Why I’m not shopping at Best Buy anymore
Ok, well I’m not cutting Best Buy out completely…. I still need a local place to find a decent price on things like TV’s and appliances. But when it comes to computer parts and most other technology accessories… here’s why I’m done shopping at Best Buy.
- Incompetent Staff
- High Prices on EVERYTHING
- Unhelpful Staff
- Never have what I’m looking for
- Don’t sell the complementary goods to what I’m buying in the first place
- Incompetent Staff
- Incompetent Staff
- Unhelpful Staff
- The Staff is retarded
- Seriously, the staff doesn’t know shit about shit
Regarding numbers 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. I was at Best Buy a few times within the last month and 2 out of those 3 times have been terrible experiences. The only reason the other experience wasn’t a bad one was because I knew what I was looking for, I knew how to find it, and I never had any questions about it. The other two times were horrible because I had simple questions but they were too under-staffed to handle my simple question quickly. Then when I FINALLY tracked down an associate, I asked him if he sold the wireless adapter for the Netgear home theatre thingy I was looking at buying for almost $200—streams media to your TV from your home network. He immediately said no I’ll have to go online. Alright… fair answer. But then this supplements my point about #5; if I’m going to buy something to put near my TV in my entertainment center… which doesn’t have hard-wired Ethernet (and I don’t know many people that have CAT5 in their home theatre setup), I’d want to buy the wireless adapter. Good going Worst Buy… cost yourself a sale simply by not stocking a complementary good. I didn’t buy it.
Now the second time I went into Best Buy looking for a media center that streams media from my home network to my TV (since I had some money to burn), I asked about the wireless adapter for the Seagate HD Theatre+. Again…. after walking around trying to find an associate who wasn’t being a tool, I came across one who was a tool… because apparently “non-tool” associates don’t exist at Best Buy. So I asked him the same question “Do you sell the wireless adapter for this?” Keep in mind, it says right on the box that Seagate makes a wireless adapter for that unit but it is sold separately, though it doesn’t tell you any model information. What immediately tipped me off that he had no freaking clue what he was about to babble about was the fact that he looked at the back of the box and hunted for the “obvious” answer with his index finger… which is exactly what I did (sans the index finger thing). Then he handed the box back to me and told me to go to Home Theatre and ask for a USB Adapter for TiVo.
Ok, fine… I’ll play dumb consumer and follow his directions—big mistake, I forgot about my #1 reason for not shopping at Best Buy anymore. Luckily reason #2 kicked in when I saw the price on the TiVo wireless adapter. Seventy (70) dollars for a USB wireless G adapter for a freaking TiVo. Who in their right (and wrong) mind would even consider spending that much on a wireless G adapter for anything? Not I said the Cale. I put the adapter and the Seagate Home Theatre system back and promptly left the store.
So lets re-cap… Reasons #1, #2, #3, and #4 all cost Best Buy a few sales. In the business scheme of things if you think about it, how many times per day does that happen? How many times does Best Buy lose sales because they: have stupid associates; don’t have the complimentary item to something; don’t have what someone is looking for; and have something but the price is so high the customer just puts it back and leaves? They could have racked up about $300 in sales just on a single customer. So according to Wikipedia, there’s ~1,400 Best Buy stores in the US in 2007… probably more now, but lets use 2007’s numbers. Lets say my little fiasco happens in every one of those 1400 stores a total of ONE time per day (which imho is a fair number). That’s missed revenue of $420,000 per day. If you extrapolate that out to one year, that’s $153 million in missed revenue per YEAR! I know that pales in comparison to the company’s > $4 billion in annual revenue, but still if I were a business owner, I’d love to see $153 million more on the books every year.
Think about it Best Buy… think about it. In the mean time, I’m shopping at Fry’s, NewEgg, or Amazon.
