briancarper.net (λ) (Category: Hardware)

Review: Logitech Performance MX

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:51:27 -0700

I have a long list of companies I won't buy from, due to horrible customer service experiences or shoddy merchandise. On the other hand, my "Must buy from this company" list is awfully short.

Logitech is one company I'm generally OK buying from. (For now...) I go through computer mouses¹ pretty fast, so I end up buying a new one every 4-5 years. Logitech hasn't failed me thus far.

In my opinion, the most important parts of your computer are the ones you interact with: Keyboard, mouse, monitor. I'd rather have a slow computer with a good mouse and keyboard than a fast computer with cheap peripherals. I already have a wonderful keyboard, and I like to have a nice mouse to match.

My latest mouse is the Logitech Performance MX.

How much can you really improve upon the concept of a mouse? It's a round thing you slide around and click. Well, if you believe the marketing on the box, it seems there are at least three areas for improvement:

Add more buttons.
Make it work on more surfaces.
Gimmicks.

None of the above features matter much to me. What I care about:

Is it comfortable to use all day?
Is it going to last me 4 or 5 years?

Let's hit each of these points.

More buttons

The Performance MX has a lot of buttons. If you believe xev, there are somewhere between 10 and 13 (counting the scroll wheel etc.).

I don't need all of these. I like to have a thumb button for middle-clicking, but this mouse has four of them. What am I going to use all of the extras for? Maybe I'll have one open Emacs.

The browser forward and back thumb buttons work out-of-the-box in Linux, which surprised me. I'm used to having to dork around with xmodmap or xbindkeys. Linux has come a long way.

Then there's a thumb button that's supposed to open Expose on OS X or your app-switcher of choice in your OS. It's in a place that's impossible to press consistently with your thumb, unless you're a contortionist. And it does nothing in Linux by default. Similarly there's a vanishingly small "zoom" button near your thumb. I can't even find this button without looking at the mouse, because it's too small.

There's also horizontal scroll, if you can manage to tilt the wheel to either side. My fingers lack the dexterity to do this easily, and the button is awfully stiff, so I'll never use this.

But hey, better too many buttons than too few.

Surfaces

The marketers wrote "This mouse works on glass!" all over the box, so this must be a selling point of the mouse. But my Logitech G500 also worked on glass, once I upgraded the firmware (via Logitech's own website), so I'm not sure why this feature is being pushed so hard.

Gimmicks

On the Performance MX, you can click this little switch and disengage part of the mechanism that makes the scroll wheel "click". This lets you spin the wheel hard and it'll spin freely forever until you stop it manually, or until its inertia runs out.

Do I really need, and I quote, hyper-fast scrolling? The scroll speed of my mouse wheel has never struck me as a productivity bottleneck. Now that I've played with it, sure, it's mildly interesting. If you scroll at just the right speed, you can go all the way from the top of a Reddit thread to the bottom, while still skimming the text. But I don't need this feature.

But the levels to which marketroids will stoop to hype up a product never ceases to amaze me. The name itself is ridiculous. Performance MX. Who comes up with this?

Comfort

My previous mouse was a G500, and it was really quite big. A bit too big. (And there were these removable weights you could use to adjust the weight of the mouse (the "gimmick" feature of that mouse), which were worthless.)

The MX is bigger, but it has more curves and that helps my hand sit on it better. There's a very large thumb rest, which I like. If you have small hands, you might have problems with this mouse. I like the feel so far.

Will it last?

This mouse feels very solid. It has a nice heft to it. It has metal bits (or sturdy metal-like plastic) in places other mouses have cheap plastic and rubber.

The wheel on my G500 wore down very fast. I was some kind of rubbery plastic, which became rounded off, nicked and worn-down a lot over the years. The wheel on the MX feels like some kind of metal, with nice ridges on the top to provide friction. I'm a bit concerned that the wheel disengagement switch might wear down over time though. The more moving parts, the more opportunity for something to break.

The pads on the bottom are huge: a good 1 inch x 1/8 inch. I love this. Using this on my Icemat mouse pad is very comfy. It slides effortlessly, but leaves me with plenty of control.

Battery

I normally prefer corded mouses. This one is rechargeable. Most rechargeable mouses I've used had some kind of stupid dock you had to jam the mouse into. Not only does it take up desk space, it also wears holes into your mouse over time from being inserted and removed from the dock. The battery connectors also wear down fast, and then it doesn't charge right unless you fiddle with it.

The MX can be charged while you use it, via a USB cable, which is a really good idea. It comes with a short cable, and a long extender cable if you need it. The cable looks like it has a non-standard connector though, which is a bad idea. Why not use mini-USB?

The charger cable is awfully heavy though. I wouldn't want to use this thing while it's plugged in for more than a short time.

I don't know what the battery life is like, because it hasn't run out yet, after a couple days. That's good enough for me.

Price

$120. That's a lot. But taken over 4-5 years, it's not that bad.

And the surgery I'd have to have done on my hands after crippling them via a cheap mouse over the next 40 years would be way more than $120.

Should you buy this?

Sure. I like this mouse so far. It works, and it feels like it'll last a while. Props to Logitech for making good products.

Yes, mouses. ↩

DD-WRT: 1, Microsoft: 0

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:32:25 -0700

An xbox360 wireless card is $100, and it's theoretically the only wireless card that works with an xbox, so if you want wireless internet, you have to buy that card. I guess the idea is to sell the console cheap (for sufficiently large values of "cheap") and then gouge customers on proprietary cables and addons afterward. Microsoft isn't the only company that does this, by far. (Not nearly as bad as $20 for 8MB worth of PS2 memory card. Ughhhh.)

Fortunately, if you have a spare Linksys router lying around (as I do) you can throw DD-WRT on it, put it into Client Mode, connect your xbox to the router via a bit of ethernet cable, and there you go. I can also plug my aging desktop machine (sans wireless card) into the same router, and two other devices if I can find any.

Installing DD-WRT was surprisingly straightforward if you take the time to read through the wiki instructions first very carefully. A bit of healthy paranoia of turning your hardware into a brick goes a long way.

15 minutes, $100+ savings. Thanks again, Linux and open-source community.

ATH-AD700 Review

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:10:30 -0700

Recently I got my ATH-AD700 headphones. I've been FAR more excited than anyone has a right to be, waiting for these things to show up, like Christmas in August. Sweet, sweet anticipation. It was well worth the wait.

The only other headphones I have to compare these with are my Grado SR80's (which have really seen better days) and some Shure "noise-cancelling" earbuds which are nice but are not comparable to either. So I'll compare the AD700 to the SR80's. ATH-AD700's are pictured left, Grado SR80's are right.

(Note: Nowhere in this article shall I refer to anything as "cans". I reserve the right to retain some level of self-righteous, snobbish disdain for the audiophile community.)

ATH-AD700 in two words: Freaking Huge.

One cannot understate how enormous the AD700's are. I thought the SR80's were big but the AD700's make me feel like a toddler. They literally engulf your face like the hand of a giant. If you have a tiny head you might have problems even keeping them on your head.

