The Wacky World of Chris Knight – Page 90 – Life is an adventure. A good life is worth selling the movie rights. These are my story notes.

2005/12/242007/03/25

Home Depot Apologizes to Pencil ‘Thief’

Home Depot Apologizes to Pencil Thief: Home Depot Inc. apologized to a carpenter who was banned by the chain worldwide after he absent-mindedly pocketed a pencil he had used up to do some quick math.

From reading the article it appears that Home Depot is apologizing for overreacting to an actual case of theft. An accidental theft of a $.20 item that many of us remember as being given away for free by our local lumber yards until Home Depot ran them all out of business. Was a Home Depot employee out of line when they handed him a pre-printed form letter banning him from all Home Depot stores? The fact that the employee had at his ready disposal a form letter for this very purpose indicates to me that he was just following an already in place store procedure. I’d even bet that Home Depot had, at least at the time, a zero tolerance policy for theft and that they only reason they apologized was the bad press.

What I would like to see is Home Depot apologizing for treating all customers like thieves. I’m sure you know what I mean: the demeaning walk through the exit where the security guard asks to see your receipt so he/she can mark it with a pink or yellow marker. It it is illegal in most states to require a customer at a non-membership store to show a receipt, but it isn’t illegal to ask. Home Depot has been, in my experience, the most aggressive when it comes to asking to see my receipts. I have personally chosen to never shop at Home Depot again because of these two incidents:

As I was exiting a Home Depot and the guard asked to see my receipt. As is my usual, I said “Have a nice day.” and kept walking. The guard said something to me that was semi-polite, but then turned to the other guard on duty and called me an asshole. This is unacceptable behavior given my having politely refused to submit to their demeaning receipt check.
I was leaving the Davis Street Home Depot in San Leandro California. As I walked by the overall wearing employee, not a guard, at the door he asked to see my receipt. I said “No thank you, but have a nice day.” He started to follow me into the parking lot, and asked to see my receipt again. I repeated “Have a nice day.” At this point he started to yell at me that I had to show him my receipt. People started staring. I turned to him and explained that under California law I was not required to show him my receipt. He said “OK, but I can ask you to never return to this store.” I replied “Fair enough” and I walked away.

The way I figure it though, since Home Depot as a corporation allows this kind of behavior in their stores, the entire chain is guilty of treating their customers like thieves. Why should I limit my Home Depot restriction to one store? I have chosen to take that one employee’s request that I not return to that Home Depot and apply it in a more global context: I won’t shop at any Home Depot again.

There are other alternatives. They may not be as convenient now that Home Depot has run most mom and pop hardware stores out of existence. I’ll happily buy my dignity with a little inconvenience, and I hope Home Depot suffers from their ‘everyone is a thief’ mentality.

Home Depot apologized to one man after he did (accidentally) steal a pencil. The least they can do is apologize to every honest customer who submitted to their demeaning receipt check because they didn’t know they had the option to just keep walking.

I won’t shop in another Home Depot until they apologize to the customers who actually deserve it.

2005/12/24

The Wrong Elves

There are lots of elves that work through the winter holidays. After Santa went bust with his pets.com investment during the dot-com boom/bust many if his elves went to work for Amazon and UPS; after all, that’s where all the toys come from now.

A few though were bitter about their losses. With their pensions invested in a failed sock puppet, and Santa delving into horror since he can’t afford to run a toy factory anymore, some have turned to crime. These bitter elves have taken jobs at UPS; not so they can delivery toys, but rather so they can steal them.

Today I came home to find two boxes waiting for me on the porch. UPS had left them while I was at work, no signature required, so I was not able to inspect them prior to accepting them. The smaller of the two boxes looked odd, like it had not been properly folded closed at shipping. The merchant sticker was intact across the seam though, so I was blissfully ignorant until I got the box open.

Eagerly I did open it, as this was the RMA memory from Other World Computing (aka macsales.com) which would finaly put my G5 saga to a temporary rest. In an earlier post I mentioned that I had 4G of memory to install in my new box. Well, it turned out that one of the modules, if not the whole pair, was defective and caused random machine crashes. OWC was very responsive when I called for an RMA, and they cross-shipped my replacement memory. Except, well, the box was empty. OK, not entirely empty; the rat bastard evil elf who stole my memory left me the RMA paperwork. Fat lot of good that does me.

I called Other World computing, and spoke to Mike in customer service. He said that he would file a lost/stolen item claim with UPS, and that I would hear from them within the half hour. UPS never called. I’m guessing they have a lot of evil elves, and I’m probably down the list of call-backs by a fair number.

