September 28: Liar, Liar, Bytes on Fire

So, I'm now convinced that Hewlett-Packard is flat-out lying to me. Megapixel was due back originally last Friday. That got pushed back to this Tuesday (ie, today). I called yesterday and they said they expected to have the parts arrive today and that I'd have my computer tomorrow. I called them again today, and the first person said it would arrive Thursday, and the second said October 4th. Let's do a bit of math.

Original repair adventure: sent away June 21st, arrived back July 9th. Total time away: 18 days.
This repair adventure: sent away September 7th, hasn't arrived back. “Expected” return date: October 4th. Total time away: 28.
Total repair adventure time thus far: 46 days. I've had the computer for seventeen weeks. That's 119 days, which means that out of my laptop's entire life, they've had it for 37% of it. THAT'S FUCKING INSANE.

Here's what I would do if I was HP, and wanted to have a hope in hell of ever getting repeat business from my customer's. Whenever machines were in for repairs, I'd give them a thorough check-up, to make sure multiple trips weren't probable. I'd keep my customer's informed of any issues as they appeared, and make sure that the customer service folks had the same information as the repair centre (they do not). To ensure that long, drawn out experiences like mine were rare, I'd keep a better stock of parts in the repair centre so that delays were less likely. Apparently, having one repair centre for the whole country ensures speedy access to parts. My ass.

After a bad experience, I'd show that I appreciate their patronage by extending the one year manufacturer's warranty by AT LEAST the amount of time it spent in the repair centre. I'd probably round up to two months of extra warranty in my case just to make things tidy. If folks have been burned in the past, like I have, I might think of throwing in a “we're sorry, but thanks for choosing HP” gift — something simple. Maybe a memory upgrade or a USB flash drive. Some small token to say “sure, we anally raped you, but here's something to dull the pain”.

One thing is for sure, however. In my case, they'll probably do nothing. And in return, I will offer them a written guarantee that I will never, ever buy anything from Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, or any other affiliated companies again. At least I know I'm not the only one.

September 26: Slouching

I am really, really tired. All weekend, actually — I guess having last weekend off got me out of the backshift swing of things. The weird part is that I wasn't really on a normal human schedule anyway — I was still up until two or three. Something is odd, though — maybe I'm getting sick. Tonight is rough, but nothing compared to last night. I got up at 8:00 am on Friday for school and couldn't get any sleep before I had to go to work, so I basically went 24 hours without sleep. Definitely not something I'm used to, or want to be used to — I thought I was going to die.

I spent way too much time last night reading stupid lists of hilarious content at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. In particular, E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone had me laughing until my sides hurt. Imagine having the email address MikeAtYahooDotCom@hotmail.com and giving it to someone stupid. Or MikeUnderscore2004@yahoo.com. Check the site out, it's good for a few laughs.

I'm on a computer named Helium on the second floor of the computer science building. Cute black and silver case, as wide as a floppy drive. The CD burner is mounted vertically. The keyboard sucks, however (ugly, black Keytronic — looks like it's from 1989), and the mouse (optical and Microsoft, though it may be) is nothing to write home about. Although I guess I am sort of writing home about it, since that's where SPB is. At any rate, I'm happy, because they've finally smartened up and started installing Firefox on the computers here (although it's only version 0.9.2).

Anyway, not much else to say of interest. Like Keddy, it's been a dull couple of days.

September 23: Don't Let the Days Go By

I have got calculus coming out the wazoo. It's driving me insane. My first assignment for MATH 1010 (yes, I realize it's a second year course and I'm in my fourth year — what can I say. I forgot to take it.) is due Sunday night, so I decided to spend today doing it. I'm not sure why, but I'm some sort of math idiot. I just don't get this crap. We're doing integrals, which isn't so hard, but the weird ones like finding the antiderivative of ln|x| and stuff like that just blow my brain up. I suck.

