Found another article where the Geek Squad is fleecing the public. While it is a laptop motherboard, let’s put this in perspective. A new laptop will cost you 600 dollars, so the repair for a laptop should not exceed the cost of replacement. To give you an idea, the labor for building my new desktop amounted to about 2-3 hours start to finish, from assembly to installing the software. If I were to bill at 40/hour, it’d cost 120 dollars worst-case. Double the difficulty for installing a laptop motherboard (assuming I had the equipment, etc.) and we still have a 240 dollar bill, rather than a 600 dollar bill.
Drop dead, geeks.
For those of you who are keeping track of my adventures at work dealing with getting PMS to communicate with TOUCH. (I swear I’m not making these names up. There’s also components called COORS and BS.) TOUCH was created around 25 years ago and has stood the test of time but still needs tweaked every now and then. The directory structure has directory upon directory. The code is not integrated into any nice IDE and I haven’t had the time to do anything special with it to make it nice and easy to find stuff with. Function and datatype names are random, so I constantly have to root around for where things are defined. With the recursive directory structure not being consistent, I can’t just do something like grep “XXX” */* to find something so I had to come up with something a little sexier. I found this little gem on the internet and it lets you walk through a directory structure of your choice and look for every occurence of a string recursively. If you’ve seen it or know it, great but I thought it was a rather nice way of doing things:
find . -exec grep “<your search string>” ‘{}’ \; -print
I’d suggest piping this to more so that you don’t just get a blizzard of unreadable results. Have fun!
In an article on TechCrunch today by MG Sigler, the author is, well, griping about the fact that the AT&T network is slow, that the iPhone is slow, etc, etc, etc. He uses this issue to illustrate the genius of the AT&T contract/Apple release schedule, in that they have suckered people into perpetually updating and renewing their contracts.
Ok. This week I’ve noticed that the service is a bit slower, sitting at my desk with two stories of concrete and brick overhead, but let us put this in perspective. None of us are alive to remember when AT&T was THE phone company where you got your ONE LANDLINE phone FROM AT&T. The phone was big enough you could kill an elk with it and you needed an operator to call anyone. The iphone, on the other hand, is less than 5 ounces, pretty, and let’s me find the nearest restaurant, invite my friends to it for lunch, and calculate the tip from the same platform. The first generation iphone was amazing. The 3G iphone is a marvel of modern technology. Yes, there can be incremental improvements (I’d love the ability to record video on the fly.) but this is about the most impressive piece of technology I’ve ever set my eyes on. If you currently have a 3G and you feel like it’s not TRULY the greatest thing since sliced bread, you’ll never be happy with the next generation phone.
I decided to take out an advance on my fun money (for the next 6 months or so + some patio furniture for Jess) and get a computer. More specifically, the components to build a computer. I’ve gotten a BS and MS in computer science and yet the one thing I never did was build my own computer. There was a very simple reason for this. I was always in school and, particularly my first couple of years of college when I bought my first compute, I was doing non-stop reports, etc. and my computer had to work. After that, I had a laptop which are very hard to build on your own and then I went through my mac phase. (Not to say I haven’t passed that phase but it’s particularly difficult (and against whatever license agreements OS X has) to build a mac machine.) Now the opportunity presented itself so I thought I’d jump at it. My plan is to get the components, build the machine, and install Windows 7 on it. I have an older desktop that I can now use as a Linux testbed. The following are the components:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 Quad Core Processor @ 2.33 GHz –This is the slowest quad core, so I can take advantage of programs that make use of the added cores while not paying top dollar.
- GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P Motherboard — Just a nice, down the middle motherboard. Don’t think it has any features that facilitate overclocking, etc. but I don’t really want them anyway.
- 8GB DDR2 1066 Memory — Ok…I overdid it on memory but what I researched, using a 64-bit with 8 GB is like 4GB with a 32-bit processor and 4GB is rapidly becoming the norm and don’t judge me.
