..but I can dig it. (License plate: ‘A RED CAR’. On a red car. A red Honda Civic to be specific.)

[And yes, my apologies for the poor quality of the photo - it's what you get when taking a photo at 45mph with the crummy camera on an HTC Kaiser. Sorry.]

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1. Lots of rain in a short period of time != good roads

As I mentioned in my previous post, we purchased a 2009 Mercury Sable that had been smoked in by the previous owner. The smell of smoke wasn’t horrible, but it was enough to give both Tiff and I sore throats while test driving the car (we’re both sensitive to smoke.) If you’re interested in what we did to eliminate the smoke smell, please read more!

The first treatment was performed by the dealership. They use the Auto Vaccine product by Biocide Systems. While I was sitting in the dealership waiting for the salesman to get some paperwork done, I had done some quick research on my phone, and this is the solution that I found that most people recommended – so I was glad to hear that they use it. From the reviews I found, here is the recommended procedure:

1. Get the car in a garage or other area that is not exposed to sunlight (apparently sunlight breaks down the product.)
2. Seal up the car – put all the windows up, make sure the seals on the doors are good, etc.
3. Try to make sure the product can reach all corners of the car – open all compartments, if seats can fold down for trunk access fold them down, fold the visors halfway down — basically, if it can be opened without blocking access to another part of the interior, open it.
4. Start the air conditioner in ‘recirculation’ mode. (Not sure if most people leave the car running for this, or put it on a battery charger, or what.) This will allow the product to circulate through the ventilation system.
5. Place the Auto Vaccine in the car, and follow the directions to start the chemical reaction.
6. Leave the car and make sure it’s sealed tight.
7. Let sit for 24 hours.
8. Open all windows and doors, and let the car air out for at least 3 hours.

When we picked up the car from the dealership after the treatment, there wasn’t a smoke smell in the interior anymore; it just had a slight chemical smell. However, when we fired up the air conditioning, there was a definitive smoke odor again (which faded to near-nil after shutting the AC off) — I have a hunch they didn’t let the product circulate through all the vents. The dealer included a second treatment in their deal, but we don’t have time to let the car sit for 24 hours at the moment, and I decided to try a few treatments myself.

The first one I did myself is a treatment with 1Z einszett Klima-Cleaner. It is basically a can of foam with a tube about two feet long that you feed into your center air conditioning vent and spray the foam until the can is empty (it took ~4 minutes for me – felt like forever!), which will cover the surface of the evaporator core with their foam. Then you let it sit for 30 minutes, and then start the car and run the AC full blast for a few minutes. This worked magic on the smoke smell from the AC – it was horrible before the treatment, and I couldn’t smell it at all in the air coming from the vents after the treatment was finished. I did read a review on the ‘net where the poster mentioned the foam sprayed all over the place; it turned out that he turned the can upside down while applying it, which apparently can cause the foam not to get all the way down to the core. So when you fire up the AC, whoosh, foam! If you try this, be careful and follow the directions on the can. They do warn on the can to follow the vehicle manufacturer’s cleaning instructions or to have a certified technician apply it – I’m imagining this is because of the possible damage that could be done if this product were to be applied incorrectly.

After that treatment, I could smell a slight smoke smell on the interior surfaces again (probably because it circulated out of the AC after the Auto Vaccine treatment.) When I purchased the 1Z cleaner, I also picked up a can of Dakota Odor Bomb – neutral scent. I figured I would give this a shot, as the reviews I had read of it said a few hours was enough time. I did the same steps I had read about for Auto Vaccine (above), except I didn’t run the AC during the process (since I had just treated that.) I went ahead and unleashed the bomb. The next morning, I let the car air out for a bit, and found that there was a nasty film all over the entire interior – blah! I spent the next half hour or so wiping down the interior to get the film off, and then went to work. The smell was really strong for a few days; once it started to fade, it was actually much better – no hints of smoke left, so it seems it did some good. However, if I were to do this again, I would probably not use the Dakota product, but find a time to do a full Auto Vaccine treatment again – it costs a bit more, and takes more time, but we didn’t have any of the nastiness with it!

