LookIt

Stop buying Dell PCs

Friends of mine know that I'm a fan of Dell because their computers work well and they get high marks from readers of Consumer Reports for their service. I have now switched to telling people "don't buy Dell" for many reasons. Here's another.

A friend had the screen on her Dell laptop go bad while under warranty. After a few very long calls to Dell, they sent out a repair person who replaced the screen. After he finished, he started walking out the door without having booted the system. She tried to stop him but he said "I'm sure it works" and quickly left. It didn't work (the screen backlight comes on, but there is no video signal; external monitor works fine).

So she calls Dell again. After an hour on hold, she is told that she needs to reinstall the drivers (which was clearly wrong from the symptoms, but the person's script was too short). Then she got cut off.

After another 45 minutes on hold, she starts to say what has happened so far and the technical support person tries to sell her an extended warranty before she will schedule another person to come again to fix the problem. This is what changed my recommendation status for Dell from "probably not" to "stay the hell away until they prove significant change", which means probably not for at least a few years.

Dear Dell:

You are doing some very harmful things in your current technical support practices. Please fix these as soon as possible.

• Include a disk in every Windows system that allows the user to reinstall the operating system after formatting the hard drive.
• Make sure that disk that comes with the system has all the drivers for the user's specific computer, and that there is a simple, one-step program that installs all the drivers the same way you installed them when you shipped the system.
• When someone is on the Dell web site looking for drivers for their model, make all the drivers available as a single combined download and put that as the first item in the list and make it clear that most users should start with this download first.
• When sending a user a disk to restore Windows, make sure that either the disk itself has all the drivers needed to restore the user's system to the way it was, or that you include a second disk with a simple, one-step protram that installs all the drivers.
• Do not make users wait an hour for tech support. Take some of the money you saved by hiring outside the U.S. and put it into shortening the wait queues.
• Do not have your tech support people say their names are "Susan" and "Bill" unless that is the name they really use on a daily basis. If you outsource phone support to people who sound non-American, be honest about it.
• When one of your field techs opens a system for any reason, make sure they fully reboot the system in front of the customer to prove that the system works better than when they started.
• Fire field techs with crappy attitudes.
• Do not try to sell anything to frustrated people with broken computers until you fix their computers.

Also please note that many people reading the above list would say "well, of course!" to most or all of the statements. The fact that Dell doesn't follow them reflects poorly on your company and could be a significant part of the reason that Dell's PC sales are declining sharply.

Sincerely yours,

Paul Hoffman
(someone who has bought over a dozen Dell computers in the past 15 years)

QOTD for medicine

Atul Gawande in a great article on aging in the New Yorker: Still, there are costs to averting our eye from the realities [of aging]. For one thing, we put off changes that we need to make as society. For another, we deprive ourselves of opportunities to change th individual experience of aging for the better.

More nerdy fun of the non-computer sort

These days, even just saying "I have a hobby" sounds kind of geeky. On the geek scale of hobbies, rock collecting (more formally called "gem and mineral collecting") is probably near the end of the scale next to stamp collecting. But it's a great to be a spectator at gem and mineral shows.

I love the annual show put on by the Santa Cruz Mineral and Gem Society. They take over the civic auditorium with exhibit cases and dealers. I always end up coming home with something odd and/or pretty. Last year, I got a furlgurite tube, which is glass that was formed by lightning hitting sand. Not pretty, but cool. As I was walking around this year, I was mostly being drawn to petrified wood. When I got to my favorite dealer, Oxcart Minerals in Vida Oregon (who are wonderful people with a terrible web site, so no link), I was floored. I could not only touch, but easily able to afford, a large 15 million year old fossilized whale vertebra. It is almost as big as a typical programming book, porous, and just completely cool. It's now in the living room.

I am probably one of the few computer folks who don't appreciate space exploration, but those who do would probably appreciate all the different types of meteorites and impactites, the stuff that comes from when meteorites smash into the earth such as Darwin glass.

An interesting privacy policy

CDBaby is an excellent source of independently-produced music. They only sell artist-produced CDs, not things from even small distributors. The prices are quite reasonable, the customer service is great, they make finding new music easy (including an 3-CDs-for-$15 sale for less popular music), and they just feel good. It's Web 1.5 at its best.

On the other hand, one thing they do is a bit surprising. I was emailing with one of the artists last week, and he said "thanks for buying my CDs at CDBaby". Um, I hadn't told him that I had bought his CDs anywhere. "They told me you bought them, and gave me your address".

From their privacy policy:

• We NEVER give or sell your personal info to any other company - EVER! (No not even your email address!)
• Only the musician whose CD you buy will know who you are.
• If you don't even want the musician to know about you, just say so at the bottom of your order form.

The "we give your name and address to the musician" policy would be an unpleasant surprise to almost anyone who normally orders stuff on the Web. Worse, the third bullet seems to be untrue: on an order I just turned it, there is no way I saw to leave any sort of note on the order form, much less something that calls out the "we are making you findable by the artist".

On the positive side, no artist whose CDs I have bought have put me on spam lists. It is also kinda cool to think that the artist gets to have a feeling for what kind of people are buying their CDs, and when. But, on the whole, I would prefer that the order form had an unchecked-by-default button that says "let the artists know you bought these CDs".

The story behind "Mr. Bojangles"

The song, as told and sung in 1972 by David Bromberg about Jerry Jeff Walker. It's a bit longer than the music I usually put here (almost 10 meg), but the finger-picking and the story are great.

This doesn't stop him from doing good

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. He was many things (novelist, playwright, essayist, crank), but he was probably proudest to be a humanist: "We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community."

His writing will outlive him, maybe by hundreds of years. It would be nice if he becomes The Next Mark Twain, something that Will Rogers had a shot at but missed. Vonnegut has much more in common with Twain that Rogers did, so the mantle-passing seems possible.

So it goes.

Amazon metadata that Microsoft doesn't want you to think about

Thinking of a Zune. Maybe buy a tent instead.

Safe?

ICANN doesn't want to be responsible for labeling domains as purveying pornography, but someone thinks that ICANN should be responsible for labeling domains as practicing safe banking practices?