Originally intended to document my experience of DeLorean ownership, focus is often radical and strange, boring and obtuse.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Roomba 2: The Sequel

Fraternal Roomba twins separated at birth.

I am surrounded by failure. Firstly, neither of our cats can speak English despite 8 years of personal, one-on-one lessons. Secondly, their arch-nemesis, the Roomba, broke down numerous times over the last week. And when I look at my computer I see nothing but failure. (It was a one in a trillion chance, but both my regular hard drive AND my backup hard drive failed at the exact same time. I lost everything.)

Yes, everywhere I look there is failure. Even the Useless Men, with two new posts in the last 30 some-odd days, are performing particularly uselessly.

But let's get back to Roomba, its failure and iRobot's silly customer support. It all started when Roomba stopped beeping.

The Roomba beeps to tell you various things. The cute & cuddly beeps are charming like a Speak 'n Spell, or sad and scary like a pissed off R2-D2. Roomba says "DO-DO! LA-LA-LAAA!" when it is happy, and "Uh-oh!" when there is trouble. The beeps are the window to Roomba's feelings and innermost thoughts. When something bad has happened to Roomba, he tells you. With beeps!

But how can Roomba tell you his speaker is broken when he can't beep at you? On top of that, Roomba wasn't working - and because of the failed speaker, couldn't tell me why.

Enter iRobot Customer Support. After explaining via email that my Roomba no longer beeps, and I therefore couldn't figure out what made him sick, I received a reply. A ridiculous reply that went something like this:

"If Roomba beeps 'uh-oh' 2 times, it means...
If Roomba beeps 'uh-oh' 3 times, it means...
If Roomba beeps 'uh-oh' 4 times, it means..."
etc.


A box o' fun!You get the idea. Customer Support was useless, and in my curt reply I let them know it. But upon receiving a nice package at my door today, I wish I had been a little nicer in my email.

After the inital email, I received a second one from iRobot. The Customer Support agent apologized for the previous email, then told me that with a failed speaker, Roomba was in need of being replaced. That's right, a full replacement because of the failure of a part worth a little less than a gallon of gasoline. (And don't even get me started on the amount of fuel it took for them to ship it to me from Pennsylvania!)

While I waited for my new Roomba to arrive, I disassembled my Roomba to try and find the problem. Inside there were bundles of tiny wires. The wires lead to various sensors and motors. I found the speaker and it was intact. The speaker wire was also intact. I took apart the motor to the side-spinning brush. I re-greased the gears with nuts and gum and put everything back together.

After all my toiling, Roomba still didn't work. It would start, but jerk to a halt a few seconds later. Frustrated, and knowing a logo-less replacement was on its way, I vented my anger in the form of a powerful punch. Roomba came back to life instantly.

It seems a good flogging now and then is good for delicate electronics, and helps the Chinese workforce stay motivated to churn out the cheap Roombas destined for jerks like me who can't afford the Trilobite.

And if anybody's looking for me, I'll be hiding in Florida till Sept. 2nd. Au revoir!

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Friday, August 15, 2008

Failure

I made this all by myself
moar funny pictures

So much failure. No Olympic medals for Canada thus far and the worst part of all - I haven't been able to post anything new lately because of a hard drive failure. Yes, that is so much worse than Canada's showing at the Olympics. Why? Because Canada never does well at the Olympics so there are no surprises.

Anyhoo, my hard drive has unexpectedly and catastrophically crashed leaving me unable to boot up Windows. I have pictures but have been unable to transfer my photos to my computer or write anything.

So while you wait for me to get up and running again, enjoy this ad I found online, and many more failures at Failblog and I Can Has Cheezburger?.

And yes, this was a real ad I found. Yes, some 'business' full of incompetent employees who can't understand why the terrorist who masterminded the destruction of the World Trade towers is running for President actually thinks they have the ability to correctly test how intelligent you are. If you take the I.Q. test and believe the results, shame. You are certainly NOT "smarter than a eight year old."

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Friday, March 21, 2008

Power Supply Surprise

The 4 extra pins pop off, allowing the power supply to fit my 'old' motherboard.

I replaced the power supply in my computer last week and found a big surprise waiting for me. A totally unexpected, awesome surprise that was both awesome and unexpected.

Ever since
I got a sweet video card for my computer, I've been having problems. If I opened more than two windows or programs, my computer would freeze and the Task Manager would even crash.

I soon discovered that my power supply was a mere 250 watts, or about 1/7th the power of my hair dryer. Since my new video card required a minimum of 350 watts to run, I figured it was a safe bet my power supply was stretched to its limits and would soon explode, sending shrapnel into my poor, defenseless knees.

An I.T.-employed friend hooked me up with a new 420 watt power supply for $40. The Codegen Technology power supply boasts a super mega giant fan beneath it, instead of the typical small rear-mounted fans. It sucks air from inside the case, and redirects it out the back, keeping everything cooler overall. This massive "low noise" fan, about the size of Don Cherry's ego, is supposed to run much quieter as well, but I discovered that part wasn't true.

I also discovered a very cool surprise which sent my brain reeling back to the mid 1980s - the power supply smelled like candy. Delicious, intoxicating candy. I'm sure the plastic encased wires were not made in the Willy Wonka factory, but they smelled like they could've been.

