“Prayer is the slender tendon that moves the muscle of omnipotence.”
– Martin Tupper, English Poet
Month: August 2007
Kudos to HP Live Chat Tech Support
Last November, almost a year ago, I was working on a laptop for a client and I had to re-format it because it was filled to the brim with digital cruft. Unfortunately, the client didn’t have the driver CD, so after restoring Windows XP I had to manually install each and every driver. That worked like a charm, except for the sound card. I figured I’d try HP’s chat tool to see if I could track down the driver. Here’s the transcript.
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Sean [HP Tech]: Hello Jason. Welcome to HP Total Care for Presario Notebooks. My name is Sean. How may I assist you today?
Jason Dunn: Hi there! I have a very simple question. I have the 3055CA laptop and I had to re-install Windows, and I don’t have the driver CD or the restore CD…I have all the drivers off the download page except one – there’s no driver for the sound card anywhere!
Jason Dunn: …so I’m baffled as to where I’d find the sound driver because it’s not on the download page for this laptop.
Sean: Oh! I see. No need to worry, let me check how can I assist you with this.
Jason Dunn: Great, thanks.
Sean: You are welcome, Jason. May I know the processor installed in your notebook?
Jason Dunn: Intel 2.8 Ghz I believe…sorry 2.4….but intel, not the AMD model. It took a while for me to figure out which WILAN driver to install, it’s bizarre how this exact model of laptop had so many different parts 🙂
Sean: No need to worry, I will try my best.
Sean: Please try with this one and let me know what happens. Here is the link: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp28501-29000/sp28552.exe
Jason Dunn: Ok, downloading now.
Sean: Are you chatting me with the same notebook?
Jason Dunn: No, different PC. Installing now.
Sean: Wait…
Jason Dunn: While it’s installing, any idea why that driver wouldn’t be listed on the driver page for that notebook?
Sean: After downloading the driver softpack, Save it on the desktop or in the Hard disk and after that double click on that to install.
Jason Dunn: Yup, it’s installing now…almost done. Requires reboot, rebooting…got the windows sound at reboot, so it works.
Jason Dunn: Thanks so much! I appreciate the fast help, and the no-hassle about the laptop being outside of the warranty window 😉
Sean: You are welcome. Are you completely satisfied with our chat session today?
Jason Dunn: Yes, absolutely, this was great!
Sean: Thank you. A copy of our chat session will be e-mailed to you shortly. You may also receive a chat survey. We would appreciate your feedback.
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As you can tell, it was a quick, painless experience – I got exactly the driver I needed, and the tech didn’t bother to hassle me for the serial number or try to prove ownership. I had an HP notebook, I needed a driver, and he provided it for me. That’s the kind of tech support I love to see, so kudos to HP tech support for doing a great job. If only more tech support worked like this!
PostSecret Movie
The PostSecret project is fascinating on many levels: I read it regularly and can’t help but be emotionally moved by the things that people share. Some are shocking, most are depressing, a few are joyful. Most of all, however, they remind me we live in a broken, fallen world where many people live in fear and doubt, lacking hope. Sometimes it hurts, but it’s good to never forget that although your life may be rosy, the person living right next to you could be on the verge of giving up on everything. People need to be in relationship with each other, but even that won’t fill the God-shaped hole that each of our souls have (no matter how hard we many deny it).
MS Paint: That’s One Powerful Application
Strictly for the geeky among us…that gave me a good chuckle!
“Made in China” Starting to Scare Me
“Mattel Inc. recalled millions of toys on Tuesday due to hazards from small, powerful magnets and lead paint, the latest round of recalls from the toymaker. The recalled products include about 7.3 million Polly Pocket, Batman Magna, Doggie Daycare and Shonen Jump’s One Piece play sets with the small magnets. According to a statement from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Mattel, about 2.4 million of the play sets were recalled on November 21.” – Full Story
It used to be that the Made in China label on a product simply meant it was manufactured cheaply and simply, much as Made in Japan meant the same thing 30 years ago. As China evolves into a more sophisticated manufacturing centre, they’re getting more and more of the manufacturing business as public companies struggle to cut costs and boost “shareholder value” (a seemingly nice term that justifies some very unethical things). When I see “Made in China” now on something, I immediately wonder if the product is dangerous. China’s fast-growing economy, combined with, shall we we say, highly “flexible” morals (though apparently this guy felt bad), has resulted in some truly dangerous products making their way all across the world. Prior to the Mattel incident, there was the toothpaste incident, and the pet food incident. And those are just the ones in recent memory, and ones big enough for us to have heard about. I’ve seen news reports about some of the counterfeit products on the market, and those ones are really scary: Viagra pills painted blue with paint used on roads in China. Batteries with sloppy chemical mixes that will explode. Headache pills filled mostly with asphalt. Some companies in China will substitute anything they can, no matter how dangerous, in order to boost profits.
The problem is that basically anything goes – it’s like the Wild West over in China right now, with the previously rural-based population, always on the brink of starvation, flooding into the major cities and factory areas looking for better jobs. Reading China Inc. was an eye-opener for me, and a must-read for anyone interested in world events. The thumb of the communist party has been partially lifted, and the Chinese people are applying their industrious nature to new industries – witness the sudden rise of the $99 leather jacket as one example. The story goes (in the book China Inc.) that cheap leather jackets are available now because previously rejected leather, full of holes, is now able to be used because Chinese labourers are so cheap they can be hired to individually fill hundreds of holes in the leather, thus making it usable. That’s a good thing for Joe Consumer who previously couldn’t afford to buy a leather jacket, but it’s not a good thing when cutting corners means products that aren’t safe to use.
Companies having their products made in China need to step up and demand higher standards. Until they do, I’m going to look at anything made in China with a sceptical eye…sadly, with so many products being made there, it’s not like there’s a lot of choice.
