American Arrogance?

I am well aware of the fact that many of my countrymen act quite arrogantly when they are overseas (you know, the "I'm from America, give me what I want damnit!" types). However, there is some arrogance that can be seen, especially when you have a chance to discuss something that isn't in the mainstream here.

This particular example focuses on the sudden death of the coach of the Pakistani cricket team, Bob Woolmer. At first, it was suspected by his family that he probably passed away due to a heart attack from stress, but it would seem that the autopsy that was performed in Kingston, Jamaica (which is only 581 miles/935 km from Miami) has proven inconclusive.

This has now sparked rumors of how he died - from suicide to even one report that claims he might have been murdered. I have to be honest in saying that when I had first heard of his death, my first thought was that I really hoped it would be of natural causes as if it wasn't that, it would certainly bring cricket to the attention of the US media, and for all the wrong reasons. After the autopsy, it now has. Aside from this, the only time cricket is mentioned on ESPN's site is in a link to cricinfo in the "More Sports" section of the toolbar.

Apparently something ESPN have started to do is allow people to make comments on stories. And here is where my discussion about our perceived ignorance comes to light. Right now there are three comments, which are as follows -

- C_lopez_13 (3/21/2007 at 9:30 AM): Not an important story in the US, never seen a cricket game in my life

A fair point, it is not an important story here, if it wasn't for the fact that it's the coach of a major world side dieing the day after his side was defeated by one of the lower-order sides (more commonly known as the minnows), Ireland.

The next comment is this -

- k.9stl (3/21/2007 at 9:38 AM): This is why we need to protect our borders!!!!!!!

What exactly are we protecting ourselves from here? Pakistani cricketers? Is that some new kind of terrorist that nobody, not even themselves, know about? I think they'll be glad to know that it's highly unlikely that any of the participants will be visiting our airports for transiting while on their way back home.

And the last comment -

- ammille2 (3/21/2007 at 9:51 AM) Any reaction to this story? I hear crickets....

The natural bad pun that one would expect ;)

Hmm...

Well, the bloody monitor finally arrived about half an hour ago. And it is the 20" model. I am not certain if I should tell LG about the mistake (though they did say that if there was no 19" models by last Wednesday, they would sort something out).

Of course, I'm thinking that they should just let the error be, send them the 19-incher back and say c'est la vie and move on. Though I am having an additional problem, one which has been festering ever since I took the old monitor off the desk: it is damn near impossible to take the little stand piece (it's the piece between the monitor and the small round base) apart from the monitor. Even after putting the new one together, I had a hard time taking that one off. My conundrum is this - should I:

a) Slice a hole in the original box, then put the screen into the box, making sure to tape up the styrofoam packaging and putting it into a larger box
b) not use the old box when reshipping the package, and just put the styrofoam into a new box
c) try in a vain last ditch effort to take the piece off so that I can use the original box

If you're curious, the instructions are at the right. It says to twist the little piece to the right, then pull hard. I can say that no amount of pulling seems to fix the problem. Maybe I should just get going with the knife now onto the box :)

Oh, by the way, one of the nice features of the 20 inch model is that it has 400 extra horizontal pixels and 26 extra vertical pixels, unlike the 19" which was only 120 extra horizontal, and 124 less vertical.

Ah yes, and before I actually publish this for real, I should mention that I am my own receptionist, as per the DHL tracking information. And they still spelt my name wrong.

The saga is almost over!

Apparently DHL does know where I live because they've finally managed to find a truck to deliveer the new monitor out to here (though I shouldn't get too excited as it just says that it's with the "delivery courier"). This is after taking 49½ hours to get the thing allll the way from South Bend to Milwaukee (a distance of about 186 miles (or 300km), for a net speed of 3.83... miles per hour, 6.06... km/h). Maybe I should revise my estimation of DHL's equipment to having lawn mowers, but I think those would even be faster ;)

So, anyway hopefully my shipment will finally get here!

Oh, I should add that the estimated delivery date is still set for the 16th of March... maybe that'll change when they actually deliver it? I doubt it :)

200 Miles

Well, it's now been two weeks since my LCD died on me. Last week, I was wondering where it had gotten to, and it turns out that LG didn't have any monitors in stock down in Alabama (which is where they're based apparently). Robert, the cool fella who I spoke with last week in their Customer Service said that it would arrive here no later than 5 PM Thursday. You can guess where this goes. Yep. 5 PM and no delivery trucks arriving.

