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To me HP is like that bad relationship that you’ve cut ties with several times but somehow it keeps creeping back into your life. Years ago I swore off HP vowing to never spend money on their awful products again. Not only had I been burned but my grandfather also had been burned.

My grandfather bought an HP color printer, and figured he might as well buy some extra ink so he wouldn’t have to run to the store in a time of printing need. But when that time came, we discovered that the ink had already expired.

You may ask “Expired, what do you mean expired?” No the ink didn’t dry up, and we didn’t ever take it out of its nice vacuum sealed containers. No the ink simply has a chip in the cartridge itself that says “if you’re past this date, I can’t be used.” Now obviously they did this so you can’t refill the cartridges, and in doing so they’ve ruined legitimate use of official HP products (this amazingly sounds like DRM doesn’t it?).

At any rate, that’s the final straw that broke the HP camel for me, but in a moment of weakness I bought an HP Photosmart C5180 All-in-One printer. I thought at the time it was a wise decision, I mean after all it came with six different color ink wells and it had ethernet, how easy would it be to put on the network and maintain. Logically when I need cyan, I can go get cyan and not have to worry about the other colors. Made perfect sense right?

Well HP got me again, because after only a few months of printing a few pages a month, my ink expired. All of them. All six wells. There’s still ink in them, I can shake them and hear it, but no HP has decided this ink is no longer worthy to touch paper and in my moment of need to be able to print something very important, my printer is demanding that I go spend $20 for a black cartridge and $12 x 5 for color cartridges. And no, just buying the black one and leaving the color ones in there didn’t work, the printer won’t do anything unless all of them are replaced.

So, what shall I replace my HP printer with?

I know this guy! I wrote the inventory system he uses to list items on eBay. Way to go Kevin!

Back in 2006 I spent a month in Tokyo working with Sega on a Texas Hold’em game machine. Someone sent me an e-mail saying they saw me on the Impress Watch website, which is a technology news website. I was at a Sega private show where they demo new machines for buyers, and my picture was taken and put in the article. A link to the article can be found here.

By popular demand, I have recorded a video of the new house for friends that have requested pictures and updates and stuff. So here’s a guided tour of the unfinished home.

There’s a point in the video where I say “dry-wood” instead of “sheet-rock”. I guess that was a Freudian slip. The basement had leaked from the kitchen upstairs and a lot of the slats holding up the panneling had to be replaced due to water damage. I doubt they won’t be asking me to host the next episode of This Old House.

Today I decided to get the old 240Z going. Since we’ll be moving soon, I don’t want to pay for a rollback to come pick it up and move it for me, I want to drive it to the new house. So I hooked up some cables to my truck and to the Z and I let it sit and charge for a while (unfortunately I left my battery charger out in the rain and it just doesn’t feel smart to plug it in now). So after a while it got some juice and I was able to get her to turn over… but she wouldn’t start. Now she’s sat for at least 8 months if not a little longer, only been pushed out of the way when I mow the grass… so this isn’t totally suprising. I took the air filter off and sprayed some starter fluid into the carbs and with very little trouble she started right up.

Then the popping starts. It sputters and it acts like it’s going to die. I give it some gas and it goes POP and white smoke puffs out of the carbs. What is this? I’m not familiar with this. So I decided to go get my camcorder and video tape it for the Z forums for some advice. But by the time I got out there ready to record it’s warmed up and it’s not doing it anymore.

I drove it to a friends house and we caught up, hadn’t seen each other in a few months. After a couple of hours I go back out and hop in, it starts right up with no troubles. I drive to the end of his street and the engine cuts off. When I try to turn it back on… it won’t turn over. Bummer. So I called my friend and he came and jumped me off and followed me home. Think it’s time to get the alternator tested.

Here’s the video I recorded.

I have been getting an awful lot of spam from spam bots on this blog, but hopefully I just fixed that.

I’ve also been getting comments and e-mails about more people with problems with Tessie Toys.  It sucks that so many people are having problems with them.  I did finally get a working blackberry from them, it wasn’t in great shape but it worked.  I chose not to write a negative feedback because I noticed a trend with their feedback.  They have A LOT of mutual feedback withdrawls.  That means that they retaliate with negative feedback, and I didn’t want my feedback lowered because they are crooks.

