed up. This takes a little more work, but isn’t too bad.
• The GUI isn’t as polished as Carbonite’s.

Conclusion
It seems like both companies have employees who peruse the web to find reviews about their products and submit comments that argue their case, so I imagine some of those might eventually pop up here. To stand by my choice that Mozy is the better choice, I would actually recommend that you first start by installing Carbonite’s free trial and use it for a couple days to see how it works for you. If you run into the same problems that I described above, then I’m pretty sure you will also share the constant nagging feeling about it that I had: “is it really backing up everything that I think it is?”, which is unacceptable (especially considering that the nagging feeling is probably true.) After you have experienced and uninstalled Carbonite, then try Mozy’s service. It is actually quite a stark contrast between the two in terms of performance and peace of mind. Mozy is clearly the better choice (for now.)

Both products have referral incentive programs (where you get money or free subscription time in return for referring people to the service.) So regardless of the product I could have decided was better, I would have used their referral program. So, if you want to buy the Mozy plan, then use this link to sign up:
http://mozy.popularmedia.net/click/share/77dc98675d4475ac4be826f08ce1b8a3
The link will give you a 10% discount and will give me a small monetary kickback as well. If you would rather use Carbonite, then you can probably find some sort of discount for it at this site:
http://www.subscription.com/carbonite/

The Problem
The problem was that reading or writing (i.e., burning) a CD or DVD took too long on my high-speed burner (48x CD, 20x DVD.) The same problem (slow reads and writes) can also happen to IDE and SATA hard drives. I was burning a Linux CD image to a DVD (using ImgBurn), which took 10 minutes to complete. A few things about this indicate a problem. First, the image was small enough to fit on a CD – approximately 700 MB – which should have taken only a couple minutes. Second, I was burning to a DVD, and DVD drives can read and write more data per second than a CD drive, so it should have been even faster since I was burning to a DVD. Third, it made me remember that a couple movie DVDs that I recently played experienced a few jittery spots where the video and/or sound would stop and go (the discs were not scratched,) which should not happen.

I realized that I was probably experiencing a problem that had cropped up in the past, and which can happen to just about any drive that connects to an IDE (PATA) or SATA port in your computer (typically this effects CD, DVD, and hard drives.) There is a very simple fix listed below, but I will start with some background info about why this happens. If you don’t care about the background stuff, then you can skip to the solution below in the section “The Solution – Quick and Easy”.

Background Info – Why This Problem Happens
The cause of the problem is this: the drive that is acting slow has been put into “PIO” mode instead of its intended “DMA” or “Ultra DMA” (UDMA) mode. To keep my explanation simple, PIO is the older standard, now used mostly for old or slow drives. It also was sometimes used for compatibility reasons (i.e., to avoid bugs with new technology), but that is not much of an issue anymore. DMA or UDMA is a newer standard that can hand much faster data rates (faster, in fact, than most drives can actually go.)

I have seen this problem occur in two scenarios:

1. The operating system (Windows XP in my case) incorrectly detects the type of drive (CD, DVD, hard drive) and sets it to PIO instead of DMA or UDMA.
2. A dirty, scratched, smudged, poorly burned/stamped, or otherwise damaged CD or DVD is put in the drive (obviously this only applies to CD and DVD drives and not hard drives) so that when Windows tries to read the disc, it has problems reading it. So Windows, thinking that the problem must be with the drive instead of the disc, tries to fix the problem by taking the drive out of DMA/UDMA and putting it into PIO mode.

The first reason listed above is understandable – when Windows XP came out, drives that used PIO mode were very prevalent. So, if you added a new drive that Windows didn’t recognize, then it played it safe by setting it to PIO mode (even if the computer’s BIOS setting stated that it was a DMA device.) However, these days PIO drives are almost non-existent.

The second reason listed is unacceptable. If my drive supports DMA/UDMA, then don’t drop it down to PIO – especially if I manually set the mode to DMA/UDMA. That right – you can even manually tell Windows to use DMA/UDMA, and it will ignore you.

