CompUSA lack of Customer Service

I purchased my Sony Clie US-50 at CompUSA. They offer this Technology Assurance Program (or TAP) that provides you with a starter kit for your PDA as well as an extended warranty. I usually don't got for extended warranties, but I have for my PDA's since I have gone through quite a few of them. They get a lot of use and are easily dropped, which can break the screen (I've broken two screens!)

So I get home and open the TAP box only to discover that the included screen protectors don't fit the UX-50. They have templates on them so that you can cut them to fit, but there is not template for the UX-50. I go back to CompUSA to see if they have a different or updated TAP that supports the product they sold it with. The service guy didn't seem to care and just said "sorry" and explained the real value of the TAP was the warranty.

Rather disappointing. They sell this accessory pack with PDA's it doesn't support. I am surprised they just didn't give me a roll of scotch tape in the package and tell me to make my own screen protector. While they bill the accessories as being "for your new PDA" they are obviously just free junk they can't sell you any other way. My advice: Don't buy a TAP except for the warranty, and don't expect the service desk to care.

I looked and they have screen protectors for the UX-50 for another $20. Maybe I need to talk to the manager or write a letter. I'll let you know how it goes.

SpaceShipOne Succeeds with First Shot at $10 Million X Prize

The first filight is completed, now they need to launch again within 2 weeks.

Firing Suppliers

Listening to the radio this morning they were talking about some police stations (Florida, Philadelphia and others) who filed suit against Ford claiming the Crown Victoria Police Interceptors were unsafe. Then they turned around and ordered some more. Ford refused to fill their orders, so they sued Ford for that too. Well a judge ruled that Ford could choose not to fill those orders.

A company has a right to choose their customers, so Ford can choose not to sell to the precincts who are involved in the class action suit. While at first this might seem like Ford's way of discouraging precincts from joining the class action suit. Ford's argument is that if they claim the cars are unsafe then why would they want more? It would seem to me that ordering more of a product you are already familiar with would be to give that product an endorsement. Either that or they want to buy more so they can file more suits.

The Detroit Free Press as an article about it.

Intel's IT Manager Game

Intel has this IT Manager game.  Kind of like The Sims, but not as entertaining, unless you are a computer geek I guess.  You play the fearless IT Manager, and you must manage the IT resources of a growing company.  I just discovered it today, and I am ranked 9th in the Asia-Pacific area (don't know why I am ranked in that area.)  Here are a few of the things I picked up.

First of all, don't use a password you use anywhere else since the first thing they do is email you your password in plain text.  I really wish everyone would get a clue and stop transmitting, storing and displaying passwords.  I would have expected Intel to have at least a little bit of a clue about security.  Also, you cannot change any of your settings or start over, but if you do something really dumb you can close the window and it will not save any of your progress today.

I lost 2 workers early on since I couldn't upgrade them to Centrino's quick enough.  You get a new worker everyday.  I guess you could try going to an intermediate system that is better then the no name desktops, but that would take a lot longer to increase your productivity. 

If you deploy anything but a Centrino you must next deploy a network card.  Then you must configure it by deploying an IT Staff member.  This is true for servers, desktops and laptops.  Also you cannot upgrade anything that is not working.  So if one of those no-name desktops fails you must fix it before you put in a laptop.  You will want to jump back and forward between the work area and the meeting area using the little diagram in the corner.  The server room will flash on the map if a server goes down, but for anything else you need to catch it and deploy a staff member.

First of all, buy laptop.  Specifically buy the Centrino one for $1500 a pop.  It is the most expensive one, but results in the best productivity.  Since you cannot resell excess inventory, only but the best, and only buy what you want.  I tried the P4 laptops, with wireless network cards, and I tried the P4 desktops with gigabit Ethernet.  The Centrino's result in the best productivity and greatest happiness.  So this is obviously a marketing ploy since I had a Centrino laptop at work and it was the slowest laptop I have used in ages.  It may just have been something about that laptop, but at this point I would rather have a P4 laptop or desktop. 

