We went in on Friday but the rack case was not prepped for us, so we couldn’t move in. So we met friends for dinner and then went home. Saturday evening we went in for what should have been an hour, but didn’t get home til 2am. At least we gained an hour due to Daylight Savings Time.
And one of the servers needs fixing…. the CPU fan stops when it gets hot so the CPU overheats and the machine shuts down. So we pulled it out and took it with us. But we replaced it with a nice machine from Silicon Mechanics. I can’t say enough nice things about this company. Great hardware, great prices and friendly and helpful people. (Disclaimer: they gave us t-shirts, so I may be a little biased).
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After my earlier troubles (others have similar problems with the discs), I got Panther installed! No help from Apple, tho. Instead, my brother ripped his CD and I ftp’d it from him, burned a CD and could then install it. So I’m now running Panther and really like it! Exposé is amazing!
Whenever you touch the hardware it will not go as swiftly as planned.
We had planned to move our servers to a new (more easily accessible rack) 50 yards away at our hosting company, CoLo Centers yesterday evening, and that didn’t work out due to lack of bolts and such, so take 2 was today at 6p. Four hours later than expected, we were done, and sitting on the ferry dock waiting for the 12:50 ferry (which, also according to the law, left at 1:30), when we got a page that the site had problems. We opted for home and a prayer that the problem could be solved over water, given the last boat was at 2. A restart and we are back in business (so far), though I think we have used up tonight’s “Fall Back” extra hour and then some….
I got my Panther this morning but 2 of the 3 CDs are just bad. Trying to open the PDF readme crashes Preview on three different Macs and the install crashes too. But the thing is released today and I can buy it at the local Apple store after 8pm tonight. So I figured I could just drop by this afternoon and get my copy replaced with one that works. Nope. I called the local Apple store and explained the problem. The first girl I talked to thought that’d be no problem but had to check. Then another girl got on the phone and the conversation went like this:
“Sir, I understand you have a problem with your Panther CDs. Panther is not released until 8pm tonight so I suggest you come to the store tomorrow or Sunday.”
“I can’t stop in this afternoon and exchange it?”
“Sir, I don’t have Panther in stock until 8pm”.
“But you just have them in the back…”
“Sir, I do not have Panther until 8pm tonight”
“You mean a truck will drive up at 8pm and drop off a shipment?”
“Sir, I do not have Panther until 8pm tonight.”
“You don’t have to be snotty with me, I paid for the thing and I live far away from the store and I just want to exchange it.”
“Sir, I’m not being snotty. I do not have Panther until 8pm tonight and I do not recommend that you come into the store tonight because it will be a mad house. I’ll be happy to help you tomorrow or Sunday.”
(How does she know they won’t sell out of the copies in the store tonight?)
In contrast, today when I called Silicon Mechanics, I was told that they just shipped 200 of the machines I wanted and they may take 2-3 days to get me a machine. But then he worked out a deal where he could delay one machine for a large customer and give me a machine today. A hardware vendor can pull strings and get me a computer today, but a software vendor can’t pull any strings and give me an exchange for a product I’ve already paid for. Customer Service is a rare thing.
I called the other local Apple store and they were much more polite, but they explained I had to exchange it through Apple Online since I bought it online. Crazy. So I called the online store and after 40 minutes of being on hold and being transferred around several times, I was told that I have to go through tech support and they can simply issue new media to be sent to me. Wonderful!
Another 10 minutes on hold…. talked to a guy who couldn’t help and transferred me to Tier 2 support. After 20 minutes on hold, I gave up. Total time: 1 hour, 54 minutes. Result: zero.
I’ll try again tomorrow.
Note: If you’re a Windows user and have no experience with other OSs, please don’t post a comment. XP is not very stable. You can argue it is, but you’re wrong. Even my friends at Microsoft won’t say XP is that great. Drop the religion about your favorite OS and be objective. It’s a lot more fun that way.
Recipezaar members invent lots of fun games, and recently I took part in one of their “swaps”. This was a Salt & Pepper Shaker Swap where people all over the world paired up and sent each other shaker sets. I got these jaunty holiday shakers from Jan S in Australia. Getting these surprise packages (they also do food swaps and ornaments and more) is so much fun, and I’m so excited to be growing the collection of shakers I recently inherited from my grandmother.
One of the web servers failed last night at 3:30am, sounds like a power supply problem. Ordered a replacement from Silicon Mechanics, a local integrator, and will be installing that today.
71,000 recipes! And we’re up to 8,535 on Alexa’s Traffic Rank.
I just saw a video of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, arguing why closed-source is better than open-source. One of his reasons was that Microsoft takes responsibility for the problems with their products to their customers and said that any customer “knows where to find him” and they can email him at steveb@microsoft.com. So I took him up on his offer and emailed him:
To: steveb@microsoft.com
Subject: Windows XP problem
I just watched the video of you being interviewed at the Gartner Symposium and you mentioned that you take responsibility for problems in your products (as opposed to open-source products where you say that no one is responsible) and that your customers can email you at steveb@microsoft.com. So that's what I'm doing...
My Windows XP crashed this morning (it said something about an error in "0x800000EA03BC0A" or something like that) and I lost some work I was doing in Office 2000. Assuming what you said was true, can you take responsibility for this problem that one of your customers is having and fix Windows XP and/or Office 2000 so that it doesn't crash anymore?
Your customer,
Troy Hakala
Let’s see if he was telling the truth.
Panther arrived!
