Monthly Archives: September 2006

Apple Got It Right In The End

This is a consumer’s tale. It starts ugly, but ends in the right place.

A couple weeks ago, my iPod Nano died. iPods have a “lock” switch on them that turns off the wheel control so you can shove it in your pocket and not inadvertantly turn the volume up to 11. I got on the T, headed into work, locked the iPod, and put it in my shirt pocket. I took it out to change the volume, and the lock switch was stuck. It wouldn’t unlock. My iPod was going to keep playing until the battery died. I went to the Apple website and found that I had a 1-year warranty. The iPod was 10 months old, so I figured I was set. I filled out the online form, they sent me a box, I sent them my iPod – it was very smooth. Here’s where it got sticky.

They sent me back my iPod, still broken, with a form letter. The form letter indicated that there were four possible reasons why it was rejected – but they didn’t check any of the boxes. I’m a bit suspicious that the iPod was in the same plastic bag. I’m not sure they even opened it, though I’m not sure of that. Obviously, I wasn’t happy.

So, I took the iPod to the Apple store in the Cambridgeside Galleria. The guy at the desk in the back of the store listened to my story and looked at the iPod and the form letter. He decided that the rejection was because the screen was cracked. I showed him that it wasn’t a crack, but it was a protective plastic film (that I’d bought at Apple!) for the screen that was a bit delaminated. He pointed to a dent in the back of the iPod, and said that voided my warranty. As far as I was concerned, he didn’t have to fix the dent, but he did have to fix the switch at the top. He offered to take my iPod as a trade in, and he’d give me 10% off my next iPod. I told him quite clearly that that was not an option. There were a lot of ways this might end, but me giving Apple a few hundred bucks in order to get them to honor the warranty was not one of them. I asked to speak to a manager.

She was equally polite and listened. She also pointed to the dent, but I repeated that I didn’t care about the dent, I only cared about the switch. She said that she’d go in back and check the service record and see if that gave any more information. I thought that was a great idea.

Several minutes later, a third guy, Ed, came out. He told me the system was down and they couldn’t check the iPod history. He said that it was unusual, but he would replace my Nano with a new one. I thought that was a perfectly fine solution. Black wasn’t available (like I care!), and I got silver instead. I’ve been using it this week, and it’s been good.

Bottom line: Apple should have honored the warranty in the first place, but they got it right in the end. It was a legitimate claim. If it wasn’t legitimate, they needed to explain why: checking a checkbox on the form letter is a good start. Similarly, the first guy at the Apple store should have been more interested in helping me. I get the feeling that he was just doing what he was told, meaning that it wasn’t his fault. And in the end, compliments to Ed and to Apple. They got it right, kept me happy, get a good posting, and my continued business.

MassINC Analyzes the Gubernatorial Primary Results

Last week I drafted an analysis of the primary results, but it wasn’t gelling, and I didn’t publish it. I’m very glad I didn’t. I would have been put to shame by the excellent analysis by Robert David Sullivan at MassINC.

His analysis backs up the common wisdom that it’s Deval Patrick’s race to lose. The primary showed that Patrick has the ability to get Democrats and unenrolled (independant) voters to the ballot box. Patrick got more of each of those than any candidate in quite a while. The question is, of course, what the rest of the electorate will do. Can Patrick convert the ones that voted against him, and the ones that didn’t vote at all, to his side? Can he get them to the polls?

If turnout equals that of 2002, and Patrick holds on to his primary supporters, he only has to win 37 percent of those who haven’t voted for him already in order to capture a majority in November — and if independent Christy Mihos and Green Party candidate Grace Ross capture a meaningful portion of the vote between them, the share he needs will be even lower. Healey, on the other hand, will have to win about 63 percent of the voters who voted for one of Patrick’s opponents or sat out the Democratic primary in order to match Romney’s 50 percent total. By comparison, Shannon O’Brien’s primary total in 2002 represented 11.1 percent of the total vote in the fall — meaning that Mitt Romney only had to win about 56 percent of the voters who were up for grabs after the primary.

I’m also struck by the list of towns that he thinks are Healey’s key to victory: “Billerica, Revere, Saugus, Tewksbury, and Woburn.” Those are cities that, at least so far, have been immune to Patrick’s message. Compare that to the list of towns represented by Senator Havern: Woburn, Arlington, Billerica, Burlington and Lexington. Arlington and Lexington went for Patrick in a big way, but Woburn, Billerica, and Burlington were bigger fans of Reilly or Gabrieli. Someday, there is going to be a very interesting race for that seat.

Ignore the Harpoon Tabblo Post

If you read this by coming to my website, you can ignore this message.