- Western Digital 75GB, 10000RPM Hard Drive — This is for my boot disk and applications. The OS should take around 20, leaving around 40GB for applications. While this isn’t a lot it should be enough. My only concern is if there are too many apps it could defeat the purpose of a fast hard drive. This is a personal experiment of mine. I have always been a evangelist saying that you should not buy the top of the line processors/memory because the hard drive ends up being the bottleneck anyway. I’m wanting to see if this is actually the case or not.
- Western Digital 1TB, 7200RPM Hard Drive — For Data. Newegg was having a sale and it 100 bucks for a TB!!!
- Pioneer 20x CD/DVD Burner — Pioneer makes good burners, so I went with them.
- Samsung Toc T220HD Monitor — I’m pushing 30 and I am tired of lugging my 60 pound CRT display around. This one is 13 pounds. It is the Mini Me of our TV, so it should be nice.
- GTX 260, 896MB Video Card — I got a refurbished video card for a good deal. This is the best of the value video cards, so I ran with it.
I left out a sound card. I live in an apartment and when I’d be taking advantage of the sound system, there are nearby kids asleep and I don’t want to be blaring a video game or anything, so it really isn’t worth it. I’ll let you now how things work out.
There is a scourge in our society. Most technology bloggers know about it. They’ve been teased, mocked, and (occasionally) exposed for the frauds they are but in this economy I think that the best contribution that I can make is to do what I can to marginalize and eliminate this company from the world. That is the people of Geek Squad.
This week, I read the following article about an exposé that a news station in Portland, OR that made my blood boil. The tech repair places that I dealt with in the past would fit in well with the description of some of the computer repair stores that are found in the article. I brought my laptop in because it would freezeup when I unplugged it from the wall. They were immediately curious and while I was there diagnosed the problem. The guy was very helpful, explained the problem and, because it was still under warranty, didn’t charge me a dime, even though they could have charged for the time for the diagnosis: “Now we know the next time someone comes in. We’ve heard of this problem but never actually seen it before.” I shudder at what they would have done if I took it to Geek Squad.
I would have probably just brushed it aside were it not for the extravagant prices they charge. Back before I was dating Jess, I went out on a date with another woman and when I showed up she was still getting unpacked from moving and that included setting up the wireless router she just bought in the apartment. I looked at the instructions, followed the steps, and set it up in about 20 minutes. The woman I was dating told me that Geek Squad charges around $130 to set up the network. $130?!?!?! If you look at their site, they estimate that it will take 1-2 hours to complete the task. That means that these high schoolers are making over (or, at 1 hour, well over) twice what I make per hour! Granted, they don’t keep it but their labor charges are that much, which, if you were to roll total value of my income and what they would bill in a contract, that would still be well over half. One of the updates I’d like to make soon would be to upgrade the memory on my desktop. If I were to take my desktop to Best Buy, buy the memory, and have Geek Squad install it, the installation cost would probably cost more than the memory. It’s insane. Imagine your grandparents or your aunt and uncle trying to set something up for the first time. Would you want them to pay double every time they bought a new piece of hadware for their house just to be able to use it?
No more; I know that I’m late to this war, but now that I’m here, I’m going to see it through to the end. I’ll be posting any stories I see about Geek Squad abusing their position here. I’ll also post any additional information I discover about their company here and on twitter. For my geekier friends, this is meaningless information because we’d never be caught dead talking with one of those little idiots at Best Buy but for family members that keep track of me through my blog, I think it’s important for you to know how bad you could be fleeeced by this company.
I thought it’d be a good time to check in on my New Year’s guidelines.
- Lose 15-20 pounds: Well, good news. I’m down 5 pounds so far. Got a somewhat late start in changing diet/workout habits but in only about 2 1/2 weeks, I’m down roughly 5 pounds. Bad news: I have more to lose than I thought. Jess and I bought the Wii Fit and when I weighed in, I was about 10 pounds heavier than I thought. No matter. We’ll keep heading towards that 20 pounds and, depending on how I look and feel, we’ll move to losing another 20 pounds. If you are in a need to lose weight, the best advice I could ever give is get someone to compete against. Jess and I are in a healthy competition with each other to see who can best stick with our weight loss plan. Jess has me beat with working out (she works out religously every day). I think I have better eating habits (I have a spinach salad and an apple at lunch every day.)