Gripes about Torque Game Engine on Windows 7
So for my Bachelors degree, we’re using the Torque Game Engine to learn how to create assets and write basic scripts for a game engine… effectively creating a whole game. I’ve used Torque lightly in the past, on Windows XP but never on Vista. Now that I’ve gone Windows 7 I’ve had nothing but problems with Torque. So far, just today, in the last 4 hours, it crashed on me 6 times. No pattern to it either, it usually happens when I just simply try to do something. In one case it crashed when I removed a dynamic property, another case it crashed when I placed an entity inside of a sim group. I’ve also experienced crashes in map2dif.exe as well. So far the Torque Constructor has been fairly solid, though I don’t like the interface at all, but the Torque engine itself has been absolutely terrible.
I really wish my college would use Unity or even UDK for teaching game development, Torque seems like an absolute joke. Of course, they haven’t tried out the new Torque 3D engine yet… they’re still on the archaic “Torque Game Engine” which is probably part of the problem.
Anyway, just felt like bitching there for a second about my Torque woes… its been a total nightmare trying to get this assignment done before the end of the 7th week of class (which is next week).
A few web host reviews
You may have noticed my tweets there on the left about web hosts. I recently experimented with a few different hosts and griped about one of them (WebFusion). First off, if anybody tells you to use http://10bestwebhost2009.com, especially via Twitter, don’t bother, its spam and a total joke. This is a site that is written/funded/created by the hosts that just want to take your money.
Anyway, here I go (I’m starting with the ‘bad’ ones first)…
1) FatCow
This company is alright if you don’t need a really fast website with tons of uptime. It would make a good personal web host, especially at the price, but I definitely don’t recommend it for business hosting. When I used them, they worked out good for a few months, then went to total crap. My database driven websites started having trouble connecting to the database back-ends and my sites were down what seemed like more than they were up. I attempted to get my remaining balance refunded but apparently there is something in their fine print that doesn’t allow this.
Pros: Cheap (don’t expect a refund if you cancel). Probably good for a static site. They offer unlimited space and bandwidth which is nice. Customer support was knowledgeable as well. They also do some cross-business promotions with Google. Their control panel is pretty good too.
Cons: Not good for business websites or ones that require database backends. Performance is terrible.
2) WebFusion
I purchased an account with WebFusion just to see what it was all about. They offer ASP.NET (Windows-based) and PHP (Linux-based) hosting on their lower-tier plans and even offer Ruby on their higher-tier plans. I went the Windows route because their Windows hosting was actually cheaper than my current Windows host so I wanted to try em out. Do NOT bother with these folks.Their customer service is terrible. I had a problem getting a database imported using their control panel, so I asked if/how I could do it with SQL Management Studio (they don’t give out the FQDN of their DB server). I’m STILL waiting for a response. And since they boast a “24/7/365” support all over their site, I figured I’d get a nice snappy response. No, I did not. Then I submitted another request to have my account canceled because they are obviously not helpful and I’m stuck until I get a response. I’m STILL waiting for a response for this one too. So they effectively took my payment, gave me a bucket, then left me out to dry. How nice.
Update: They finally responded and promptly closed my account and refunded my money. It took several days for them to do that though. They they tried to get me to release my contact details over Twitter… lol. Pathetic.
Pros: Their control panel is almost stupidly simple to use. I had trouble with it because I’m a power-user. If you’re a basic user, have at it. Their price is also very nice.
Cons: They don’t know what customer service means and if you buy a Windows plan, expect to deal with the pains of not being able to use management studio—and their web interface for the database(s) sucks. I couldn’t even import a basic schema to it because it had problems with comments in the SQL. That’s pretty bad.
3) NetFirms
Netfirms is one of the larger hosts that I’ve worked with in the past. For the price, it isn’t bad. They’ve definitely got some cheap domains, even if you don’t buy a hosting plan from them. If you buy a domain from them, you get free hosting anyway. The hosting you get for free is VERY basic and will usually host a personal website just fine. That’s actually where I ran this one for a while (back when it was static content). I quickly realized how nasty their performance was when I put WordPress on their hosting space. I got a bunch of database timeouts and whatnot. Just all around not a very good place to stick anything mission critical. Otherwise not a bad host, especially for the price.