I deeply inhaled the candylicious aroma before sealing the computer case forever. But I am weak. Weak to the power of candy. Once in a while I crack open the power supply's box, and take a sniff, then quickly shut the lid so the candy scent doesn't escape, and so that nobody catches me doing it. I like to sniff my candy in private.

It's embarrassing. I'm addicted to power supplies.

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Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Radeon is Rad-ical

This card could've powered Sputnik.

Not so long ago my birthday made an appearance then quickly went back into hiding. He's a sneaky devil and likes to surprise me only once a year. But he's predictable so I always know when he's going to show up.

This year I was prepared as usual, but surprised when my Suz got me, in a round-about kind of way, a Radeon 512 mb video card for my comp. The card features a good-sized cooling fan which has a nifty image of a girl on it.

I was surprised to find a company would spend extra time and resources printing high quality images on their components when they'll never be seen once placed inside the non-transparent case of the computer.

Anyway, I am happy to find that I'm able to play my most favouritest games, like C&C Zero Hour, with the graphics cranked to the absolute max. Even still, I am finding I must turn the game speed way down to be able to play properly.

Now my buildings can be captured 7x faster, my gattling cannons blown up 6.5x quicker, and my Chinese Nuclear Migs can crash at record speeds while my pilots have mere milliseconds to scream "China going dowwwwwn!"

Oh, and my carpal tunnel can advance 8x faster also.

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Monday, April 09, 2007

Retirement Fun

Stare! Stare my pretties! Turn your brains to mush! (so I can suck them out through a straw. My blender's broken.)

My parents have decided to retire, and with so many friends and family members living in the U.S., they really needed email to stay in touch. So, just before Easter a package arrived.

Inside the box was a new 2.0 Ghz Dell Dimension computer and big-ass printer. I spent about 10 minutes hooking it all up so the cable guy could install their high-speed modem the next morning. Without it, emails to their friends would have to be printed off, folded, put in an envelope and mailed.

Although my dad has had email at work, he's never had internet access until now, so he's had much fun learning to put pictures of BMW M3s as his desktop wallpaper.

My mom is a conundrum. Terrified of technology, and wires specifically, but with a smile that reminds me of the animated Reach Toothbrush "flip top head" guy, she laughs like a little girl when she views .mov files of her grandsons taken with her own camera.

It is all very amusing to watch how this computer is changing their lives. But somehow I just can't imagine Dell's advertising campaign had any influence on this purchase.

It would be interesting to see the actual demographic vs. the targeted demographic of the "Dude, you’re gettin' a Dell!" campaign. Colossal advertising blunder? Or ingenious marketing ploy? "Yo, old dudes, only cool young dudes buy Dell’s! BOOYA!"

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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Twenty Years of Technology

P4, son of Abacus.In 1987 my parents bought a home computer for my sister and me. It was an IBM clone 286 with a quarter meg of RAM and came with a mouse, which was unheard of at the time.

My friends were amazed by the VGA colour monitor, but very disappointed that we couldn’t swap files because of the weird new 3" disk drive. Years later even our high school computers still used 5-1/4 disks, so I could never bring anything home to work on. Nothing could be saved to our hard drive without deleting one of the two programs it came with and the modem was literally useless because there was no one else we could connect to. In fact, my mom was the only person who even knew what a modem was.

It's like I have lived the past 20 years in a cocoon. And I finally broke out of the crusty brown thing this weekend when I bought my first DVD-burner, a Pioneer model. It was on sale at a place called Summit Direct for $39. I thought it was a good deal, although, admittedly, I have no idea.

It's a 40x8x12 if I remember correctly. Again, I have no idea if this is good, but for $39, I didn’t think I could go wrong.

I also picked up some Kodak 8x re-writeable DVD -Rs. Each DVD holds 4.7 gigs of info, which is 50% larger than the hard drive from my old Pentium 2. The 50-pack cost $16. For $16 I could have bought eight mini cartons of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, or 6-1/2 cupcakes from Cupcakes, or 3 minutes of time here.

After installing the burner and the Nero 7 software, I burned my first DVD on the weekend. It felt like 2001. Man, I’ve a lot of catching up to do.

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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

New Computer - $0

NASA put a monkey into space with less than this.

Money comes and money goes, but in my household, money does go spent upgrading my computer every time something new comes out, which, in the computer world, is about once every 4 days.

Nope, I get my computers from the garbage. But I don’t have to go dumpster-diving to find them. I simply sit and wait - and they come to me.

My good friend BPZ has come through once again and supplied me with a whopping 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 which used to be his company computer. When they upgraded his home computer, the old one, which is outdated by their standards, was slated for recycling. Instead, it will replace my P3 450. As BPZ points out, my old computer is the ‘point four’ of the new one.

This one came loaded with circuit boards, wires, boxes that hummed and tilt steering. It even had a big fan that spun around, dizzying the eyes and mind. The circuit boards were covered in little nubbies and bits of shiny stuff.

Very cool.

It also came with a CD burner, which I’ve never had before. I don’t know how they fit matches in there, and I don’t know why anyone would want to melt a CD, but considering people use them as coasters, I guess someone had to invent more fun things to do with them.

I do enjoy my new computer very much. If it weren’t for the tempting, candy-like ASUS finger-grater located directly in the middle, I would’ve considered the computer less of a torture device and more of a toy.

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This many people accidentally stumbled upon my site
...while searching for porn.