Many of us know that good customer service is hard to find and the ever increasing number of overseas support teams makes the experience all the more aggravating. With all the complaints companies must hear about overseas tech support I am suprised cost is more important than customer satisfaction. It would make sense that a customer would become more aggravated when they are having a problem, having to hear a solution they dont understand, and even worse when they can’t understand what that person is saying. I am in no way speaking about the abilities and intelligence of people from other nations, just that accents can be a big barrier for communication. I have developed hearing problems from equipment I have used and from what I have heard may be passed down from my grandfather. This hearing problem I have makes it very difficult for me to hear certain pitches. I can be standing close to you and have a hard time hearing you because of the pitch of your voice. Background noise also effects that. It doesn’t matter if you are male or female if the pitch of your voice drops or increases to just the right level you will get a “Repeat that please” or “What?”.

Anyway back to the main topic. In December 2003 I purchased a Dell 1800FP UltraSharp monitor for $400 shipped off of eBay. At the time the going price for the monitor was $460. The monitor was great, no ghosting or any other problems; at least until August of 2004. In August of 2004 the monitor completely died on me. I searched and searched and came up with nothing. I called Dell and asked them to fix it, but because the warranty was not transferred to me they said nothing could be done. I tried to contact the seller but that did nothing but get me in touch with someone that said he had been using their cell phone.

I finally found out that it was the internal power supply which you cannot buy from Dell seperately. A group of people found that you can replace the psu with an LG one, which was matched using FCC documents. After moving to California and back and not having it fixed in that time I found a company that you can purchase refurbished power supplies from and just never got around to ordering it. About a week ago I mentioned something in a post about how I wanted to get it fixed and that is where it all started.

I recieved a comment from a fellow named John Blain, a Dell employee who is a customer advocate. He threw out the idea that it might be a power cable, but that was the first thing I checked. I sent him an email outlining what happened; how I was told I could not get it fixed because the warranty was not transferred and so on. He returned asking me for my service tag, which was never on the monitor. I was able to forward a copy of the email I recieved from eBay when I won the auction. In his reply he said the following, “The attachment was instrumental in finding the identity of the person who sold it to you.” and continued to tell me how there was a problem with his account that kept him from doing anything, but he felt something could be done. Keep in mind that his reply to my email was sent on Monday, November 20, 2006; 1 week and a few emails later I recieved an email stating it was shipped. Today, November 28, 2006 I recieved a 1907FP. The box was labeled refurbished, but how can I complain. The 1800FP was no longer produced and since my monitor had a 3yr warranty I was given a replacement. The 1907 is a huge improvement, 1 inch larger, rotates in just the right places and you can change the height with 2 fingers.

None of this would be possible without the help of John. So to anyone having Dell problems take a look at the following link and send them an email. If they try to contact you I think you should work with them, whether it is Dells way of trying to get more customers or just keep the ones they have the end result is most likely going to benefit you.

http://www.direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/11/19/3648.aspx

To John, Thanks for all of your help, it is suprising how much such a small gesture can mean to one person.

A couple posts ago I went on about the software decision between OpenOffice and Office 2003. Today I am trying to make the decision between IDEs and I am hoping someone can give me some advice. I’ve used WingIDE and I’ve used Komodo, PyAlaCarte, and Pythonwin, but have been unsatisfied. When I first used WingIDE I was in love, but recently I found that the auto-completion doesn’t include the items I need when I need them. I read something about another IDE called SPE or Stani’s Python Editor and so far I am very impressed. It runs quick, the code completion is very good and it has a lot of nice features. I wouldn’t say that it is the greatest, WingIDE seems to complete the imports while SPE and Komodo havn’t been. I will most likely purchase a WingIDE license sometime either that or just use it on open source projects, for which they provide a free OSS developer license.

I have three main technology goals for 2007:

- Learn Python
- Learn Linux; primarily Slackware
- Prepare for a MySQL Certification by 2008

That’s right, I’m a slacker. I decided to start using Linux more and more because I really need to improve my skills. I am running Slackware 11 after having problems with PHP and MySQL on v9. I never did figure out what my problem was, it seemed like I wasn’t the only one having it, but no solutions were found to make it work. I am in love! I am mad at myself for not using linux more often, I think I just didn’t give it enough time. Whether you are a power user or basic user linux is a big learning curve. If you are a basic user of Windows you probably do not understand how DNS works, how to configure things via the command line a lot of skills that power users are used to doing. If you are a power user and you move to linux you are probably required to use Windows in your daily life, either programming on it or using it for something more than a work processor. This causes a couple problems; the first being you have to relearn a lot of method of altering the system configuration and learning the vast array of commands available on linux. The second problem is making sure you can maintain a working knowledge of both at the same time. I am not a computer so my memory is not perfect, but I would have to say it is pretty good, but when I try to learn too many things at one time it is not as effective. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t remember their name if people didn’t use it while speaking to them. Recently I have had to explain how to network a printer about 15 times and each time I was showing them how to do it. This is a bit off topic I guess, but I don’t understand how a person can’t understand that if they want to learn something they need to pay attention and be willing to learn. Computers are not easy for everyone to learn, but it gets to a point where you shouldn’t think about becoming an expert if you can’t pick up some simple actions.

