ben lowery

Mandy, Kate and I were watching Napoleon Dynamite for the upteenth
time today and Mandy was poking around on the web. She stumbled upon a photography site by the actor who played Kip, Aaron Ruell. Good stuff.

Well, it looks like my fancy new Dell 24″ flat panel, the 2405FPW,
has a problem with the component input. The picture looks great for
between fifteen
minutes and a half-hour, after which some really nasty horizontal
banding shows
up. The banding sticks around until the monitor is turned off for
at least an hour. I think it might be heat related, but I’m
quoting Modern Jackass on that. It appears others have run into this same problem
and received a new monitor for the trouble. I’m getting in touch with
Dell support now to try and get a replacement… I’ll let you know how
it goes.

So far, their support gets a D. All of the support channels want a
Service Tag, which monitors do not come with. The online chat, which is
their preferred method of support, requires a Service Tag, which I just
don’t have.

The phone support doesn’t seem to think it’s possible to buy just a
monitor without a Dell desktop, so I’m currently in a holding pattern
waiting for a Dimension (a desktop) support. We’ll see how this goes
when I finally get through. So far, I’ve spent ten minutes in the
holding pattern.

Update! As heard in the little blurbs Dell plays while you are on hold:

Spyware and viruses are third party software products that are not installed or supporting by Dell.

I’d never really thought of virii and spyware as software products, though I am glad that Dell doesn’t support them. Heh.

Update 2! Well, that was easy, if slow. I ended up being on the phone for 1h 34m, and had to be transferred after finding out that the Dimension support department wasn’t the right place for me (big surprise). I was transferred to a very nice woman @ 800-822-8965, which seems to be premier support or something who quickly ran through my problem and decided to ship me a replacement monitor. It should show up fairly soon and will return a return shipping label so I can send back my current monitor for free! Once I got through, the whole experience was quite good and the folks involved were very nice and polite. The 1h 10m wait to talk to someone was painful, but with a speakerphone, I could do other things. Grade so far: B.

As part of cleaning up today, I noticed I still had a bunch of tea from Adagio sitting around in little sampler tins. Instead of packing, I decided to make some iced tea with it. Mmmm.. Lemon iced tea!

I keep seeing the verbs “architecting” and “architected” around
the software world and it drives some friends of mine well versed in
the English language insane. What do you think? Is “architected” a
word? How would you say “I architected a web site.” instead?

I really dislike IComparer in .NET. Instead of an interface with one
method, I really would have liked things that take an IComparer to take
a delegate instead. That way, instead of having to whip up an entire
class just to encapsulate my custom sorting algorithm for an Array, I
could just make a method with the right signature and run with it.