A picture of the car while being fogged with the Odor Bomb

I also noticed that the leather on the car seemed a bit dry (not sure if it was because of the Auto Vaccine, Odor Bomb, or if it just hadn’t been treated before), so I picked up a container of Lexol 3-in-1 Leather Care Spray. I applied it using a microfiber cloth, rubbed it in with a small brush, and let it sit for about 5 minutes before wiping it off and polishing with another microfiber cloth. I had great results with it; the leather feels much better than it did before – smoother and softer. I will probably reapply this a few times over the next few months to ensure the leather’s in good shape, and then keep it up on a semi-regular basis to keep the leather nice.

The steps above have much improved the smoke scent in my car – as of right now, I can’t even smell that it was ever smoked in. If you try any of these, or have other tips for getting rid of the smoke odor, I’d love to hear about it!

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1. Oh Passat, how I will miss thee… (or, “my tale of a new car”)

Our beloved 2007 Passat just came up on lease end, which means that it was time to decide if we wanted to keep it, or if it was time to go car shopping.

We loved the car, but our old Passat (which we traded in for this leased ’07 Passat) ended up costing us a ton of money just for routine maintenance as it got over the 60,000 mile mark. Note that we didn’t have any real problems with it; all the maintenance was either routine (oil/lube/filter, other fluids, belts, etc) or replacement of wear components (brakes, boot on the front suspension, etc.) We hadn’t had to do any of the expensive work on our ’07 Passat – we basically just had to do 4 oil changes in the time we owned it.

Here’s some of the expensive / annoying repair notes from our previous Passat:

1. All the parts were significantly more expensive than the equivalent components for cars I’d owned in the past (all domestic.) A lot of them also weren’t stocked by the general auto part delivery places (NAPA and similar), so the repair shop would end up having to order the part from a local VW dealer, which cost more and caused delays.
2. The car required ‘specialty’ fluids in some cases – for example, the engine coolant was VW-specific. Again, it had to be ordered from a VW dealer.
3. I found that I couldn’t have the maintenance done at any generic repair shop – for example, I had trouble with quick-oil change places (Valvoline specifically) breaking components while doing oil changes as they didn’t have the VW-specific tool to get the filter out, and also had problems when I had a Goodyear Gemini location replace a front suspension component (I believe it was a control arm) due to a leaky boot (apparently there were two slightly different versions of the control arm for the year and model that I had, depending on the engine type, and they ordered the wrong one. When they dropped the car off the lift, the part snapped. Oops!) After this occured, we decided only to have maintenance done at either a VW/Audi dealership or at a specialty import mechanic.. which means more expensive labor on future repairs.
4. VW “highly recommended” replacing the rotors with each brake job.. something about high-performance rotors that will only last the life of one set of brake pads. Of course, both parts were more expensive than the domestic equivalents.
5. VW required synthetic oil for all models. Nothing wrong with this (lets me go longer between oil changes), but still has a bit of sticker shock when changing the oil.

..and the one thing that did apply to both the old Passat and our ’07 Passat — expensive gas (they require premium – although I have heard that you can do ok with regular gas, didn’t want to risk it.)

However, I really did love our Passat, and we had driven way less than the contracted miles on our lease.. which meant that the residual amount on the lease (the price we’d have to pay to purchase it, plus taxes of course) was slightly under the wholesale value of the vehicle, and therefore a reasonable deal. I tried to get some independent confirmation of what my gut was telling me about maintenance cost, and after some searching, I found Edmund’s True Cost to Own tool. Punching in both the 2007 Passat and a 2007 Impala (domestic car kinda/sorta similar to the Passat?), I found what I was hoping not to find – that the Passat was more expensive to maintain.

Passat TCO:

Impala TCO:

The only columns that I’m really paying attention to are the ‘Maintenance’ and ‘Repairs’ – the rest are kind of out of scope, as we plan on driving the car into the ground.. 5-year maintenance+repairs on the Passat ended up at $7005, and the 5-year maintenance+repairs on the Impala ended up at $4985, for a $2000 difference.. kind of a big jump.