Pros: Cheap, especially when buying a domain. Don’t have to pay a higher premium for your domain if you choose not to host with them. Even if you buy JUST a domain from them, you’ll get a little bit of hosting no matter what; but it isn’t very good hosting.
Cons: Poor performance. That’s about all I can say about them. Their control panel isn’t bad though, for a custom written one.
Now on to the good hosts…
4) HostDime
These guys rock. The price is right, though still a bit higher than your bargain basement hosts. But these guys run on great hardware and don’t use crap control panels. Their staff is pretty knowledgeable as well. I’ve been back and forth with these guys but have never had a bad experience with them at all. I’ve been with them since around 2002 or so—though I am probably going to be canceling my current hosting with them soon. Not for any performance reason or anything, I just like hosting with a few more features (namely Ruby).
Pros: Good price, awesome features, they use cPanel, fast hardware, almost always up and available, good customer support, get a lot of space, bandwidth, and databases, also has quite a few stock scripts that can be installed with a few simple clicks. Makes a good business host.
Cons: No Ruby or Ruby on Rails support 
Otherwise there are no cons.
5) Arvixe
These guys are pretty good too. The price is fair, the staff is knowledgeable, the performance is great, and I have yet to experience any pro-longed downtime (if any at all, I haven’t noticed yet). I’ve been using Arvixe to support my ASP.NET development on top of SQL Server 2008 since around June 2009. Their control panel is a .NET standard control panel for web hosts (can’t remember the name off the top of my head). They also have a Linux facet of hosting too that I haven’t experienced but if it is anything like their Windows side, it is probably pretty damn good.
Pros: Decent price, plenty of features, unlimited space and bandiwdth, good performance, standard control panel, and they let you manage your database with SQL Server Management Studio!!!!!11oneoneone. Makes a good small business host.
Cons: Haven’t really found anything worth listing. Maybe price, but you get what you pay for in the hosting business usually. If you want good stuff, you pay a little more than basement prices.
6) Site5
I could spend the rest of my life with this host, unless they REALLY screw up. I’ve been with them since November 2009 and have no complaints at all. They’ll host practically anything that can run on Linux including Perl/CGI, PHP, Ruby (+Rails), and even SSH!!! The price is pretty good too and I have no quarrels about performance. I moved from HostDime to Site5 ONLY because of the Ruby and Rails hosting. Plus the SSH access to my account gives me a lot of control over what I can do with it. Their control panel (the non-Backstage one) doesn’t LOOK like cPanel, but it is definitely cPanel. It takes a little getting used to but it isn’t too hard if you’re a cPanel user.
Pros: Fast, very smart and friendly staff, great performance, SSH access, Ruby hosting, they’ll host about anything under the sun, and the price isn’t too bad.
Cons: None.
Now I really hate AT&T
So, as a continuation of my last post about how much I hate AT&T… the line tech finally come on site when they said he would. He apparently found a bad ring ground at the neighborhood’s equipment. He replaced it and my ringtone is now nice and clear and I consistently test at 6Mbps…. yay.
Well that lasted for a month or so. Now I’m down again. I replaced my modem entirely after the last occurrence of problems so that I could be better “supported”…. yes I put supported in quotes, because AT&T’s “support” is a joke to begin with. Now that I’m down again, the modem is giving some pretty good indicators as to why: “Could not find an ATM circuit.” Cute.
I call in and an automated message tells me that they’re “working to resolve a network outage in my area. The estimated resolution time is 12am.” I called at 3:30am. So, 3 1/2 hours have passed since their estimated resolution time. I know that this is an “estimate”, but seriously… 3 1/2 hours off? Some estimate, they might as well have simply said “We’ll be down for a while. In the mean time, play boardgames and jerk it to Playboy like the good ol’ days.”