Note that I believe this can be an issue for SATA drives only if your computer’s BIOS has set the SATA mode to Native IDE instead of AHCI. However, if your BIOS does have the SATA mode set to Native IDE, you probably don’t want to change it to AHCI unless you plan on reinstalling Windows XP. However, I have heard that you can safely change the setting if running Windows Vista or newer versions.

The Solution – Quick and Easy
The solution is actually quite simple, though not obvious. The part that takes the longest is the process of checking to make sure that PIO mode is the source of the problem. I will try to keep the steps simple and use plenty of pictures to illustrate.
WARNING: I have never seen this solution cause any problems; however, any time that you modify computer settings, you run a slight risk of messing something up. Therefore, by following the steps below you are recognizing that risks exists (however small), and that you are responsible for negative results or effects.

• First, check to make sure that this really is the problem you are experiencing by doing the following:
  1. While holding down the Windows key on your keyboard, press the “Pause/Break” key. Or, to achieve the same effect a different way, you can right-click on your Desktop’s “My Computer” icon and select “Properties” in the pop-up menu.
  2. In the window that pops up, click the “Hardware” tab near the top. (See image in #3 below.)
  3. Click on the “Device Manager” button (see image below.) This will make the Device Manager window pop up.
     
  4. Expand the “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers” list item by clicking on the [+] symbol next to it. (See image below.)
     
  5. You now will see several sub-items under the one you expanded. The ones we are interested in are labeled “Primary IDE Channel,” “Secondary IDE Channel,” and any others that end in “IDE Channel.” Note that you may have multiple items that share the same name. (See image below.)
     
  6. Double-click on one of the items that we are interested in (e.g., “Primary IDE Channel.”) This will make a Channel Properties window pop up. (See image in #8 below.)
  7. Click the “Advanced Settings” tab near the top. (See image in #8 below.)
  8. There will be two sections – named “Device 0″ and “Device 1″ (see image below.) Check to make sure that both of these devices have the field “Current Transfer Mode” set to a DMA or Ultra DMA (UDMA) mode. If either one (or both) is set to PIO mode, then that is usually the source of the problem. Note that there is a different field named “Transfer Mode,” and even if you set that to the value “DMA if available,” it won’t have any effect once Windows has decided to set the mode to PIO.
     
  9. Close the Channel Properties window and perform this same visual check for each of the channels listed in the Device Manager window (e.g., “Primary IDE Channel”, “Secondary IDE Channel”, etc.) Note that you need to do this for all items that end with “IDE Channel,” even if some of them have the same name. Keep track of the items that have devices set to PIO mode.
• Second, “uninstall” the IDE channels that are set to PIO mode by doing the following:
  1. Now that you know which of the “IDE Channel” items (listed in the Device Manager window) have PIO mode settings, you need to “uninstall” them so that Windows can automatically reinstall them correctly.
  2. Right-click on the first “IDE Channel” item that had a device set to PIO mode, and select “Uninstall” (see image below.) Only do this for IDE channel items that had devices set to PIO mode.
     
  3. A window will pop up warning you that you are about to uninstall that channel. Click “OK”. (See image below.)
     
  4. Repeat this for each of the IDE channels that had devices set to PIO mode.
• Third, restarting… (after it tells you to.)
  1. Once it finishes uninstalling the IDE channel(s), it will say that it needs to restart the computer. Click in the affirmative to allow it to restart.
  2. After the computer restarts and after Windows finishes loading, just sit and wait… The computer will recognize a “new” IDE channel (the one you just uninstalled) and will reinstall it for you.
• Fourth, restarting… (after it tells you to.)
  1. Once it finishes reinstalling the channel, it will tell you that it needs to restart your computer (again.) Once again, click in the affirmative to allow it to restart your computer.