So, we decided to go ahead and find another car.. we came up with a list of requirements:

• Relatively new (2005+) with fairly low miles (under 50,000 or so.)
• Capable of comfortably seating four adults or two adults with two car seats – this means a fairly large car, as I’m a tall guy, and an adult or a rear-facing car seat won’t really fit behind me in many vehicles.
• Decent gas mileage – we have a Trailblazer for our second vehicle (which Tiff currently drives most days, and for rather short distances), and since I have a ~25 mile commute, keeping a car with good gas mileage around is a good idea. The Passat averaged 30mpg on my way to work, so we wanted a car that would get similar mileage.
• Leather seats – child+dogs == mess – it’s amazing how much easier it is to clean up leather than cloth.
• Inexpensive maintenance that any mechanic can deal with – from my experience, this means either a domestic or a very common import.
• As inexpensive as possible (ideally, $10k – $15k) – we were trying to come in with a payment on a 60-month loan that saved us a decent chunk of change compared to the Passat lease.

After many gruelling nights spent on Edmunds, Craigslist and Carsoup, I ran across Alliance Car Sales. Their offerings intrigued me, as it seemed that they sold primarily low-mile late-model vehicles, and for prices that were quite good. I shot them a (very, very, very, very long) email with what I was looking for, and got a reply back from Dave in short order with a few suggestions, and asking when Tiff and I could come out to check out some cars. (They buy cars off auction, then use them as a rental fleet until a customer is interested in buying one of the.) We were able to meet Dave a few days later, and tried out a few cars. When we went in, we were considering the following, in no particular order:

• 07+ Pontiac Grand Prix
• 07+ Chevrolet Impala
• Any year Ford Fusion / Mercury Milan
• 2005-2007 Ford Five Hundred / Mercury Montego
• 2008+ Ford Taurus / Mercury Sable
• Recent model Hyundai Sonata
• Recent model Nissan Altima
• Recent model Honda Accord
• Recent model Toyota Camry

Note – the 2008+ Taurus/Sable are actually the Five Hundred/Montego with an upgraded engine.. very different from the Taurus of old. They are larger, get better mileage, have a much more modern design – in fact, they share their platform with the Volvo S60. I personally wouldn’t really consider a previous-generation Taurus or Sable.. heard way too many horror stories.

We were able to knock off the Sonata, Accord, and Camry just due to size.. the Altima would probably work, but they were quite expensive, so we dropped that too. The Grand Prix and Impala (I guess they are essentially the same car, like a Taurus vs. Sable, just different body and trim) worked, but they were hard to find (and expensive) in leather. All of the Milans and the Taurus that Alliance had in stock were out for rental, so we met on meeting Dave later on in the week when he’d have them back on the lot. (Side note – if you are in the metro area and interested in a newer used car, I highly recommend Alliance – it was really great to work with a person who was only interested in getting us the right car, and didn’t give us any pressure at all. Dave was even willing to offer me advice after I told him we were purchasing a car elsewhere – who else will do that?)

..and then one of my Craigslist RSS feeds turned up something interesting – a loaded ’09 Sable Premier at a Mercedes dealership for a very reasonable price. The car is newer than we were really looking for, and also more expensive ($16,500.) However, it had everything we wanted (plus more), and would more than meet our goal of lasting at least five years – it’d even have a warranty included for the first couple years. I stopped out at the dealership for a test drive, and only found one issue with the vehicle.. it had been smoked in by the previous owner (who only owned it for a few months.) The smoke wasn’t super-heavy, but both Tiff and I are sensitive to cigarette smoke, so this could be a problem for us. The dealer assured me that they had a solution to fix that, so I went ahead and took the car to my mechanic for a mechanical inspection, which it passed with flying colors. I also got his impressions on how the cars were to work on in general (going back to the Ford Five Hundred / Mercury Montego days, since they are essentially the same car, just with a smaller engine), and he said they were generally quite reliable, and were one of the better cars out there for repair costs, etc. An Edmunds TCO backed this up:

Granted, this is for a new Sable (they don’t have 2009 available for ‘Used TCO’ yet), but the 2008 was there for used, and came out at $4746 for maintenance and repairs – still quite good. Short version – we signed a purchase contract on the vehicle, with a stipulation that we had to be satisfied with the smoke scent after their treatment, and then agreed to purchase it the next day (they used the Auto Vaccine treatment, which worked fairly well – however, it did leave a hint of smoke behind after the scent of Auto Vaccine faded away, especially when the AC was on.. the dealership promised to do the Auto Vaccine again whenever we desire, but I decided to do some cleanup myself in advance of that – will detail what I was able to do in a future post.