I pressed zero and got to a support tech… we’ll call him “Albert” (real name was probably something closer to Habeeb Mohammednirishnikahnapali). I told him that I’m aware there’s a network outage, but the estimated time was midnight, it is now 3:30…. is my issue related to something else? He went through the motions like a good little AT&T drone…. ran the line test and attempted to get more information about the outage for me. He came back with the results of the line test: Line is good, but my area is still affected by an outage. And unfortunately the NEW estimated resolution time is “Monday.”
MONDAY!?!?! What the hell! I’ve been down since Thursday! I guess it will be pretty difficult to do things like pay my bills, turn in my school work, and perform my job functions. This is terrific. I should sue for lost wages or something… if any lawyers out there are planning to issue a class action lawsuit against AT&T, count me in. I don’t care what its for, count me in. I want to hit AT&T where it hurts. They only thing they value is money and I’d love to get mine back.
Luckily for me, I have T-Mobile cell phone service (because I dropped Cingular before the AT&T buy-out). I also have a Google Android phone with a tiny app called PdaNet. I’m forced to use the 2G internet connection that I have through my cell phone in order to do any online stuff. At least I have something, but I still can’t do any work-related stuff over this connection. I need a broadband connection for that.
Anyway, I’ll be calling AT&T and asking for a credit. I will only be paying AT MOST 87% of my bill if I am indeed down until Monday. I’m sick of paying for a full month of service, when I’m actually only getting about 20 days or so. This is a great way to start off the month of October… 4 day outage without a single notice to their customers.
Please somebody save me.
Oh, my site got blacklisted btw.
Almost forgot to mention. My site got black-listed last week because it got hacked AGAIN! Even after I ran a virus scan, changed my passwords, changed my security questions, EVERYTHING… I get boned by a trojan or something which stole my account information and distributed malware via my website. I think I’ve narrowed it down to FileZilla. I sort of made the mistake of storing account passwords in FileZilla. I think someone must have gotten a hold of the configuration data. Anyway, no more stored FTP sites.
Because this, Google put my site on their shit-list. Which is apparently used by a large amount of web filters and things of that nature. So my site traffic had dropped drastically last week. Hopefully people have checked back and realized I’ve cleaned the threat. I got Google to remove my site from their shitlist so it shouldn’t be flagged anymore.
Again, I will re-iterate: I am a PC… and I got hacked… 3 times now.
I hate AT&T and there is nothing I can do about it
I need to vent for a moment, about how much I hate AT&T and how I’m frustrated that there’s nothing I can do about it.
About a month ago, I decided to save myself some money and cut off my home phone line. I wanted to keep my DSL line so I switched to AT&T’s DSL Direct—DSL without home phone service. At the time I wanted to switch, I had 3MB DSL. I did the math and found that if I cut out my home phone service and upgrade my speed to 6MB DSL, I’d still save some money. So I had them upgrade my speed to 6MB as well as cutting off my home phone service.
I was told at that time that it will take up to 48 hours for the new speed to take effect and that after 48 hours I should power-cycle my modem. So I followed their instructions.
So after the 48 hour wait and the power-cycling of the modem, I still didn’t have my 6MB speed. I called them up and said I’m being billed for 6MB DSL now but I’m still only getting 3MB. As it turns out, the lady who took my call initially when I cut the home phone service off had done something wrong and now their billing didn’t sync up with my class of service. This service call took care of that and I had my 6MB almost immediately.
Then just yesterday, the 1 month anniversary of upgrading my speed (new billing cycle), my modem dropped back down to 3MB. After digging around on their site for 20 minutes trying to find a way to contact them, I decided to try to handle this problem via online chat with a customer support rep.
This encounter with support started off OK. She got my account information and verified that I’m supposed to be getting 6MB. She directed me to a speed test website that they could use to verify the validity of my claim of only getting 3MB. I ran the speed test and it came back with 1.5Mb down and 153Kb up. I relayed this information to the support agent and she said that this is indeed way below the allowable speed for my account. I said that this number didn’t jive with what I had been getting previously (just 10min prior) at Speakeasy’s speed test website. So I told her I’d run the test again real quick. This time it came back with 2.9Mb and 163Kb.
