As it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything I’ve been looking for something that would get me started blogging again.  Given that I can be hugely critical of bad customer service I decided I should be equally complimentary when someone gets it right.  Men’s Health (and their publisher Rodale) gets it right.

I’ve been a subscriber to Men’s Health for about 8 months now and really enjoy it.  Easy to read, informative and very useful.  A few months ago I got a random letter from Rodale (their publisher from what I can tell) that I owed them $49.95 for the Men’s Health Total Fitness Guide, something I never ordered nor received.  At the time I pitched it in the trash assuming it was some sort of error or way to get me to order the books.  When I got a second one that listed my account as delinquent I decided I better take action.

Today I called up the customer service number ready for a fight.  I explained to the rather polite lady that I’d never ordered these books nor had I ever received them.  She immediately apologized for the trouble, noted this in my account, canceled the order and confirmed for me that I was all set.  “Are you still there?” she said, as I sat there stunned that it was so easy.  As I thanked her she commented “it’s nice to help cheery people” – to which I explained I was ready for a fight and stunned that I didn’t have to have one. 

Not really sure what this book is but now I may actually want it.  Well done Rodale, well done.

So this is going to be a little bit of a rant as this is a huge pet peeve of mine.  Ever since I’ve been into electronics (AV stuff specifically) I’ve been a fan of just about the cheapest cables I can get.  I usually get my cables at Home Depot and the best advice I got a long time ago was to use lamp cord (you know the bulk stuff you can buy to rewire lamps and such).  I’ve argued this a lot with people, mostly with sales guys trying to sell me the expensive stuff.  There have been study after study (and even a $1 Million dollar bounty if you can prove the difference) that show that the human ear (or eyes) can not hear the difference these extremely high end cables give.

While this is a little hard to argue for analog sources, for digital the argument is totally ridiculous.  Recently a salesman at Best Buy tried to sell me a 3 foot $265 Monster HDMI cable.  I burst out laughing when he suggested it and tried to explain to him “if it’s digital, then it’s digital”.  He just couldn’t understand that if ones and zeros are flowing then ones and zeros are flowing – the fucking cable makes no difference whatsoever.  Then yesterday I find this great post on Engadget showing that not only can people not hear the difference between Monster cable and cheap cables they went one step further and used COAT HANGERS to connect the speakers!  And guess what, no one could hear the difference between the coat hangers and expensive Monster cable.  Hey, anyone want to buy some $100 coat hangers???

Next time you need cables get the cheapest ones you can find, especially if they are HDMI.  Don’t ever let the sales guy talk you into the expensive stuff no matter how hard he pushes.  If you need HDMI cables here are the ones I have, I have about 5 of them and they all work great (oh and they are $4.99 each!).

It seems to be rarer and rarer that software actually works as it claims so I guess this has been a fairly lucky week for me.  Late last week Jason’s laptop hard drive started to fail.  He got the critically important data off but didn’t have time to get all his other media (like pictures, video, music, etc).  So he asked if I could do what I could to get that media off.

I started fairly simply by putting his old drive in an external enclosure and connecting it up to my XP machine.  XP wouldn’t even mount it, it would just hang until I unplugged it.  At this point I knew this wouldn’t be easy so I booted into Ubuntu to see what I would get.  Well after messing around with Ubuntu for a while I dediced to try out HDD Regenerator since Joel had heard good things about it.  Man am I glad he suggested it.

According to the HDD Regenerator site it has the ability to repair physical bad sectors on the disk using reverse magnetism.  I was skeptical to say the least but as it also promised that it would be non-destructive I didn’t have much to lose.  I started it up and went home for the day (it must have taken at least 8 hours to scan the 100GB drive).  When I got in this morning it told me it was finished and had found and repaired only one bad sector.  I thought that can’t be right, that it’s clearly more than one bad sector that’s keeping it from mounting and hanging Windows.  Well I was wrong and it was right.  The machine booted right up like nothing had ever been wrong.  I quickly plugged in an external drive and started grabbing the data off, all the while grinning ear to ear.