We’ve liked the new car quite well so far; it’s big, comfortable, has tons of features, and gets good mileage.. but it’s a sedan, not a sports sedan. Ah, Passat, how I will miss you! Especially the tiptronic transmission..

I hope the next owner of our goold ‘ol Passat will love it as much as we did! :)

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At my day job, we purchased 3 Sun (er, Oracle) 7210′s (part of their ‘Unified Storage’ platform; the machines are X4540′s with their specialized Unified Storage OS) on the recommendation of one of our vendors. The models we purchased contained 48 250gb disks and 32gb memory — no SSD’s. Our intent was to use these for our VM image storage (VM infrastructure is Xen, using LVM-over-iSCSI to the 7210′s.) We planned to install two units in production, one in our DR environment, and to use ZFS replication to have VM disaster recovery bliss.

It’s been a disaster.

Update [2010/02/26]: Sun has really stepped up to the plate and gotten the right people on this issue. I’m not sure if it’s what I posted here, the numerous ex-Sun contacts that I had who pinged people they knew, or the president of our VAR hammering at some of his contacts within Sun/Oracle. I will keep updating as we work towards RCA’s and a resolution.

Update [2010/08/27]: Thanks to some hard work from our reseller and people at Oracle, we were able to return these units a few months ago. I wish we had been able to work through the issues with Oracle, but needed to get something that we could trust online ASAP. For the record, I do think that we probably did receive a “batch” of bad units; I still have not heard from anyone else who has had multiple independent units fail simultaneously as we did. I will also keep comments open here, and encourage anyone who has had great deployments to post a followup – I do believe that there are people that have had great success with these units out there, or else they wouldn’t be selling so well! :) And again, thank you to the hard work from our reseller, and for all the people from Oracle (and those who used to work for Sun but did not move to Oracle) who did their best to help us!

Here’s the pre-sales issues we had with the unit..

1. ZFS does not use traditional raid controllers, and uses your system memory as cache. This is great for reads (massive cache!), but for writes, it means that it’s extremely dangerous to turn write caching on. The memory used for write caching (which could be up to 32G in our system, or more in one with more memory) is not battery-backed, so if the system fails in any way (power supply failure, crash, power failure, etc.), any data in that cache is gone. On a “normal” ZFS configuration with SSD’s for the ZIL, there wouldn’t be a need for write caching in memory – data is cached on the write-optimized SSD’s, and if your system crashes, it will still be there. However, the model we ended up with does not contain a SSD, and the Sun Oracle-supported SSD for this unit is around $6000 (18gb ‘Logzilla’.) YIKES.
2. Without SSD or write cache (we need the write cache disabled for the reasons described above), the maximum streaming synchronous write speed I have been able to get over iSCSI is ~35MB/s – that’s with triple-mirrored disks. With this configuration, if I have multiple virtual machines running and start a write-heavy process, the other VMs will slow to a crawl with high I/O wait. Not acceptable in production.
3. For the reasons above, I firmly believe that Sun Oracle should NOT sell any ZFS-based storage appliances without SSDs – at least not without a big warning sticker that says “Make sure you can afford to either lose any data in cache (in some environments this would not be a huge issue), or work with the speeds described above.
4. Sun Oracle no longer offers Try-and-Buy programs. We’ve been told that once you open the unit, it’s yours. Not a strong sign that they are confident in their technology. Oh, and we were told this after we had purchased and installed the units.

Now, for the technical problems we’ve been having..

