Phasor Burn

DSC_4517.dxo, originally uploaded by SmugBastard.ca.

I forgot to take notes… something from the monkey section of the Calgary Zoo on my birthday this past summer.

I think it may be a Cotton-Top Tamarin.

I was a happy Dell customer from about 2000 through 2005, back before I converted over to Apple’s products. The next business day onsite repair service, for a notebook under such a contract, was quite impressive for the three or four times I needed it over the life of the notebook.

Time changes everything.

Robert Cringley is not happy with the product quality nor service experience he has received with a shiny new Dell netbook.

My son Fallon’s Vostro A90 netbook, which I wrote about right after Christmas, was finally repaired successfully by Dell but now the Vostro thinks it is an Inspiron 10V.

…I got a call from Dell support saying that had received the Vostro for a second motherboard replacement and I’d be getting an update from them just as soon as they heard from the repair depot, probably within minutes or hours.

…But I knew most obviously that work had been done when I booted the A90 and it told me as the BIOS loaded that it was now an Inspiron 10V.

…Maybe I should be glad that my $200 netbook now has the motherboard of a $350 netbook. … The last time I got a shuffle like this was when a Chevy 350 engine appeared inside my new 1976 Oldsmobile. GM paid customers millions to cover that executive decision.

…This is just slipshod support. Maybe they’ve already discontinued the A90 and are out of motherboards. … Dell is supposedly committed to supporting my machine and they didn’t do it. Worse still, when I reported this back to my “official contact, ” he quoted Customer Support as saying that they had sent me an e-mail that I never got.

If they are lying to him and lying to me, then they are lying to you, too. Worse still, if they’ll play this fast and loose with a tech blogger with 300,000 readers, then Dell simply doesn’t give a damn about any of us.

I suspect Dell has started it’s final decent into receivership . . .

Read the full article here

Bank Job, originally uploaded by SmugBastard.ca.

Clearing the way for the west LRT expansion, the Scotia Bank at 17th Ave and 38 Street West has been torn down this past week.

Today the jackhammers were making slow work of the bank vault.