The BBB Gets Stuff Done

They can't do math ($199.99+$17+$31 = $247.99, which is what they refunded), but they did respond more than adequately.

For what it's worth, while I wish I wasn't prompted to do things like contact the BBB or my state senator, I have been remarkably pleased with the promptness and effectiveness of the responses.

"MESSAGE FROM BUSINESS:

To Whom It May Concern,

We would like to apologize for the inconvenience surrounding this product. We want to assure Mr Belton that we never internally ship defective products and do our best to support our customers when there is an issue to be corrected.

Per Mr. Belton’s request, we are issuing an RMA number for the return and refund of the gaming system ($199.99) the original shipping charge ($17.00) and return shipping paid on original RMA (31.00). The total refund to be processed upon receipt of the second defective gaming system will be $230.99. The second RMA number Mr. Belton should use is: G220660.

Again we do apologize for the inconvenience that Mr. Belton encounter. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance

Regards,

Brian S
Customer Service Manager
(760) 726-7700 x1312
Office Hours: M-F 7am-5pm PST
http://www.geeks.com/"

Who doesn't want to file a BBB complaint on a Friday?

"On July 16 I ordered a refurbished Xbox 360 from Geeks.com for $200, roughly half the standard retail price. It arrived roughly a week later and immediately upon set up it was clear the console itself or the power supply was faulty as evidenced by the 'Red Ring of Death' (RROD, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_ring_of_death) a widely recognized failure mode of Xbox 360's.

I contacted customer support to obtain an RMA number. It was promptly provided but I was forced to pay the return shipping, $31 for ground shipping from Pennsylvania to California. The RMA was received and processed and a replacement unit shipped out and was delivered yesterday, 6-Aug-09.

Today, while playing Halo 3, a game not known for it's crashes, the console froze up, twice within half an hour, requiring a hard reset to become responsive. I will be contacting Geeks.com on Monday to take up this issue with them, but from what I can tell, they have deliberately been shipping defective product, scamming customers.

At this point I want a paid shipping label to return the clearly defective system as well as a full refund of my purchase amount, $199"

This, Ladies and Gentlemen...

...Is what we call a "Killer App"

Once I heard about the motion sensing abilities of the wii-mote, I said the wii would not be complete without a game like that.


----------------
Now playing: High School Musical Cast - Work This Out
via FoxyTunes

Does he get paid in like, pencil shavings or something?

Why else do they keep letting Uwe Boll make movies? He's poison to anything he touches.

Similarly, why the hell did they make a sequel to BloodRayne? It was a terrible movie based on a mediocre video game!

Uhoh, this is bad...

There's a group making an "open-source"Total Annhilation, with a new engine and more functionality, no less!

This along with Mech Commander being made available as well as the new release of Starshatter are definitely bad things with regards to my productivity.

We're like, the same person...

Scroll down to the bottom; that's why I'm not good at real-time strategy games. I get too emotionally involved in the welfare of my troops.

Hallelujah!

Sam and Max are back!

Virtual World Entertainment., LLC

CMU is installing 4 of these in our latest eating establishment. I'm incredibly excited.

Here are some better pictures.

The man speaks tghe truth...

Nuklear Power - Home of 8-bit Theatre

Read the newspost at the bottom.

Life Update: Spring Break '06

Warning: Very few opinions will be expressed in the body of this post; you might as well skip it if that's all you come here for.

So, what have I been upto since I've been home over break?
Numerous things, would be the short answer.
As with any time I come home, I'm tasked with repairing/setting up any number of electronics that have become inoperable/acquired since I was last home. Today was less with the repairing and more with the setting up. Since winter break my parents picked up a digital music streamer (It has geek cred: it runs on a linux kernel). Setting it up required that I change the encryption protocol on my wireless network, either that or I run some Cat5 (I was very close to doing the second option). I had to change from the uber-easy WPA to the much less convenient WEP for my network and that took help from CS friends as well as some helpful folks on the Dell forums.
It's still a little shaky, likely due to Musicmatch being a mediocre piece of software, at best. It is, however, better (and already in-use) than the bundled software used to broadcast our music library over the network.
Next was a really cool dash-mounted GPS unit. I have a lot of respect for them as a company; it seems they give their engineers pretty much free reign as to features. The interface is totally (as in all of it can be skinned, not the valley girl "Totally") skinnable, evening allowing for buttons to be added/rearranged on menus. It is based on a 20GB harddrive. One of the coolest features is that the HDD is divided into two partitions. One is FAT and is accessible via USB (1.1, those lazy jerks). If I put mp3's (or ogg's!) on this partition, I can play them through a full-features 6-band equalizer, no less! It sounded pretty good going through a tape-deck adapter into the Bose sound system in our MDX. Good stuff. Anyway, I was tasked with figuring out how it works as well as how to get music into it. Neither were difficult tasks, especially the music.

So basically that's what I did Saturday and Sunday, right after I got back. On monday I went in search of some games, and was shocked by the results of the trip, as detailed in my previous post. I basically just played Rome: Total War and watched TV all day. It was a good day.