1. The DR unit has had problems since a few days after we installed it. It’s been throwing fan errors, which Sun Oracle has told us is a ‘firmware bug’ with no fix (even though it only happens on one of three nodes) – the workaround is to restart the service processor. It also has had a bad CPU, and worst of all, it started rebooting every night. Sun Oracle support had us jump through a zillion hoops for over a month to try to debug the nightly reboot issue, replaced various components (including the motherboard), and never came up with a workable solution. Then, a few weeks ago, after 4-5 days of not touching the system (I had been assigned to other tasks and the coworker who was taking it over was on vacation, plus a weekend), the reboots suddenly stopped. We were never able to get the reboots to either alert Sun Oracle via the phone home mechanism, or trigger the alerts we had set up via the web GUI – even though it was rebooting unexpectedly. There was no easy way to figure out that it had rebooted, in fact – I ended up having to go to the shell (naughty!) and run ‘last’ to see the reboot times. If we were relying on the GUI, and didn’t have monitoring set up of the system (which is what alerted us to the reboots), we wouldn’t have known until we put a production load on it — which, since this is a DR unit, would only have been when we failed to our DR site. Sun Oracle support has not been able to offer a RCA, except to say that whenever it rebooted the mpt driver threw errors. Since it ‘fixed itself’, Sun Oracle considered the case closed. The combination of the machine being flaky from the start combined with the fact that Sun Oracle couldn’t debug the issue has made us push for a replacement unit, but it seems nobody in Sun Oracle support has the authority to replace a chunk of hardware that can’t be trusted.
2. A few weeks into debugging the issues with the DR unit, both of the production units (which were taking a test workload) developed problems at the same time. One of them stopped answering on the VLAN that we were running iSCSI on (which was trunked on top of the management VLAN; that VLAN continued to work fine), and the other turned itself off. The best part is this happened within 10 minutes of each other. Again, Sun Oracle support is unable to give us a root cause for either issue. The systems are completely isolated from each other physically (separate circuits, separate racks in different areas of the data center, etc) — the only shared component is the network (both are dual-homed to two switches.) Nothing else in the data center exhibited any issues during this period – the switches didn’t show any oddities, other systems and PDU’s on the same UPS branch did not show power issues, etc. Again, Sun Oracle’s response was “if it happens again let us know.” Even though we would have taken a full production outage of _everything_ because of this. Again, neither of the units triggered the phone-home or self-alert functionality when these issues occurred.
3. When troubleshooting with Sun Oracle, their first step is to reboot the system into a debug mode. These are production storage appliances – having to reboot to get a RCA for a previous issue is *not* acceptable! Again, this makes it feel more like “this a server that should be in a redundant zero-shared config” more than a storage appliance.

Really, I can understand technical issues; they happen with every product. However, it appears that the way the specialized version of Solaris is set up on these, they are incapable of getting useful logs. On top of that, the support has been worse than useless. They have chewed through a ton of our time (we’ve probably spent at least 4 man-weeks working with them on this), and have not come back with anything useful. After escalating the tickets, nobody has the authority to either replace a box or allow us to return it. The escalation process is slow and doesn’t actually really seem to do anything; after requesting escalations, we don’t get higher-level contacts (the only way I’ve managed to do that so far is by blind-calling the service center when our regular tech wasn’t available, and requesting a callback), and the people it’s escalated to still have no power to resolve our issues. Every time we request escalation it also seems to slow the process by at least a few days – it’s crazy. The support people all seem to want to help, but the system is stacked against them.

So, right now I’m stuck with 3 7210′s that have all had issues, that I don’t trust in production, and I can’t return. Thanks a lot Sun Oracle! What happened to the old-fashioned Sun, where the gear was way too expensive (and yes, these 7210′s were expensive), but the support made up for it?

My advice to you if you are looking at a Unified Storage appliance is to run far away – the ones with SSDs included would in all likelyhood perform as expected, but the quality of the support and lack of customer service will scare me away from ever making a Sun Oracle purchase again.

Update [2010/02/24] – After chatting with many contacts that I used to have within Sun, I have changed most of the relevant ‘Sun’ names to ‘Oracle’. It seems that when Oracle purchased Sun, many, many good people were let go. Bummer.

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Last night, Minneapolis was the first stop on Skillet’s Comatose tour, with Thousand Foot Krutch and Decyfer Down. It was at Club 3 Degrees, which is a small Christian club on 1st and 5th downtown. Tiff and I went with a friend, and met up with one of my coworkers and a couple friends at the show.