- Pay off Debt: Check. With variations on the original plan, we have already paid one thing off and are on target to pay the next goal off. I checked my credit reports recently and everything is in tip-top shape. Barring tragedy or something else unforseen, we’re on target to pay everything off and will be able to get a top-rate mortgage when we’re ready to get a house.
- Work Independently on a Software Project: If you haven’t seen BensVirtues, check it out. I’m basically using this as a way of playing around with some of the newfangled web technologies. It’s by no means what my final goal is. I have a couple of ideas for large scale open source projects that could be useful but I’m torturing myself thinking it needs to be perfect, so I’m still very much in the idea phase on my other projects.
- Write a Book: I have an idea for a non-fiction book and a fictional series of books. The non-fiction book would be something about personal finance or productivity. The fictional series would be an alternate history/science fiction series where nations employ hoardes of peacekeepers that have to solve regional conflicts peacefully while still having to cope with the powers that be desire to wage war. At the moment, that’s as far as I’ve gotten but I think any of the ideas would be cool.
- Keep up with the blog more: Epic Fail.
- Go “Paperless”: I can’t claim success with this yet, either but I’m still focusing on it.
So my overall grade appears to be a D+ at the moment, but hopefully I’ll be able to improve the score with at least pushing through some of my plans to go paperless. I emptied out some of our closet 2 weekends ago and my next goal is to begin going through papers. That’ll get me up to a B and if I can manage to post at least once a week I’ll be able to get my gold star.
Well, I finally managed to take some time and do some extra programming on my own time. The fruits of my labor can be found here. I wanted to put the Google app engine through its paces and so I played around with creating a form similar to the one that Ben Franklin used to keep track of his indiscretions. The idea was that every time he made an infraction against one of the virtues in the list, he put a dot. His goal was to keep his little sheet free of dots. Well, in the days of the internet, I think it’s probably a little easier to just enter the values. (Maybe, maybe not, but it’s sure easier to code at first!)
I’m not done with this little program; it’s way too slow at the moment. (Each field is individually got and put from the database regardless of whether or not it was updated…I’m actually trapping a DB timeout at the moment but it’s late and I don’t feel like dealing with it.) I also want to add reports, like the average number of infractions year-to-date, how you’re doing compared to others, etc. This type of stuff will come in due time, but I wanted to get something out there. Feel free to play around with it, if you want. I will notify you all of updates as they come along.
Have a good evening!
I think most of my close friends would agree that this title is somewhat humorous, since most of the time I do whatever I can do to belittle environmentalists, greens, or whatever you want to call them. While I was at work today, they were having an Earth Day presentation in the cafeteria and I was amused with the fact that they chose to celebrate it by looping a video on an overhead projector about conserving energy (Irony) when I started thinking about things that I did in my day to day life that would have one of these pinko hippies give me a hug:
- I carpool with my wife. We have 2 cars, but we decide to just drive each other to work. Not only do we get to spend some time together, we also save money on gas. And, I suppose, we make little Disney animals smile at our ecologically-friendly decision.
- We keep the thermostat off during the day. Once we get home, we turn it on or turn on our gas fireplace just long enough to keep comfortable in the evening and then get home. (In the summers, we probably use the air conditioning more, since neither Jess nor I can tolerate being too hot.) This, again, saves us money and, again, cute Disney animals like it.
- As an addendum to the above, we explicitly picked an apartment that faced a forest, which will block some of the sunlight during the summer, which will (hopefully) reduce our AC bill.
- I’d have to say about 1/5 - 1/4 of our garbage is recycled. Most of our kitchen garbage just goes straight into the trash, since sorting takes a lot of room that we don’t have in the kitchen. However, we get a huge number of bags and boxes that all get recycled.
- I only run the dishwasher when it is full.
- We use a Brita water filter instead of bottled water.
What’s the common theme with all of this? Saving money. However, when I went to this site and entered my data, it turns out when you adjust for carpooling and that type of thing, it turns out that I actually have a smaller carbon footprint than the industrial world’s average, just by doing some things that any of you can do to save money in this economic climate.
