amazon #fail

I've been an Amazon customer for a long time.  I really like their services and believe they have a great business model.  They've made me accustomed to great customer service, with fast shipping, no questions on their refunds, overall a good service.  I can't remember when; but a long time ago they allowed independent merchants to sell goods through their systems.  I believed this was a good idea, overall; because they expanded to new types of products more users came to the site.  This benefits the merchants because they receive business from Amazon, from the users that are accustomed to deal with the large e-tailer.  It's a win/win for everyone, oh wait I forgot about the user's experience.  I guess I should of known there is no such thing as a win/win.  Here is my experience, I buy a laptop through Amazon, from a market place merchant.  The purchase process is good, no problems, I receive my confirmation emails, I get billed to my card, the product is shipped by the merchant and I receive it.  Here is were the fun starts,  I try the new laptop, I turned it on, it goes through the BIOS process and all I end up with is a  black screen.  At this point I'm aggravated, I send the merchant a note letting him know that I just tried the machine and it's not working and I would like a refund.  The merchant very quickly responds to me letting me know as per their return policy (which can be read before the purchase was made), they do not have refunds on open packages and I must deal with manufacture directly, with their warranty.  They provide me with a link to the manufactures website for support.  After spending two hours on the phone trouble shooting the brand new computer the mfg. will send me a box so I can send the computer back.  So $1700.00 later I have a machine sitting on my floor waiting for a box to come in so I can ship it out.  Maybe in a week I will have my machine back.

All in all who's fault is it, I guess I should take most of the responsibility and say it's my fault I did buy a product with out reading the return policy.  While I don't think the merchant is necessarily at fault I will never buy another product from them.  Why buy a product from someone who has no real costumer service.  The last participant in this ordeal was off-course Amazon.  While Amazon clearly points out you are making the transaction with another merchant, it doesn't provide any indication that their return policies differ.  Till now I had never though to look at the other merchants return's policies.  I always though because I was buying from Amazon I would be protected by them (guess not).  While I don't think this experience will stop me from buying from Amazon it has tainted the image I had of them.

Moral of the story think twice before buying from a merchant that's not Amazon.

Later...

taser app for free!

Now everyone can carry a free! taser on thier iphone, check it out on the itunes store Don't Tase Me Bro!

busy...

It's been a while since my last post, I've been so busy working on our next release I don't have too much time for anything else.  The new release will be a game, so stay tuned for more information.  I've been working with a talented musician, Nick Pipitone who was been making the background tracks for our game.  Check out some of his work in the iTunes store, he has an album called Esque

Later...

Dead Mac Pro!

What a waist of a day, I dislike when technology goes wrong.  It seems lately that technology is failing me.  Unfortunately today it was my MAC pro, which happens to be my main machine.  When I made it to the office nice and early to get some work done I found my machine to be non responsive.  Here is what I did to trouble shoot this problem.

First of all if your MAC is under warranty I suggest just taking it to the store and let them deal with it.  If your MAC is like mine and it's out of warranty you might want to try to diagnose the issue.  Who knows it might be something you can fix.  

Step one the power LED had power but monitor was not responsive, fortunately I had a second monitor so I plugged it in.  Monitor still did not respond, so I held the power button down and turned off the machine.  I tried it one more with a similar result, I ruled out the monitor.  

Step two remove components that where added to the machine by me.  First I removed the memory which was purchased from Crucial and replaced it with the original apple memory.  Cycled the machine and had the same result no response from video.  Before removing the secondary drive that was added a few weeks ago I decided to remove the video card.  

After removing the video card, I cycled the machine and notice the machine was booting.  I heard the normal tones for boot-up, of course nothing to see.  Fortunately I had screen sharing turned on and I was able to log into the machine from my air, nothing like trading 30" for 13" :-(  Just to make sure the video card was the component having an issue I turned off the machine placed the video card back into the machine and powered up.  Same result as the morning, the machine was no longer responsive.

First I went to apple online to see what video card I could get for my machine, they recommend a Radeon HD 1900 XT.  Now with this information on hand the torture started, wouldn't you know it apple does not offer availability at their stores.  Called the closest stores to me and of course they didn't have the video card.  I decided to check the generic route; and unfortunately it was bust.  I ended up in Best Buy which is one of the last electronic stores in my area that actually sells computer parts and no luck.  They didn't have the video cards that people are saying work with the MAC pro (GeForce 8800GT and Quatro FX 5400).  So I bit the bullet when back to the office and spent $400.00 on a new video card which I'm hopping ships today and I should have it hear tomorrow.  