These are the kind of headphone that completely surround your ear rather than sit on your ear. With the AD700's I could probably fit 2 or 3 more ears into the cups along with mine.

There is no way you will wear these and not look completely ridiculous to those around you.

And yet, freaking comfortable.

In spite of their size, the AD700's are very light. They seem to be made of some kind of thin plastic with aluminum grated sides and a few metal finishing bits. They barely feel like anything when you put them on. I've worn them for many hours without discomfort.

And they feel wonderful. The pads are some kind of soft comfy velour fabric. These headphones are not manually adjustable; instead there are little 3-D flaps on top that auto-adjust on springs, and they seem to help equally distribute weight around your head so it isn't all bearing down directly on your ears. The lack of a proper "band" probably contributes to keeping them light. When you put the AD700's on, and you feel everything magically shift around to fit your head, it's a freakish (yet strangely entertaining) experience. I felt like a cyborg.

By comparison, you can't forget you're wearing SR80's. They are mostly metal and thick heavy plastic and they hurt after a half hour. The cups are hard plastic and the foam pads are oddly shaped so that your ear inevitably sits directly on the poky, scratchy plastic of the drivers. From the first day I owned the SR80's there was no mistaking that they were painful, and they've gotten far worse over time. I put up with the SR80's in spite of this because they sound great.

Which brings us to...

Sound quality

The AD700's really do sound awesome. I had my doubts how much different they'd be from my SR80's, but there is definitely a noticeable difference.

The AD700's are very detailed compared to the SR80's. The SR80's have an overwhelming amount of bass and it drowns out the vocals on a lot of my songs. I'd never noticed until I put on the AD700's and heard the difference.

My music of choice is metal, industrial, hard rock, soft rock, a bit of techno and J-pop, and they all sound great. I don't have to screw around with the equalizer settings on my MP3 player just to be able to hear the vocals clearly, as I sometimes did with the SR80's. The AD700's are probably what people call "neutral".

When I listened to one song of a live concert on the AD700's, I actually heard a police siren in the background as a cop car apparently drove down the street outside the concert hall. I'd listened to that song probably 50 times on my SR80's, and never heard that. There were actually many times this week when I was sitting in my office at work and heard what I thought was a sound behind me, and as I looked around trying to find what was making that noise, I realized it was in the music. It's a bit unnerving.

If your main criteria is bass, the SR80's are probably better. I thought I really liked bass to the exclusion of all else, but maybe I'm getting old or maybe my tastes are changing, because the bass on the AD700's is more than good enough for me. It's definitely weaker but it's also clearer.

Anything else I can say about these is going to be even more subjective and unhelpful than what I already wrote, but I think I do prefer the sound of the AD700's over the SR80's at this point. To be clear though, both of these headphones sound amazingly good and I was very happy with my SR80's for years and years. (The AD700's also have the advantage of being shiny and new and I'm sure this skews my opinion.)

Note that these are "open" headphones, so they will leak noise. People sitting next to you will hear your music. This isn't an issue for me but it may be for some.

Build quality

I won't be able to make a real comparison until I bang the AD700's around for four years in my briefcase like I did with my SR80's, but at a glance they certainly look and feel sturdy. Some of the ridiculous design flaws of the SR80's (like the ever-spinning cups that result in crimped and broken wires) are joyously absent in the AD700's. The headphone cord comes out of only one side of the headphones, which helps you not to feel like you're being strangled by two cords meeting under your chin as with the SR80's. The headphone wire itself is thinner than the SR80's but also feels more flexible and hopefully less likely to snap.

(The cord on both the SR80's is way too long, and I end up looping it and twist-tying it to avoid tripping over it or running it over in my office chair. But too long is better than too short.)

Even the box the AD700's came in was impressive. It had nice Japanese writing all over, and to open it was like unfolding origami.

Price

I got the AD700's for less than $80, new. The MSRP is supposedly $250. I don't know if I got an insanely good deal or if the MSRP is artificially inflated, but you can still get the AD700's on Amazon for around $80 if you look around.

This is $10-20 cheaper than Grado SR80's. I don't think the price difference is significant. I think both headphones are easily worth $80-100. Are they worth $250? Er... maybe not.

Conclusion

ATH-AD700: I love these things. I suggest, nay, demand that you buy them. They feel and sound very good. I am glad I didn't get replacement Grado SR80's as I originally planned.

I think it is easily worth spending $100 to get a "good" pair of headphones. Even if all you listen to is a crappy MP3 player, it makes a huge difference in how much you will enjoy your music. But I also use headphones when I'm at my computer, or even when I'm gaming. For me music is essential for avoiding distractions while programming, and these headphones are excellent for that purpose (especially because of the comfort).

The only bad thing about the AD700's is how ridiculous I look wearing novelty-sized, bright purple headphones in public. Personally, I will pay the price of bearing that shame.

Audiophail

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:17:12 -0700

My Grado SR-80 headphones are more electrical tape than headphone at this point. Inexplicably, sound continues to come out of them. The wires have so many breaks that I'm not sure how this is physically possible.

Also the top of the band is also splitting apart and the pads are worn down and fall off constantly and there are pokey plastic bits that hurt my ears a lot. After prying them apart with a hammer and screwdriver to fix the wires a few times, they look like they've been through a wood chipper. I love those things but it is time for retirement.

Researching headphones can suck up months of your time if you let it, especially if you believe the bullcrap. Going to an "audiophile" site like Head-Fi is like entering a new world. I have no idea what any of the vocabulary means.

"Detailed", "neutral", "open soundstage", I can figure those out to some degree. But what the hell do "sweet" and "dark" and "thick" and "smooth" mean with regard to headphone quality? Are we talking about music or chocolate? What do "forward" and "recessed" and "transparent" and "analytical" mean? These are rhetorical questions, I don't care what they mean. I have my doubts that they even mean anything objective.

Then there are strange beliefs, like that letting your headphones run for 100 hours to "burn them in" when they're new will make them sound better. I'd really like to see that theory put to a proper scientific test. I have strong doubts that it's anything more than people's minds fooling themselves. It sounds like voodoo. At least it's not as bad as $7,000 speaker wires.

I can definitely and easily tell the difference between cheapo $5 headphones and my Grado's, but beyond that I really start to doubt that it matters. Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on headphones seems like insanity to me.

For this reason I decided to do next to no research, and went and bought the first pair that I found online that looked comfy, got mostly good reviews, got a couple good reviews on head-fi (as far as I could decipher) and had a price of around $100. I ended up ordering ATH-AD700's from Amazon. Should be here in a week.

Crackberry Acquired

Thu, 07 May 2009 18:26:26 -0700

All I ever wanted out of life was to SSH to my computer from a cell phone. That dream has finally come true.

Up to this point I have not owned a cell phone. I bought one a few years back, then I returned it and got a refund because it was pointless. Communicating with other human beings via spoken voice? How trite. My current employer gave me a phone for free but I never used it.

