Archive for December, 2005

Buying an Apple refurbished computer from the online Apple Store? Be ready for a few problems.

I purchased a refurbished Apple iMac G5 (20-inches, 2.0 GHz) last month, and had to take it in for service, since 2 of the 3 screws that held the chassis together were damaged. One screw was broken inside, so that it would turn freely but never catch (or release). The other screw was tightened so hard that I couldn’t turn it. I ended up partially stripping it.

My goal was simply to upgrade the memory. 512Mb seems like a lot, but even a powerful iMac needs more memory, so I bought two 1Gb modules and went to install them, and then discovered that I couldn’t open my iMac.

I called AppleCare, and they told me to take it to the local Apple Store, which I did. But the Genius at the store took a look, and said that it was “DOA” and should be exchanged through the Apple online/phone sales department. He also suggested that Apple cross-ship me a new iMac while I returned the old one to them.

After 45 minutes on the phone with AppleCare, I was told that no, that repair needs to be done in the store, and no, they wouldn’t cross-ship me a new iMac because it wasn’t standard procedure. Fortunately we were still at the mall, so I dragged the iMac back to the Apple Store and explained everything to the Genius.

After much hemming, hawing, and reluctance, he finally agreed to fix the problem. I left the iMac there while they ordered the replacement parts and completed the repairs. The next day, another Genius called me and told me that the repair would not be covered under my warranty (despite the fact that I purchased the AppleCare extended plan) since it was “abuse”. So I explained the whole story to him again - it came that way in the box, and it needs to be fixed. He finally agreed to repair the iMac at no charge.

A few days later, I got a call from the Apple Store and was told that the iMac was ready to be picked up. I did so, took it home, and upgraded the memory with no problems.

I’m not sure if everyone gets the runaround like this, but I’d feel better about this if somebody at Apple would step up and own this problem and drive it to completion, rather than pointing fingers and saying that some other person/department needs to fix this. It should not take a lot of effort and persistance to convince Apple to fix the product which was shipped to me in a faulty condition.

I’m using the iMac now, and with its 2Gb memory upgrade (and a fast, really fast Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA hard drive) it’s the fastest computer that I’ve ever used. Airport wireless connectivity isn’t the greatest, but I’m on an Ethernet connection now, and it just flies.

So we’re having our first snow of the season, here in lovely Hillsboro. It’s sticking to the ground, and I expect it’ll come down pretty heavily tonight.

This winter has been absolutely frigid so far. The air has been so dry, inside and out, and we’ve had to use our puny humidifier pretty much every night since the furnace is running just about all time. I think we need a humidifier for the whole house. Dry air affects my whole family.

My daughter has a favorite toy - it’s a small rattle with Piglet’s head and arms, from the Classic Pooh series of baby accessories. We got it at Target when the twins were very young, and she’s taken it as her companion. She plays with other toys and rattles, but this one is her favorite. When we give it to her, she’ll drop her other toys and give us a squeal of pure joy, take the rattle and cuddle it, chew it, and shake it around until it slips from her grasp. Then we give it to her again, etc.

She’s such a cutie. I’m smitten. She even has my eyes!

I’m in the process of moving my domains over to a new web server, and I’ve been pondering what to do about my vast archives of e-mail that I’ve accumulated over the years.

Managing multiple MBOXes and Maildirs can get very unwieldy, very quickly. In the past I had tried to strictly archive my mail by month, which eventually slipped into every quarter. I kept separate folders for sent mail and received mail, and tried to organize them.

The problem was, as you might guess, searching for a specific message when I needed to refer to something. I used a little PERL script named “grepmail” which helped to search for certain text strings inside the body or header of a mailbox, but it didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

So I could continue doing this, but my new server is fairly slow for disk access, and searching multiple Maildirs for a specific text string might be pretty slow.

Google Mail has the search thing worked out pretty well, at least as far as I’ve been able to test. Their service is fairly fast and generally very reliable, and only rarely does it have any problems. Just on a lark, I created a separate account and imported a bunch of messages (from 2001-2004) with the help of several BASH/PERL scripts that I found.

Disk storage isn’t a concern for Google. My messages only take up 66Mb of space (out of a 2.6Gb account, which is still growing) and I don’t foresee that I’ll fill it up.

Privacy concerns - yeah, I worry about this, but consider that these messages have already passed unencrypted through a whole host of mail servers when they were sent to me (or from me), so all the privacy that I might have had was an illusion. I’ll have to trust Google to not allow anyone else to access my messages.

And even though this would make privacy advocates cringe, I don’t have anything that’s really sensitive in my e-mail anyway. I don’t use encryption, though I could if I wanted to.

I tried using ZOE last year, and while it was an interesting exercise, I was not impressed with the UI at all. The date-based search and domain-based organization were interesting, but the UI really fell flat in most areas that general e-mail users would expect to utilize. The “intertwingling” aspect wasn’t useful to me, since I can generally use search keywords to find whatever I need to.

Also, I had used Yahoo Mail for several years, but never really was impressed with their service either. The banner ads were very obtrusive, the UI was slow, and there was no way to effectively organize and search for messages. They’ve improved their capabilities since then, but I’m still left with a sour taste. In fact, I just saved all my Yahoo Mail messages to my local workstation (with the help of a nice script called YoSucker and I cancelled my Yahoo Mail account last week. (The spam was getting a bit heavy, as well.)

My point here (and I do have one) is that Google Mail will allow me to consolidate all my messages into one place, search for things with a UI that makes sense, and hold everything in a central, easy-to-reach location that requires nothing more than a web browser. The sidebar ads are unobtrusive and sometimes good for a chuckle, since the keyword search doesn’t always relate to the message, but I can live with that. The UI is sensible, the “Save Draft” feature is awesome, and the threading abilities are superb. (The spam filtering is pretty good too, though I haven’t yet been targeted heavily.)

I’m this close to importing all my mailboxes and Maildirs from everywhere, and redirecting my main @gerb.org address to Google Mail. What’s holding me back? An irrational fear that Google will take my data and do something with it, or go offline and leave me without my message history or my contact addresses?

I really like the idea of not running my own mail server.