What a Difference A Hill Makes
June 25th, 2006
As reported by Sheila.
Temperature in Valley: 100
Temperature in Culver City, 15 minutes later: 73
Like, what a difference!
Archive
Archive for June, 2006
Two Good Quotes That Have Been On My Mind Lately
June 23rd, 2006
From Mark Cuban:
To me, the proof is always in the details. No matter what business Im in, most people work in headlines mode. They think that if they say or write something that makes a good headline , then there must be substance to their point. That’s not the way business works. Which is why most people never get further than the middle.
Substance comes from detail. Luck comes from detail. Winning comes from being willing to do the work on the details. Learning comes from investing in details.
From Sally Hogshead:
Being in a crap job isn’t your fault.
Staying in a crap job is.
Hope these help give you some insight or make you feel better about the world, as they have to me.
It’s a Warranty, Kind Of
June 1st, 2006
My iPod bit the dust yesterday. I took it to the car to drive to a client meeting, and when I powered it up, it was devoid of songs. When I got back, I tried re-sync’ing it and it froze up about 1/3 of the way through. I tried resetting the iPod, restoring the firmware, running chkdsk on it, formatting it in Windows, and formatting it on another machine. All of this, and it still kept freezing up. Then I noticed the hard drive constantly clicking when it froze - uh-oh, failure city.
So I scheduled an appointment at the Genius Bar at the Apple store in Santa Monica today (which was pretty convenient - I showed up exactly on time and they were calling my name). I figured the iPod would still be under its 1-year warranty - after all, the unit came out in October. And it was. However, there’s some fine print.
After describing the problems, the Mac Genius told me that the one year warranty doesn’t mean you get free service for a year. That’s just for the first six months. After the second six months, there’s a $29.99 service fee for them to do anything. Which is kind of like a warranty, except you still have to pay for it. In fact, the Mac Genius recommended I buy the AppleCare Protection Plan, which would cost an additional $30, but would extend my warranty for another year with no service fees in case the replacement unit has problems as well.
I felt kind of like I was being suckered, but I’ve had such a good experience with the iPod since I got it, so I bought the AppleCare plan, and they swapped units. I did not get an off-the-shelf one - I got one in a brown box that was just the iPod itself. It says in the letter also, that when you get a replacement iPod, it may be either new or refurbished. Mine looks pristine, so I guess that’s okay as long as it doesn’t crap out after a year and a half. We’ll see.
The new/refurb iPod is now sync’ing and it hasn’t frozen up so far, so we’ll see. Overall, apart from the surprise of having to spend more money to get a new unit, the whole process was pretty painless.
Also, I just got the new Rainer Maria album in the mail today. I think it got mixed reviews, but it’s totally catchy, well-written pop/rock, and I think it’s going to be the album of the summer for me.