When I was in 6th grade, an environmentalist came to our class to give a presentation about what horrible, narcissistic consumers we all were. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but I’ll say that she left a permanent impression on me to basically eschew anything that had to do with being a good steward of he Earth. Then I started remembering some of the activities that environmentalists and others had put on in the name of preserving the Earth:
- The presentaiton at the office: wasting a lot of energy on a power-hungry projector.
- A store was offering *a* free reusable grocery bag. Most people will take them and never use them again, so you wasted the energy and resources to make these bags.
- When I was at VT, a student organization was handing out “earth day” like lanyards. Every college student on the planet has 5. Again, you wasted a lot of energy and resources on “stuff” that most people would just take and throw in the corner of their dorm.
When I was writing this, I was kinda reminded of a line from one of my favorite movies, Lawrence of Arabia:
- Bentley: I heard in Cairo that Major Lawrence has a horror of bloodshed.
- Feisal: That is exactly so. With Major Lawrence, mercy is a
passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive
is the more reliable.
With environmentalists, conservatism is a passion. With me, it is merely smart money. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.
Happy Earth Day.
Well…sighs…it finally happened. One of Oprah’s researchers told her about Twitter and how it’s kind of a neat idea. The one consolation that I have is that she’s actually late on this one in that everyone else is in on this before she was.
The second thing is #AmazonFail. For those of you who haven’t heard about this or the associated news story, an author of a book about an adolescent homosexual relationship had noticed that his book was not included in the amazon ranking of most purchased books. On his inquiry with Amazon, he learned that his book had been flagged as adult content and that it therefore the book wasn’t counted in the rankings. This could have been considered an isolated case of misunderstanding but on further analysis many more books were labelled as adult-oriented that had gay themes. This resulted in a twitter storm tagged #amazonfail. Amazon has taken a pretty big PR hit and is continuing to do so. Whether it was intentional (in which case, in my opinion, there are hundreds of other websites for me to take my business to) or unintentional (in which case, they need some developers that are not quite so ham-fisted in their cataloging design capabilities), Amazon was forced to respond rather aggressively to something that originated in a prior to a month ago unheard of web app.
Do I think the world has changed? No. Not materially so. What may have changed is the speed at which people get information. Before now, we had to wait until a blogger created a 500-word essay or Drudge got the news up on his site before we could be outraged by the day’s outrages. If someone posts a lie on twitter now (who on Earth would do such a thing?), the Truth is now not even able to get it’s socks on before the lie makes it around the world, much less his shoes.
What may be slightly world-changing is that this is the first time that “the world” (let’s call it that but really there are still only probably around 4 or 5 million users or so…too many for the fail whale to deal with) had a single platform to voice an opinion about a topic. Sure, there are dozens of websites and blogs out there where people can posts blogs and then have people comment on them, just like this site but this is a consolidated locale where people can get together and publish content about whatever topic they care about and decide on where they get their information from (by following people or keeping track of the twitter feed.) In that regard, it is rather world changing. Maybe the popularity of Twitter due to Oprah’s newfound interest in the site is a good thing, since it will put more voices in the wild to focus on some of the nightmarish problems that are facing us right now.
By the way: “@mtthornton was here before @oprah http://herebeforeoprah.com #herebeforeoprah”
I’m strongly contemplating getting a Kindle. I have started reading a lot of books online and I have come to really like it. Even though I enjoy reading a regular book, I always have a psychological block because I always see how much I have left to read. With an e-book, this block is gone and I’m able to just enjoy the book. Furthermore, I’m on a clutter-reduction kick. This will put all of my books in one place and reduce the weight from hundreds (maybe 1000) of pounds of books to several ounces. All of the benefits people describe for paper books are just not really there in my mind. People say that e-books are not good for research. I think, assuming that it is well indexed, etc. an e-book can be as good as a paper book. There are others who think reading is an experience of picking up a book, turning the page, etc. I think reading a book is about reading and I can accomplish that fine with a Kindle.
Paper books do, in my mind, have one thing over electronic books. I have an emotional attachment to many of the books in my library and I’ll never part with them. I was thinking of funding my Kindle with some of my books that I don’t need anymore but I’m going to have to be very careful about which books I get rid of.
