The Empty Soda Can

When Anna and I first got married, we bought an HP printer. I don’t remember what model it was; I just remember that at the time, I wanted a nice printer that could handle 11″×17″. It cost us over $500, but we were happy—right up until we tried to print something. It was horrible . In the three months we owned it, we had no less than thirty different errors. It probably worked, about 2% of the time—no exaggeration. I remember one day, I needed to print a two-page, black-and-white text document, before I left for work. I was late, because I only gave myself 20 minutes and the printer took 32 minutes to complete it. We finally got HP to take it back, but they docked us $50 for the ink we used.  I decided it was time to find another manufacturer. Shortly after the HP debacle, we got an Epson Stylus Photo EX. It was awesome , but when we got a new computer, a few years later, its standard 8-pin serial connection was no longer standard. We upgraded to another Epson, a Stylus CX5200 al...

A few weeks ago, my parents came for a visit. As it happened, just before leaving, my father accidentally deleted five songs he had recently downloaded from iTunes, and contacted technical support to see if he could download them again. Now, in my experience, this is a fairly simple endeavor. Long-time readers may even remember that I blogged about it, a while back, when a few of my own tracks went missing. Unfortunately, my father, who has probably the worst luck on the planet, was not so lucky. By the time my parents arrived at their hotel, en route to our house, a support tech had contacted him and re-enabled every track he’d ever purchased from iTunes . Let me re-emphasize this: he needed five tracks replaced, and they supplied his account with something to the effect of 981 tracks, 976 of which were already on his hard drive. What’s more, they were queued up in chronological order, so he had to download all 981, to get to the last five. In a hotel room. Over hotel WiFi. He le...

Six years ago, Anna and I got a very nice birthday present from my grandmother: a brand new iBook (then Apple’s consumer-grade laptop). We named her Candace, and she was a great little machine. Although she did have a few minor problems, Apple was very good to take care of us whenever something went wrong. From the time the hard drive died to the letters wearing off of a few oft-used keys, they always replaced everything quickly and free of charge. Their customer service was, in a word, impeccable. Then, just over three years ago, with only a week left on our extended warranty, I brought our little Candi in for a checkup. I told the Genius on staff to look her over, see if there was anything wrong with her, and if so, fix it. (If by chance there were something wrong, I was not going to have to pay for repairs, if I could help it.) He took her into the shop, and a few days later I got a call: some part I’d never heard of, that did who knows what, was indeed broken. Unfortunately, it w...

A few months ago, I was horrified to discover that the RAID I use to store our family’s iLife—photos, movies, web sites, and music—had suffered severe header corruption. For those of you that don’t know what this means, the header is sort of like the index to the drive. Imagine a 10,000-page reference book that you use every single day. This book includes a 500-page index, so you can easily find what you need. Then one day, you notice that some of the page numbers are suddenly wrong: about 10% of the time, if you look up term A, it gives you the page number for term L, or Z, or W. That’s a pretty good description of header corruption, except that at least with a book, you can flip through until you find the right page. Without an accurate disk header, the computer can’t find the right data at all . Now, all this shouldn’t be so bad, since I’m extremely conscientious about backing things up. Unfortunately, the backup software I was using at the time was so good that it dutifully backed ...