In other news, I've been enjoying school so far. I can't wait until Megapixel comes back, though, because I have already created a ridiculous amount of notes, and I really hate writing stuff out by hand. Plus, it's so much harder to find anything I'm looking for. I called Hewlett-Packard on Monday and talked directly to the repair people. They said they're waiting for several parts: a new hard drive, new CD/DVD combo drive, new motherboard, and new LCD. Basically, they're replacing everything except the case, which is excellent. I wanted a replacement, but this is about as close as one can get. It seems to me that it would have been cheaper for them to just give me a new machine, however, if you factor in the labour costs of disassembling and reassembling the system. C'est la via. She should be snuggled up in my arms by next Wednesday at the latest (the deadline got pushed back when they decided to replace everything).

Continue reading “Don't Let the Days Go By”...

September 19: The First Cut is the Deepest

So, I had a weekend of randomness. How was yours? It all started with a moment of eerie coincidence. I was at my house, and a bit hungry, so I thought “Hey, I kind of want a donair.” I called Keddy to see if he wanted to go up to Alexandra's Pizza and — what the hell — he and Steve had just pulled in to the parking lot there. So, I burned my way up there and had a great donair. I love donairs. After that, we went back to Keddy's house and he set up the new TV he had just bought, which is pretty nice, although too big to fit on his TV stand properly. That was Thursday.

Friday, I hung out with Russell and Amanda for a bit, although not for too long, since I wasn't feeling too good. Friday was no good. But last night was great: I watched The First $20 Million with Keddy and Steve and then we went on an old-school adventure, because hey, it was pouring outside. We only ever do randoma adventures in bad weather. We just sort of drove at random and found ourselves out in Beaverbank, which is pretty far out there for a random destination. After driving back to the city, we wandered around Halifax for a bit and then headed home. Interesting night of non-interesting-ness.

Anyway, the Channel 9 Summer of Express content has closed. Take a look at my competition. Take a look at my competition and tell me what you think my chances of winning are (once again, my entry is SpindeXML). The judging criteria are as follows: (1) Creativity. I think SpindeXML is pretty creative — I've never seen a program that does what it can do. (2) Architecture. As a 4th year CS major, I think I can design a half-decent architecture for an application. (3) Widespread interest. Who doesn't need to keep track of a zillion CDs?

A lot of the other entries seem to be lacking in either (1) or (3) — for example, the ASCII art generator, Texter, is wicked cool, but it's nothing new, and who really needs an ASCII art generator? I don't know. That's the one that seems to be the most impressive to me. That, and Adaeria Today.

Finally, in computer news, Megapixel is expected to leave HP on September 24th, this Friday coming up. She should be home on the following Monday.

September 16: Tell Me Something That's Sure to Break My Heart

Hey-o, I'm without a computer again. How shitty is that? Life resumed suckiness on Tuesday afternoon, when a big yellow taxi took my laptop away. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got til it's gone? Actually, it was a big white Purolator truck. And by the way, the woman who I dealt with on the phone at Purolator was a real bitch.

Fortunately, Mom's computer (Gwen) is a much better substitute this time around. I spend a big chunk of Tuesday fixing it up for her so it would run all nice and smooth. I installed MobyDock, the latest version of Firefox, and Thunderbird. I installed matching themes on both of them, and set up a Gmail account for her. I got some trendy wallpapers and used Foood's icons to make her dock look very cool. And then I made a custom screensaver for her using some neat images from Google Images and The Stock Exchange. Anyway, I've got a screenshot of her desktop (800x600 — ugh) if anyone wants to see how ludicrously trendy it is. I really like MobyDock, and I'll be doing something like this to Megapixel when she returns.

Continue reading “Tell Me Something That's Sure to Break My Heart”...

September 13: A Series of Unfortunate Events

Ahjhdfjgjsdghsdghlafo!! Jim Carrey...book borrowed from Katie...can't wait...aghh...erm. Ahem. Sorry. Guess what? Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is coming out as a movie this December! And guess who plays Count Olaf? Yeah, Jim Carrey! Watch the trailer — it's awesome. There is one thing kind of bugs me, not because it's bad or anything, but just because it seems a bit...sneaky. The song at the beginning is from Edward Scissorhands, and the song towards the middle is from The Addam's Family. I wonder if they've stolen those songs, or only borrowed them while the movie is still in post-production. (Is it sad that I noticed that?)