After relaying this information to the support rep, she said that this could be a problem with the line and that I needed to call in to talk to a support person live so that we could schedule a service call. I then said “So you mean you will no longer be handling my case?” to which she replied “I assure you that we will get your problem resolved if you call in.” Then I was in the middle of typing “So is there a ticket number or anything that I need to give them?” when she ended the chat session. I said out-loud “You bitch.”
After cooling off for an hour or so I followed her instructions and called in. I had to re-explain my entire problem to Eddie, a support rep. He didn’t quite understand what I was telling him at first, so I re-iterated “This is happening every billing period. My speed gets dropped back to 3MB. I’ve called in before and they’ve taken care of it.” Then he understood what I was saying. But because I never had a support ticket, I had to go through the whole rigmarole of doing the speed test and all that jazz. Then after I again proved that I wasn’t getting the speed that I was supposed to be receiving, Eddie tried to call the “Digital Services Department.” After about 10min he came back on the phone and said he wasn’t able to get ahold of them. Then I said “Is there a number I can try them on?” He said yes and gave me the same number I used to get ahold of him. I told him that can’t be right because that’s what led me to him. Then he realized he made a mistake and gave me another number. I thanked him and we ended the call.
I spent the next hour doing my own thing for a while, taking a break from the hold music and broken English that is AT&T support. Then I tried to call this number Eddie gave me. This number was not a support number, it was the number for “Electronic Payment Claims Center”, and was closed until Monday morning.
So I’ll be going through this same bullshit again in a few hours when I start this entire process all over again. I need to chill right now.
Q: “But Cale, why don’t you switch to cable?”
A: Because I can’t. There isn’t a cable provider in the subdivision where I live and there isn’t any cable infrastructure near me. I am in an area of town that isn’t incorporated, technically not within city limits—though this is one of the more busy areas of town. I’ve tried Charter and I’ve tried Comcast, both of which tell me they don’t serve my area.
Q: “Ok, what about using Clear?”
A: Yes, Atlanta has Clear (WiMax provider) which I WOULD use if they offered home internet service in my area. Where I live, they only offer Clear as a mobile broadband. Plus, have you talked to their customer support? They’re just as bad as AT&T! They don’t know their elbows from their assholes. I looked into getting Clear last month, this led me to a few questions which I decided to talk to a customer service agent about.
Q: “Alright, well that’s a punch in a crotch. What about FiOS?”
A: I’d LOVE to get FiOS. But again, I can’t. Verizon has no infrastructure where I live and can’t support even home phone service where I’m at.
Q: “Holy hell! Ok, what about satellite internet?”
A: LOL. Internet from outter-space… yeah right. 1MB is the highest speed I can find, and its more expensive.
Q: “What the hell! Where do you live?”
A: A seemingly under-developed area of un-incorporated Lawrenceville, GA which I have dubbed “Little Mexico”.
Hacked! Part I
I will keep this short, because my thumbs will get sore from ranting.
I am currently forced to resort to my G1 for posting because my laptop got infected with several trojans and a couple of root kits.
These infections led to my websites being attacked with malware injection. So needless to say, I am a bit pissed. However, trying to find the light side in all of this, I feel like I am important enough for someone to want to do this to me. That is probably a delusion, but it is sort of fun to think like there is a virtual ‘hit’ out on me.
Anyway, I will post more later after my laptop rebuilds.
I am a PC, and I got hacked.
Why is open source project hosting annoying and not playing nice with me?
I wrote a neat little web-based task system in PHP, jQuery, and SQLite last night and wanted a place to put it so I could give it to the world (and maintain my source code).
I checked out Google code, where I have placed several projects of mine. I successfully created a project, but when I’d try to check in the code, the SVN server wasn’t available. At the same time, I’d try to click the “Source” tab on the project that I just created and I’d get an HTTP 500 from Google (which is incredibly rare). So I marked that project for deletion from Google Code.
