Abes of Maine: Rokinon 8mm Fisheye Lens

Fathers day was June 20th and I got a Rokinon 8mm f3.5 fisheye lens from Abes of Maine! Let me just say that I love the lens! 8mm and a 180degree field of view rock! The link above is to Amazon and there's a reason why. I ordered from Abes of Maine(they're located in New York) for the first time and the price was right and shipping was free! All good, right? I did have an issue with the order, me the dumbass, ordered for the Canon mount, like I didn't know I own Sony! So, I called them and got through after a couple of minutes and changed the order but then the guy wanted to sell me a lens pouch. I said, didn't the lens come with a pouch and he said no, so I got the pouch. He said $14 something on the phone but I was billed $15. Whatev, so I got my pouch first and then the lens. The lens came with a pouch! I then called and was switched to a guy that said he would knock off $5 from the cost so I said okay, will I get an email stating that? he said yeah. Well, no email. Actually, he also said that Bower(the brand of the pouch) was "top of the line". Right. My recommendation is NEVER shop with Abes of Maine. PAY more for a better experience!

Netgear SC101 Storage Central: Hall of Shame

One of the worst things I ever bought. I purchased this on the premise that it would protect my data, not destroy it. I stored picture files on it that could not be replaced and that is the case because they are gone and there is no recovery method whatsoever.

I mirrored two hard drives and thought that I had  my data protected. After problem after problem, my pictures were gone! It's been a couple of years now and I  still have one of the drives and I search from time to time for a data recovery solution but never find one. Even if you hook the drive up to a computer running some form of Linux nothing will help. If this was an all windows environment (fat32, ntfs, etc) then you would still be able to recover files by using the tricks of the trade we all know how to do. In this case, nothing works and I still have a problem with it because netgear never acted like this was a problem. I do like some of their products and have used them since but when it comes to insuring that your data is safe, I advise you to use another product, another company.

This thing had a lot of promise and seemed like a smart buy. But the more I used it and relied on it, the worse things got. I mirrored my data, thinking that's the best thing to do and ended up losing all my pictures! I do admit that I bought this when it first came out and should have waited and watched the reviews but I didn't.