Zombie Dinosaurs

On a recent flight, I was thumbing through a magazine and found an awesome advertisement (download the whole thing). Check out the headline:

Well, to be accurate, it’s not quite a headline. It’s more like a massive pull quote that just happens to be where the headline should be. And right next to it? A picture of some dude from 1963. Who is this amazing hasn’t-yet-heard-The Beatles-guy? Who knows? The article never once mentions his name. Did he write the full page advertisement? Good guess. But no, the ad (which, I should point out, is less an advertisement and more a full page of densely formatted text, sort of like a high school newspaper editorial) is attributed to this lady:

Okay, maybe Richard is a red herring. Perhaps I should stop worrying about him and concentrate more the message in the ad. You can get the gist of the ad just from the headline/pull quote/rambling introduction. You see, even though Mr. Wetherill was photographed on his way to his Bewitched-era public relations office*, apparently the author of the article had fully internalized John Lennon’s Imagine, because this is a full page plea to imagine all the people/living life in peace. Try this on for size:

Whatever this thing is, you might want to pull out your checkbook, because it holds the key to eradicating—once and for all–100% of the world’s poverty, crime, law enforcement, lawyers, drug dealers, and locksmiths! You heard me right… locksmiths! Sign. Me. Up.

Oooh, wait a minute. You totally had me, but as I continue reading, I start to get a whiff of crazy sauce.

Really? But you just put all the cops, lawyers, and locksmiths out of business a few paragraphs back. What are all those folks going to do for a living, in this Land of Full Employment and Unique Opportunities? Maybe picking beans on the The Leader’s farm. And I’m intrigued; how exactly do we get nonpolluting vehicles out of this deal? Is that like the free toaster that comes with my checking account? Maybe you’ve got a warehouse full of bliss-powered hoverbikes sitting in China, waiting for us to sign up?

But wait.

These people can freakin’ control the weather! That’s right; all the Hope you’ve been saving up for Barak Obama will first cause in wholesale bankruptcy of the global locksmith cartel (okay, I can sort of see that), but then also unexpectedly result in gentle, misty rains and 5 mph winds out of the NNW, every day, forever more.

Seattle will be totally awesome without all the rain.

*Maybe he’s an architect.

You don’t come here for entertainment advice, I get that. In reality, only my mom comes here at all, and even that’s usually only by accident when she’s actually trying to start Solitaire. But, damn. Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a masterpiece that will go down in history as one of the greatest works of art ever produced.

Watching Neal Patrick Harris sing his way to world domination as Dr. Horrible will give your life meaning. By the time you see this, it will probably no longer be free, but it’ll be worth buying no matter what the price. (Though that price is just $3.99 for all three acts from iTunes.)

Update: You can now watch it on Hulu for free.

While visiting my parents in New Jersey last week, my sister took me and the kids out to dinner. Marin pointed out a game on the supposedly kid-friendly placemat which, in our collective opinion, is the creepiest thing, well, ever. I might never get a good night’s sleep again. Who designed this thing – Harlan Ellison?

All I wanted was some pizza. Instead, I will forever be haunted by the bone-chilling knowledge that a few strokes of my pencil can endow these that these faceless cornfield zombie children with the power to see me. 

The saga continues. It has now been 5 months since I ordered a Dell XPS 720, and the system suffers frequent unexplained bluescreen crashes. I’ve talked to uncountable tech support techs. I still don’t have a working computer.

Since the last time I described my problems with my order, Dell told me they could not exchange my system for a different model; they would only swap it out for the exact same specifications. So they sent me another XPS 720, which I decided to set up in the most scientific manner possible. I created an Excel spreadsheet and logged every single thing I did to the system. I noted every app I installed or removed; when I rebooted; when I changed the screen resolution; when I installed a peripheral. I discovered that my first bluescreen was a mere 5 hours after unboxing the system, and I had done nothing more complex than uninstalling crapware and installing Microsoft Office 2007. As time went on, I noted the bluescreen error code of every failure.

Want to see the details? You can grab my spreadsheet and read it for yourself.

After the first bluescreen, I called Dell XPS support, and the tech promised, after investigating my issue, that he’s escalate my problem to level 3 tech support and I’d get a call back within 48 hours. That call, of course, never came. I waited a few days and tried again. A second time, I called and let the level 1 tech tell me how easily he would solve my problem with some inane solution like running the hard disk error check utility, and eventually he agreed to upgrade me to level 3 support–with that mythical call back after 48 hours.

No call came. Lather, rinse, repeat–I’ve called Dell four times now, and four times I’ve been promised a call back with level 3 support, and each time I am glad I didn’t cancel any special dinner plans to wait by the phone, because I’ve never gotten any kind of call back.

So after 5 months, what am I to do? I am genuinely stumped. Dell apparently has no "customer advocacy" department designed to solve problems like mine. They won’t call back. They don’t give a shit. Keep in mind that I spent over $3000 on this system.

Fans of this blog — and by "fans," I mean my mom and about 10,000 spambots — might recall that I bought a Dell XPS 720 back at the end of October, 2007. It didn’t work, so Dell swapped it for a replacement, which I finally got in January, 2008, after enough frustration to run some sort of futuristic locomotive that is powered entirely by frustration.

Well, the replacement didn’t work, either. And while I haven’t been blogging about it, I’ve spent the last 2 months troubleshooting the problem, with occasional (and relatively indifferent) assistance from Dell.

First, a very short summary: The XPS 720 locked up frequently (and by that, I mean the mouse would freeze, all desktop activity would cease, and then, after about a minute of eerie quiet, the machine would bluescreen and then reboot).

This tended to happen a few times each day, and generally seemed tied to high hard drive utilization, such as when installing an app from DVD or trying to back up the hard drive. Not always, though. Occasionally, it would just lock up and bluescreen when the system seemed relatively idle.

That was how the first XPS 720 behaved. It had come with with Windows Vista Home Premium installed, but as soon as I got it out of the box, I immediately upgraded the machine to Windows Vista Ultimate. But as soon as I began installing apps from DVD, I noticed it locked up intermittently. I contacted Dell, who had me try some common troubleshooting, and though we didn’t find any specific problems, Dell decided to send me a new machine.

When the new machine eventually arrived, I decided to leave Home Premium in place in case the upgrade to Ultimate was somehow to blame. Again, I started installing apps and, pretty quickly, I noticed this new machine was locking up just like the first PC. It continued to lock up on a frequent basis, making it borderline unusable. Now bear in mind that I wasn’t installing buggy, insane stuff with names like CrazyPhishingSpooferPro — I was installing Office, Photoshop, and a handful of popular games, all ordinary stuff that ran just fine on my old Windows Vista computer. For backup, I use (and continue to highly recommend) Casper to clone my hard drive to a second internal drive. It was incapable of making it all the way through a backup; the machine would routinely lock up before the backup was complete, leaving me without a backup. Check out the Reliability Monitor snapshot above for a peek at how my machine handled itself through the month of January.

Each time it crashed, Windows Error Reporting would tell me:

So Windows was implying there was a problem somewhere in the storage subsystem. Maybe the hard drive itself, or the hard drive controller, or perhaps some filter driver or software interfering with the hard drive operation. That certainly seemed plausible, since the system most commonly hung when the hard drive was doing heavy duty.

So here are just some of the ways I tried troubleshooting:

• Disabled most of the services that seemed suspect, including the Sidebar, TIVO Desktop, and Startup apps like iTunes and Photoshop gunk
• Uninstalled anti-virus software
• Uninstalled Capser even though Future Systems tech support assured me Casper was completely benign
• Checked all the cable connections to make sure they were secure
• Ran Dell’s diagnostics that tests memory, hardware, and the hard drive, including SMART tests
• Underclocked the processor
• Ran MEMTEST and swapped out the RAM for different memory
• Swapped the hard drive, installed Windows from scratch

Since I had the exact same problem on two computers, logic dictated that it was a software glitch, not a hardware problem. But even that seemed increasingly unlikely as I winnowed down the possible causes. I was going out of my mind–I had seemed to rule out hardware problems like CPU, motherboard, memory, or hard drive, and I was running a machine that had little more than a handful of extremely common applications on it. And trust me, I was pretty exhaustive in my troubleshooting efforts.

Which is more than I can say for Dell, which exhibited only mild interest in assisting me. Each time I called tech support, they’d pretty much start over with doing asinine Tier 1 troublshooting tricks like deleting the files out of the Temp folder and disabling stuff in the Startup folder. More than once I had a tech delete the files from Temp and insist valiantly that the problem was completely solved, not unlike poor Lieutenant Gorman, who insisted "the area is secure, Ripley."

Once I had a tech tell me to run a suite of tests overnight. He said that if the tests didn’t complete in 6 hours, there was something radically wrong. I called back the next day to say the tests had been running for 12 hours and were only a tiny fraction complete. ‘Never mind,’ the new tech said, ‘that test doesn’t tell you anything, and it can run for days.’ His solution? Wipe the hard drive and start from scratch to see if the problem went away. I got that kind of conflicting support on a number of occasions.

When I asked to be upgraded to Level 2 support, I’d be promised call backs which never came. I took to emailing Dell’s Unresolved Customer Service Issues every single day, and sent them perhaps 15 requests for support. Dell’s web page promises a reply within 24 hours, but they never responded to me. Ever. Not even once. Ever Ever.

Finally, after 2 months of this, I called customer service and asked to return the system. That’s finally when something started happening; a tech support rep scheduled a house call to replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory. For a week after the motherboard transplant, I didn’t have any bluescreens. Which was a record for the XPS 720, which would bluescreen on average once every 36 hours, assuming I was not trying to install software or back up the hard drive (in which case it would bluescreen more or less on cue). But then the bluescreens came back with a vengence. I had 4 in one day, then one or two the next. And yesterday, the machine bluescreened so many times I lost count — more than 6 times. And that’s after disconnecting every external peripheral.

In inserted a fresh hanrd drive, popped in a Windows CD, and watched in amazement as the computer bluescreened during initial setup.

So what isthe problem? Beats me. I’m now trying to get in touch with customer service to negotiate a refund. While I won’t fault Dell for the actual hardware problem, they definitely deserve all the credit for the worst customer service experience in recorded history. Just some of their crimes:

• Losing my order. Several times.
• Taking weeks and weeks longer than promised to ship. Twice — both on the original order and the warranty replacement.
• Lying to me about the order status on more than one occasion.
• Promising to send, but then refusing to honor, a $200 gift card promotion because of a rule no ordinary customer should be expected to anticipate.
• Repeatedly failing to contact me or follow up on tech support.
• Failing to offer on-site support or hardware replacement until I asked for a refund.
• Providing generally crappy tech support that was far, far inferior to what I was capable of doing on my own.

And just in case you’re curious, no, I’ve never gotten anything like an apology from Dell for this fiasco. The closest I’ve gotten to an apology, in fact, was when they took away the $200 gift card I was supposed to get with my order. Could have been worse, I suppose — they could have kicked a puppy in my name.

I have wanted to get back to the voice recognition in Windows Vista for a while. I had messed with it a year ago, and was impressed with how well it worked. But I don’t like having a wired microphone hanging off my head–it limits my mobility–so I abandoned it. This morning, on a lark, I tried it out again with a genuinely awful mic that was unable to reach a minimally acceptable recording level. I was pleasantly surprised that, despite the overall crappiness of the mic, I could use my voice to launch Word on the first try. Then I dictated a short test paragraph, and got, well, this:

The lunch with a time that I thought unlikely to live with how-to thing you can voice recognition. On the other hand, the 13th inning with a platoon of that that have the legal level made it very difficult for me to live each day.

I will very much enjoy going back and reading the text that my head that has interpreted plumbing. I suspect it may be a stream of consciousness local alternate reality led by all the words like they are converted into a different language, and in venture of a high and low pay and which not only that he realizes that have anything to do a lot of religion and fled.

I wonder how we’ve done?

There’s nothing from Halloween chillingly Korean about all of that.

Remember my $3000 paperweight with the cool Dell logo on it? The story isn’t over yet.

Indeed, I’ve never had such a highly concentrated collection of problems with a single purchase in my entire life. First of all, let me point out that after waiting for a replacement XPS 720 for a month, the new machine exhibits exactly the same bluescreen behavior as the first system. I’ve spent the last 2 months troubleshooting this system, and it still bluescreens on average once every 1.5 days. I’ll post more information about that soon — looks like I’ll be returning it to Dell for a refund, if they will let me. Jury is out on that right now.

But in the meantime, Dell has found another way to screw me!

When I ordered my original XPS 720, the Dell web site promised a $200 gift card with the system. To make a long story short, it never came. So about a month ago, I called Dell XPS customer service (which is awesome, because unlike standard Dell tech support, you always seem to get a North American call center rather than somewhere in New Delhi) and got a wonderfully polite, helpful person who promised to rectify the situation. She said that she would get my gift card sent out to me soon, but if I hadn’t received it by the time I wanted to place an order, I should just e-mail her and she’d credit my account $200:

Now, I wasn’t too enthused about relying on that offer of crediting my account, so I figured I could wait for the gift card to arrive before ordering my 500GB external USB hard drive.

A month passed, and no gift card. So I sent the nice lady an email to see what happened to it. I got this terse, gruff reply:

Wow. Dell customer service reps are no longer allowed to communicate with customers via email? That’s odd, because I still get this message in e-mails from Dell:

If they won’t reply to emails anymore, you’d think they’d stop asking you to, you know, reply to emails. But okay, fair enough — Dell is erecting even more walls preventing customers from getting a satisfying customer service experience, and they seem to take some perverse satisfaction in frustrating users in the process. Makes sense. Kids like to set ants on fire. It’s the same principle, I suppose.

So I called customer service, and was told that I didn’t qualify for the system because I ordered it over the phone. But I didn’t order it over the phone — I ordered it via the web!

Nope, apparently I didn’t. As soon as I talked to a customer service rep about the order several weeks later, it became a phone order. No one told me that by picking up the phone, I had suddenly forfeited $200. Lesson learned: Dell is evil incarnate. Now I know. And that external hard drive? Obviously, I’ll buy it elsewhere.

Well, I’m pleased to announce that my latest book has hit the stores. I’ve revised How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera to its glorious 5th edition. I should point out that Osborne McGraw-Hill has decided to drop the grammatical connective tissue "with your" from the title, so now, it’s apparently just called "How to Do Everything Digital Camera."

I’ve pointed out to anyone who cares to listen that revised book title now sounds like a self-help volume aimed not at digital camera owners, but instead at the digital cameras themselves, packed, perhaps, with advice on empowering these little electronic marvels to do anything they set their minds to. As if the titling editor was inspired by Phil Hartman’s classic "Let’s Fix, Robots" sketch.

Well, that’s neither here nor there. The book is available, and I’ve extensively updated it with all sorts of new information–it’s the biggest update this book has ever gotten. There’s now a chapter dedicated to Digital SLR owners, with advice on keeping the sensor clean. There are details about how to create hyper-realistic images with High Dynamic Range, infinite (or stacked) focus, false close-ups, and more. The file format chapter has been dramatically reworked to include the most up-to-date information on working with RAW images (as well as JPG and others). The book talks about managing photos in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. And, of course, many of the photo examples are new, including the entire color section in the middle of the book. You’ll still find essential information like understanding exposure, how to compose a photo and control lighting, as well as how to edit a photo on the PC. This book is ideal for beginner and intermediate photographers.

It is available at Amazon as well as your neighborhood book store. Go buy a copy for yourself, and get a few more for friends and neighbors. Remember: not only is this an awesome book for anyone new to digital photography, but buying enough copies might bring forth world peace, cure cancer, and summon magical unicorns that will fly us to work each day without the need for carbon-emitting automobiles.

Do you want to save the planet? Show it by buying my book.

My family got Rock Band for Christmas, and it’s something of a hit. We all play it quite a bit, both as a Partridge Family-eque family band and on our own. Evan tends to play guitar; Marin usually sings. Kris switches between guitar and vocals, and I play guitar and drums, though, as is my real-life proclivity, I tend to stick with drums most of the time.

Why, you ask, am I mentioning this now, in mid-February, when Christmas was so long ago that I was still in the early stages of trying to get a working Dell XPS 720?

Well, here’s the thing: as cool as Rock Band is, the kick drum pedal is a horrifically bad example of engineering. Mine broke after just 3 weeks of use, and based on the volume of information about this on the intertubes, it appears to be a reasonably common occurrence. The problem is that the pedal itself is a wafer-thin strip of plastic, and if you tend to put the ball of your foot near the top of the pedal, you end up putting fatal amounts of stress on an un-reinforced section of the assembly. Inevitably, it cracks and then shears right above the spring.

Now I should point out that Harmonix is pretty good about replacing these things under warranty, and I got a new pedal pretty fast. But guess what? About 3 weeks after it arrived, I noticed it was already cracked, meaning it was within days of failing yet again.

At this point, I considered modifying a real kick pedal for Rock Band as documented on Metafluence, but I didn’t want to invest quite that much energy into the problem. Nor did I have a spare pedal to donate to the cause, and I certainly wasn’t going to buy one just for Rock Band — pedals aren’t cheap.

So I took my own cheapie road to fixing the problem. After all, the real problem here is that if you tend to thump the pedal much higher than where the spring contacts the pedal, every downbeat flexes the footplate. It’s only a matter of time before it cracks. So I cut a new footplate out of spare half-inch plywood and then secured it to the top of the pedal with enough epoxy to fasten an elephant to the roof of my house. 

Marin pointed out that since I tend to play Rock Band while wearing socks (which is odd, because I always wear shoes when playing “real” drums), I should sand it to avoid getting splinters. So, after a few minutes with a belt sander, I ended up with a kick drum pedal that has a smooth footplate with gently rounded edges, and which should be virtually indestructible.

I’ve owned a few Dells in the past, but my current purchase might just be the last. I’ve had an almost indescribably bad experience buying my current PC. Well, it’s not indescribable, I suppose. In fact, I’m going to describe the experience right now.

I placed an order for a Dell XPS 720 with the Q6600 quad-core processor back on October 31. To give you some hint about why I’m so angry, here’s teaser: I’m still waiting for it, 2 months later, and no one at the company can or will tell me when to expect it.

That’s the short version of the story. Here’s a more detailed version, told in bullet form:

• I created a Dell Preferred credit account (to get 6 months same-as-cash) and placed an order on Oct 31. The estimated ship date was in about 10 days.
• Almost immediately, $1100 in charges were added to my account that did not belong to me. I called right away, and a rep told me the charges were accidentally placed on my account due to a technical glitch, and they would be removed from my account within a few days. After a week, those charges were still there. I called several more times. Finally, someone gave me a completely different story: now the mysterious charges were a fraud problem, and they sent me paperwork to complete in which I had to swear they were not my charges. Several weeks later, the charges were removed.
• On November 9, I received notice that the PC was delayed. I called Dell, and a customer service rep said that it was delayed for the processor — and helpfully suggested that if I got a different processor it might ship faster. Seemed like a good idea, so I upgraded to the Q6700 processor, for an extra $800. This resulted in the order being canceled and re-created from scratch. New estimated delivery date was around Thanksgiving.
• After a delay, the system finally arrived on December 3.
• I immediately noticed the Bluetooth headset (a $100 option) didn’t work in stereo mode. After several hours on the phone with tech support, they decided it was a hardware problem and shipped me a replacement headset.
• After a few more hours of setup the next day, I noticed the system crashed regularly. After several more hours of troubleshooting on the phone with Dell, they said they’d ship me an expedited replacement PC. Notice, it’s December 4. Replacement system scheduled to arrive on December 11.
• The replacement Bluetooth headset arrived. Same problem: they didn’t work. Is this because of a fundamental problem with the PC (after all, the PC was crashing frequently and probably had some significant defect) or there’s a driver problem, and perhaps they simply don’t work at all with Windows Vista? I don’t know (yet). I suspect it’s the latter, but currently the jury is still out. For that to be true, Dell would have to be selling a Bluetooth option with Vista computers and not know it doesn’t work. Conceivable? Read on about their overall competency, and decide for yourself.
• When the expected ship for the replacement PC date came and went without so much as a status update on the Dell web site, I started calling. I was especially concerned that there were two different, contradictory ship dates indicated on the site, depending upon where you looked, and both were increasingly in the past. I got rep after rep after rep in about a half dozen different calls who all insisted that (1) their screen showed the system "in production," (2) please be patient and wait for the system to arrive and (3) there was nothing to be done, it’ll work itself out.
• Eventually, after about 4 days of this, I got someone on the phone who confirmed my fears–that the order was indeed lost or mis-configured and we needed to cancel it and re-create the order from scratch. On December 19, yet another order was created, now with an  estimated ship date of December 26.
• Here it is, December 28, and history repeats itself. The system has not shipped, the order status is woefully inaccurate on the site, I’ve gotten no email updates from Dell about the status of the order, and several different support reps continue to tell me that there’s nothing anyone can do except wait for it to someday ship. I have essentially begged for someone to escalate this to someone who can actually do something, but it appears to be falling on deaf ears. "We’re a mail order company," one rep helpfully explained, as some sort of mind-boggling excuse for why it’s impossible for customer service to actually talk to someone in production about the status of my ghost PC, or perhaps to escalate the issue to a manager who has a more holistic view of the overall order/production/customer service picture and effect an actual solution. 

Wow. I’ve talked to a slew of reps, asked to be escalated several time, and I continue to not find a single person at Dell willing to actually "own" this problem, advocate for me, or find out what the real issue with my order actually is. I’ve been waiting for this PC for a few days shy of 2 months now, and spent $3300 for the pleasure of getting jerked around by Dell.

Unless something dramatic happens soon, there is simply no way I will ever buy a Dell again, or recommend a Dell to anyone I know. This is the kind of service that makes you wonder how the company can remain in business.

I’ve wondered what Dell could do at this point to win me back as a customer. And to be honest, I’m not sure. It would have to be quite a gesture.

~~~

Update: December 30: no change to the order status, and no communication from Dell despite numerous requests for assistance.

~~~

Update #2: I got a call from someone who identified herself as "Dell corporate customer service" yesterday, December 31. (Though the person had an Indian accent, so I highly doubt I was getting a call from Texas.) She reported:

• My system was being expedited (but wait — I thought they said they were doing that already..? Is it now Super-Duper Expedited? Or was it not really expedited previously, despite what they told me? Or was it expedited before, and nothing is really changed, making her now a liar? Ah, my head hurts.)
• It was being held up because of a missing/backordered component. I asked her what part that was, and she said the Bluetooth headphones. That’s right, folks–according to this woman, the $3000 computer isn’t shipping because of a $50 pair of headphones, which they could easily slap in the mail separately. Or so she claimed. In reality, I really, really doubt that this system is not being sent to me because they’re sitting around saying "We need to wait for the headphones, Ed. That computer is useless without headphones."

And today, I see the system has been inexplicably canceled again, with a new order number, resetting their clock on the delivery date yet again! Now it has a new estimated ship date of January 8. That’s right, Jan 8. That’s 3 weeks after customer service generated a replacement order, after they lost my first order. And it’s an entire month after they promised to rush me a computer to replace the non-functional one they sent me that I ordered at end of October.

Wanna start a pool on when it REALLY arrives? If it ever arrives? If you ask me, they should give it to me for free.

~~~

Update #3: The system shipped today. Interestingly, even though Dell claimed they were going to ship it Next Business Day, apparently it went out Second Day. This is the email I received from Dell this morning:

This e-mail is a follow up to our conversation concerning Order number 916848917. The replacement system under Order number 995209833 has shipped via DHL on 01/08/2008 and is estimated to be delivered on 01/10/2007.

Honestly, what gives?

~~~

Update #4: It’s here. It appears to work. Of course, the Bluetooth stereo headset does not work, but really folks, who honestly expected it to? After all, Dell only advertised it and charged money for it — expecting them to preload the proper drivers and ensure it functions is a bit too much to ask.

Nonetheless, on Day 73, the Dell Ordeal appears to be over. Thanks for reading.

~~~

Update #5: I spoke too soon. This replacement PC doesn’t work either. More to come in another blog post…