 The only way to solve this people is to complain to eBay.  I know you may think this won’t help, but trust me it does.  eBay listens to complaints, and if a buyer is doing things like this they will remove them from the site.  But my complaint isn’t enough, everyone needs to complain.

 I hope everyone is having a great 2008 so far, and hopefully I’ll have some new and interesting stuff to blog about soon.

Okay I admit it.  Every time I see this Mac commercial I want to switch from Vista to XP.

I love Vista. People are shocked when I say this, but I really REALLY love Vista. I love the way it looks at it works, and for some reason the “confirm/deny” thing doesn’t bother me. But for things like World of Warcraft or Second Life or other games I have, it locks up. I’ve tried various nVidia drivers and nothing seems to stop it. Vista is very nice about catching the driver crash and restoring itself so I don’t have to reboot… but still the crashing sucks.

So today I sucked it up and backed up everything that was important, formated and reinstalled XP Pro. After 12 reboots after all the patches and updates, I’m SCREAMING FAST on this new machine. I installed WoW and with full screen graphics, everything turned up to max I am at 20% CPU usage and 723 megs of memory usage. I was over that much memory just running Vista!

So maybe I won’t miss Vista at all….

Okay, so you all know about the hell I’ve gone through trying to get a working Blackberry (see “The Blackberry Curve 8300“). Well it gets worse. My daughter wants a cell phone for Christmas, and while I don’t think she really needs one, the cost is minimal to add her to my minutes so I figure it’s an easy Christmas present. So I go to the Suncom store here in town and pick out a cute little pink Sony Ericsson W200 phone and I do all the stuff about adding the 3rd line and everything. So when they call in activation to turn it on, I’m denied. “I’M WHAT!?” I’m denied! Now over the last 3 weeks I’ve gotten a text message and a flyer in the mail about being approved for a 3rd and 4th line already, so why am I declined?

So I call Customer Service. They said it was a billing issue. What billing issue? So they transfer me to billing. Aparently for a period of 3 minutes, my phone was disconnected for not paying. Wait a second folks…. I pay my Suncom bill out of my checking account automatically each month. I don’t even look at the bill when it comes, it just gets paid. So why was I disconnected? Billing said I needed to talk to Customer Service about that. So I go back to Customer service. Remember the Blackberry Curve problems? Well they delayed billing me because of my phone issues. They didn’t want to charge me until I got the phone. When I did get the phone I called in to Customer Service and they activated the Blackberry features, and while I was on the phone with the lady she said “Hey they are disconnecting you for not paying, but I’m going to fix that right now because we delayed your payment on purpose.” and then I paid my bill in full.

So long story short, since I had a disconnect, they won’t give me another line of service for 90 days from the day it happened (which would be January something). I spoke to 3 different supervisors about this, and none of them would budge. One of them even admitted that I did nothing wrong and that my account has always been in good standing, but they couldn’t do anything about it.

So this is how Suncom treats its long term and loyal customers. I’ve been with Suncom since they first popped up here in North Carolina, for years now.

So now I’m pissed, and I have to find something else for my daughter for Christmas, and I’m seriously considering going to Cingular and buying an iPhone and telling Suncom to take a hike.

After getting a defective Blackberry Curve from Suncom and patiently awaiting my replacement, I got a package in the mail from tessies-toys.  My Blackberry Pearl has arrived!  I admit I was pretty mad about the poor customer service from tessies-toys but I got over it.  I mean after all they wouldn’t knowingly send me a bad unit, and maybe the person that sent me that response was just having a bad day.  My replacement Pearl had arrived and I had something to work with.

Then I opened the box.

This isn’t a Blackberry Pearl.  I don’t know what this T-Mobile Windows Mobile thing is.  Ok after looking at tessies-toys listings it’s an HTC Excalibur 620.  Not exactly what I was expecting.  It came in the same sized white box that my original phone came in with no markings on the box.  How do they keep these things separated?

So I send a note to tessies-toys, trying to hold back my anger here:

And this was their response:

Well they were nicer this time at least.  So I decided to write a good ol formal letter to send back with my misshipped phone (imagine nice Word formal letter template here):

So now we’ll wait and see what happens.

I’m just not meant to have a Blackberry am I?