You want them to have laptops so they can take them to their meetings, which they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in.  You want wireless so they can connect to the network.  The gigabit Ethernet seems to give them slightly higher network productivity, but hardly worth the lower stats in the other areas (especially when they are in the meetings). 

Don't bother hiring any staff.  Even with the maximum sized company I still seem to be able to keep everything under control with just the manager.  Occasionally it would be nice to have two people, but that is a very rare occasion.  Staff are hard to keep happy, and expensive.  If you do want staff wait until much later, and be warned, training takes about a week.

Upgrade your servers before noon so you will be sure to have enough money to buy a laptop the next morning.  Put a wireless gateway on each, and also the GbH (or whatever it is) network card.  Don't worry about switches, you won't use them since everything is wireless.

Here is my ranking at number 9 as of this writing:

Updated Photo

After many reminders I have finally updated my Blog profile photo. I shaved my beard off a few weeks ago. I had intended to update my photo before BorCon, but didn't get around too it. When I was talking to Danny Thorpe at the "Meet the Team" he commented that he didn't recognize me because my blog photo had a beard.

Also the original photo was taken at an odd angle, which gives me a really large nose. I thought it was fun, but a lot of people have commented that it was scary. I didn't realize large noses were scary.

Maybe later I can post some of the pictures from the process of shaving. We had some fun with it.

Are you Biased?

If you really want to evaluate your bias (known or unknown) you should try contributing to www.wikipedia.org . They enforce a Neutral Point of View (NPOV), and if you post something biased then other editors will call you on it really quick. When there are that many people editing you get revised to NPOV pretty quick usually. Occasionally you might find something biased out in some obscure corner of the content, there are over a million articles after all.

I have found that working on articles there really helps you to notice bias in what you write, as well as in external sources. Of course bias has always been an interesting topic for me anyway, so I guess I am biased in my comments about bias.

OS Personality Test

I took the OS Personality Test and my results were:

You are Red Hat Linux. You're tops among your peers, but still get no respect from them. It's all right with you. You have your sights set higher.

If you don't want to take the test you can just look at all the results.

What Kind of Training?

I am down in the basement of the building I work in. I don't go down here too often. This is where they have some training and conference rooms. They added a new room since I was last down here. What is the first thing you think of when you see this sign? Keep in mind my employer is a contractor in Iraq right now.

I don't see this as being a popular training destination.

UPDATE: Formatting for easier reading.

Live from Carl's Jr.

Check it out, I am posting from Carl's Jr. just to say I can. I should try attaching a photo of my two wrapped Jalapeno burgers. Maybe next time.

Sun Through the Clouds

So I am driving to work the other day and the sun is shining through the clouds. It is really cool looking so I pull out my camera can catch a few photos. They actually come out looking pretty good so I will share them here with you.

Sunset on the Ditch

I am driving home and I go past this ditch. The angle was just right that the sun was setting right above the ditch and the entire ditch was illuminated with this cool purple. I stopped and hopped out of the car to try and get a picture. I took three shots and they didn't come out great, but I thought I would share it anyway. The sun was setting as I took it. If I had only been there a few minutes earlier. Maybe I will need to stake the spot out some evening and see if I can catch it again.

May Fade, but not Run

So I am driving home from work the other day, and the truck in front of me has this bumper sticker that says "These Colors Don't Run" and has a picture of the American flag. Only problem is the ink they used for the red was severely sun faded. You could vaguely see where the red was, but it was very washed out. That really struck me as funny. They really should have put some thought into the inks they selected. It would have been even worse if the colors ran in the first ran. I tried to take a picture, but it really didn't come out. You will need to use your imagination.

Guess where I was?

Hot Sauce

I found this new hot sauce at WalMart. I have only seen it in the ethnic food section of the WalMart in Nampa, Idaho, on 12th Ave., but you may be able to find it else where. It is a Habanero sauce, but isn't so hot it is going to make your ears ring. Plus it has a really good flavor. I picked it up for only $1.38. I should go buy a few more bottles since they have a bad habit of going out of stock on something and then not getting any more.