But nowadays cell phones are pretty much mini computers that happen to be able to make phone calls as a side effect. I almost got an iPhone, but I am very wary about hype. Apple's business practices turn me off; the app store is a shystering waiting to happen, their crappy proprietariness makes me puke, their overblown marketing and "image" makes me puke even more. I don't want an MP3 player in my phone; my Cowon D2 is far superior to any silly iPod. And as I tried the touch screen keyboard, I quickly realized that the Blackberry's physical keys win in that category by a mile.

So I got a Blackberry Bold and I'm pretty happy with it so far. I have yet to make a single phone call, but I've put it to good use. I installed all kinds of silly stuff on there, including an SSH client so I can do system maintenance while driving. (Not really, don't worry.) I can look at Google maps when I get lost, which happens embarrassingly often in my car. I can look at Slashdot from the sushi restaurant. I can get the weather updated every 15 minutes, which saves me from rotating my head 25 degrees and looking out the window.

I still object to certain cell phone things on principle. Paying $3 for a 15-second song clip as a ring tone for example; the insanity of this is almost physically painful to me. The Blackberry let me set any old MP3 I wanted as the ring tone though, which is nice.

Paying for text messages is almost as painful. How can it cost a quarter to send 160 bytes of text to another phone, when the whole freaking internet costs orders of magnitude less? How do cell phone companies get away with this? It's such a racket. But I can put IM clients on my phone and use email and I have "unlimited" data transfer each month, so that's nice. (And I really grilled the salesperson about what "unlimited" means. She said some people go into the gigabytes of transfer each month without consequence, so it looks like I need to find a torrent client now!)

Maybe one of these days I'll call someone. What a novel concept.

Unicomp Customizer keyboard review

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:52:39 -0700

I got my Unicomp Customizer 105 in the mail today. This is a keyboard using the same technology as the infamous IBM keyboards of yore.

Why?

The Customizer is an enormous blocky hunk of hard black and grey matte plastic. It is the very antithesis of modern, soft, rounded, Apple-esque fashion. It has no "multimedia" keys, it doesn't glow in the dark, it doesn't have a built-in USB hub, it looks distinctly 80's-ish, and it costs $70. Why on earth would anyone want this thing?

A couple of reasons... one is that it's a status symbol of grizzled old hackers. This keyboard has gotten a lot of good reviews, e.g. last year on Slashdot, but I've heard the sentiment repeated elsewhere. There are stories of people rescuing old IBM keyboards out of dumpsters and selling them on ebay.

If it was simply a status symbol I would look away without a second glance. (Which is why I own a Cowon D2 and not an iPod. I like to research my purchases to the point of paranoia.)

But the popularity seems to be backed up by real functionality and build quality. These keyboards have a reputation for being great to type on due to the unique feel of their buckling spring "clicky" keys, and for being indestructible, with some keyboards still in use after two decades. So I decided why not see for myself?

A keyboard is the main tool of my livelihood and one of the main tools of most of my hobbies. It makes sense to try to get the best tool for the job. The three most important parts of a computer in my opinion are the keyboard, mouse, and monitor. CPU? RAM? Hard disk space? I'll take whatever you give me. But the things I interact with on a constant basis, I want those things to be comfortable.

Clicka clicka clicka

Yeah, this thing is clicky. Even after all the reviews, I was unprepared for just how clicky it is. You can feel the click of each keypress in your fingers and hear the clicking from 3 miles away.

I tried pushing a key down slowly to make it click without activating a keypress, and I found it very difficult if not impossible. You can always tell when you've successfully pressed a key on this keyboard: if it clicked, you did; if it didn't click, you didn't.

One bad thing about the clicking is annoying everyone in the room with you. I'm a bit worried I'm slowly going to drive my wife insane.

Finger workout

The keys have a lot of weight to them compared to the mushy feel of modern keyboards (which usually use some rubber or plastic dome under the keys). The Customizer's keys have little springs in them, and you can feel the keys pushing back on your fingers as you type. It feels much different than any other keyboard I've used.

Is it a good or bad feel? I'm undecided. It does feel pretty good, there's a lot of response to the keyboard and you can more easily tell when you miss a key or flub a keypress and hit two keys at once. I think this probably aids accuracy. I don't type more accurately but I more easily notice my mistakes.

I'm afraid the weight might lead to fatigue though; the keys are harder to press than other keyboards and my hands feel like they're getting a workout in comparison. However I've had a few long nights of typing on this keyboard and haven't noticed any more fatigue than usual, so the worry may be unfounded. On the other hand, I do often notice how annoying it is to type on a laptop which has no resistance and no distance to the keys at all. The resistance in this keyboard is a nice change of pace.

Built well?

I think "indestructible" is probably an apt word. I've only had mine for a couple days, but just hefting the thing, you can tell it's built like a tank. Very thick hard plastic all around. It weighs a ton. If I had to choose a keyboard to use as a weapon in a pinch, I'd grab this one immediately.

The keys come off easily; every key is just a cap over a smaller plastic key beneath, and that cap is a simple piece atop a tube with a spring in it. There isn't a lot of room for mechanical failure here unless you lose the springs. Everything comes off and goes back on very easily, which is nice for when I need to clean out the gunk in a year.

I have heard that if you spill a cup of milk into one of these keyboards, you may find it hard to drain. So don't do that.

Lack of features is a feature

Multimedia keys suck. I've never used them. They waste space and the only time I remember they exist is when I push them accidentally.

The Customizer is very "traditional". There are no multimedia keys, no volume controls, no programmable (i.e. useless) macro keys, no email or internet shortcuts. Just the standard 105 keys. This is a plus in my book.

Caps Lock is slightly shortened with a gap between itself and the A key, which is nice to avoid hitting it accidentally. The version of the keyboard I got has a modern Super ("windows") modifier key, but you can get a version without even that, if you like. Otherwise there are no frills.

Speed typing

I took a couple of silly online typing tests, and I got between 75 and 95 WPM with 98% accuracy, which is as good as I've ever gotten. My six-fingered typing style is a bit odd but this keyboard suits me well.

WPM is a terrible measure of programming speed, because programming has a much higher punctuation-to-letter ratio than English prose. So I also tried an Emacs session and a bunch of Vimming, and I experienced no problems. I forgot I was using this keyboard almost immediately, which is a good thing. It means it wasn't annoying me.

Very important to me, as a Vimmer, is the position and size of the Escape key. I have one other keyboard that has Escape offset to the right a half inch, which is horrendous and messes up my Vimming all the time. My other other keyboard has a tiny little Escape key, half as big as a normal key, which is equally bad.

On the Customizer, Escape is positioned off by itself in the corner as it should be, with a ton of space between itself and the number row, and the Escape key itself is freaking enormous. This is a huge plus in my book. You can't miss Escape on this keyboard.

Similarly, all the other keys are the right sizes and in the right places.

Verdict

So how is the Unicomp Customizer?

It's solid, standard, unique, and has a nice retro, minimalist style that I personally enjoy.

It's also huge, loud, and expensive. Is it worth buying? If you have the money to spend, I think it is. I don't regret the buy after a few days. When I come home from work and start typing on this guy, I'm always pleasantly surprised.