So I call them this morning, and I am told that it's been shipped and should be here today. They even gave me a tracking number, which Google didn't recognise. As it turns out (and she told me) it is a DHL tracking number.

I go to the DHL website and find out that the package had been shipped 2nd day; today was supposed to be the second day and it was supposed to be delivered to here by 5 PM. Well, it's now 9:00 and no sign of it on my doorstep. In fact, according to the tracking, it was at South Bend Indiana (200 miles from here via the roads) at 6:44 EDT. That was 9 hours after it was spotted in Ohio, some 36 hours after it was shipped out from Alabama. Hopefully with any luck, it'll actually show up here sometime tomorrow.

And, if you think I'm the only one that this has happened to, I'm not alone. Check out these posts -

DHL: Disasterously Haphazard Liars? (Chris Pirillo)

and

The Myth of DHL Customer Service - this person has been waiting since October to receive their shipment of laptop computers in Bolivia from here in the States

Lost in transit?

So, I've been waiting to receive a couple of things - one real (and very useful, not to mention having some tangible value) and the other a more-or-less throwaway item.

The real item, being the replacement widescreen display from LG, is somewhere between wherever it is they ship these things from (at the rate they specified 2-5 days, I'd have guessed California, but I wonder if it isn't Malaysia which is where the things are manufactured). As it is, I don't even know which delivery service is sending the item, so I figure that if it doesn't show up tomorrow, another call to their support department shall be in order.

The "throwaway" item is the "CrazyTalk avatar" for skype. I don't know what's taking them so long, but y'know, I did win it in their promotion, so it'd be friendly if I could redeem it. ;)

Let's see Fox or ESPN do this...

Granted that this is from 1991, but it's something that isn't done enough (or if they do it, like ESPN have for the last couple of weeks in their Busch coverage, they hardly ever use the option and then overhype it). What would happen if you put a live microphone with a driver and let him have discussions with your commentary crew live on air.

(You'll note that I didn't mention TNT - that's because they are going to do something like this for at least one race)

Anyway, back when they had the rights to broadcast these races, Network 7 in Australia would hook up a driver and let them be their (as ESPN put it now) "in-race reporter". In 1991, it wound up being the Neil Crompton/Brad Jones Telecom Mobilenet Holden. Here are a couple of clips ;) -

By the way, both drivers are involved in racing media - Cromley as the colour commentator for 7 (after a stint with ten) and Jones co-hosting a show with Crompton available on broadband from Bigpond.

I'm a winner!

Though I'm not exactly certain what I won...

I got an email from Skype saying that they have a "casino" promotion going on; I checked with the site and it is a legitimate promotion. The prizes that they offer aren't bad either -

"Minor" prizes, at least 3 on offer per day
- 6 months SkypeIn [10/day] (that's a direct-dial number that you can get anywhere in the US {this is only open to US residents} Retail value listed at $1.00 each, but the price that you'd pay is $25 or so based on €10×2 months)
- Skype Unlimited for a year [3/day] (i.e. free calling with I believe no connection charge to the US and Canada, $29.95)
- 5, 10, or 15 minutes of SkypeOut [1000 each/day] (call phones at a low per-minute charge with a 4¢ connection fee; retail values 10, 21 and 31 cents respectively)

"Major" prizes - 0-2 available per day
- Logitech QuickCam Chat, $29.99
- Logitech USB headset, $49.99
- SMC Phone (only 10 available, including one today), $159.99

And the, as I would term them, "useless" prizes, both available in a quantity of 1000 per day. This is the description from the official rules -
- A RingJacker Ringtone (30,000 available): ARV $1.50 US dollars ea.
- A CrazyTalk Avatar (30,000 available): ARV $1.50 US dollars ea.

So, I figured I'd take a punt. And I did win a prize. A CrazyTalk Avatar. According to the winning page, it is "A tool that makes animated avatars come to life on your Skype video chats".

Ah well, at least I won *something* ;)

Good news and bad news

Well, generally you do get both in a short amount of time. For this particular instance, the first spot of bad news appeared yesterday but the good news came up this afternoon.