For those of you with RSS readers, please ignore the last post I just made. I was testing some new Tabblo feature stuff, and I inadvertantly published a link to our test environment. You’d be really bummed if you made a tabblo on the test area, and then we deleted the test database. . . .

Disaster at the Office

I was at my desk. I was doing the final QA cycles on a new mini-feature (if you use Tabblo, and you have a blog, you’ll like it, but it has been . . . delayed by events). The feature was working for most cases, and Eddie and Dave were ironing out the final implementation details while I was trying to break it.

Suddenly, I heard shouting and a loud roaring noise. I jumped up and ran to the door of the office and was met by a spray of water. The sprinkler was hosing down the central hallway outside the door. I turned back inside and Dave closed the door. Eddie, Dave, and I ran around in circles lifting computers, hubs, power cords etc. off the floor and onto high ground as fast as we could. Water was coming in under the door at a good clip, and the fire alarm had started to go off.

We opened the door and scooted across the hallway to the fire exit on the opposite wall, and went outside. We had time to catch our breath and contemplate (dread) what was happening to our office. The fire trucks came and, a few minutes later, the water slowed from a deluge to a dribble. By 8:30 it was stopped for good.

The rest of the night was a lot of sweeping water, shop vacs, brooms, and separating trash from salvage – nothing worth reliving, let alone asking anyone to read about.

Antonio made a tabblo right after it happened (heck, as it happened). I took photos too (more after the fact than during) and created a variation of his tabblo. Despite how tired I am at this point, I like the variation. You get to see Antonio’s perspective and my perspective on the same event. Some things look the same, but others are very different.

Good night.

Dollars Per Vote

I reviewed Gabrieli’s campaign spending on the OCPF website. It looks like he spent $9.4 million in his primary campaign. He got 248,000 votes. That works out to $37.93 per vote. Winning, of course, makes you look good: Patrick spent $4.9 million to get 452,000 votes, or $10.80 per vote. That’s still a lot of money, but it went farther.

What does this mean? For one thing, it shows that “buying an election” is easier said than done. This doesn’t disprove that money matters, but it shows that money isn’t the only thing that matters. If money was the only factor, Gabrieli would have walked away with 50% of the vote, not Patrick. The next time you read an editorial compaining about the role of money in elections, remember to check the numbers once the dust has settled a bit.

Did you read this information in the mainstream press? Not too likely. It’s after the fact, there’s no one to give a sound bite, and that makes it boring. Check out the Globe’s political finance page. Last update? Last month.

Manny and Theo, Theo and Manny

My favorite Red Sox reading is a comic called Soxaholix. I guess it is a blog, but it’s not in the standard model.

Today’s episode is typical. Good critique of Boston media. Witty writing – check out the “arms” entendres. Good links to content on the web. And, best of all, the comments. The Sox have a lot of smart, articulate fans, but I think Soxaholix has the highest signal-to-noise of all of the fan sites.

June ’04 is when I realized the brilliance. There is no way to link Michael Moore’s anti-Bush tirade to the Saudi oil sheiks to Babe Ruth – or so you’d think.

The Week In Review

I haven’t found my writing rhythm yet, as evidenced by this week’s output. Catching up with a grab-bag of topics.

It was a very busy week. We pushed a bunch of minor features and good bug fixes that kept me hopping. I had lunch on Tuesday with Jason Butler. He’s at Boston.com with a very interesting job. Ask him about search – he’s doing some vThat night I went to the Red Sox game. I was hoping to see Ortiz hit 50. Instead I stood in the rain and watched Wakefield give up 6 runs. I’ve enjoyed better games.

Wednesday, or course, was Grandma and Grandpa’s 65th.

Chavez, Chomsky, and Dershowitz

As everyone knows, Chavez’s rant at the UN has spawned a spike in sales for Noam Chomsky. It also has brought out some quality Chomsky bashing:

But Alan M. Dershowitz, the lawyer and Harvard Law School professor, said he doubted whether many of the current buyers would ever actually read the book.

“I don’t know anybody who’s ever read a Chomsky book,” said Mr. Dershowitz, who said he first met Mr. Chomsky in 1948 at a Hebrew-speaking Zionist camp in the Pocono Mountains where Mr. Dershowitz was a camper and Mr. Chomsky was a counselor.

“You buy them, you put them in your pockets, you put them out on your coffee table,” said Mr. Dershowitz, a longtime critic of Mr. Chomsky. The people who are buying “Hegemony” now, he added, “I promise you they are not going to get to the end of the book.”

He continued: “He does not write page turners, he writes page stoppers. There are a lot of bent pages in Noam Chomsky’s books, and they are usually at about Page 16.”

Ouch.