It is called El Yucateco and claims to be an original Mayan recipe. They had three different varieties. I picked up one of each. There is a green habanero one and a chipotle one. They are both really good too. I think Tabasco's chipotle is a little better though. The green habanero is good too, not quite as hot as the XXXTra Hot one pictured here.

email blog post test

This post was made from my ux50 via the email to blog post feature of blogger. The advantage of this method is that I can post without doing a hotsink as long as I can get a WI-FI signal.

This is a test post from my Sony UX50 Palm OS PDA using Avantblog. It works via AvantGo to post to Blogger blogs. I'll need to find a way to post pictures too.

Audio Extraction from DVD

A friend of mine wanted me to extract the audio from a Music Video DVD he has so he can make an Mix CD. He had all but two of the songs already on CD. I did a quick search online and found Nicky Pages' which explains how to perform DVD Audio Extraction with GraphEdit, which is part of the Microsoft DirectX SDK. It worked pretty good, but I had a couple hurdles still to cover.

The first hurdle was that Nicky suggested using MPEG-2 Splitter or Ligos Mpeg Splitter. I tried the Ligos Mpeg Splitter first, and it seemed to work, but the audio quality was fairly poor. When I switched to the MPEG-2 Splitter the audio quality was better, but there was no progress bar.

I tried following Nicky's instructions to compress the wave files into MP3's, but it didn't seem to work. Instead I fell back on AudioGrabber (Now freeware) and LAME MP3. That also failed. Said that my wave files were 48K instead of 44K, so it wouldn't work with them. I also tried BladeEnc's MP3 and it didn't work either. Undaunted I switched to GoldWave, which in my opinion is the Photoshop of Wave editing. It is a bit of overkill for this task, but it performed it perfectly. I simply loaded the wave file in, then saved it as MP3 using one of the previously installed Codecs. I am pretty sure the issue compressing it was with AudioGrabber.

Now I know how to do it better for next time.

Superior color sense of women

I guess the University of Arizona did some research and found women do have superior color sense over men. I am pretty sure I can see how this went.

Scientist: What color is this?
Man: Green.
Woman: It is not green, it is more of a medium sea foam.

Scientist: How about this one?
Man: That is green too.
Woman: How can you be so blind? It is a spring green.

Scientist: And this one?
Man: Still green.
Woman: That isn't green, it is chartreuse if I have ever seen it!

Scientist: OK, something different this time.
Man: Oh, this is easy. That is red.
Woman: Red? You call that red? It is definitely crimson!

Scientist: Interesting. How about this?
Man: Blue?
Woman: Hardly. It is cornflower!

Scientist: Ok, then how about this?
Man: I'm going to go with purple.
Woman: Closer to orchid.

Scientist: Thank you, that was all very interesting.
Man: Sure, whatever. I get paid for this right?
Woman: Next time I would recommend using more of a misty rose border on your cards. It would especially bring out the differences between moccasin and Navajo white. Also for your lab coat, if you wore a linen finish it would bring out the chiffon flecks in your eyes.

Of course they didn't ask a geek:

Scientist: What color do you see here?
Geek: Do you want it in CMYK or RGB?
Scientist: Excuse me?
Geek: For RGB I am going to say #66CDAA.
Scientist: That wasn't the type of answer we were looking for.
Geek: I'm sorry, I just assumed you wanted hexadecimal. How about 102, 205 and 170, based on a 255 scale naturally. Hey, does that laptop support 802.11i or 802.11n? I would recommend those over g or b, and you certainly aren't using a, are you?
Scientist: Will you stop touching my laptop! Can we get a new test subject in here?

Don't get me wrong. I wasn't trying to convey women as nagging, but guys just don't care about the differences between the colors. This indifference to colors usually seems to drive most woman crazy.

I am sure if we men do suffer from a lack of ability to differentiate colors it is due to evolution after years of not using the ability. Since as we all know the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy in a system only increases with time, so evolution can only result in a degradation of a system.

NASA fakes moon landing!

The latest photographic evidence of NASA's faking of the moon landing! This time the evidence is indisputable!