Yesterday while I was in another part of my house, my monitor (LG L194WT, 19" widescreen) went off like it usually does after 10 minutes (it used to be that the monitor stayed on, but after getting the LCD screen, I became suddenly concerned about burn-in; actually it's more that there really is no reason to have the screen *always* on. When I came out to jiggle the mouse to bring the screen back to active, it didn't go back on right away. Instead, the power indicator flashed rapidly, but after about 30 seconds of being miffed at why it did this, the screen came back on and everything was going well.

That is, until this afternoon when, right in the middle of watching the season opener of the second season of the West Wing (now that I'm addicted to it too) - the screen suddenly went blank again, with the flashing power light. Ever the optimist, I figured that the problem would resolve itself again and I'd see the "f-engine" screen and the picture would come back. But it didn't. That's the major bad news; I now have a dead monitor sitting on the floor and getting ready to go back into its original packaging. Of course, I could wait for an identical package to come before packing this monitor away.

Yes, that is the good news. I wound up calling the toll-free number for LG customer service and gave them all the required information - serial number, my name, address etc and the description of the problem. After that, I was given two options -

1. Give a credit card number, have a package with an identical monitor arrive and send back the defective monitor; the card is not charged as the original is returned to the company. This would take two to five days to get a replacement and there are only two areas that could fail.

2. They send me a sticker, I put the monitor back into its original packaging, send it back and they send me a new monitor. This would take somewhere in the range of 10 days to complete, and involves three steps that could falter in this process.

So, I gave them my card number (I hardly use the thing anymore) and I should be expecting a new monitor in the next couple of days.

I have to say that LG's customer service is quite good (and unless they have **really** good accent training, based stateside still; unlike RealNetworks' support whose service center is definitely in India - "Jeremy"'s accent didn't cut it for me back in June). And the fact that the preferred method of dealing with problems like this is to swap the monitor is a great way to get people coming back to their products.

In the meantime, I put the monitor that I had been using for the better part of two years back onto the main desktop system, and I have to admit that it is hard to readjust to a CRT monitor after using an LCD. Not only does everything seem so small (consider that I am using a 17" CRT), it seems almost out of focus. I think I might just watch some of the stuff that I'd been meaning to on the TV since I do have the DVD player that can play files that I burn to disc ;)

Oh, can I just say that CRTs are evil again? Thanks :)

Fun with keywords

I think that this is a post that a lot of bloggers have at one point or another - the one where you go through the logs and find some interesting keywords. Here goes ;)

dilana robicheaux and dilana nude uncensored pool - Rockstar Supernova lives on with a couple of searches related to Dilana the runner-up and her infamous leap into the pool on a dare ;)

Interestingly enough, I was watching a show about the upcoming V8 Supercar season, and music from their album appeared in a couple of places during the show; I was paying attention to that and wound up having to go back to actually pay attention to what the people were saying.

Another search term that appeared recently is nina visser bott, which appeared in my post about the literary qualities of spam.

Someone else searched for something that I'd be somewhat interested in watching just for the curiousity - runaway truck ramp video.

Lastly, there was someone who has good taste with simple recipes and searched for jamie oliver recipe chicken flour water bake.

Buying a TV or VCR or DVD Recorder? Wait at least week...

I was browsing through Wikipedia tonight when I came upon an article about ATSC Tuners (for those of y'all in Europe or Australia, it's our version of the digital tuner). One thing that was mentioned was a Federal regulation that stipulates the following -

(iv) Other video devices (videocassette recorders (VCRs), digital video recorders such as hard drive and DVD recorders, etc.) that receive television signals—100% of all such units must include DTV tuners effective March 1, 2007.

In other words, after next Thursday, all DVD recorders must be able to pick up digital signals over the air. That explains why the local Wal-Mart was selling off a whole stack of DVD recorders for dirt-cheap (right around $50); they were clearing stock for the new recorders that accept digital signals.

So, if you're looking to buy a DVD recorder (or even VCR), make sure you wait for a bit - you'll be able to take advantage of recording new stations and even the HD feeds of regular channels (even though it will still be in standard quality, you'll still get the widescreen picture - and let me tell you, if you've seen sports in widescreen, you will never want to go back; you'll even wonder why they don't show the widescreen version on the analogue signal).