My Poor Headphones

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:45:01 -0700

My precious Grado SR-80's needed some emergency surgery a while back, resulting in this disaster. They still work today, in the sense that sound is still emitted from them, but in terms of aesthetics, the situation has rapidly deteriorated. I've got bare wire and sticky electrical tape hanging all over the place. Also I'm probably one good yank away from snapping the wires off again.

If anyone reading this has a good tutorial or information on re-wiring a set of headphones, it'd be appreciated. I've never soldered anything in my life. I don't know where to acquire the wires; I imagine any wire will do, but I'm clueless when it comes to such things. I think I might like to do something like this mod and run the wire up over the top, to prevent the inevitable twisting from destroying the wires in the future, but I'm uncertain I could pull it off without complete destruction.

(At least I know enough about these things to cringe when people start talking about the "performance" of their headphone wires. $400 for a hunk of wire? Wow.)

I can't figure out my phone

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:36:40 -0800

Bjarne Stroustrup said:

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

I have to agree. My phone at work is indecipherable. What do these buttons do?

PROG
Call Park
DND
VM Transfer
AUTO
DND/CF
EXT
FLASH
Some kind of little squiggle

To the best of my knowledge, there are only so many things you can DO with a phone. It rings, and then you pick it up and talk. Or it rings, you don't pick it up and it goes to voicemail. There are also HOLD and CONF (conference call?) buttons which I never use, but I'll allow that they can be useful. But the rest of those? In my wildest imaginings I can't fathom what they might do.

The phone also has a bunch of lights all over it. Sometimes they light up one color, sometimes another. Sometimes they blink and sometimes they light up steadily. There must be some kind of pattern to them but I don't know it. When lights start lighting up I start pressing buttons and talking to the empty room like a madman, and when someone talks back to me or the lights go out (whichever comes first) I consider that a victory.

What pioneer came up with hidden voicemail options? I call my voicemail, it tells me "To listen to messages, press 1, to do blah blabbity blah, press 2", etc. But there's a HIDDEN OPTION 0 to configure the voicemail, which the disembodied phone demon never tells me about. Why is this knowledge hidden? Is it too powerful for the average phone-user? Do you have to prove yourself worthy of the knowledge first?

I'd like to read a manual for the phone, but I don't think a manual exists. No one knows how the phones work at my job. What knowledge actually exists is sort of spread around via word-of-mouth, like the tribal history of some primitive civilization passed down from generation to generation by village elders telling stories around a campfire.

Is this what people who aren't good at computers feel like when they sit down at a keyboard? Do they look at a screen and see a bunch of meaningless squares and colors and words, where I see buttons and menus and useful GUI widgets?

Stylus DIY, hand health

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:39:52 -0800

The stylus that comes with a Nintendo DS is a very mild form of hand torture. Not sure whose hands those were designed for, but not mine. In googling for a good replacement, I chanced upon a blog post which suggests finding a nice big ballpoint pen and jamming a DS stylus inside so just the tip sticks out. This works amazingly well. It's not as portable, but I will make that sacrifice to prevent being crippled.

I am in fact always a bit worried about preserving the health of my hands. I have no hard data to support this, but I suspect my generation may have major hand-related problems in the coming decades. What with computer keyboards and tiny cell-phone and PDA keys and lots of other techy things. Many of us use our hands to communicate almost as much as our voices. Until we have Star Trek voice-recognition software, this will be a problem.

I started experiencing a lot of aches and pains in my hands and wrists a decade or so ago, and I attributed it to computer use. Since I started paying more attention, things are better. I maintain a very comfortable typing position for my hands. I have a nice big comfortable mouse. And so on. My hands don't hurt any longer nowadays, which is nice. If I become unable to type someday, I'm completely screwed. How can I work as a programmer if I can't input text into a computer? And I won't be able to draw or do origami or play video games or do many other things I enjoy.

Cowon D2 = awesome MP3 player

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:33:15 -0800

I finally broke down and replaced my crusty old Creative Muvo². Like any self-respecting geek, I agonized over which to buy. I settled on a Cowon D2.

I did tons and tons of research before settling on this. I knew exactly what I was looking for and the D2 met my requirements almost to the letter. So maybe I can save you some time and effort if you share my tastes. My requirements, which the D2 satisfies:

16 GB flash memory. More importantly, expandable via SD / SDHC cards. This means this thing is going to last me a good long time. 8GB of flash memory is $20 or less nowadays, and there are already 32GB cards though they're crazy expensive. The price is going to drop fast though, giving me almost unlimited storage space.
Shows up as a simple FAT partition. This is essential for me. (Also supports MTP, if you can stomach it.) Music transfer via Devices in Amarok 1.4 works just fine.
Folder browsing or ID3 tag browsing. I obsessively tag my music, so I like that way.
Supports non-Latin alphabet filenames and tags. Most of my music is Japanese, so this is also essential for me. Cowon is a Korean company anyways, so they've got this down. The interface itself can be switched to many different languages, which is nice.
Audio codec support: MP3, FLAC, OGG, WAV, WMA, APE. You can't beat that. All I needed was MP3, OGG and FLAC, but the others are a nice bonus.
52 hours of battery life for music, optimally. You'll never hit this in real life, but you're still likely to get almost two days worth of playtime. Comes with an A/C adapter, charges in 3.5 hours. Can also be charged via USB, of course. (The USB connector is a standard cable, no proprietary garbage, which is also nice.)
Displays album art, including embedded art in MP3 tags.
FM radio.

The only one of my requirements the D2 didn't meet was to have a replaceable battery. From what I've read of people who disassembled this thing, the battery is screwy and may be difficult to replace, but I'm not too worried.

The D2 does lots of other things I don't care about, like playing movies and displaying pictures and text files and Flash, and it has a scientific calculator and displays the time and so on. All I wanted this for was to play music, and it does that amazingly well.

The sound quality on the D2 is noticeably better than my old Muvo. It sounds very good. There are a lot of equalizer settings, bass boost, and a bunch of things I don't understand. I turned them all on, and everything sounds awesome. I can turn this thing up VERY loud (ear-shatteringly loud) before getting any distortion. With my Grado SR80's, music on the D2 sounds as good as or better than the sound card in my computer.

The touch-screen interface is good enough for me. I'm not thrilled by such things and I'm smart enough to adapt to any usable interface; "user-friendliness" was not on my list of priorities. I'd rather have power than simplicity, and this gives me the power I want.

This player is like the KDE of MP3 players; there are options for almost everything you can think of. The interface is crammed full of information but the stylus works well to get through it. If you like a dumbed-down minimalist iPod click-wheel kind of interface, the D2 isn't for you. The D2 also has three hardware buttons, two for volume and one for menu, and their function can be customized.

All of this for $175 from amazon.com. This is a very good time to buy a D2, because the next generation of Cowon players is right around the corner. The D2 is likely to be discontinued in favor of fancier, flashier, more expensive but less awesome players. I couldn't let this pass.