I figure the theft had to have happened at OWC or at UPS, and if it happened at OWC mine was a pretty small order to take such a risk. I can’t imagine why a thief on my doorstep would have taken the time to pry open the box and then put it mostly back together. It would have been easier to just pick up the paperback sized box and walk away. That leaves UPS. I wonder if the theft has anything to do with my package not being trackable in the UPS system for several days of its journey?

This holiday the wrong elves were working at UPS. The bastards!

2005/12/142005/12/20

My Experiences with the new Apple G5 Quad Processor

It would be an understatement to say that I was eager to get my hands on Apple’s new Quad Processor (Quad Core, really) G5. I had read rumors about it before it was announced, and I was drooling. Apple held off on announcing it longer than the rumors had anticipated, and I was annoyed every time Steve Jobs made another announcement that didn’t include it. Then it was announced, and it still wasn’t available. I checked the Apple site every day waiting to see it become available. I was happy when the shipping status changed from “2 to 3 weeks” to “5 to 7 days”, but the anticipation was driving me nuts!

My dreams were shockingly realized on November 21st. I had gone to the Apple store with one girlfriend to buy the other girlfriend a video iPod for her birthday. As a joke I said to the sales guy “I have two questions, and the first answer better be no. Do you have any quad processor G5s in stock?” Damn it, he said yes. I walked out with a video iPod and a 2.5GHz quad processor G5. (Getting it home via the train was amusing…)

My troubles began when I got home and plugged it in. I have two 20″ Sony SDM-S204E LCD displays. I plugged them both in using the DVI ports. When I booted only one monitor lit up. No biggie, maybe that was the default behavior, right? I go through the initial setup, then to the System Preferences, then Displays, then Detect Monitors. Still, only the monitor plugged into DVI #1 lights up. I swap the connections, cables and all. The display switches; with DVI #1 lit and DVI #2 dark. OK, it isn’t my display. Next test, put both monitors on DVI->VGA adaptors. Now both light up, but Detect Displays is only able to determine the model of the monitor on DVI #1, and it lists the monitor on DVI #2 as Generic VGA. This is not good.

So, the very next morning I’m on the phone with Apple Support explaining the problem. I talked to a fellow named Hector who was knowledgeable and supportive. He had me walk through a few tests, and said he was going to ship me a new video card. I pretty much left the machine off while waiting, not knowing whether the video card was bad in a way that could cause long term damage to the system. Over a week goes by, and no video card. I call Apple to get a status. I am told that it has not shipped, and there is no ETA. This isn’t good.

My fourteen day window for returning the box for a refund was almost over, and Apple hadn’t shipped me the replacement nVidia 6600 video card. I was also getting ‘buyers remorse’ in regards to having bought a nVidia 6600 instead of the nVidia 7800 GT. So, I took the machine back on Sunday the 3rd of December. I took my refund as a gift card and ordered a custom built QP G5 with nVidia 7800 GT as soon as I got home.

The next day the replacement 6600 video card arrived. Oh, sweet Irony, how you are the true voice of the Universe… I sent it back unopened. When Hector called back to check up on me, which impressed me greatly, I explained about the machine and all was good.

The waiting began all over again. Now I was waiting for my custom built box to ship. It was agony. I kept reloading the Apple Order Status page over and over. It shipped five days after I ordered it, well in advance of the expected delivery date listed on the status page. Now I started reloading the FedEx page over and over. See how I am?

It finally arrived last night. The box was dinged up a bit, and there were a couple of holes in the side. Nothing appeared to have hit the G5 itself. It looked like someone had pushed the box across the floor on its side, explaining why they had to replace the barcode mid-shipment.

When I pulled the G5 out of the box I heard something rattling around inside. A cold chill swept through me. There should be no loose screws floating around inside an Apple G5! Apple has higher quality standards than that, or so I thought.

Broken side-panel alignment pin I opened the side panel to look for the item that was rattling around. As soon as the side panel came off one of the guide pins fell to the floor. It apparently broke off during shipping. This poor G5 must have had a rough ride at the hands of FedEx. That wasn’t what was rattling around though…

It took me a while, and lots of holding the machine over my head and shaking it, to figure out where the loose screws were hiding. Yes, screws: three. Three screws designed to support a rather heavy set of components. They were floating free. That heavy component was not fully supported during a FedEx ride that was rough enough to break off a guide pin on the side panel. I am having bad feelings about this, even though the machine seems to be working fine now that I have restored the screws to their proper place. They should have been supporting a very important set of components during shipping, and I am very nervous about what damage might have happened as a result of their nor being secure. For the next two weeks I will be running dnetc in order to cook the processors and other components. If it suffered damage during shipping I want to know before the return window closes.

