Life » Zeyus

My MacBook Pro, and dealing with the Apple store…

Jan 202012

UPDATE (8 February 2012): Took it in again last night, the manager came out and spoke to us he was nice anyway they fixed it on the spot, replaced the display and the motherboard (again?) now my laptop is all working and correct etc. I’m glad to have it resolved, but this has really jaded my view of apple.

UPDATE (6 February 2012): After taking my stupid macbook in again to get it fixed after the part arrived. Again they assured me it would be same day or MAX next day service. But no, I took it in Saturday after lunch (I had to have a stupid “date” to do it of course) then I could finally pick it back up again on Tuesday night!!!!!!! WTF Apple????

Want to know what’s even worse??????? Over the weekend I tried to use my built-in camera. Guess what doesn’t work???? That’s right I have to go back AGAIN on Tuesday for another “date” with their “idiot bar” and see how much more time I get to waste traveling to and from the Apple store and if it takes another couple years to fix the damn thing!!!!

UPDATE (24 January 2012): I spent about half an hour yesterday in the Apple store. The staff were very friendly but unfortunately, I didn’t get offered anything, no new macbook, not even a replacement while they fix it the next time, not a single tiny bit of compensation for hours of traveling to and from the store (and more to come). I specifically asked them about all this and they said they can’t do anything, hell, even a upgrade to a solid state drive would be something (and awesome). The best they can do is promise me it will be a quicker repair this time, instead of 3 weeks it will take maybe 1 day. That’s better, but not so great. I’ll still be without my laptop for work for that 1 day and I’ve wasted so much time and a bunch of cash on metro trips to and from the store. I’m awaiting their call to say the replacement motherboard is in so I can take my laptop in AGAIN then wait a day and hopefully they’ve fixed it so I can go to the store AGAIN and pick it up finally how it should be. Let’s see! I’m definitely not happy with Apple, AppleCare, Apple Store and their service.

So my laptop started playing up, the keyboard wasn’t working great and for some reason the SD card slot only worked intermittently so if I wanted to get some photos I’d usually end up finding a USB card reader after getting frustrated. You don’t expect this from a top of the line macbook pro, mine is fully upgraded, and I have AppleCare

OK Next step, I call the Apple store in Barcelona (which by the way is nowhere near the center of the city), and they give me a date that I can go and talk with them. My wife and I hopped on the train on the Friday afternoon we both had off from work and spend the 50 minutes or so it took us to get to the Apple store.

We informed one of the staff that we were here and they indicated we should wait on the bench until it was our turn, no problems because we were a little early. Finally we get to speak with a genius, a little later than expected but not too bad, especially considering how busy the place was.

Our guy was friendly and helpful and told us that they would replace the motherboard, the top case and the keyboard. Great, I was really happy with that, and he said it would take about 3 days to get the parts in plus 10 days to repair it…well OK, I use my laptop for my work but I thought I could borrow my wife’s for a week or so. IMPORTANT: I noticed on the guy’s screen that the parts he was ordering said motherboard 2.66 GHz, we mentioned this to him and said that I had the 2.8 GHz version, but he said not to worry because they’re all the same.

Well after 2 weeks we called them and they said still no word. Then a few days later I called again and they said well maybe tomorrow or the next day. OK fine, I checked on the web at almost 3 weeks after we took it in and it said I could go pick it up. So off I go, on the train in my lunch break, spending another half hour to get there. I go into the store and the guy, who was friendly said that it’s not actually ready because they ran some tests and it failed, and they might have to change the motherboard again. He said he was working on it right at that moment and if I could wait around it should be less than an hour. So I did, and it was a little over an hour. A little frustrating, but whatever, I had my laptop back finally! I signed for it and they handed it to me and I went on my way.

Oops:

What happened?? I turned it on and logged in, and checked out the system information just to see if anything had changed (serial number, or anything else to keep track of it). Lo and behold, my laptop’s CPU had been changed to the 2.66 GHz model.

I called the store again and they said that they can’t do anything until I book another date, which I begrudgingly did.

Now I have to wait till Monday to see if they can do something, and hopefully not leave me without my work laptop for another 3 weeks, and maybe if I can get some compensation, this has wasted a lot of time!

I’ll update this post when I find out more. Ugh!

