Solstice

Longest day of the year, soon to be followed by shorter and shorter.

Be nice to say that I'd accomplished some change today. But no, all I really did was catch up on some of my sleep debt. At this rate, I need about a month in hibernation.

In the process of switching over from Apple software. Not a total boycott, but for a long while, there have been certain things which have annoyed me, which I have overlooked or found ways to work around because, hey, it's Apple!

No more of that. I've never used Safari in the first place, but now I'm abandoning iTunes (except for the free weekly song download at Apple's expense), DVD Player, and a host of other pre-installed products which I consider to be lacking in functionality or generally bothersome.

As part of this, I've been ripping my music collection out to FLAC and thence Ogg Vorbis. I'd probably go straight to Vorbis, but I've been thinking of keeping the FLACs around partly out of paranoia, and partly because they'll take up space on the hard drive which can be easily freed up the next time I need extra, because I own the cds/dvds and happily delete stuff without having to scramble to burn a backup disc.

I'd actually have preferred to go with APE, for the space savings, but there's no readily available command-line tool to tag those. I tried apetag, but it a) failed to compile, and b) when I edited the source to get it to compile, failed to recognize or apply any tags to a file, something that may have resulted from my hacking, or maybe it would have just happened on its own.

In any case, FLAC can be transcoded directly to Ogg, is much faster to encode and verify on my machine, and the space savings are only about a meg per file anyway.

Suicide or homicide? Decisions, decisions...

By four o'clock, I've discounted suicide in favour of killing everyone else in the entire world instead.

— Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan #17

Not quite at that point yet, but getting closer. Sleep debt growing. The past week has completely shot what equilibrium I managed to gain.

I can honestly say that I haven't felt this bad since the corresponding period in ————. I'd make a joke about how we all know what happened then, but the entire point of my not discussing personal matters is that no one else reading this does.

Still very angry about the AppleCare situation, when I'm not being depressed. I suppose I should have expected this betrayal of trust invested, given their past track record of repeatedly screwing over their heretofore loyal customer base, but it always comes as a surprisingly painful shock when it happens to me personally.

My remaining faith is destroyed and I am now apostate from the Cult of the Macintosh, which is probably for the best. For the past few years, it was the closest thing I had to religion, and as an atheist, I know just how bad those are for me.

I have planning ahead, and need to remove distractions. I'm going to unsub from a lot of things I haven't been keeping up with, and try to get other things cleaned and organized. I'll be needing the free space and easy access.

AppleCare Customer Service is full of lying weasel people who will try and pass the buck

Well, the lady from AppleCare Customer Service who said last week that she'd check into my case on Monday and contact me, who didn't, finally called today after I left a message on her voicemail late Tuesday afternoon, waking me out of what little sleep I got.

Even though I was still experiencing the problem, and in fact had experienced a new and annoying iteration of it on both Monday and Tuesday, she tried to pass the buck, first to the repair place, and then onto an unfortunate Tech Support person.

We went through a great many rounds of unplugging, rebooting, testing, and all the other stuff I've tried for months on end, to no avail, since everything still points back to an issue with the PowerBook. It doesn't happen with the iMac, it doesn't happen with any of the Windows computers in the household, it doesn't happen all the time.

It happened twice. Once during the original test section, the hard drive failed to mount on the desktop, or even show up in Disk Utility, although System Profiler could read that there was a USB/1394 Combo device attached.

The second time, I'd just gotten off the phone with the guy after doing a reboot, seeing the drive mount, and the guy declaring that everything was okay now and he could hang up.

Since I was already awake, I decided I might as well check my email and go blog about this. I open my mail program and browser, then click on the drive icon on the desktop, thinking to unmount the drive. Spinning beach ball of death, and system lockup, which goes on for quite awhile, eventually requiring a hard reset.

I phoned him back to inform him of the irony of his statement.

Both times, the Tech Support guy tried to convince me to take it up with the manufacturers of my external drive enclosures, who'll probably just point me back to Apple, as they well should, considering it's very likely to be Apple's fault. Then he tried to convince me to go out and buy another set of Firewire cables and see if I was still experiencing the problem.

I already have what seems to be two entirely usable cables, why should I spend money on more to try and solve an issue that seems to stem not *from* the cables, which have been swapped back and forth, used separately and together, but from the PowerBook itself, for which I have already wasted $500 in useless AppleCare, and another $52 for the dubious privilege of discovering that said AppleCare was useless, and probably wrong.

I didn't even get what I requested when I took the PB in to have it checked and hopefully fixed, and ended up being slapped with the unexpected surcharge for: a full physical inspection of the PowerBook itself, to make sure that nothing was obviously defective or likely to fail in the near future.

Instead, it reads like the guy just plugged it in, tried it once, said “Works for me”, and went on with his day after filling out his invoice for services not rendered.

In the end, I blame Apple, not him, because it's their AppleCare service policy which is at fault. It promises support and coverage while actually penalizing the customer for experiencing a problem that cannot be traced back to an obviously loose connector or other glaring manufacturer's defect, and making them afraid to report any real problems, on the off chance that nothing will be found upon casual inspection.

After all that you have spent on the extra coverage, you will receive extra surcharges for a cursory once-over which will neither look into the cause of the issue, nor tell you anything you didn't already know, and, in fact, stated openly in your report of what you've been experiencing.

And then they'll try to blame someone else for the problem, and weasel out from under their service agreement.