That's awesome news, I think. Now, remind me to write my actual blog entry tomorrow. Items to include: Teaser MacGrapefruit, International Cat of Mystery (that's Amanda's uber-cute new kittie), and saying goodbye*
(It's not goodbye, it's 'see you later'. No, no...I promised myself I wouldn't cry!)
to Megapixel.

September 11: School Rocks, Life Sucks

So, my first day back at school was pretty decent: most of my classes sound interesting. In particular, I'm very much looking forward to “Compiler Construction”. Remember the scene in Hackers at the cybercafe, when Cereal Killer was quizing Dade on all the “important” hacker books? One of them was “the dragon book, compiler design”. This is actually my text book for my compiler course — it has a big red dragon wrapped around an ancient IBM PC (the book's latest edition is 1988 — it must be damn good if they're still using it at most universities). The 10:30 - 2:30 schedule is really quite nice, although I was a bit late for my first class. It's been a while since I bused*
(Yep, only one 's' in the word 'bused'. 'Bussed' means something completely different.)
and I forgot when it came.

However, life loves to kick me in the junk, and my beloved laptop is acting up again. For most of today, Megapixel was convinced that she had no hard drive. For some reason, it randomly started working again (and the built-in diagnostic claimed there were no problems), but I'm still shipping it off to HP, again. There are a few other issues (humming noise when hooked up to TV, bright spot on monitor, occasionally crappy CD burning) that they will hopefully resolved. I'm not impressed overall, though, since the system isn't four months old yet and this will be the second trip to the repair shop. I've already got my eye on a particular laptop to replace this one in another year and a half or so. I wish Megapixel didn't hate me.

Anyway, that's all. I'm on my lunch break, which is almost over, so I'm ending this now. Cheers.

September 06: Slinky Girl

You know's what great? Going through old CDs and finding stuff you have never, ever listened to before. Slinky Girl by 311 is my anthem of the moment, and despite the fact that the particular copy I have was downloaded by yours truly five years ago (as of the 12th of September), it's all new to me. Isn't that fantastic?

Even greater than finding retro-but-new music is finding amazingly kick ass new stuff. A few weeks back, I downloaded Somebody Told Me by The Killers. It took me a while to get into it, but now I can't get enough. However, I am a little confused. For those of you who are not familiar with the song, the chorus goes as follows (ahem): “Somebody told me you had a boyfriend, who looked like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year.” Let's try to figure that one out, shall we?

The singer found out that Person-X has a new boyfriend. This new boyfriend resembles an ex-girlfriend of the singer. Therefore, either the singer was dating a very manly and/or androgynous woman, or Person-X is dating a very girly and/or androgynous man. The final possibility is that the new boyfriend was a girl at one point, but has since sex-swapped. I am currently waiting the video to see if it gives us any hints. And...it doesn't. Plus, the quality was really crappy. I guess this is a mystery that will go unsolved.

Somebody told me you have a boyfriend...

September 03: Things.

Things that suck:
  • Running out of hard drive space.
  • Waiting forever for a dozen CDs to burn.
  • Realizing that your hard drive is still almost full, despite those dozen CDs being gone.
  • BitTorrent trackers that disappear, letting that oh-so-rare item escape your grasp again.
  • Channel 36, aka Fox.
Things that rock:
  • SpinCity.
  • When there is exactly enough room to fit what you''re writing.
  • Milla Jovovich. And speaking of which, they are giving out free tickets to see Resident Evil 2 at the Last Game Store on Portland Street. Ask for Mofu.
  • Coffee. God, yes...coffee.
  • This hilarious picture.
Still no word from Tawnya. But life is happy other than that.