March 25, 2006
Mother was, at times, gripped during her trip to Singapore
It's always fun when mother comes on a trip, whether to Outback Australia or urban Singapore.
March 03, 2006
ATI Warranty Support Sucks -- do not buy their products
I have an ATI Radeon 9800 SE VGA card. Within days of using it, the bearings in its cooling fan started to fail. Eventually the cooling fan completely seized. By the point that almost everything on my pc had died (the motherboard, the VGA, the harddrives, etc) I started ripping things out and sending them back for warranty repair.
All the equipment had local representatives who, to some degree, repair or service the gear.
Except ATI.
There is no local representative in Singapore. Eventually, through their really poor website, I drill down to their warranty repair section. You have to enter in all the particulars of your card through an onerous form that seems designed make you give up trying and balk. You need to enter a long product number, serial number, and product type. The form just dumbly says, "invalid serial number" or "invalid product number" with no explanation of what failed. Turns out it is a brittle regexp that doesn't like the hyphens that are scattered in the s/n as written on the board, for example.
Once you've forced a form to work, it issues you an RMA number for return. The kicker is everything must be sent to Ontario Canada for repair.
Fucking bite me ATI Graphics, you suck. They even have the cheek to suggest you send it via courier to ensure it gets there. So yeah, I'm going to spend $45 to have them replace a $0.45 part on a $90 VGA card. Oh fuck off.
ATI's game is "NO SUPPORT IF AT ALL POSSIBLE".
I highly recommend never purchasing an ATI product because it will be a useless pile of pc board if anything, no matter how trivial, fails.
March 02, 2006
Wanted: hi-res vintage equipment photos
For a project I'm working on, I'm looking for high resolution, detailed, close-in photos of interesting military/electronic equipment from the 1940's 1950's or 1960's.
Examples might be radars, radios, command-and-control, encryption technologies, etc.
Luke Pops a Tooth
I haven't seen it yet, but Ling reports that Little Squeaker (whose been angry as a hornet lately) has popped a tooth. Lower left middle incisor. No photos yet. I guess it could have been worse. He's been grouchy, but he didn't get the fever that people warned of.
I'll miss his gummy little smile.
I won't miss his gummy little shrieking hiss.