AnythingButIpod has a good review of this player including videos.

Please die already

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 23:19:36 -0800

My one and only MP3 player is (still) a Creative Muvo². Complete with all of the state-of-the-art technologies you'd expect in an MP3 player:

4 GB hard drive. They don't make them like this any more.
A microscopic two-line black-on-greenish-grey monochrome display. It takes so long for song titles to scroll across that the backlight goes out before I can read them.
Two buttons. Play, and a sort of primitive swivel thing for everything else.
2 cm. thickness, so you never have to worry about losing it. You can't miss it. (By comparison, an iPod Nano is 6.2 mm.)
Cheap plastic exterior. Mine has all the corners cracked off.
Inability to display foreign-language ID3 tags. My Japanese song titles show up in some mixture of Chinese and Korean characters.
All for a low low 2004 price of $250.

Well, it's old. I want a new one. But similarly to my darned Grado headphones, this thing simply won't die and I can't justify buying a new one while this one works.

It's been dropped from great heights onto hard concrete, had heavy objects slammed on top of it, had cell phone power chargers plugged into the USB data port, had the filesystem all but corrupted by unproperly unmounting it from Linux, but nearly four years later it just keeps going. It has a HARD DRIVE in it. You'd think just wearing the thing while jogging for years (which I have done) and banging it around on the front seat of my car to and from work every day (which I have also done) would wear it out. But no.

I don't want to just break the thing outright. So I'm subtly trying to mishandle it in more and more extreme ways, to maybe coax it into giving up the ghost. I sort of accidentally listened to it in the bathtub and splashed water all over it today (again), and now none of the buttons work and it keeps booting into recovery mode. Then I put it directly in front of a space heater for 15 minutes to dry it off. This is awesome, except that I tried the same thing before, and once it dried out it came back to life.

Next I'm going to pry it open with a screwdriver. But it's probably still going to work. I'm going to have this thing until I die. I'm going have to pass it on to future generations.

Westinghouse: behind the scenes (the horrors of a call center)

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:03:50 -0700

Recently someone purporting to be a phone rep from a Westinghouse call center left me a comment. After the months of pain, I appreciate getting some more information from behind the scenes. Given how many times I called Westinghouse, chances are good I maybe even talked to this guy once or twice (so hello again, anonymous Westinghouse guy!).

The situation at Westinghouse is largely as I imagined. Here is the comment, and my response follows.

Heads up for everyone ever trying to deal with a Westinghouse RMA.

I ?currently? work for the call center for Westinghouse. It is not our fault the service center will not ship you a tv, or even tell us why. Our database only lists information that has been typed in by other tech support reps, and occasionally things like a logged reciept, tracking number, or RMA number. And yes, it is true that we cannot transfer you to a manager, they do in fact have to call you back. Also, we literally do not have access to any contact information for the corporate office or the RMA center in any way, and even if we did, we are expressly forbidden from given it out. You'd have a much easier time searching for the contact on Google. We also have no way to change any of the Warranty policies, or give you free shipping labels for RMA. Those don't even come from a ?manager? at the call center, that all is done through corporate.

Basically, 95% of all of the RMA issues arise from the fact that a)the Westinghouse corporate warranty policy does not allow us any deviation on our level and b)the RMA center is the slowest, shittiest facility I have ever dealt with. Last I heard, there were litterally 5 people working there. Also, the fact is, there are far more returned RMA tvs than there are available to ship back to customers, and that is causing most of the shipping problems. But please don't call us at the customer service and expect us to be able get you a tv faster. We are in NY and ME, and the service center is in TX, we cannot ?walk downstairs? like some people would like to think.

If you do want to buy a Westinghouse tv for some reason, please PLEASE purchase it at Best Buy. We have an exclusive deal with Best Buy that if your tv breaks during the warranty period, you can call us to get a return authorization and bring it back to the store directly and get an exchange/store credit, even 11 months 3 weeks and 6 days after you bought the tv. Other than that, DO NOT buy one online, and I'm sorry to say it but, even at Woot, E-Cost, or any other online discount store. ESPECIALLY if it is a refurbished television.

And also, please, everyone, read the warranty policy on ANY expensive item you purchase, especially TVs. You'd be surprised what isn't covered under most electronics companies warranties. Almost every major TV manufacturer requires you to ship a defective tv back to them at your cost.

For all I know I can get fired for posted this online, but to be honest at this point, I could give a shit. Sorry everyone who has had to deal with a Westinghouse RMA, but please remember that if you have to call the tech support line, it really is not our fault, and there is almost nothing we can do.

I worked at a call center too (tech support and general billing/service for a residential satellite TV company); I lasted about four months. I remember very well the horrors of that job. Working at a call center should be classified as a form of torture by the Geneva Convention.

The main criteria of whether we were doing our job "properly" was how fast we finished the calls. Call volume mattered, not making customers happy. The second criteria was how closely we followed the scripts. We were told to never, ever deviate from the scripts, even when the scripts were completely bogus, redundant, or insulting to the customer's intelligence. And the scripts ARE insulting; they are written to appeal to the lowest common denominator of customer, by necessity. If I as a phone rep knew how to fix a problem and it deviated from the script, tough crap. Deviate from the script at your own risk. If someone was monitoring that call, you're in trouble.

At any given time, there was approximately one manager per 15-20 phone reps. If a customer asked to speak to a manager, s/he often got put on hold for a good 10-15 minutes by necessity; this is because I was 30 cubicles away looking for someone to take the call. And yet putting people on hold was a HUGE no-no, per company policy. It was a lose-lose situation.

The company under-staffed the center to save money, so the hold queue was always filled to the brim. By the time the customer got to us, they had been sitting and fuming on hold for 15 minutes or more. We also had an offshore call center in general vicinity of India, and those reps were only trained to take the most basic of calls. If there was a tech support issue or anything complex, it was transferred to us (resulting in another 15 minutes of hold before they talked to me). THOSE weren't fun calls.

We had to take calls non-stop for hours, until we got a specified 15-minute or 30-minute break. Breaks were measured DOWN TO THE SECOND. Aside from your breaks, you couldn't stop taking calls even to go to the bathroom or get a sip of water.

Phone reps are hated by customers, because they are the voice of the company for the customer. They are also abused by the company; the pay is terrible, the people doing it are desperate (few people take that job if they can find any other), and the company knows they're replaceable. Attrition rates at call centers are through the roof. Even people how stay at the call center aspire to become managers themselves as fast as humanly possible, so they can stop taking calls, so at any given time, the person you're talking to when you call a call center has probably only been working for 3 or 4 months tops. Phone reps are seen as little better than cattle by their employers.

So I definitely sympathize. In all of my lengthy dealings with Westinghouse, I was always polite, and the phone reps were generally polite back to me.

One thing that absolutely IS the phone reps' fault, though, is when I'm promised a call back, and then I never get one. This happened to me many times when dealing with Westinghouse, and there's no excuse for that. Or when someone says "Call back tomorrow and we'll have more information for you!" knowing full well that they won't. This also happened to me many times. Once the phone reps determined that they had no information for me, I was often told anything that would get me to hang up quickly.

