5 posts tagged “consumer”

I could have sworn the kitchen light, one of those fancy-pants long-life “eco” light bulbs, was changed only three weeks ago. (It’s still ‘up to 9 years’.) Anyway, there is a new one as of yesterday, for the record. We’ll see how long they really last.

Note to self (and to audience): new office light bulb, east side.
   I have a feeling I last put in one of those long-life, power-saving 20 W light bulbs in this office—you know, the ones that are meant to last ‘up to 9 years’, according to the packaging—about nine months ago. I guess nine months is technically ‘up to 9 years’.
   I was an early adopter and began using them in the house years ago but kept the old-style bulbs in the office going till they died.
   We’ll soon know just how long these buggers last.

[Cross-posted] Honda’s Takeo Fukui has said that he will put the world’s first hydrogen fuel-cell car on the market by next year, with a sticker price of around £50,000. The car emits water vapour as its “exhaust”.
   This is fabulous thinking: rather than hold the technology back, as all the other automakers are doing, Honda is going full steam ahead and pioneering.
   In one move, it’s overcome any slowdown in the Japanese car market and made an impact in an eco-conscious world.
   And £50,000 isn’t a lot to pay for a large sedan that’s brimming with technological advancements.
   Asked how the new Honda FCX might overcome the absence of hydrogen filling stations, Mr Fukui gave a great answer that shows the company has really considered its car in a historical context: ‘When the car was invented, countries weren’t full of petrol stations. When the demand is there it will happen.’
   It makes Red China’s copying of western automotive models seem outmoded and silly, considering that it had nearly a carte blanche with which to play in the 1980s and 1990s. That could have meant jumping ahead of the rest of the world without having the worries of old plant costs to contend with.
   It also shows that brands will only get you so far: major leaps ahead like this, without reference to what the establishment might think, can spell success when it taps in to the Zeitgeist. And Honda has detected that the world in the late-2000s is still going to be obsessed with global warming and climate change. It has detected that there is a rebellion against brands that do not help the planet. And it might have also considered that there will be a rationalization in the brands we deal with, so why not get ahead now?

I walked inside and asked if they did circumcisions, as I had recently converted to the Jewish faith. The guy there looked at me puzzled and said, ‘But this is an electronics’ store. How could you possibly get the idea that we would do circumcisions?’
   ‘But it’s on the front of your shop,’ I replied.
   ‘Show me,’ he demanded.
   So I did. Emblazoned on the front of his shop were the words, in Avant Garde Gothic Bold, uppercase, ‘Dick Smith’.

I am joking about the above, and no, I am not Jewish. But I did go to Dick Smith Electronics today and bought a Logitech QuickCam Go webcam after having been asked to appear on al-Jazeera. From there, the problems began. After all, it is the tail end of Mercury retrograde.

• Got home to find that the sealed box was missing the stand.
• Went to a nearer Dick Smith store to be told that they had sold out, but a customer return of the same product had a stand, and that was given to me.
• Began installing software. The box claims it’s very easy: install software; plug in camera; video instantly. The instruction menu warned me to not plug in the camera till prompted.
• Installation froze about three-quarters of the way through. Had to crash out of the program.
• Restarted installation. Program took four minutes to start from the time the CD-ROM was reinserted.
• Installation was slow and took nearly half an hour. At no point was I prompted to ever plug in the camera into the USB port.
• Installation program alerted me, despite the status bar having reached five-sixths of the way, that I should reboot my computer. I clicked ‘OK’. As I did so, the remainder of the installation continued while other programs were crashing around me.
• The installation completed as everything else was shutting down, in the nick of time. A second prompt about rebooting appeared. Still no prompt to plug in the camera.
• Computer rebooted. Started Logitech’s program. It complains that I have not plugged in the camera. I plug it in.
• It asks for a sound check. Lo and behold, it turns out that this device has no microphone built in. Not that there was any warning about this other than a line in the instruction manual. In other words, a regular Joe would not know that he had to buy an optional accessory to be heard. And I am not appearing on telly with my regular headphones on.
• The camera supposedly stands on top of the monitor. I’d like to see it done. Yes, I do have a flat screen. I just assumed the stand would be designed to accommodate both. It isn’t: you need a CRT for it to work. Otherwise, it’s out with the Scotch tape.

   This comedy took around an hour to see its way through, from the time the stand was supplied by Dick Smith (whose service, I should note, was excellent).
   Let’s see how they are when I take this piece of crap back.
   As with most software and hardware I have bought of late, remember the golden rule: do the opposite of what the manual tells you and all will be fine.

So, do you reckon Dick Smith sells Viagra?

New Blogger’s site feeds do not work, if an email from my friend Johnnie Moore is any indication. He is right: I just put my mouse over the old Atom feed button, which used to be correctly linked at old Blogger, and it gives the wrong URL—regardless of whether I have this set right in my new Blogger settings. I have just hard-coded the URL into the template code, rather than rely on the string that Blogger’s template uses (as it seems that old templates and new templates do not appear to be compatible).
   In the old days, I could choose for only the home page to be updated. I no longer have that choice, and I am going through the process of waiting for the entire blog to be republished in another IE7 tab right now. Only thing is, as I typed this post, the following came up at Blogger: