Last year in May I finally upgraded my dying first-gen iPhone to a shiny new iPhone 3GS.   I owned the original iPhone for nearly four years and it had never failed me; overall a very satisfying experience.   It was really a no-brainer to upgrade to the 3GS, though my timing was a bit terrible (a few weeks later the iPhone 4 was released).   Regardless it worked out well and I’m not exactly a bleeding-edge type of guy anyway.

The 3GS worked quite good for about six months.   Around the beginning of November it began to act strangely.   I’d miss calls and was convinced the phone had never rang.   Voicemails and text messages would arrive 24 hours–if not more–after they’d been sent.   Initially I chalked this up to congestion on AT&T’s network, yet after driving most of the way across the country and experiencing the same problem I began to suspect the iPhone itself as the culprit.

Sure enough, after arriving in Kentucky around Christmas time the phone finally quit.   Attempts to restore it back to factory stock and backups from iTunes failed to work consistently.   Either it wouldn’t restore at all or would work for a day or two and go back to being bricked.   Many thousands of miles away from home and needing a phone for both work and communication on the road trip back, I traveled a few hours up to Nashville to the closest Apple store.   Much to my satisfaction it was replaced no questions asked, though I did have to drive a distance in order to do so.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.   The replacement 3GS began to act eerily similar: I started missing calls and voicemails.     I use this phone for business and it is my only phone number, so unreliability for me is completely intolerable.   A few days after the initial flakiness it began the “bricked” behavior again, so I visited the local AT&T store in Redding since the Apple store is 2 hours distant.   I was fully expecting an apology and another replacement which would have left me satisfied, but a little frustrated.

But oh no, that isn’t how this worked out.   What transpired is a textbook example of how not to treat a customer, especially a 10-year one.

The representatives in the store were kind enough, and after doing a few simple troubleshooting steps got on the phone with Apple on my behalf.    After a few minutes of “Ok’s, and uh-huh’s” the phone call was handed off to me personally and the Apple representative provided several options, all of which involved some type of expense to me:

1. Send the phone via courier at my expense to Apple and be without any phone for a week, perhaps a little more while it was fixed.
2. Drive down to Sacramento to switch it out again, if they found it defective.
3. Pay them $599 and have a new 3GS, sending the original back and getting a refund only if Apple determined the phone was indeed faulty.

Already a bit frustrated with the degraded quality control at Apple, as well as seeing a stack of new 3GS boxes (and thus a working phone number) behind the counter, I simply asked the Apple rep why I couldn’t replace the phone there at the AT&T store versus driving two hours to Sacramento’s Apple store.   The rep on the phone provided some long convoluted answer with arbitrary excuses of how AT&T and Apple’s relationship worked, and I simply told him none of those options were acceptable.   I then asked the AT&T rep if I could simply swap the iPhone for something much cheaper, reliable and at least functional one, so I could have a working number.    Apple’s and AT&T’s only option to resolved the issue in that manner without incurring early termination fees would be to wait until the end of my contract on May 16th.

At this point I’m nearly livid:  I had just paid my monthly wireless bill of over $100,  and certainly many thousands of dollars over the span of my patronage with AT&T.    I’m in the store being told that my account, which is completely paid up, is useless unless I fork out even more money, or wait literally 19 more days for my contract to expire.  No budging from either AT&T’s or Apple’s position.

Well, that’s all it took.   I refuse to be subservient to a company I’m sending money to.  That’s not how it works in my book.   I do not run my business that way, and I expect the same courtesy out of the businesses I use.  I thanked the representatives on both the phone and behind the counter for their time, and explained that both Apple and AT&T had lost a long-time customer over some silly arbitrary agreements between the two of them that really only existed to inconvenience their customer.

Verizon, here I come.

Q: Hi Brian, I don’t remember the username.

A: “Username” for what?

Clearly there is an expectation of telepathy, which I have not quite mastered as of yet.   To further cement my issue, allow me another example:

Q: I don’t remember what directory we put that stuff in, do you?

A: What stuff?

My point is, that if you’re initiating a conversation with a question, and you’d really like an answer to that question, try to ensure there is no questioning its completeness.   Here is a wrong/right example:

Q – WRONG: Where did you download that thing from?

Q – RIGHT: The program you used to connect to server2 via the keyboard yesterday… where did you download it from?

As a general rule of thumb, if your question contains any of the following words:

• thing
• stuff
• place

It probably needs some adjustment.

Try to remember the person attempting to answer your question may be juggling dozens of different things, probably has hundreds of numbers, passwords, and other data to remember, and would greatly appreciate the reduced mental workload a few extra words provides.