Then I went over to Source Forge. Source Forge is having issues. I couldn’t get their site to load at the time that I tried, again, HTTP 500 errors. Though I did get an email from them a few days ago saying they were going to be pushing a new UI to their site soon. The email said the service interruptions were only going to be for a few minutes at the most. Lets just say it was more than a few minutes, so I scrapped that idea.
Then I remembered a guy at work recommended GitHub. I’m really new to Git and so far I don’t like it. I find it more difficult to use than SVN–though it is faster by far. So I get the code put up on GitHub just fine, but now I can’t edit the repository details in the admin area. Every time I try to change the project website or description it responds with “Name is already taken”. Ok, minor annoyance. Ignoring that, I went over to the downloads area to upload my ZIP containing the final v1.0 build of the project. It gets 100% done and then I get a HTTP 500 from GitHub. I try to go back to the project page but now I’m getting a HTTP 500 error anytime I try to do anything with my project. Not all of GitHub… my project page. I seem to be the only one affected by this.
So, I’m a bit frustrated at the moment. I guess I’ll start working on one of my closed-source projects and call it a night.
Serj Tankian – Elect The Dead
This has got to be one of the worst albums I’ve heard in a long time. I’ve NEVER deleted an album the second after I’m done listening to it, but I definitely do so with this one. I even still have Earshot – Letting Go even though I don’t listen to it. I don’t know how this album got 4 1/2 stars out of 5 on iTunes–absolutely horrible.
For some reason, I felt like checking out Serj’s solo album (even though its been out for a while) after listening to a few System of a Down songs. I’m a metal head, with a little bit of industrial, techno, and alternative mixed in but my roots have always been metal (of the Metallica, Pantera, BLS, Diecast, Acid Bath, and Rapture variety). So naturally, I’ve heard quite a bit of SOAD and happen to like a good bit of their music. Some of it is a little too ‘wacky’ for me, but I figured maybe there’d be a few pretty kickass songs on Serj’s album. I couldn’t have been more wrong. So wrong, that I feel like blogging about my blunder.
So I’m spreading the word. If you love metal, and like your ears (because if you’re a metal head, you _can’t_ LOVE your ears), do NOT download this album.
Fixing the MozyHome "FilesystemError3" message
So if you’re like me, and you’re paranoid about data loss, you’re probably using something to back up your data. Whether that something be Ghost, Carbonite, Iron Mountain, or simple file copies, you are always making sure you’re data is protected one way or another. Now, I personally use a combination of things. I use Norton Ghost to do full drive images every other day and copy them out to an external hard drive. I also use MozyHome for my most important files (financial data, some source code, school work, etc.).
If you use MozyHome, and have ever seen this message for an un-explained reason, keep reading:
This error, according to Mozy support, means that the temporary location for caching the backups is full. Now, that may be the case for a lot of users, but it wasn’t for me. You see, Mozy is SUPPOSED to use the Windows environment variables to determine where to store its temp files (See the %TEMP% variable). In my case, this variable is set to %SystemRootTemp which is C:WindowsTemp. Where was MozyHome storing its cache? Try G:TEMP. I couldn’t figure out why this is the case, but now that I know, I’ll be sure not to delete it.
So before I realized all of this, I did a little “house cleaning” a few days ago and G:TEMP happened to be one of the directories which I removed completely. Then today I figured, maybe I should make sure my files are backed up (because I like getting warm and fuzzy feelings). So I look and sure enough, they weren’t. I did some hunting into this error and discovered all of the above mentioned information.
I have since sent a response to MozyHome’s KB article on this error message explaining that this error can crop up if there is plenty of space, but the TEMP directory is simply missing. I then proceeded to jab them with a stick by saying that their backup software was completely ignoring Windows environment variables. Then again when I told them “Why not just create the temp directory if it doesn’t exist?” They shouldn’t be making their software complain about free space when that has nothing to do with what is going on. It is a very misleading error and they need to fix it. This error sort of seems like a “cach-all”.