Why I won’t ever get another iPhone

Life, Tech 4 Responses »

Nov 202011

So, I had my Sony Ericsson K800I for about 5 years, and it served me well, then I had a Samsung Omnia HD (i8910) which was OK but the OS was useless (Symbian is terrible!!)

Unfortunately my Samsung got stolen, and then I was back to my SE K800i, until a colleague sold me their iPhone 3GS for cheap, and when I got it the loudspeaker wasn’t working, I paid a local phone shop 15€ and they fixed the loudspeakers so I could hear the phone ringing again.

Great, but then the vibrate stopped working and not long after the 3G service stopped and then I hardly got network service anywhere! It’s really frustrating having a smartphone but not being able to use any of it’s network features, (not even mail). I did play with installing iOS5 and all that, which was much better to use and had some cool features, but of course it didn’t fix the hardware problems with the phone.

After 4 months of having a phone like this finally I dropped it accidentally from a relatively low height (about half a meter) and bang, here we are again. back now to my K800i, ugh, this sucks.

My wife is using the 3g (not 3gs) which my boss nicely gave me but it’s so so so so slow, even using google maps!

New rage comic…

Life No Responses »

Oct 072011

My first rage comic…

Life, Tech 2 Responses »

Sep 072011

but all the guys at work were doing it…

On learning and science

Life No Responses »

Jul 272011

Before continuing, spare a minute to take a look at this great video:

Before I go on, I would like to say if you disagree with me, or wish to discuss this at all, please do!

I’m not going to go into it in great depth right now, but rest assured, I will at some point in the future.

It’s amazing just how hard it is to admit to yourself that you’re wrong about something. Our brains are wired in a way to find support for whatever beliefs we taught and hold, and in a lot of cases completely disregarding or dismissing any counter-evidence that may come along!

I would like to address a couple of those things in this post, briefly and rationally.

When I was younger I believed in all sorts of alternative medicine, this was partly due to the vast amounts of anecdotal evidence I had available to me, my parents have been to a homeopath and iridologists, and I had been too, and the advice was sometimes normal, sound advice, but when it came to the theme of medications, wow, they really take the cake, a whole array of these medications that you have to take and that cost a fortune.

But you may think, you can’t put a price on your health…well little did I know at the time that there is incredible amounts of evidence that it works no better than a placebo.

OK but what’s the harm in that….well I have heard personally of someone being told to take homeopathic remedies to cure their cancer, this is dangerous, if they choose an alternative treatment like this instead of chemotherapy and related things which can actually save their lives. For other examples have a look at http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html

Alright, one last point on this subject, and it’s on how homeopathic remedies are made (you can find out more by clicking on the 2 links 2 paragraphs above). Basically the idea is to treat like with like, so if you have problems sleeping they might make a remedy based on caffeine. With me still? Next they use the principle that by diluting it over and over again and whacking it against a hard surface it makes it stronger. How does this work? Well they say that the water has a special memory (think about this for a second, if it’s the case then we are drinking water that’s got memory of fish poo, dog poo, human poo, and anything else the water has ever come into contact with, trees, iron, lead, stones, concrete, anyway for a quick briefing click here)…and that the solutions which are more diluted are stronger treatments! WTF????? Also, the end product of homeopathic remedies is just water or sugar pills!!!

The other thing I wanted to address in this post was some things I had been taught specifically about science.

One of them is that: Radiocarbon dating is entirely inaccurate and not to be trusted.
This is just not true, if you look around you’ll find that it’s accurate to 50,000 years (see: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/carbon-14.htm there are many other resources if you’re interested discussing the topic).

Think about it for a second, if it is accurate to 50,000 years and human skeletons have been found at the upper end (and more) of that spectrum.

Another thing is that we have a lot of junk DNA, that’s leftover from viruses and things like that, but from a looooong time ago. Have a look at http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/enogenous-viruses-and-junk-dna/

Like I said, I’m not going to go into this, or anything else in great detail today. But it’s worth thinking about, debating and discussing.

The universe is a massive and fascinating place, and science is an incredible tool for helping understand the inner workings of it!