The doors were set to open at 6:30, we showed up around 6:40 after parking, and the line of people was wrapped around the block. I took a look at the number of people, tried to figure out how in the world they were all going to fit in the club, and then decided not to worry about it. ;) We finally got in around 7:00ish, and found a spot that wasn’t too crowded off to the side. The sound wasn’t the greatest where we were, but the view was much better than the shorter people in our group could have gotten from the floor.. next time I go to the club, I think I will have to pay the $50-$75 for a private table on the first row of the balcony, however.. get a great view and good sound from up there.

Decyfer Down opened up. I’d never heard of them, and I think I will still maintain I’ve never heard of them. Just didn’t interest me.

After about a half-hour set change (eesh), TFK came out. Their show rocked! They were really able to engage the crowd and keep things moving. Unfortunately (for me!), most of the songs they sang were from their new album, which I didn’t even know existed until yesterday afternoon.. but they did pull out a couple of their old songs, which was great.

Then came Skillet. From the moment they got on the stage, they had the crowd moving – it was great. If you’re not familiar with Skillet, they are a bit of a unique band – the lead singer (John Cooper) plays bass, they have another guy on guitar (Ben Kasica), John’s wife Korey is on keyboards and guitar, and they have an unbelievable female drummer named Jen Ledger. They also have an cello and violin in many of their songs, which is pretty awesome – how often do you see a rock show with strings other than guitars? In any case, their entire performance was unbelievably sweet – by far the best concert I’ve been to. I just wish I had gotten there an hour earlier, so we could have gotten a good spot on the floor – but ah well. ;)

If you ever have a chance to see TFK or Skillet in concert, all I can say is do it!

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Where I live (Savage, MN), I don’t have much of a choice for high-speed internet other than Mediacom. They are the local cable company.. I don’t qualify for DSL, the wifi services in the area don’t reach me, and a T1 is just too expensive (and slow!).

Unfortunately, they have been having outage after outage (they are down right now – this is the second outage that has lasted over four hours in the last two weeks), they don’t have battery backups in my area, so if power goes out, they go down, etc, etc. When they are down, they also refuse to give an ETA of any sort on when it will be back up, and I’ve had employees be extremely rude when I ask about it.

I really, really wish I could get some other provider that is actually reliable (and/or actually cared) for under $400/mo.

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Original Post: August 14, 2006 @ 20:18
This morning, around 9:00, I took my dog out on a walk, and there was a strange car across the street from my house. When I walked across the street, a guy I didn’t know walked up from behind the house with what I thought was a towel draped over his arm. I said hey, he said “how’ya doin?”, and I noticed that he had really bad teeth. Then, he got into his car and drove away. Something was bothering me about him, so I took a look at the license plate, and walked back behind the townhouses (it’s backing up against a nature area), and took a look around.. I didn’t see anything unusual, so I assumed he must’ve been there for a reason, and wrote it off.

Then, tonight we were walking Chimo again, and noticed a police car by the neighbor’s house. I asked our neighbor what was up, and it turned out that someone had gotten into their house through the back porch door, which was unlocked, and stolen some items, including a ring and and a pillowcase. The timing was perfect – they had been gone from ~8:30-10:00 this morning. I gave the police officer all the information I could remember (make/model/color of the car, a general description of the guy, and that the license plate had sequential numbers in it), but I am really kicking myself for not going with my instincts and calling the cops right away, or at least writing the license plate down. If the police do find the guy, at least I will be able to pick him up out of a lineup — he had fairly distinctive features.

Ah well.. next time. I guess it’s better to be paranoid about something and be wrong than to dismiss something but have been right. Our house is gonna be locked up tight for the near term.. hopefully the police will catch the guy.

Update: August 22, 2006 @ 13:35
Well, the detective just called me back on this.. it turns out that the guy has robbed 14-15 other houses, and the car I saw him in was stolen out of a house in July. LOVELY! They are having me come in to look over some mug shots and such.

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1. amusing phone call today..

I purchased a 50″ Samsung DLP TV at Sam’s Club in Sep ’04. When I purchased it, the guy who was helping me with it asked me if I’d like to purchase an extended warranty. I had previously read that Sam’s will let you return items after any period if they break, as long as there’s no physical damage, so I asked about that.. he basically said that yeah, if the TV ever broke, I could return it — all the extended warranty would do is have someone come out to my house to fix it, so I didn’t have to hassle with it. So, I just purchased the TV alone, for $2800 + tax.