Now that I have ranted about people I have to deal with I will get back to the subject. My original goal was to avoid doing anything in X unless I could remember how to do it in bash. That has worked out so-so; I do all editing from a terminal on my windows machine using vi. I had forgotten about cat so I have also been using vi for reading of files, so I have started to use cat file | most as of 10 minutes ago. I have spent a lot of time in the past two days just moving around, learning permissions and editing with vi. Obviously those are not the only things; I am not a slow learner. There is so much to learn though.

Other than just the general need to learn it more thoroughly my recent desire is to prepare myself for my next employer. More employers are requiring Linux knowledge and with what I know now I feel comfortable using it or a regular basis. I am very hopeful I will get the job I interviewed for recently, but we will see. I have already commented on the interview so I will not go into that now, but not hearing from them at this point hopefully means they didn’t rule me out right away.

Wow, I started working with X-Win32 and ran into a lot of problems and couldn’t find any solution to actually getting KDE to show. So lame it was easy in the end, but I just spent hours doing it and forgot I even wrote this post so it is time to go to sleep. Night people

I have spent a lot of time trying to go through this massive collection of data I have downloaded over the years. I tend to run across things and look at them later, I download them to make sure I have a copy incase it goes away and I never get around to actually looking at it.

We all have to make decisions on what software we use and with all of the opensource and/or free solutions available nowadays it makes the decisions harder. I have made some very clear choices:

MySQL, PHP, Python for most of my development needs. My IDEs are commercial, I have tried to use some opensource IDEs but none have met my needs. Eclipse looked good, but while I did not spend enough time going through it I felt it was too generic. Eclipse was built and plugins handle each individual language, etc. I am in no way bashing Ecliplse, obviously with such a large user base something is giving these individuals what they are looking for I just did not see the benefits in my short use of the software.

RSSOwl for reading syndication. 99.9% of Java programs I have used are ugly and slow, RSSOwl is the exception in most cases. The software does not have that ugly Java look and it moved quickly for the most part. So I highly recommend checking it out, I cannot think of too many features it is missing, for my needs at least.

One thing I have no yet been able to make a decision on is an Office Suite. I was a big OpenOffice user, but I changed to Office 2003 when Outlook became my preferred email client. I use it primarily because of its large feature list and the VERY clean contact management. Now that I am learning C# I may create my own contact manager that mixes some of the features of Windows Address Book and Outlook 2003. The problem with that is that I now use Plaxo and I would have to learn how to integrate that into the software as well. Now that I am off topic I will get back to my point. I ran across some OpenOffice articles that outlined some of the features that were new since the last time I actually used it for something. I found that when I opened the software I was reminded of the features that made OpenOffice so nice, but it is missing a number of things I feel it should have.

In a perfect world, OpenOffice and Microsoft would get together and create a free office suite that combined the features of both pieces of software. I say in a perfect world because that will obviously never happen. Office has been one of the life preservers around Microsoft’s neck. Windows gets pirated by many just as office does, but I think that office is one piece of software that may keep people from moving to Linux, there are just too many features and it operates much smoother than OpenOffice in many respects. That is just my opinion though, I know it has been a factor keeping me from moving to Linux, but there are a lot of other applications I would have to do without as well. I will not bash either piece of software, but if you are only using Office I recommend you compliment it with OpenOffice

I have been tooling around with C# and I am loving it. In high school I took C++ and we used Borland with special libraries that were basically crap. So some of what I learned is very wrong and I can use very little of it. One thing it did teach me is control structures and variables and so on. That knowledge has helped me to learn PHP as quickly as I did and what looks like a quick study in C# too. C# seems to have the same structuring and usage as C++, but that ease of programming that Visual Basic was known for. Knowing only how to do only a few things in VS I was able to create a Windows application that used a slider to adjust the opacity of the application and you were able to open a file and calculate the MD5 hash of that file. Very basic, but something for a project I was working on.

One question I do have is, will all programs I create use a lot of memory? Is it all of the C# base classes in the application or what? This application was about 40kb and it used 14mb physical and 13mb virtual, seems a bit high for such a small application.