So thank you HDD Regenerator you make me look like a hero.  Now if only Microsoft could do the same from time to time…

If you’ve been following my blog for a bit you’ll know that we haven’t had the greatest time with Windows Vista so far.  For a while now I’ve been holding out hope that SP1 will resolve many of the issues we’ve been facing (specifically performance).  I’ve been reading the rumor that SP1 would be released on February 15th.  This is good given the amount of issues we’ve had.

Now today I read that while it’s done and being released to manufacturing today, they aren’t going to release it to the public until sometime in March.  What?  Why on earth would they do this.  They’ve got fixes ready to go, no more testing, no more changes but they are going to purposely delay the release until March.  This is ridiculous.  If it’s ready it’s ready – POST IT.  I can understand if they only posted it for tech professionals or to MSDN and didn’t push it through Windows Update but they aren’t even doing this.

Microsoft you just keep making this hard on me and this time for no good reason (or none that I can see).  Why am I even having to think about this, it should just be out.  And it better rock.  I guess if it doesn’t I’ll just upgrade everyone back to Windows XP…

If you read my blog I’m sure you know I’m no fan of DRM.  I have no problem with the underlying goal of keeping people from profiting from piracy but in general I believe that DRM simply makes things more difficult (or costly) for regular consumers.  While I’m not really a regular consumer and am pretty out on the fringe when it comes to digital media I’m doing what everyone else will at some point.  So why did DRM cost me $85, I’m so glad you asked…

This weekend my new Bluray drive finally showed up and I sat down to install it.  Everything went great with the hardware install (took about 20 minutes to physically install it) so I quickly moved to install the software.  Once I got that installed and going I popped in my first Bluray title and sat back on the couch ready to be blown away ready to be disappointed.  And disappointed I was.  The disk started to play and the FBI warning came on screen (since I must be a criminal).  A few seconds later an error message popped up which lead me to a tool to test my system for Bluray support.  I ran the tool and it found only one problem, my video card doesn’t support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Copy Protection) – DRM.  So while my system runs great, my current video card works perfectly and looks beautifully AND everything I’m trying to do is perfectly legal (I’m not ripping, stealing, etc) I’m screwed.  I’m trying to play a disk that I rented in a machine that I own in my own home.  And because someone somewhere is afraid I’ll try to capture a digital stream of the 30GB movie as I watch it I have to get a new video card.  This is utterly ridiculous.

So thanks to DRM I still am unable to enjoy the $250 Bluray player I bought with the Bluray disk I rented.  I completely understand I’m out on the fringe here doing this in Windows Media Center, my point is if DRM is going to stop me from doing something that should be totally legal then how is this ever going to work for normal consumers.  The answer is it isn’t which is why we’re all seeing DRM slowly fall away.  Too bad it couldn’t have happened sooner, I really wanted to use the stuff I bought to entertain me, not give me another reason to bitch.

I should really just rename my blog to “Ramblings from a guy that wants to love Microsoft but is having a really hard time doing so”. So yes here is my “stupid Microsoft” post of the day…

A friend of mine in the Netherlands (thanks Wim) just sent me a great link to a tool on Microsoft’s site. Its a tool you can download called Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit. It does just what the name says, it keeps Windows Update from automatically installing new service packs as they come out. Now first I do think this is actually a good tool, it’s the why it’s a good tool that’s the problem. As readers here know we’ve definitely had our issues with Windows Update. It reboots you in the middle of work without much warning and the updates fail – a lot. It’s generally a pain in the ass. Managing corporate desktops you want to know everything that’s happening with them and have full control over that experience so I see that this tool could be great for many shops (including mine).

Here’s the problem. We shouldn’t be scared of a service pack. Microsoft, the largest software company in the known universe has had over a year to get Vista SP1 and XP SP3 out the door. They should be amazing. They should rock. It should have me posting “thank you Microsoft, Vista rocks now”. Instead they are already admitting they could fail. “Hey we know this might suck so here’s how you keep from installing it”. My guess is that Apple has never even contemplated such a tool. Why would they? People rush to install their updates yet are scared to death to install ones from Microsoft (me included in that). Why is this Microsoft, why?

Again I ask “Microsoft what are you doing to me”. Please stop making it hard for me to support you in our office, please?