If one girl at Westinghouse hadn't finally taken 15 minutes to somehow track down my first (lost forever) monitor, I'd never have known what happened. I don't know how they did it, but if a phone rep had done that sooner instead of two months of dodging my questions, I may have been able to get UPS to track down the first package.

If someone is unable to help me, they should say "Sorry, I'm completely unable to help you." A little honesty goes a long way. If I'd have contacted the corporate office sooner I could've gotten things done a lot faster, without all the run-around.

But yes, this comment reaffirms what I already suspected. Don't buy expensive electronics online; the price savings aren't worth the disaster you face when it breaks. And remember you're taking a huge gamble when you buy Westinghouse or any other "bargain" (i.e. cheap) brand.

(Read the entire Westinghouse saga, if you dare: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6, Update 7, Update 8, Update 9, VICTORY, aftermath.)

Crap... I fixed them

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:24:58 -0700

I couldn't give up on my precious Grado SR-80s. Turns out the cable was only broken in three places; nothing a couple hours and a lot of electrical tape couldn't fix. Now I can't justify buying a replacement.

They really do sound amazing. If only they weren't so fragile and difficult to transport. And ugly, for that matter.

Grado Labs SR-80: RIP

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:00:46 -0700

My precious Grado SR-80 headphones died today. :( I hardly new thee.

This picture may not be suitable for small children or those with a heart condition:

These headphones sounded really great, best I've ever owned. They should, for how much they cost. But they were designed so so so poorly. The cups can rotate 360 degrees, which means no matter how well you take care of them, the cables from the cups to the Y-splitter will get twisted. Once I realized this I electrical-taped the cables together to avoid some of the twisting, but it didn't help. No matter how carefully I wrapped the cords up and stored them in my briefcase, 10 minutes later I'd pull them out and they'd look like a tornado hit.

Today I plugged them in and the left cup was sputtering and hissing in its death rattle. I immediately put the headphones on life support and performed emergency surgery, but the left wire snapped in my hands. You can only twist copper so many times before it gives. What followed was a good 45 minutes of hacking away at the plastic Y-splitter to get to the wires. But it was no good. I think something broke in the cup too, and that thing is impossible to get apart no matter how much force I applied. I tried heating it up to melt the glue but that didn't work either. I made it hot enough that the working parts are probably a puddle in there.

I'm almost glad this DIDN'T work, because then I'd be wearing that mess on my head for another year. Now at least I can justify possibly buying a replacement.

I absolutely need music while writing code. Depending on my mood, either angry German music or cheerful Japanese music. Foreign-language music seems to be just the right mix of brain-stimulation without the distraction of needing to pay attention to the lyrics. So yeah, I'm now in dire need a of replacement. I have backups but they're the in-ear bud sort and aren't the comfiest thing for an 8-hour session. Plus they cancel noise too well and I can't hear my boss talking to me.

It took me MONTHS of research to find these, but I can't justify buying another set after these broke in a few short years of heavy daily use. I need something sturdy and comfy that sounds really good. I need good bass in particular. Back to the drawing board I guess.

EDIT: Crap, I fixed them. :(

Westingouse: Victory

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:51:33 -0700

It only took seven months, a report to the BBB, 30 phone calls, a half dozen emails, and threats of reporting Westinghouse to the FTC and CA Attorney General, but they finally sent me back my monitor. It's the one on the right there (with the very slightly crappier picture quality).

I must say, 3840x1200 resolution is pretty much a dream come true. I can have Firefox and Vim/Emacs open and nice and big, and still have room for lots of terminals, and maybe even a file manager or two. Multiple that by eight virtual desktops.

As near I can tell, it appears to e a new unit, not refurbished. If it is refurbished, it's refurbished well enough that I can't tell one way or the other, which is fine. However I'm still expecting this one to die too. My first monitor died in such a way that it wouldn't power on at all. This one is running very very hot, which scares me. I give it 3 months tops.

It makes me sad every time another person posts to my blog that Westinghouse is giving them the same horrible treatment. But hang in there. Lessons learned:

Don't buy a crappy brand just because it's cheap. I saved $75 or $100 on this monitor compared to a better brand, but it cost me over seven months of anguish (and $25 in shipping fees to send it back to the factory, and I had to buy a replacement!) Cheap things are cheap for a reason: The company isn't paying anyone to support their customers, or it's cutting corners in the quality of the merchandise, or something similar. Is it worth the gamble?
Don't buy anything expensive online unless you have a very clear method of getting it replaced if it breaks. Manufacturer standard warranties are evil. Is the time savings of shopping online rather than going to the local big box electronics store really worth it, if you have to pack up and mail your stuff to Zimbabwe for seven months?
UPS sucks. Hey UPS, how about if you don't drop off $500 pieces of electronics on a random person's front porch without a signature next time? I hope whoever ended up with my first monitor is enjoying it. (Actually I hope they die in a fire.)

(Read the whole crappy story of Westinghouse's dishonesty and horrible customer service: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6, Update 7, Update 8, Update 9, VICTORY, aftermath.)

Westinghouse: It Never Ends

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:40:00 -0700

(If you're just tuning in, long story short: I bought a Westinghouse L2410NM monitor November 2007, it broke March 2008, I sent it to Westinghouse (paying for shipping myself), they sent it back to the wrong address and didn't tell me about it for 2 months, I filed a BBB complaint, they didn't respond to that for another couple of months, and seven months and 30+ phone calls later, I still don't have my monitor back.)

My last post about Westinghouse's horrendous customer service and never-ending RMA process was titled "Westinghouse: Finally getting somewhere?". The answer to that is sadly "no".

I got a flurry of phone calls and emails from Westinghouse's corporate office, attempting to settle my BBB complaint. On September 12th, Westinghouse finally responded to the BBB, saying:

Company states, replacement unit shipped 09/10/08

Good news! I was looking forward to posting an end to this horror story.

However, today is September 24th, and guess what? No monitor. I contacted Westinghouse last week, asking for a UPS tracking number so I'd know when to expect my monitor. However, after being promised a phone call last Thursday that never came, and then sending an email Friday which was never answered, and then waiting three more days for good measure, it appears I'm once again being given the runaround.

So today I sent this email to my contact at Westinghouse:

Do you have access to Google? Please search for "westinghouse rma" and look at the top result. I believe it will be my website. I've been carefully documenting all of my adventures with Westinghouse for the past seven(!) months. On my website, many other people have related their own similarly terrible experiences being kept in the dark for months by your customer service departments.

You promised me a phone call on Sept 18th to provide me with a tracking number for my replacement monitor, but I never heard from you. I also never received a reply to the email I sent you since then.

The BBB was informed that a replacement monitor shipped on the 10th. If that was the case, I probably should've had it in my hands by now, given that it's been two weeks. Has it actually even been shipped? I suspect not. I feel as though I'm once again being given the runaround while nothing is done to resolve this issue. Please understand my frustration.

