Welcome David James Degutis
Born 2:32 pm weighing 8lbs 9oz and 20″ long. First photos:
Archive for June, 2008
Samsung’s “Customer Service”?
My son bought a Samsung TV a couple years ago and did not buy the service plan. This year his TV stopped working and he took it in for repair. Two months later the repair shop calls to say that they will not be receiving the part from Samsung but Samsung agreed to replace the TV with a brand new 2008 model for only $400. Great! Awesome! The TV comes back from the repair shop and he has to contact them to arrange for payment and delivery. He has to pay with a credit card in his name, which he does not have. So he looks into getting a pre-paid card but then that wouldn’t have his name on it. So one more month later we call them together and they finally agree to let me write a check and send that to them. The check was written on 6/3 and mailed the same day. Since then he has called them a couple of times a week to arrange for the shipment and exchange of his TV. Each time they tell him the check has not cleared yet. So I check with my bank and they have not even deposited it yet! Supposedly they were going to deposit it this week but as of the night of 6/27 they still have not deposited the check. Why does it take a month to deposit a check? From the initial conversation with Samsung they said once the check clears it would take 14-21 days. Guess we should have asked how long will it take you to deposit the check so it CAN clear!!!!!!!!!!! I went from thinking that they had great customer service based on the $400 exchange price to thinking it’s TERRIBLE customer service for stringing him along for so damn long. Hope I NEVER have to deal with them again.
Photoshop for the iPhone
Adobe sent a representative, a software engineer, to the Midwest Astro-Imaging Conference which I organized and hosted last week. I was able to get him to share some details on a future version of Photoshop. I’m pretty excited after seeing this product demo of Photoshop for the iPhone, as I plan to get the 3G iPhone in July.
- Al
Predicting how your baby will look
Web service MakeMeBabies.com attempts to predict what your baby may look like. So I put it to the test with some family members that are expecting. I used two different pictures combinations and ended up with two different results (no surprise).
Set 1: |
Set 2: |
Here’s the control part of the experiment:a prediction of Steve and Nikki’s kid followed by their actual son. |
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And for the real life results: |
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My 3G iPhone Thoughts
When the iPhone was announced last year I wanted one, but didn’t get one. Why? The price. Even the price cut two months later couldn’t sway me to get one. At that point the allure had worn off. Reports from the street were in and the iPhone was great, but not perfect. At that point I decided to wait for the second generation iPhone. So I waited… and wait… impatiently if you ask my family.
This week Steve Jobs announced the 3G iPhone. It’s a definite improvement from the first generation iPhone, but it’s still has it’s imperfections. Well, imperfections we need to guess based on reading between the line. You know, the things that Steve Jobs didn’t mention: copy and paste, video recording, etc.
One of the big announcements was the price cut to $199 for the 8 GB model and $299 for the 16 GB model. The stories quickly came out that the price savings will be erased by the addition $10 per month AT&T will charge for the unlimited data plan. Umm, okay but when someone purchased a first generation phone at the hire price, either the original price ($499/$599) price or the discounted price two month later, they still had to pay for an unlimited data plan, right? Sure that data plan cost $10 less per month, but they paid a lot more for the phone in the first place and still had to pay $60 a month. I’m not a mathematician but the new pricing doesn’t add up to the cost of using a first generation iPhone.
The 3G iPhone will have a lot going for it, such as 3G (not an issue for me here in farmland, see the 3G coverage map below where blue depicts 3G), GPS and iPhone apps. Plus the enterprise support, specifically Cisco VPN and Exchange, two technologies that I use at my day job. Hurray.
Is this enough to get me to finally buy one? Yep. I would have purchased one on June 9th if they were available. Even after the keynote hangover, followed by all the sobering bad news (such as the data plan price increase).
One last note: a shout out to GeekBrief.tv, Engadget and Gizmodo for their live coverage of the keynote. GeekBrief.tv was able to get a live audio feed of they keynote which they provided through their studio. Thanks!
-Al
AT&T 3G Coverage Map (Blue designates 3G coverage)
Steve Jobs vs Twitter
Which one will be the last one standing? Since there’s no Vegas Odds on this, at least that I could find, here’s your chance to vote:
Results updated in the sidebar (there seems to be a delay).
Created using Google Spreadsheets.
A Day at the Races – Bed Races at Harvard Milk Days
We have been to the carnival during Harvard Milk Days, but this year was our first exposure to the Big Wheel Race and 15th Annual Bed Race. Next year we’ll enter Topher into the big wheel race.
-Al
Please, please, please get VMware 6!
I get the impression that The VMware Team really wants me on their team:
-Al
![Topher & Haily Dancing [video]](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4122/4916771751_9e25b4034d_s.jpg)