Your favorite support person will thank you!

The best I could get was Time Machine to begin to write the files to the share, but after a few seconds die with a vague “Backup disk could not be created error”.  This stumped me for a bit until I came across this.  Apparently sometime around 10.5.2, Apple introduced a new, undocumented “feature” to Time Machine that causes it to fail over network volumes when doing the initial backup.   However, once the files are created it will work fine.

So, the magical combination is as follows:

• CentOS 5 with Netatalk-2.0.3 compiled, installed, and configured per this post.  Note: I also had to modify etc/cnid_dbd/dbif.c with the same code change as specified there, but YMMV.
• OS X Leopard, patched to 10.5.4.
• Changes to Netatalk’s netatalk.conf file per this post at the Gentoo Wiki.
• Following the post linked above precisely.

Once that happened, Time Machine has begun to work great over AFP to our backup volume–even for multiple Macs connecting to the same share. Behold!

It probably doesn’t need saying; but this is clearly an unsupported way to use Time Machine.  It has been running this way for me only about a day.    If you’re concerned about having to troubleshoot problems that may pop up down the road, especially regarding backups; picking up a Time Capsule is probably a far better idea.

After scratching my head a bit–I came to a quick realization that I cannot even use it now.   Other than simply signing my name, it’s completely awkward and cumbersome.  Even trying to write out a simple sentence took me a minute or so.  Phaedrah’s, on the on the other hand; looks perfect.

Which got me to thinking–even my “normal” handwriting (comprised of mostly slop capital block letters) is pretty illegible.  I  find myself hurrying trying to finish a word, and I’ve come to the conclusion  it’s because I can type it far faster and just print it.    Writing gets annoying because it’s too slow.   When I do have to write something, it gets me annoyed and I try to do it as fast as I can.

Am I the only one who uses a computer so much that simple handwriting is becoming troublesome?

The Persimmons/Ice Cream Lady is pretty nice, a bit quirky, and she loves persimmons. We’re ‘lucky’ enough to have a nice and healthy persimmons tree in our back yard, and in the fall she comes by and takes all the ripe ones she can put into boxes to make various foodstuff out of. Last year it worked out to about one hundres persimmons, which I’d otherwise have to pick up–rotting–on the lawn in the spring.

That’s perfectly fine by Phaedrah and I since neither one of us particularly like persimmons. In fact, they’re kind of gross. But the Persimmons Lady likes them, so that is all that matters. It keeps our yard tidy.

Anyway, down the street comes the Persimmons/Ice Cream Lady. At first, I tune out the jingle blasting out of the truck, but then I realize it’s none other than “Intermission” by Tool, one of my favorite bands.

I wave her over, mostly to explain she’s using a progressive-metal band  as her ‘happy’ ice cream truck song. She tells me it is indeed “funny sounding”, but was all she could find that would fit. I simply explain it’s a tad “dark” (the song is in a minor key, of course).

Laughing aside, I buy an ice cream sandwich for Phaedrah and she goes on her way blasting Tool for the masses to hear.  By far, the coolest ice cream truck song ever.

The Tundra, common name “super-ultra-truck”, or also occasionally known as “The Silver Bullet”, was found dead by a tow-truck guy on the side of Airport Road early this morning.

Apparently someone managed to break into it–right in our driveway–and then take it out and have a little fun. They ended that fun by doing some jousting with a tree. The tree won.

The Van also suffered a minor molesting, but nothing horrible: just some change thrown on the floor.

We haven’t been able to see it yet as it is the weekend and the tow-truck guy is “out of service”, but according to the office personnel we won’t be driving it any time soon.

Truck: You were a good truck, a bit underpowered at times, but a good tow vehicle nonetheless. But I’m still sorry I blew a couple hundred bucks in new brakes for you a month ago.

UPDATE:

We just heard back from the insurance company:

As I straightened up the slat and tried to push the nail back in to the fencepost, I heard the distinct sound of clucking from the opposite corner of the yard! I turned around, and there they were: three hens scratching and pecking around.

Our neighbor keeps some chickens in a coop in the exact corner of the yard where the slat had fallen. Apparently the hens were feeling a bit adventurous and decided to check out our yard for food.

When Ethan got home, I let him run around the back yard with the chickens, who were surprisingly tolerant and friendly: one of them even let him pet her. They’re not the smartest animals, though. One happened to walk into our now-defunct garden and circled for about an hour trying to figure her way back out of the fencing. I finally got frustrated just watching, and picked her up and dropped her off with her friends.
They finally decided around dusk to head back to their coop in the neighbor’s yard.

Millie has been stuck to the window for the entire time.