That’s all! You can go back and check the devices in the Device Manager if you want to verify that it worked. It’s a quick fix to a fairly common problem. I would have hoped a Windows XP update would have been made to address this, but that probably won’t ever happen now that there are several versions of Windows that are newer than XP.

I guess technically it does have screws for removing the latch, but those did not affect the rest of the doorknob. It turns out that doorknobs like this are pretty common in older houses, and you usually only have to find a slot behind the interior knob, and push in on the slot with a pointy object while simultaneously pulling on the knob. This I did, the knob did come off, but then nothing else would budge. It turns out that our door knob was of the Schlage brand, which used to implement a little tomfoolery with their knobs. In addition to the slot, they also include a little wire that you must depress to remove the knob’s rose (the big round part that is flush against the door.) Pushing/leveraging the wire in will probably work best with a very small screwdriver (that’s what I did) or a straighten-out paperclip (per Mo’s comment below.) Click the images below.

After pressing the wire in, I had to put a knife blade under the rose to pry it off, because it was a little bit stuck to the door’s wood stain, but it took very little force. Here are the pictures of the knob before and after removing the rose:

That’s right! There were screws under the rose! It was all a cinch after that. Just unscrew the screws, and pull the knob out from the exterior side of the door. Normally, the inside part and outside part will separate and pull out in their respective directions, but this old doorknob was pulled out entirely from the exterior side of the door. The latch pulled out simply after removing its screws. Here is the new doorknob that we replaced it with:

k0-0kkkk0kojklmjdrrrrrrre5e55poki6ghtygriuyirf

I’m not sure if this was just spontaneous arm movement, or whether he knew what he was doing; because what he typed is definitely similar to the types of sounds he makes.

Preliminary Ideas
I knew my previous 2 ideas weren’t very promising. These poor design choices were:

• Using voltage divider resistors, which requires that you know exactly what the load resistance will be,
• Using Zener diodes to drop the voltage down, which uses up a ton of power and isn’t worth the effort in the end.

Also note that using the Zener diode method can create some really high current that can blow up some of your parts (the bridge rectifier, in my case.) What tended to happen was that if one of the Zener diodes was flawed then it would burn out and basically become a short – causing no voltage drop across it and burning out any parts that came after the diode.

I definitely needed a way to limit the voltage in a more indirect way (without using a lot of components that have to be in series with the load.) I had heard about switching power supplies and that they are fantastic because they use a transistor that turns on and off at a given frequency. By putting a capacitor on the output, the output voltage become the average of the on/off voltages. The output voltage can then be changed by adjusting the duty cycle of the switching. However, most switching power supplies that I am aware of are driven from a relatively low DC voltage (15 to 20 V) that is generated from a different power supply or from a transformer and capacitor. The problem with this solution is that I don’t want to use a transformer, and I don’t have an external DC power supply to drive my switching circuitry. My converter needs to directly change 120 V AC to 3.3 or 5 V DC.

Design Plan
Some early design choices would make the design easier to implement with fewer roadblocks. For example:

• The circuit needs to to lower the voltage before tries to do anything with it, which can help to avoid high current problems.
• The circuit needs to have as few parts in series with the load as possible, to avoid a chain reaction of part failures and unusual voltage division between the parts.
• Capacitors will inevitable need to be used to stabilize the output voltage, but the smaller the physical size of the capacitor the better.

I came up with a few really good ideas to implement this, which I am sure will work and won’t have the flaws the other concepts had, that are listed above. However, I must stop here (temporarily) for the reason explained here:

I just graduated from Northern Arizona University, and am now working for General Dynamics C4S. Unfortunately, anything I create on my own time belongs to them if it is remotely related to any business that General Dynamics has their hands in. Since I am a hobbyist electrical engineer besides also having my degree in it, pretty much any hobbying I do on my own time could potentially belong to them. For this reason, this project is on hold for a while and I will work on other hobby projects that have already been done by other people before and that could not be considered GD’s intellectual property. I’ll probably even help my wife with her online digital scrapbooking…

