Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Spontaneous technological combustion (20 of 31/55 of 274)

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I ran to double-check the model numbers on our two Acer computers in the office after seeing this Engadget post this morning:

Some of Acer’s Predator PCs recalled: they’ll set your games on fire, but also your desk

Yes, I know it gives a specific model name (Predator gaming PCs), but after Tuesday’s spontaneous monitor combustion, I wasn’t taking any chances!

Edited to add: I guess this is also my NaBloPoMo post for 3/20, although I didn’t originally intend it to be! Funny how the day gets away from you sometimes.

Mobile music (19 of 31/54 of 274)

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I’ve never owned an iPod. I was around when the first Walkman came out, and I have to look back in amazement at how far portable music has come. Comparing the size and weight of the original Walkman to the current iPod offerings, maybe part of our workouts back then was carrying around the Walkman!

When I bought my first BlackBerry this past November, a major goal was to eliminate the need to carry a PDA and MP3 player in addition to a cell phone. That goal has been accomplished in most satisfactory style. I often still opt to bring a small point-and-shoot digital camera and Flip Mino, even though the BlackBerry Curve has a camera and video built in, but that is another post for another day.

The music player on the BlackBerry Curve is pretty basic, but meets my needs pretty well. I didn’t have any issues transferring my music from my laptop to my Curve’s SD card, since almost all of it was already in MP3 format. I had been converting my iTunes music to DRM-free MP3 format as I purchased it, since I had a non-iPod MP3 player. When Apple broke iTunes to prevent the conversion utilities from working, I switched to Amazon for all digital music purchases. Not too long after that, Apple brought out their iTunes + DRM-free versions. May I say that I still purchase from Amazon and only when a song is available nowhere else will I ever purchase from iTunes.

I am not enough of a psycho audio freak to bemoan any sound quality inadequacies or shortcomings of the music player. At my age, and with my lack of musical skills, the difference between “real” sound quality and that of my Curve is not even a factor.

I’ve currently got three different Internet radio clients installed on my Curve. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, so I’ve kept them all rather than choosing just one.

iHeartRadio is a little different from the other two, so I’ll mention it first. The BlackBerry version has about 150 stations to choose from, including major-market and medium-sized market “real” stations as well as Internet radio stations. If you are living far away from your hometown, this is great. That is, if your hometown stations are included. Currently there is just one station from Honolulu, which would not be my first choice to listen to when there, but it’s ok and nice to be able to get it in the car here in Chicago. My old van did not have an AUX jack for music players, but my new one of course does, and one of my first purchases was the cable to connect music players to the car stereo.

Slacker and Pandora are similar in many ways. Each one allows you to create your own custom stations by choosing artists or songs that you want to listen to. For legal/licensing reasons, neither one is available outside North America nor do you have 100% on-demand choice of music. With Slacker, you choose up to 15 artists for your custom station, and most of the music selected will be by those artists or by artists very similar in style. With Pandora, you choose one artist or song and Pandora takes it from there to create your station using the Music Genome Project to choose artists and songs that you should enjoy based on your original input. Both allow you to ban artists or songs that you do not want to hear again, and favorite those that you do.

I have been a fan of Pandora for a while and often have it running on my desktop computer at work. Their BlackBerry client came out just this week, so I don’t have a lot of time with it yet. One feature that the BlackBerry version of Slacker has that I have found invaluable is the ability to cache stations. This means that I can listen to these stations even in areas where I don’t have a good signal.

The free version of Slacker has audio advertisements (about 1 an hour); the free version of Pandora has visual advertisements (so far, all for Docker that I’ve seen). I haven’t yet felt the need to upgrade to the paid versions of either service. The free versions are that good (sorry, Slacker and Pandora).

Any other BlackBerry users out there? Would love to hear your thoughts on these, and anything else I haven’t tried yet!

Giving Up: The Death of a Monitor (17 of 31/52 of 274)

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Today’s title is courtesy of Denora: thank you!

As much time as I have spent around computers of all sorts ever since the prepress industry moved from hot type to computerized cold type on mainframe and minicomputers in the late 1970s, this is something that has never, ever happened to me before today. I have had numerous monitors fail on me, of course, but never in flammable fashion.

I was preparing to do some updates to the operating system on our Snap Server. The updates were downloading and I was reading information and instructions for the update when the image on my screen blurred, contracted, expanded and then disappeared. As it disappeared, I heard a “pop” and white smoke started wisping out of the back of the monitor.

I immediately unplugged the power strip and thankfully the smoke started subsiding rather than proceeding into full-blown ignition and combustion. Shortly, all that was left was a slightly nasty burnt-plastic smell. It wasn’t even as bad of a smell as burnt popcorn in the microwave, so on the scale of emergencies this was maybe a 0.7. Didn’t even make it to a 1, let alone a 10.

I am somewhat afraid of electricity, and I also have a fear of accidentally setting something on fire and somehow having it torpedo my firefighter husband’s career. I could just see the headline: Firefighter’s wife sets Bill Kurtis’ office building on fire. This is a perfect Chicago headline, by the way. It blames fire or police for something, and also drops a name.