That two extra years of coverage for “parts and labour” you paid so much for so you could have “peace of mind” when something goes wrong? Only applies to “parts *and* labour”, and only together. They inspect the part which has gone wrong (if they even got as far as inspecting it, and not just doing “plug and play”) and don't replace it? You're liable for the labour costs, as the miracle of finding nothing counts as an “Act of God”, for which they will not take responsibility.

That intermittent problem you keep having which is directly traceable back to the PowerBook itself? It's the fault of the peripherals.

It happens once when you're talking to Tech Support and doesn't happen the next time you reboot? Well, keep rebooting!

It happens another time just after you've gotten off the phone and are working during the reboot session and completely locks up, and you call back to mention that it definitely hasn't gone away? Well, reboot yet again!

Oh, and go spend your meager remaining money on buying new and improved peripherals, maybe that'll solve it. And if it doesn't, well, it's their fault again, because Apple can do nothing for you. No visible defect obviously requiring replacement, we don't have to pony up coverage to all the fools we've suckered in, yay!

Lying weasel people.

AppleCare is not only worthless, but wrong

Just had to do a hard reset of the PowerBook.

What happened? You guessed it, another Firewire issue.

Tried to unmount a partition on an external drive which kept stubbornly refusing to unmount, claiming that it was still in use after I'd shut down the various applications which might possibly have been referencing a file or directory there.

No luck. I had a compile and other stuff going which I didn't want to interrupt, so I let it power down.

But it kept powering up every time I downloaded a new dependency, and I kept trying to unmount it every time afterward. It still refused.

Finally, I tried one last time, and it locked up the PowerBook entirely. Spinning beach ball of death, frozen Terminal output, absolutely no response for quite some time. I had to force a shutdown, and lost my work.

This happened with an entirely different drive, with an entirely different cable, leading to an entirely different enclosure.

Maybe it's vaguely possible that I have two entire sets of dud equipment, but I've never had any problems using either with the iMac, and the only thing these incidents keep having in common is the PowerBook.

So not only did I get shafted by AppleCare on the extended coverage I bought, I also had to pay extra for what's probably a very lazily done and outright wrong diagnosis.

Rotten AppleCare experience, continued

“I have wasted a day.”

So the Emperor Trajan was said to have said if he'd let a day go by without doing some charitable act.

And so have I wasted mine, waiting for the lady from AppleCare Customer Service who, on Friday, said that she would look into my case on Monday, to call, which of course she hasn't. I really don't know why I'm so surprised.

Or rather not surprised, but extremely disappointed that they wouldn't keep their word. After all, they've already demonstrated deception and dishonesty.

I'm making up for the time lost by compiling and installing new software on the Mac. I want to get away from using actual Apple apps (which have a tendency to suck, anyway, often missing useful features found in other apps, or just plain having annoying behaviours), as soon as possible.

Adding Unix software is a surprisingly complex process. Even with Fink to help out with dependencies and such, in order to get a configuration of ImageMagick that I like, using the latest version before I use it a dependency in the KDE Office port, which I'm installing for their paint and vector programs, I have to go backwards in a kind of reverse breadcrumb trail, building the tools I need in order to build the tools that I want.

I want SVG support, so I must have librsvg installed. In order to have librsvg installed with support for gzipped SVGs, I must have libgsf. In order to compile libgsf, I need to have the XML::Parser perl module. In order to build the XML::Parser perl module, I must first compile expat. And so forth.

None of this really wavers my determination to have SVG support in ImageMagick, but it's mildly frustrating. They could at least list in the README where to find the necessary packages. One could probably make a rather fascinating map of various software dependencies.

Rotten AppleCare experience

“No sound effect can express my anger.”

Got back from picking up the PowerBook. You'd think I'd be happier that there was nothing wrong, but I'm not.

This is because although I am still covered by AppleCare, I was also charged extra because they didn't find any problems with the laptop. This was what I was hoping for, as it's easier to replace a faulty Firewire cable than an entire motherboard, but there was absolutely no warning that this would happen, even though I specifically stated that the issue I was experiencing might have come from an external source and was it okay to take the PowerBook in to get a general check-up under the warranty even if there was probably nothing really the matter.

I wouldn't have minded so much if I'd been given some form of indication that there would be an unwarrantied service fee if they didn't have to replace anything. Then at least I could decided not to bring it in, or at least take my custom elsewhere, but while the guy doing the intake was sure to tell me that software issues were not covered, and the guy who phoned to say that the PB had been checked and was ready for pickup at any time, neither of them bothered to mention the extra charge.

I'm going to phone up Apple and hopefully they'll reimburse me, but I can say right now that I'm never buying anything from CompuSmart again, and I'm not likely to get another Mac in the near future.

Not the worst of times, but far from the best.

This has not been a good week. Or, for that matter, a good year.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother. Then I remember. Apathy and failure, not necessarily in that order.

I'll be reclaiming the PowerBook on Friday, as well as sending off another complaint to Visa.

After that, I'll decide what to do next.

Hell, prack, and damn!

Whistle, too. Double whistle!

Discovered I had fewer days left on the AppleCare than I'd thought. Fortunately, Compusmart will take the PowerBook as a drop-off, and if there are any resulting issues, hopefully they'll be covered.

Now doing last-minute backups. I really should have done this a month or more ago, but I got caught up in that damned DVDSoon business. Speaking of which, still no refund, and no response. I'm going to mail the Visa stuff off tomorrow.