Being Home Never Felt so Good
After being away last week from Monday to Sunday night, it felt so incredibly good to come home – I always miss home after a while on vacations and travelling for business, but in this case because our week was so hard (my grandfather passed away on Tuesday night) and full of alternating periods of being busy and then standing around for hours, I think it made me miss home ever more. I’ve never been so involved in all the aspects of a family member passing away as I was this week, so there was a lot of learning for me. I try to be a lifelong student, always learning, improving, and growing. I took away lessons about the importance of having a living will, something I’ll likely write about in the future as I drafted one for my parents on the way home from Penticton.
This blog will likely take a slight turn away from technology over the next couple of weeks as I process this experience and what it means to me.
I Lost My Grandfather Last Night
I’m typing this sitting at a Starbucks in Penticton, British Columbia. On Sunday night I received a phone call from my sister telling me that my grandfather was suffering from kidney and liver cancer, and was near death. This came as a complete shock to everyone – a few weeks ago he was healthy and walking around. Ashley and I got on a plane and flew to BC Monday afternoon, and got to see him open his eyes and acknowledge we were there. Last night, while I was holding his hand, he passed away – his lungs filled with fluid and his heart stopped. I’ve never experienced death in such a direct manner before, so it was an experience unlike anything else – and likely something I’ll be exploring on this blog in the future. We’re going to stay in Penticton until the funeral on Saturday, then we’ll be heading home.
I have no connectivity unless I walk over to the nearby shopping mall and pay $8 for an hour of online access ($13 for the day) so if I don’t respond to email messages, that’s why. I’ll likely be back on Sunday night and returning to work Monday morning.
Intuit: I Have No Confidence in Your Software
You know, there’s nothing worse than buying a piece of software, installing it, starting it up, and having it immediately crash. No splash screen, nothing – it just pukes and gives you an error. I just installed Quickbooks Pro 2007 on my Vista-based laptop, and that’s exactly what it did.
You’ve gotta’ love the fact that there’s no error information. When I click on VIEW REPORT I see a 500-line XML file that’s completely incomprehensible. Ok, I figured maybe the version out of the box wasn’t Vista-compatible, so I went to their Web site and downloaded the latest update. Installed it, started up the software, same damn error. Rebooted, started up the software, same damn error. It’s interesting to note that there’s no phone number for tech support shown, and no instructions for solving the error – clicking HELP simply gives me information about their reporting policy, nothing to assist me in solving this error.
No wonder some people hate computers – the idiot companies making the software ruin the whole experience. I’ve always thought Quicken products were kind of flaky (I had a Quicken file get corrupted on me last year), but now I know they’re completely flaky.
Vista’s Windows Update Needs Two Layers of Functionality
The automatic update functionality in Windows Vista has been really irritating me lately, and here’s why: by default Windows Update is set to install updates automatically at a certain time of day. That would be fine if no update required a reboot of the PC, but some do, and Microsoft still lacks the technology to capture the state of the system, apply the patch, reboot, and restore the system state. I learned early on to turn off this setting or I’d lose my work. The next-best option is “Download updates but let me choose whether to install them” – this works great for having system reboots occur on our own time frame, but it sucks because of one application: Windows Defender.
There’s a new Windows Defender anti-spyware update on an almost daily basis. That’s good for protecting me from spyware, but it’s a hassle because I have four PCs that I work on regularly. Basically every day I have to approve the installation of a Windows Defender update across four computers. That’s just a pain. There’s no good reason why something as simple as an anti-spyware profile update should be in the same category of update as a major system patch. Windows Update needs to evolve into a dual-layer system where minor updates that don’t require reboots can be installed automatically, and major updates require user permission. Or perhaps they could just add an option to not install patches requiring a reboot without user permission? There must be a way for an update to be flagged as reboot-necessary or not. Windows Update has to get better, and smarter.
Facebook and Ex’s
Facebook, and indeed all social networking sites, are fascinating from a sociological standpoint. I bet psychology and sociology researchers are drooling in anticipation to study and data-mine everything that’s going on with those sites. One thing that I quickly realized when Facebook started to explode was the issue of the Ex’s. As in, ex-girlfriends. Life is all about cycles, and for a while you might date a woman (in my case), be involved with her circle of friends and family, and then that cycle either becomes permanent (marriage) or it ends and you begin a new cycle with someone new. I’m generalizing of course, but that’s usually how it works.
Sites like Facebook take those cycles, throw them in a super-blender, and make it messy! Ashley (my wife) and I had this discussion early on when the first ex-girlfriend invited me to be her friend on Facebook. First, it shocked the hell out of me to see her name and photo in my Facebook Inbox – I hadn’t seen her in about eight years, so it was bizarre to have her appear in my life again (even in only a virtual way). Ashley and I talked about what would happen, and what could happen, if we accepted our ex’s back into our lives. We talked about what good could come of it (not a whole lot) and the dangers of it to our marriage (a whole lot). Ultimately this isn’t about thinking our marriage isn’t strong enough to handle either of us chatting with ex’s (it is), it’s more about avoiding risks that we don’t have a good reason to take – we live in a divorce-prone society, so why tempt fate by introducing such factors? It’s all too easy to bring back memories and feelings from the past, and that’s not a healthy thing for a marriage.
In case this wasn’t already obvious, the reason I’m writing this today is that I finally got around to sending messages to the two ex-girlfriends that had sent me requests on Facebook. The first one I declined several months ago without a reason (I felt kind of bad about that), and the second one was more recent, which prompted me to craft a response that I’ll now send to any ex-girlfriend that contacts me. And, no, I haven’t had that many girlfriends in my life, so I don’t expect to be sending it out all that often. 😉
What about you? How does this issue impact you?