Note Added: 12/20/2005: Yesterday I called Apple to request a new side panel. Fifty-nine prime-time cell minutes to get the new side panel ordered. While I was on the phone I told the support guy about my loose screws, including where they were. Since he didnâ€™t freak when I explained where the screws belonged, and that I had put them back myself, I guess it is safe to put my pictures up. 🙂

OK, loose screws handled. I’m ready to turn it on. It boots. Whew! I do the initial setup and registration. I go through a few rounds of patches. All looks good.

Now it is time to upgrade it. I’ve got 4G of memory from Otherworld Computing and a Seagate ST3500641AS 500G SATA hard drive that are going to give this G5 a real boost. The memory goes in easy. The hard drive had one catch… Whoever connected the SATA cables to the motherboard put a twist in the B slot cable. The twist poked up into the drive bay and prevented the insertion of the new drive. No big deal, as I just unhooked the MB connector, removed the twist, and put it back. Still, that shouldn’t have happened. The hard drive was now installed.

It boots again, though I didn’t expect any problems this time. Odd though, OS X didn’t notify me that there was an uninitialized drive detected. I go to About This Mac and I see that it now has 4.5G of memory. It doesn’t list my new drive in the System Profiler. Uh, oh. Disk Utility doesn’t see it either.

Now begins my drive saga…

First I check the Seagate site for firmware updates and tech specs. No updates, no utilities, but there is a drive diagram. There is one user jumper and it controls forcing the drive to 1.5Gb/sec for systems that don’t support speed negotiation. I dig out a mini-jumper, since Seagate didn’t include one with the drive. It has no effect, so I remove the jumper. I put the drive into my PC, and it is detected immediately. I move the drive that shipped with the G5 from bay/cable A to B, and it works fine. So, the drive is good, and the B bay/cable is good, but the G5 can’t see the Seagate.

Google to the rescue… There are several people reporting this problem. Several people post an explanation. Apparently Seagate ships this drive with SCC (Spread Spectrum Clocking) enabled/required. The Apple QP G5 doesn’t support SCC, and therefore can’t negotiate data communication with the drive which renders it undetectable. Two post a solution. Of the two people who post a solution, only Paul Jongsma posts a link to the ‘secret Seagate utility’ that will allow me to turn off SCC on the drive. I say ‘secret utility’ because it is nowhere to be found on the Seagate site and can only be obtained directly from tech support, which is of no use at 11pm. (The utility is sscset.exe and I’m making it available here as well.)

This utility requires that the drive be attached to a PC, which could be a problem for many Mac users. Fortunately mine was already attached to my PC due to my testing. I create a boot disk and copy the utility to it. I boot off the disk and run the utility. The utility detects my drive, displays the model number on the screen, then scrolls that off with blue space and exits after printing a line of gibberish. Frell. I goof around for a bit, and I go to the BIOS to enable Enhanced mode for my SATA interfaces and disable the onboard Promise SATA RAID controller. (I did not connect the Seagate to the Promise controller, but I was thinking that perhaps the simple minded sccset utility might detect the Promise and its attached drives and not know how to handle it.) Now the utility runs correctly, and I am able to disable SSC on the Seagate ST3500641AS.

I put it back in the G5. This time when I boot I am informed that there is an unitialized disk, and I am prompted to run Disk Utility. The drive partitions, and appears to be working correctly. Not without a lot of effort though.

Setting up a new Mac shouldn’t be this hard. Sure, I wasn’t setting up a stock Mac and not a lot of Mac users do their own memory and hard drive upgrades. Still, even if I hadn’t been upgrading the memory and adding a drive, those screws would have still been loose. That was’t cool.

It’s running, and I plan on beating it up pretty hard. This machine is fast: dnetc processes 5.2 times as many keys per second on the QP G5 as it does on my P4/3.2GHz; and that just amazes me. Both monitors are working, and World of Warcraft looks awesome on the 7800 GT with all the graphics controls cranked up to max. I haven’t started installing my real work tools yet, but it was late last night by the time I got it working this much. I am sure I’ll be making some drooling post about its capabilities soon.

-Chris Knight