Disappointed:  The one thing that troubles me a bit with this whole thing is; although the new MAC's are intel based, apple chooses to have a proprietary video card in their machines.  While its ok for a phone and not as relevant for a notebook, those of us who get a desktop machine do it to take advantage of customization and expansion of our systems.  If this would of been a windows PC I would of been able to pick up any of the 5 or 6 video boards at the store and be up and running in no time.

I have to say I started seriously using apple when they switched to the intel chipset and unix for OS.  This move allowed apple to benefit from the open source movement and introduced a great number of free applications that were not really possible before.  This combination of software and good hardware has kept me happy for the last five years; but  I always get worried when I run into proprietary components that in the end limit the ability of the user.  On a tangent here, I know apple bought a chip manufacture not too long ago, lets hope they don't start putting proprietary chips on their PCs. 

Oh well tomorrow is already hear, let's hope i get the new card today and hope that it fixes my problems.

Thanks...

Airport Express Mixed Feelings...

I have to say I've owned my airport express ever since I bought a MacBook Air, I though it was the perfect companion for the laptop that doesn't have an ethernet port built in.  When I travel I plug in my airport express and provided wireless for my room, which is very convenient.  I've been very happy with this device, its very easy to configure and works well.  You can extend an existing network or convert a wired ethernet connection to wireless.  Also using the built in USB port for charging my iphone or ipod, makes it convenient and it's one less adaptor I have to carry.  So far so good, until last week when I tried to use the airtunes feature in itunes to send music to the analog output on the airport express.  While it was simple to setup, simply follow the wizard on the airport setup I was not able to get it to work properly.

The first attempt:  I configured the unit to extend my existing wireless network using WDS.  The master station is an airport extreme which I bought previously to fix what I though was another problem see below.  I used the wizard, followed some simple steps and there I was two green lights ready to rock ;-).  I went to itunes changed the destination of the speakers to the new airport express and it worked.  I used it for about an hour and the sound started to cut out.  At first the songs would play for a bit and cut out, it got worst to the point where it would even play.  I thought it was distance or interference so I placed the unit about two feet from the master station and the problem persisted.  

Trouble Shooting:  Now that I ruled out distance or interference I doubled checked that I had the latest firmware and software for the airport and airport express, which I did.  So I went to the web to see if anyone else was having the similar problem and better yet see if they had a solution.  After a couple of hours of searching the internet, I did find quite a few people having issues with the airtunes express and a few of them were having the same issues I was.  

The second attempt:  After reading a few hundred messages and visiting a few websites I found one that suggested to use the airport express as a client and not a bridge.  This sounded reasonable using the airport software I reconfigured the airport express to be a client.  Note, because on the first attempt where I configured the airport express unit to extend the wireless connection it changed the configuration on the airport extreme.  The airport extreme now displayed a yellow light indicating some kind of issue.  When I looked at the error the unit was complaining there were no WDS clients.  Of course I had just reconfigured the airport express to client instead of bridge.  I went into manual setup for the airport extreme and turned off the WDS.  Now with both green lights on I tried it again, unfortunately it had the same result.  The songs would play sporadically, which really sucks when you are trying to follow the a beat.  

My final attempt:  A few of the post spoke about trying the multiple speakers selection in iTunes, which seemed to fix a problem similar to mine.  I configured itunes to use my airport express and my apple TV, which sits on the other side of the house.  While it seemed to work at first after a few minutes the airport express cut out and the apple TV kept playing.  This was it, I would waist no more time on this, obviously the problem has to be with the airport express unit.  

After wasting six hours on a saturday trying to get airtunes to work I finally gave up and decided to write about it.  If someone out there has had this problem and fixed it let me know or if you are having this problem it doesn't look good don't spend too much time on it.  I have to say I'm not sure on the exact model of my airport express base station; but I've had it for about three years and works flawlessly for wireless internet.   Also the computer that is streaming the music is an iMac with the itunes 8.1.1.  By the way I use it to stream movies to my apple TV and works great (not at the same time).   The funny thing about this whole experience is I always though my airport express was a cool device and in truth in all these year I never tried to use the airtunes; but now that I have I'm disappointed with the device, in a way it tainted me.  Oh well maybe apple will come out with a new firmware upgrade and that will take care of the problem.

Thanks for reading...