Currently Reading

Life No Responses »

Jun 072011

First of all, I’d like to say that I love my Kindle!
Now that I got an old iPhone (3GS) for very little cost, I decided to test out the kindle reader on there too, the app is great and so far so good, reading on the iPhone isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be although the kindle runs rings around it, but for example today, I forgot to put my kindle in my backpack but I had my phone and it was great for reading on the metro!

So, I purchased a eCopy of “The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths” by Michael Shermer (phew, what a mouthful). I only started reading it a few days ago and I’ve read 27% of the book so far.

It presents the idea of beliefs, whatever they may be as coming from our physical and chemical responses on a very base level. It discusses various studies and ideas and pulls it together very nicely. So far I’ve really enjoyed the bits about his upbringing and now the section I’m reading talking about the brains response to dopamine.

Anyway I obviously have a lot more to go but I can’t wait to keep reading, it’s a fascinating read!

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Kindle Edition)

The internet

Life, Tech 2 Responses »

Jun 012011

The internet is a rage inciting tool.

It allows the ignorant a voice that expands across time and space.

I’m not saying it should be regulated…but at least justify your indignation with facts!

I don’t mean the trolls, they merely feed off the absence of intelligence.

The effort of finding the truth is higher than that of believing everything that comes to you.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s cost is fatal!

…

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Leaving Australia

Life, Travel 6 Responses »

Feb 162011

To some people, leaving their home country is something very hard to do. For me it was probably one of the most easy and natural things I have done. It had been a great adventure traveling around the world with my family and not an opportunity everyone gets, even though it was only for 6 weeks it was still great. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t all fun, the car trip from London to Glasgow for example…Our whole family arguing and mum and dad getting angry about the music I put on because it was too profane, and losing our luggage for days and well anyway you get the idea, many hours in the car with an atmosphere thick enough to cut, it wasn’t pleasant. But the general idea of traveling really got to me, seeing new places meeting new people.

I was at a point in Australia where I felt like things were going in circles, I had a decent job and I guess things were OK in general, but I was sure I had more things to see. I had some amazing friends, and also had some people that I didn’t want to be around but had no choice in the matter. I also had this feeling (I usually trust my feelings) that because I’d been in that town for such a long time, people didn’t understand that I had changed, a lot. It was a real shame that some people looked at me as the same person that I was when I was only 12 years old. I was starting to make my own way, but I lacked so much confidence and experience in life and having this invisible pressure from other’s expectations or past ideas about who I should be got to be too much. I’ve done a lot of stupid things and made a lot of mistakes, but my decision to leave Australia was most definitely not one of those.

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Airport security

Life, Travel No Responses »

Jan 252011

Airport security has been somewhat of a hot topic since long before the twin towers marvelously collapsed, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a big joke. Any international voyager (and mostly everyone else) knows the ins and outs of the factory line that is the queue for the x-ray scanners and metal detectors. It’s normally chaos and pandemonium at the best of times, with people trying to control their savage children and/or grandparents from running amok, others not knowing they have to remove their fake mustache, 3 top hats, and 12.5 overcoats before they step through the metal detectors, and unfortunately, in the case of countries such as the United States, you can see families of non-westerners being herded away for further “questioning” (more on that in a moment).

Anyway, as frustrating as it is that people don’t understand the concept of what’s happening, and cause delays in the queue while they have to go through the scanner over and over – slowly performing an act that perhaps in other places they may get good money for, although entirely less sensual, and far less amusing – yes, as frustrating as this is, what bothers me most is this concept of “security”. Almost every time I’ve been to an airport, I’ve felt as if, with a bit of planning (not much, I might add) it would be possible to get away with a lot.

Quite often I get called over to get the old pat down if the scanner goes off. In theory this isn’t a bad thing, being checked in case you have a concealed weapon or something else you may be trying to hide from the x-ray scanners. But in reality, what good is a physical pat down of your body, if they completely avoid the most likely areas to hide things (ie genetalia and ass crack). Now I’m not saying every person that sets the scanner off should be poked in the anus, but surely if the whole point is to find something that may be hidden, at least do a thorough check!