If I don't have a UPS tracking number by Friday, I'm filing a complaint with the FTC and the California Attorney General. They have a very easy-to-use form for filing complaints here: https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/ and here: http://ag.ca.gov/contact/complaint_form.php?cmplt=CL

My website only has a couple thousand readers, but I'm also going to cross-post my story to every online tech news aggregate I can think of (e.g. http://reddit.com and http://digg.com), which translates to tens of thousands more potential readers. The story I would like to tell is "Westinghouse finally sent me my monitor after seven months", but I'll tell it either way.

I look forward to hearing from you, --Brian

Look for this story on Reddit and Digg on Friday if I don't hear anything.

UPDATE: Well, I got a reply already. That was fast.

Your Fed Ex tracking number is 772xxxxxxxxxxx, you can track the package at www.fedex.com/tracking to see the progress of your shipment. Please keep mind that there was a delay at our warehouse and your unit is going to ship tonight.

Just a little two-week delay, I guess those things happen. Hopefully if/when it shows up, the monitor actually works. I've burned through seven months of my warranty and somehow I doubt Westinghouse will courteously extend it for me if this monitor fails too.

Westinghouse: Finally getting somewhere?

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:43:15 -0700

I finally got not one, but two phone calls from Westinghouse today, inquiring as to the status of my Better Business Bureau complaint against their company. This is of course in connection with the big expensive L2410NM computer monitor I sent off for repairs in March and never got back.

I actually have three different people's names to get in contact with at Westinghouse now, two or more of which are apparently supervisors. After I returned one call and was told all the supervisors went home for the day, I then received an unprecedented second call back from a different supervisor, saying she was on her way out the door but that I should call her tomorrow, and she gave me a direct line to contact her.

Some supervisors must be rooting through old BBB complaints and responding to them all, would be my guess. A phone rep let slip that there's someone working on "all of these cases... er, I mean, your case". The LA BBB still lists 69 unanswered complaints against Westinghouse, so I'm sure there's plenty of work to go around.

After six months of bullcrap, I can't get my hopes up at this point that I'm going to actually have this resolved but hey, you never know. In spite of my 21 phone calls to Westinghouse (and counting) and many promises of a return call, this is the FIRST TIME I've ever heard from anyone at the company. I'll be posting the result of my phone call tomorrow.

Westinghouse BBB rating: CC and falling

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:07:30 -0700

Thus continues the ongoing saga of Westinghouse, their low-quality electronics, and their incompetent or evil (I can't decide which) customer service department, who likes to take your broken crap and never bother sending you a replacement.

I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau in California, and Westinghouse never bothered responding to my complaint. The sort-of-good news is that Westinghouse's AAA rating has dropped to CC. There are 58 unanswered complaints listed on that site. I hope their rating keeps dropping until it lands squarely in the mud where it belongs.

Not that the BBB rating is going to do much good in the bigger picture, and it's not going to return the money I wasted on the monitor I'll probably never see again, but every bit of new business I can prevent that company from attaining is another victory in my mind. I've already cost the company far more money in new business than it would've cost them to just send me a fixed monitor to begin with. Plenty of people have let me know they aren't going to buy Westinghouse brand from now on. For every person that bothers leaving me a message on this website to that effect, there are likely many more silently avoiding the company, which is good.

I think another good idea would be for people to file some complaints with the California Attorney General's Office. Oh how I wish it was financially feasible for me to fly to California for a week and sue them myself. But maybe the AG can take action if enough people make a stink.

I'm going to be writing a letter to Westinghouse's corporate office, and I'm going to post their reply or lack thereof. I have little hope that I'll ever hear a response.

I've been getting a lot of people leaving comments describing their dealings with Westinghouse, and their encounters with Westinghouse's policy of making crappy broken electronics, then giving you the cold shoulder when you mail their crap back to them and try to get it fixed and returned. I feel bad (and angry) for everyone in the same boat as me, trying to get the people at this shyster company to do their damned jobs, so I'm not going to keep quiet about this.

Still no news from Westinghouse

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:46:38 -0700

I filed a complaint against Westinghouse to the BBB, but two weeks later they haven't responded to it yet. Can't say I'm surprised. The good thing is that if they don't respond to the BBB, they get a big fat stinking black mark on their BBB profile. Might not do that much good, but it hopefully will let others know to avoid them.

I've gotten some posts from some people in the same situation of Westinghouse blowing them off and not sending them replacement items when their crappy merchandise breaks. Some people want to file a class-action lawsuit. I don't know if I'd go that far. I may take them to small claims court though. Before that, I'm going to write a letter to their corporate office, pointing out the existence of my website.

In the meantime, conclusions:

Westinghouse doesn't give half a crap about its customers.
Never ship anything expensive via UPS. They're happy to leave $500 merchandise sitting on your front porch (assuming it even made it to my front porch and the UPS guy didn't just keep it, how would I know? I never saw it).
Beware buying things online. When they break, your options for getting them fixed or covered by warranty are limited, impractical, and prone to months of aggravation. Is it worth the time you save buying things online, when you have to spend six months going through the kind of bullcrap I went through over this monitor?

This is post is just a friendly reminder to everyone reading this, don't buy anything from Westinghouse, and tell everyone you know the same thing. I wonder if Westinghouse cares about all of the people whose business they flushed down the toilet by ripping me off?

Westinghouse, the saga continues

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:56:52 -0700

Friday a guy on the phone said he'd call me back Monday or Tuesday to give me an update on when / whether they're ever going to send me my monitor. Monday came and went with no call. Not really surprising.

I filed a complaint with the BBB today. We'll see how that goes. At the BBB Westinghouse has around 150 complaints in the past 36 months, but 133 of them were supposedly solved "satisfactorily" and Westinghouse somehow still has the highest possible rating at the BBB. I've read some things about the BBB not being an entirely neutral entity itself, but who knows. I'll start filing complaints with other consumer groups if I need to.

A good handful of people have left comments here at my blog saying they aren't going to buy anything from Westinghouse themselves, which is great to hear. I may mention my blog to Westinghouse next time I call them, if there is a next time. Is not sending me the monitor I paid for really worth losing a bunch of customers?

The sad thing is that I really do need a monitor with component and composite inputs, and they are somewhat rare (the local store had none except Westingcrap brand). However I have found a Gateway model that has them, so maybe that'll work out. I'd gladly take a refund from Westinghouse rather than a monitor at this point.

My desk

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:32:33 -0700

Following in the footsteps of Sean Potter I took a photo of my desk.

My desk itself sucks, but I'm moving again in a year or so and didn't want to invest in a good one yet. I'm missing one of my big monitors (thanks Westinghouse) and in the meantime I have to settle for that old Apple display as my second monitor.

My mousepad is an Icemat; can you believe the green ones were cheaper than all the other colors? That shade of green is clearly the best. And my keyboard is a tasty Saitek Eclipse II, which is one of the most comfy keyboards I've found to type on (and it glows in the dark). Nothing too exciting beyond that.