Recently, I had found out how to get around GoDaddy not supporting IMAP email, and while I was trying to decide what to do with my brother’s new domain name, I remembered the IMAP experience and realized that I could change A records and CNAMES for his GoDaddy-registered domain and my GoDaddy hosting account. An A records defines the IP address of the server that hosts the domain (for example: mike-thomson.com is hosted by 64.202.163.4, which is also the IP address listed when you do an nslookup for a domain.) CNAMES are aliases of other addresses that your server will redirect to. (for example: email.mike-thomson.com redirects to the login page at https://www.google.com/a/mike-thomson.com/.)

You must do the following to use your GoDaddy hosting account to host a domain that is external to your GoDaddy account:

• First, with the account that controls the domain, complete these steps (the following describes a GoDaddy registered domain, but will be similar for almost any company with whom you registered your domain):
1. Write down the IP address of the hosting account you will be using.
2. Log into the GoDaddy account that controls the domain.
3. Click on the “My Account” link.
4. Click the “Manage Domains” link on the left side of the page.
5. Click on the domain name you want to have hosted from the different GoDaddy account.
6. You are now at a “Domain Details” page. There are a lot of links here. In the main box where the most links are, click the link labeled “Total DNS Control and MX Records” (it is under the “Total DNS” subsection.)
7. On the new page, you will be editing the “@” entry under the “A (Host)” section. Click the little pencil icon at the end of the row where the “@” entry is listed.
8. In the “Points To IP Address” field, enter the IP address of the hosting account you are going to use. You obtained this IP address in step 1 above.
9. Click “OK”
10. You are done setting up the account that owns the domain. The remainder of the steps refer to changes that need to be made to the account that will do the hosting.
• Now you will modify the second GoDaddy account – the one that will do the hosting.
1. Log into the GoDaddy account that will be hosting the site.
2. Click on the “My Account” link.
3. Click on the “Hosting Account List” link on the left side of the page.
4. Next to the hosting account you wish to use, click the “Manage Account” link next to it.
5. On the new page, position your cursor over the drop-down menu labeled “Settings” (it is at the top of the page), and click the “Domain Management” link.
6. It now displays a list of domains that are currently associated with the hosting account. You can add a domain by typing in the domain name (e.g. “mike-thomson.com”) and the hosting path (where the files for the site will be located on your host) in the “Assign Domain to Hosting Site” section near the top of the page.
7. Click the “Add Domain” button that is directly below where you just entered your domain and hosting path.

That’s it! You are done! It was a fairly simple process. However, it may take several hours for the changes to take effect, so be patient or go watch a movie. Also note that you will need to repeat this for any subdomains that you wish to use with the new domain. For example, if you want to use a subdomain “coolstuff.yourdomain.com” then you will need to create the subdomain “coolstuff” in the account that owns the domain name, change the subdomain’s “@” A-record to your hosting IP address, and then go into the hosting account and add the subdomain under the applicable domain listing in the “Domain Management” section. (You can get to the “Domain Management” section as described above.)

I will try find some spare time so I can make some screenshots for this, since I think they would help a lot.

1. Log into the GoDaddy hosting account that you want to find the IP address of.
2. Click on the “My Account” link.
3. Click the “Manage Domains” link.
4. Click on the domain name you want to have hosted from the different GoDaddy account.
5. You are now at a “Domain Details” page. There are a lot of links here. In the main box where the most links are, click the link labeled “Total DNS Control and MX Records” (it is under the “Total DNS” subsection.)
6. On the new page, the “@” entry under the “A (Host)” section contains the IP address of your host. It is shown under the “Points To” column.

Creating the website was part of the project, and so I didn’t feel very compelled to talk about it here. I have copied the site over to my hosting account so that if NAU changes their server or the folder structure, then I will still have a copy of the project site up. Here is my local copy of the project’s site:
http://mike-thomson.com/school/Wulfsberg/