I spent the rest of the work day using an ancient 14″ monitor and suffering eyestrain. A new monitor should be arriving at work shortly after I do tomorrow. Not a moment too soon!

That was probably the most exciting thing that happened in my world today, sadly enough. Oh, except for the wonderfully nice weather. I got home in time to enjoy at least a little of it with the Rottweiler wrecking crew. Good thing, too, as rain is on the way tomorrow.

I can’t wait to see what might almost catch on fire tomorrow!

Giving credit (4 of 31/39 of 274)

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Just a short follow-up to yesterday’s post, because that is all I have the time and energy for tonight, giving credit where credit is due.

I have never had a great opinion of Comcast. I do not know how it is in other cities, but here in Chicago, you do not have a choice if you want to have cable television. You have a choice between cable and satellite, yes, but there is only one cable company serving each area. So providing superior customer service does not need to be a priority for any cable company.

I have a much better opinion of Comcast after adding their high-speed internet during the whole fiasco with Earthlink. I still have issues with their rather-high pricing, but that’s all at this point.

After the freakshow of a phone call I received at work from Earthlink, just before leaving for home, I called Comcast customer service and spoke to an American person residing in my local area to find out what I needed to do to add high-speed internet service to my existing cable television service. Among the options given to me was to purchase a self-install kit at Best Buy. I stopped on the way home to do that. The associate at the store told me to call Comcast to activate it once I got home. She thought it took about 3 days to activate service. Fortunately she was wrong. I called the activation number and spoke to an American technical service person who told me the line would be active in just a few minutes since I already had cable television service. And it was.

Total time from no ‘net to nothing but ‘net: less than an hour, including the stop at Best Buy.

Credit where credit is due. That was a great and painless experience provided by Comcast. Wish everything could go that easy.

Giving up (3 of 31/38 of 274)

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Shortly after our original Rottweiler Heidi came to live with us in 1994, I made a very basic web page for her with a few photos, a couple of cute stories and a list of links about Rottweilers. Sometime over the next year or so, I was searching for more links to add to the page when I stumbled across Mindspring’s website. At that time, Mindspring was a regional ISP based in Atlanta. Their website included a page featuring their “Chief Executive Rottweiler” Henri, a three-legged Rottweiler belonging to an employee.

Of course I thought that was wonderful. I added the link to Heidi’s page, and had Heidi write to Henri, complimenting him on his business acumen and hoping that she, too, could one day achieve success in a technology career. I was shocked to receive a reply a couple of days later from Mindspring CEO Charles Brewer (or an assistant, I’ll never know for sure) with some kind words to Heidi about her page and the good resources she provided with her links. I wrote back on Heidi’s behalf and said that if Mindspring ever expanded to our area, we would use them as our ISP.

In 1997, they did come to Chicago, and I kept Heidi’s promise. Mindspring had excellent customer service and technical support. There were some growing pains, but things were always taken care of in a friendly and professional manner. We upgraded to DSL in 2000. When Earthlink bought out Mindspring, things were still fine for quite a while.

Somewhere along the line, Charles Brewer left to pursue other projects. Garry Betty passed away from cancer. Things started changing for the worse around that time. Support and customer service were outsourced. The service itself had pretty good uptime, but whenever I did have to contact support for any reason, it was simply hell to deal with the lower level outsourced technicians and their canned scripts and fake American names.

The last outage was the last straw. It lasted a little longer than usual, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem clearly lay outside my network, but the lower level tech put me through the entire script regardless. I could have dealt with that if he had actually escalated the call to the phone company to check the physical lines as he said he was going to do.

When I called back the next morning to check on the status, per tech’s instructions, the new tech said that he would put a trouble ticket in to the phone company. Ummm. It was done last night? No, apparently not.

This was still not the breaking point, as the phone company did more than their part and actually showed up shortly after I’d left for work and took care of their part of things.

The breaking point was the tech who called for me at work. He got off to a great start by asking one of my male co-workers if he was me. This particular co-worker does not sound like Barry White, but neither does he sound like a girl. Then, wonder tech continues by asking me to check on my service. I point out that he has called me at work, and the troubled DSL is at home. He repeats his request verbatim. I point out his error again, a little louder. He repeats his request again. I resort to profanity, ask for a supervisor, and am denied. I tell the tech I will check on the DSL when I get home and hang up.

Fortunately all was well. But that was the last straw, and after a dozen years, I have finally given up. The Mindspring I subscribed to is long gone. Heidi’s gone, Henri’s gone, and customer service is gone and way more dead than either of those beautiful dogs. And now I am gone. I made the call to cancel my account earlier tonight. The… again, outsourced… customer service rep noted that I had been a customer since 1997. Yeah. Had been. Not happy. Leaving.

I truly mourn the loss of the days that a company could still have a cutesy page with a “Chief Executive Rottweiler” and a CEO that took the time to see that a silly letter from a dog was answered. And a person could call for customer support and be able to talk to a person in their own country who could communicate effectively in their language.