A depiction of your average security checkpoint

In reality, there’s no need to hide things on your person as half the time the people watching the monitors of the scanners are too busy recounting stories of their weekends to their collegues. In this case it is possible they may get a quick glance as something rolls past the screen, I wouldn’t count on it though. One time I boarded a plane with a can full of propane (I had a propane powered soldering iron) and they didn’t notice, I’m sure if more than 100ml of water is a danger to others, 500ml of propane is a little worse. My aunt also recounted a story of a guy who pulled a knife out in the cabin while he was next to her, telling her that he didn’t trust the security and he had to have his own protection. Who could blame him, really!

OK so I did mention earlier about people being sent off into other rooms, I’ve seen this happen. In the line for customs in Seattle there was a family that were blatantly from London, the children had a London accent and the parents had an Indian accent. The father was NOT wearing a turban, or any “terrorist” garb, but still the border guard was hounding them with question after question: “Why are you here? (holiday) How did you get enough money to come here? Where were you before this? How were you able to be there?” and millions of other questions along those lines, putting into practice guilty until proved innocent. After them seemingly giving satisfactory answers to every question, they were taken by some guards into another room, what happend after that I can only guess, but from the screams and spats of blood seeping underneath the door I have to assume the worst. OK so the last bit I made up, but they did get taken away into another room.

Bonus art works, #1 Andrea’s parrot, and my destructive scribbles on top…#2 a figure sleeping in the sun. Drawn on dA Muro.

Today’s post was inspired by the letter T and the post here: http://timgrey.com/blog/2010/flying-without-identification/ which made me think about airports, and security and all these things.

Barcelona Metro

Life 2 Responses »

Jan 192011

First of I will say that the metro system in Barcelona is pretty good, there’s not too many service interruptions, you can get almost wherever you want to, and generally it’s not too dirty.

Metro map of barcelona (source: hhttp://luminarynyc.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/been-a-minute/)

Now with that out of the way, I feel like I’m able to complain (vent) about it. Actually, truth be told, I don’t have a problem with the service, only the people that ride it. Just the other day for no less than the third time, I encountered a man about the age of 60 who decides to get on one stop before I have to get off. This very same señor every time feels the need to get in the car, turn around and face the door, and stand there…Which is great for whatever stop he decides to get off at, but me and the 40 million other people that want to get off at my stop have to squeeze past his rotund stature while he stands as motionless as the cat in raval or the horse in the airport.

Barcelona metro, just another day

There’s that, and every day squeezing in like sardines among all the other people commuting to and from work, which I suppose is the malady of every public transport system around the globe. I much prefer riding my little bmx bike to work, unfortunately this comes with it’s own set of problems. It’s likely that I ride a little more aggressively than most people who cruise around on bicing which is fun, especially when I have my music going and see how close I can get to the little old ladies crossing the street, but the main problem is the short amount of time that I have to be on the road (Barcelona is shocking in it’s lack of bike friendly roads and lanes). In that minuscule window, I have to deal with the downright hatred that exists between everyone on any other form of transport, and bicycle riders. I mean it’s one thing that a pedestrian hates that you almost gave them a heart attack because it’s too much to ask for them to (a) stay off the bike lanes, and (b) walk in a straight line, instead of darting from side to side like someone possessed, but the fact that cars, busses, trucks, vans, scooters and motorcycles are also out to get me (yes it’s a personal thing). I try and stay as close to the side of the road as sanely possible, and keep out of their way. Considering I ride quite quickly, I really can’t be the worst person on the road (especially considering the viejos taking their daily cruise to the supermarket or the second hand store so they can line up and wait before the shops open…WOW, just WOW, anyway I’m digressing…actually get used to it) but there is this constant pressure from vehicles creeping up behind you. In particular, the other day I was, hmm, extremely pissed when one driver of a van started beeping his horn at me when slowed down because there was a pile of traffic in front of me waiting at a RED light. Imagine that, slowing down for a red light and 30 cars in front of you. Anyway I crossed the road, cruised on the sidewalk past Plasa España, making sure to flip the guy off as he was jealously watching me weave my way to freedom and the other side of the intersection. Ugh, la gente!

I didn’t mean this blog to become the Peter Griffin slot “What really grinds my gears” but there you have it, what can you do!

Don’t you hate it when you can’t find the droids you’re looking for?

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Zeyus

My MacBook Pro, and dealing with the Apple store…

Why I won’t ever get another iPhone

New rage comic…

My first rage comic…

On learning and science

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The internet

Leaving Australia

Airport security

Barcelona Metro

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