A couple months after the purchase, I had been holding onto the box, and was wondering if I could get rid of it.. I called Sam’s 800#, and asked if I needed to keep the box to return the TV. The guy said “well, technically we’re supposed to say yes, but they will probably accept the return without the box.” Since we didn’t have much storage space, and we didn’t expect problems with the TV (so we wouldn’t need to return it), I went ahead and trashed the box.

Over the last couple months, the TV’s been having problems where if we turn it off and try to turn it back on within an hour or so, it’ll just click a couple times and not turn on. We were living with it, but over the last week, it’s been refusing to turn on almost all the time; it seemed like it was a bad ballast, since when it would fire up, it’d stay on without any problems, and the ballast is not really a “user-replaceable” part. So, I finally got fed up, and decided to give the return policy a shot. I grabbed the TV, the remote, and my receipt, and wheeled it up to the customer service desk at my local Sam’s Club. I explained what was going on, and that I’d like to exchange the TV. The lady said “oh, ok”, then she looked at the date on the receipt, and said she’d have to call a manager over to approve it. The manager walked over, and said “no problem! Go find the TV you want.” I went over, and picked out a 50″ Sony LCD Projection TV, priced at $1950. Brought the tag back to the desk, and the next thing I knew, they had handed me a receipt for the new TV, complete with a $905 credit back to my Discover card.

So, basically, I got to use a TV for 1yr 10mo, and when it died, got a brand new TV with better features, and $905 to boot. The most I was expecting is that they’d do an even exchange for the TV, or at the absolute most, give me a store credit for the difference.

How’s that for customer service?

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Today, I ran into this link again:

http://www.kondra.com/circuit/circuit.html

It discusses how to set up monitoring of your circuit panels to get detailed information on how much each circuit in your house is using. I’ve been looking to implement something similar at home, and I fired the author (Dave) an e-mail asking where he purchased his gear. He was very helpful (we’ve actually been having quite a long mail thread – seems like quite a nice guy!), and suggested that I e-mail “someone” at Trend Point, which is the company he developed the monitoring software for.

I fired “someone” an e-mail, saying I was interested in getting pricing on their new logic board (which looks very cool – supports an ethernet transport, with XML for the data). I got a reply back pretty quicky, just stating:

“I’m sorry but, we do not provide the software or hardware for home sales.”

I replied back, saying:

“Well, does it count that I run a small business out of my home? :) (Or is it a certification thing?)”

His reply was that their products run many thousands of dollars, so he can’t help me.

I *hate* it when sales people give you this crap. How does he know that I don’t want to spend a couple grand to monitor power at my house? If he took a second to peruse my web side, he’d quickly see that I’m a real geek, and willing to spend cash on good solutions. I sent him a short rant back saying that, and his reply again was just “Sorry, I can’t help you.”

All I really have to say is after that experience with a sales guy, this is one company I won’t be going to when I look at implementing circuit monitoring at work, and won’t suggest it to any of my clients. Their loss, I guess.

Update:
Dave called “someone”, and requested that “someone” shoot me another message. “someone” sent a good message, saying that they are currently over allocated for production, and that they are trying not to take any small orders at the moment. So, it wasn’t actually anything against a “home user”; it was just that he doesn’t want any small orders at the moment. I just wish that he had said that in the first place.. but I did also probably overreact a bit.

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My wife decided to surprise me, and picked up tickets for the Stomp show at the Ordway tonight. I’d never seen the show before; it was a blast! If you’re in the Minneapolis area, and haven’t seen it, I’d highly recommended stopping in. Not the best show for young kids or anyone else sensitive to loud noises, though..

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Switchfoot’s new album shipped with (weak) DRM on the album media – it’s that Sony “DRM” that installs a TSR under Windows that prevents you from ripping the album. Apparently, though, the band was very upset with the fact that DRM was included, and has posted a guide on how to get around the DRM. I’m glad to see a band standing up for the rights of their fans. I’ve been a fan of Switchfoot for quite some time, and I’m really glad to see them doing things like this. Now, if they will just drop Sony, and get a distributor that will let the band dictate what’s on the album..

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