Westinghouse still sucks

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:55:28 -0700

Way back in March I sent in my L2410NM monitor for RMA to Westinghouse. This is June and I don't have it back yet. Last I heard they sent my case to their corporate office. I called again this week, call #16 or 17, I lost count, and I was told that they put in a request for a "status update", but having heard any update on it. I'm always promised a return call, but I've yet to receive even one of those. As of now they've promised to send me a new monitor and have given up hope of ever recovering my legendary lost monitor, and supposedly they even created the order in their system that will initiate the monitor-sending process, complete with a long string of letters and numbers representing my fates.

I almost wish they would say "Ha ha, just kidding, screw you customer, you're not getting anything from us" so that I'd feel justified in filing a complaint with the BBB. But no, they keep the carrot dangling in front of my nose, inching closer and closer to resolving this issue. Likely I'm going to do so soon though. Not sure if it'll actually help anyways.

I've already ensured that my friends and family will never buy anything from them, nor will my place of employment, and hopefully some people reading this will also refrain. The real problem is, what company is any better? I keep a mental list of companies that have screwed me over, but that list is becoming so large that I'm running out of companies I can actually buy things from. I can at least prioritize according to the level of suckiness. Westinghouse tops the list at the moment.

Westinghouse: FAIL

Mon, 05 May 2008 17:00:54 -0700

My ninth call to Westinghouse today, about my Westinghouse L2410NM 24" LCD monitor which I RMA'ed back in March, revealed that they did in fact shipmy monitor, supposedly to my house, on April 4th or so. A UPS tracking number confirms it. There are are a few things wrong with this.

In spite of the fact that I asked for a phone call to be updated on the status of my monitor whenever it was shipped, I received no such phone call.
During the four phone calls (or was it five?) I made to Westinghouse in April, AFTER my monitor was supposedly shipped to my house, no one at the company had any record that it shipped. I was told that by multiple representatives over the past four weeks that my monitor was "in processing".
I asked for my monitor to be shipped to workplace, not my house. My nice, safe, cozy workplace with human beings who can sign for large expensive packages. Not my empty house in a neighborhood full of drug addicts, in the property theft capital of the west. In addition to telling the phone representative this, I actually taped a 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper directly to the monitor itself (as well as the outside of the box) specifying SHIP TO: and my work address. Even such drastic measures were not enough to catch the attention of whatever magical monitor-repair fairies work at Westinghouse, apparently. Perhaps I should've carved that information directly into the monitor screen.
I could possibly overlook the above, except that, as you may have surmised, at the present time, I do not, in fact, have my monitor.

After calling up UPS to ask why their driver left a $450 computer monitor, in a shiny bright blue and white box with pictures of a computer monitor all over it, sitting on my front porch while I was at work without getting my signature, I placed call number ten (yes, I've finally hit double digits!) to Westinghouse, and managed to escalate my issue to the Westinghouse corporate office. Supposedly in 7-10 business days they will send me a brand new monitor.

Oh how I wish I had any confidence that I'm ever going to see that monitor.

In the meantime, this guy was on sale at the local store, so I bought one. Time will tell whether LG brand is any better than Westinghouse. This time, I also bought the extended warranty, having learned my lesson that it can, indeed, be worth an extra $60 to save myself some pain and aggravation later. I'm also going to think twice about buying things like this over the internet in the future. There is something to be said about being able to drive 10 minutes down the road to have your property serviced or replaced by real-life human beings, rather than paying to have things shipped around the world for a month.

Hello again, world

Sun, 04 May 2008 20:04:07 -0700

Computers are a love/hate thing for me. I love all things digital, but I desperately need to get away from it sometimes too. So I had a nice vacation away from my computer last week. I couldn't keep myself from reading some mailing lists and hitting Slashdot once a day, but I didn't write a single line of code and didn't give my websites or work projects or anything much thought.

But now my vacation is over, and it's so easy to fall back into old habits, endlessly looking at webcomics and reading articles about Common Lisp unit testing suites and cringing at the latest drama amongst Gentoo devs and minding my message board like a crusty old beat cop making his rounds. It's the life I've chosen, and I do like it, but I do like getting away sometimes too.

I fulfilled one of my dreams last week when I finally caved and ordered a solid glass mousepad. They're pretty cheap on newegg.com, depending on the color you want. I happened to want green, and it happened to be the cheapest, so all is well. It looks very nice, and it's big and hopefully the surface won't degrade over time; I tend to eat through mousepads via a slow yet inexorable process of erosion.

Unfortunately my laser mouse doesn't work on it. However, I have learned that if I upgrade my mouse's firmware, it will magically be able to work on a solid glass mousepad. Who would've thought my mouse had updateable firmware, let alone that updating the firmware would allow it to work on new surfaces? Not I.

The bad thing is that I need freaking Windows XP to upgrade the firmware on my mouse. I don't have any computer that has XP on it and I'm afraid to try anything in a virtual machine that involves something as dangerous as fiddling with the innards of connected peripherals. So I tried to install XP on my laptop, desperate times calling for desperate measures. But of course the install failed because my XP install CD is so old (pre-SP1, received free from my college 7 years ago) that it didn't recognize most of my hardware. In fact, the XP install CD blue-screened, which set a new record for how low Windows could sink in my opinion.

So I tried slipstreaming SP2 into my install CD. But it failed because, get this, the filenames of some drivers on the CD, namely usbehci.sys, ended up in lower case rather than uppercase and the CD's install program couldn't locate them. I kid you not. Since when is anything in Windows case-sensitive? Is it running Linux? I had to burn another CD after renaming all the files into uppercase. Then the CD worked, but it couldn't find my hard drive, probably due to missing SATA drivers. At that point I gave up, and plan to take my mouse to work tomorrow to upgrade the firmware on a work machine that has XP on it.

And so the score up to this point in my life is Windows: 947, Brian: 0. Windows remains undefeated.

Thanks go out to Logitech for not letting me use Vista (or, say, LINUX) to upgrade my mouse's firmware, and of course to Microsoft, for yet another gloriously broken and frustrating computing experience.

Westinghouse: the saga continues

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:31:08 -0700

I'm up to eight phone calls to Westinghouse now (about my RMA). (Previous Westinghouse enjoyment can be read here.) It's been almost a month, and no one seems to know where my monitor is, other than reassuring me that "they received it". I don't think I should be kept waiting in the dark this long.

When I first called today (call number 7), a fellow answered, then put me on hold for a while, then said "Please call back in 10 minutes, our computers aren't working!". This isn't what I like to hear from a supposed electronics company that's supposedly going to fix my huge complicated LCD monitor. When I called back in a half hour (call number 8) their computers apparently were working again, and they put me on hold for a while longer and then said essentially "Dunno. Call back tomorrow between nine and noon and we'll have more information for you." At this rate the number of calls I've made will hit double-digits by Friday.

I can now safely conclude that Westinghouse = suck. The next rank beyond "suck" is "shyster". I'm hesitantly confident they can achieve that lofty status, given their track record so far.

(P.S. it's still a Westinghouse L2410NM 24" LCD monitor.)