On tuesday I had an interview in the morning. Unfortunately I did not wake up when my alarm went off; I woke up when my PDA beeped a friendly 30-minute reminder. Now, it's not a 30 minute drive at the best of times; however the tail end of rush-hour isn't the best of times. That and the fact that I had to get dressed and whatnot. So not only did I not really wake up in time, but I got lost on the way. There was a sign that I didn't notice until the third pass up and down the street, after I called at 10:30 (my interview was at 10) to tell them that I was late, and after consulting a map. I wasn't very happy. But the tour/interview was good. I certainly think I could enjoy working there. An exchange from the interview:
[Robert (a project engineer) and I walk into Gerard's office after my tour of the factory floor]
Gerard: "Look, it's the boys of summer!"
Robert: "Whatever that means..."
Gerard: "I don't know, I just like how it sounds"
Note that Gerard is French or French-Canadian, so he has a very distinct accent.
Wednesday evening was Spamalot! It was fantastic! Wednesday was the debut of the touring company and they were amazing! There were even 2 CMU alum in it (Galahad and a member of the ensemble), I was proud to see that graduates from my university are able to rise to the occasion of appearing in broadway shows based on works by Monty Python. At the end Eric-Freaking-Idle came out to thank some people and tell some very Idle-y jokes:

"I'd like to thank one very special lady, without her support I would not be here tonight: my pharmacist"
and
"If you've enjoyed us half as much as as we've enjoyed us, then we've enjoyed us twice as much as you have"

Thursday was basically more video computer games and TV (several ST:DS9 episodes). Thursday evening I went with the 'rents to a CMU networking event in Natick. I ended up running into Charles and Christine, fellow MechE sophs and we had a nice time talking. I did end up talking to a few companies. Raytheon, Bose, and Demiurge were all there formally and they got my resume. Christine's father met her there and he actually works for Draper Labs, and he took a couple resumes too, including mine. All in all, it was a pleasant way to spend an evening.

Today (Friday) was hanging out with Miriam. I managed to get lost both going to her house, as well as coming home. Coming home was worse; I ended up on Speen St in Framingham and I deduced that I was not really heading some that much, so I pulled into a parking lot, checked a map and turned around, for my 3rd attempt at Rt 9 (I originally went the correct direction, then thought I was wrong and turned aroud then ended up in Framingham) and finally got home. I don't think I was ever quite so happy to see a sign for 95 South. I'm not a fan of getting lost.

Tomorrow is my last whole day at home, and I'll be spending the day at semi-finals of MHSDG 1-act festival in Brockton, supporting those crazy kids of the Sharon High School theatre troupe!

Break a leg, you guys! I'll see you in the morning.

Policies that encourage piracy...

So being home, I have both time and access to a car. I decide to drive to my local EB Games/Gamestop to pic up a recent release:Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. I peer through their remarkably limited selection of PC games and note many old, bad games amongst their collection. I mean, if they still have the individual expansions for BF1942, they've got to have the latest and best 4/5X Strategy game out there, right? What may be the best game of it's type since MoO2?
Nope.
Apparently they only got a single one. This game is great, has been getting rave reviews etc, and they still have old crappy 2+ year old games sitting on the shelves that will end up being thrown out, likely, while good new games are denied shelf space. Likely corporate figures that since the old games aren't selling, it isn't worth it to ship them any new games.
I then asked about another excellent, recent strategy game release. Turns out they have 5 copies in the back; all defective. And, so they claim, since they still have '5' in inventory, they won't get shipped anymore.

So here I am for a week. If I buy the game online it won't ship for at least a day, and then it'll be 2-3 days minimum for it to get here, yielding maybe 2-3 days worth of play time before I go back to CMU. Totally not worth $40-$50.
What options does this leave me? Piracy, really. All because of piss-poor distribution, all the while corporate is likely being more convinced by the minute that noone's buying PC games anymore.
It's sorta like Hollywood/MPAA/RIAA complaining about piracy killing ticket/CD sales when it's really sucktastic movies/music.

Well, game publishers/distributors, let it be known that you were going to receive 40 of my hard-earned dollars, but now you won't. I'll just reinstall Rome and go massacre some Goths (as in Visi- not spikes and black mascara).

He needs to sort out his priorities (said as Ron Weasly)

Feds after Google data
Bush really ought to care more about his poorly planned wars, global warming and our dependency on foreign oil than badgering Google around.

The internet is for porn, as the old adage goes and there's not really any way to prevent your kids from running into it except by keeping an eye on your kids and keeping your computer free of spyware etc. I know on computers with minimal virus/spy/adware protection I always find mulitple popups, some containing less than 'decent' content that puts 'nipplegate' to shame.

That's right, I said it! Good parenting wins again over government regulation! This is much the same as the video-game debate, if you let your kids be raised by video games, there's a good chance they'll come out a bit weird. If you just buy them whatever games they ask for without wondering what that "M" is on the front, it's your fault, certainly moreso than the game developer/publisher, if your kid goes off and does something stupid 'because' of the game.

Yay, finally the MSM runs a story about videogames that I totally agree with.

"Please, if you care so much about your children," he said, "take a minute when you're with them buying games and read the rating box and why it's rated that way."