WalkerPad

Feel free to come early if you like (might get put to work) but we planed for folks to arrive about 2:30-3PM and supper should be at about 4PM

Dad, Sandra: Castarole Salad, Coffee

WalkerShaw: Dessert

Walker-Cleary: Mashed Potatoes and Yams

Kay: Dessert, Wine

Walker House: Turkey, stuffing, Appetizers

Looks like I struck out.

I have got to say that I think I agree with the tinfoil hat crowd about MS deliberately engineering the appearance of a shortage. I had retail drones telling me they are not expecting to get more in until January (after only having a handful for resale). If what MS is saying is true, and that this is because a world wide release then that was a mistake and they never should have tried it. I hit a dozen places none of which had any or had gotten cleaned out this morning by fan boys willing to wait out all night. Pretty nuts for a console that is getting so so reviews and has a pretty weak line up if you are not a hardcore race or sports fan franchise fan.
Really though I think they are trying to create the cabbage patch kid phenomenon of yesteryear. They wan the news to sound the shortage alarms and show pictures of everyone waiting in line everywhere. Some times grabbing market share is about grabbing mind share. Personally I think it’s going to back fire, people will just get pissed off and blow it off entirely and wait until the PS3 comes to do a real side by side and then buy the better system. Also angry disenfranchised people taking frustration out on retail folks is going to spawn some might bad karma for anyone who had a hand in architecting this slowly rolling ball

Will the stores get more tomorrow, more Friday? If so the retail folks don’t seem to know. Not impossible that they are clueless but that seems like yet more signs of a potential disaster. People where turned away in droves at one Circuit city this morning… how does this help MS? Does it somehow really increase demand and thus drive that non-existent critical mass?

The Retailers can’t drive up the price but E-bay and Craig’s list are going nuts. I counted about 70 entries for 360’s on Craig’s list ranging from about $500 for a core system to a 3k. Most seemed to be around 1k to 1.5k. Are you people nuts? Anyone who plays that game deserves to get fleeced IMO. How does this help MS, are those people really likely to feel kindly toward MS and give them a lot of business once the buyers remorse kicks in?

Anyway. Bummer but perhaps for the best for now, by january the next gen MCE extenders will be trickling onto the market and that was mainly the functionality I was looking for from the 360 since none the current games really float my boat.

If you like Blogs or bloging make it a point to make a donation to the EFF. Right now they are working hard to protect our freedom of speech and consumer rights which are under virtual siege from large corporations and their political shills. EFF is doing a fund drive right so it’s a good time to help them out.

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My treo650 takes awful pictures but a couple capture some cute Kaily moments.

Kaily in her first Corvet at Toys R us. Note who called shot gun.
Mom maid us buy the Tryke instead of the car, go figure.

Horses are almost as good as cars… Oh yeah we own PoohBear now, I don’t think she has put him down in two days. Pretty funny, Pooh there is almost as big as she is.

After taking a more careful look, the 360 is not as big as I thought it was, but still bigger then I like to see. A bit smaller then the original. the Hard drive pack extends the side out a bit.

Anyway I got about 10 minutes to play Kameo and COD2. Both looked great, Kameo was sort of typical platform fight/smash/grab run along the path type game. You play a fairy that can shape change. As an ogre I could pick up Orcs and beat other things to death with the body . COD2 looked great, I fucking HATE fps games without a mouse and keyboard. I totally suck trying to move and aim with the xbox controller . I like fighting games but doesn’t look like any will be in the first release wave of titles.

The media stuff seemed ok but without a MCE box feeding it of limited use. Lucky I have one of those that I kit bashed a while back. It was going to be a new Myth box but I decided to mess with MCE again instead since rollup2 had just come out.

Just a reminder. Charise and I are hosting T-day this year (her Mom is going to be up helping out since Charise will still be a titch gimpy with her wrist). We bought turkeys though (note the plural, I still don’t follow her logic in that but anyway…), so we are a GO GO GO!.

Charise will be sending out some invites. My head count is currently at 13.5, not because I have talked to anybody, just going by the people who where present when Pam and Connie put the thumb screws to me about it being at our house (I kid, I kid ).

Dad, Sandra, Connie, Jessie, Carmen, Pam, John, Selina, Alexander, Kay, Me, Charise, Christa and .5 for Kaily. Whom I might add ate her own body weight in Chinese food today so maybe I should revise that.

I forgot somebody or if anyone else is planing to come or bring a guest (totally cool of course) please let us know for planing purposes.

Game plan is to gather at about 2:30-3 food will be served at 4-4:30 depending on variables. Folks are of course welcome any time. This will probable be pretty informal buffet style.

OH! If you have an extra card table or something and few folding chairs or what not let us know, otherwise will all just have to to be cozy

Might have an xbox360 on hands for the kids (big and small) that is still a bit up in the air though.

Just got my first look at a best buy demo setup today. Had Charise and Kaily in tow so I didn’t get to play. I think they had Call of Duty 2 on it. I have to say the graphics looked very nice. The full screen AA is nothing to sniff at. I’m feeling the itch to get one if for nothing else to show of my HD TV some more.

Some new cute (even if I do say so myself) pics are up of Kaily. Features some radon cutness around the house and a few pics of her at Coyote Point up near Burlingame.

Charise is awake and doning really well. None of the problems from last time. We are discharging now, just a bit after noon. Took a bit longer to get out then I thought it would. Oddly it’s Charise’s elbow that is hurting her not the wrist… course the pain meds and block havn’t worn off yet. We are home now and she ate some pudding and is crashed out.

Charise is going in for her surgery tomorrow morning (early). With a little luck will be done by lunch but given how long things took last time I’m not holding my breath.
My Mom is going to take kaily over night just in case there are complications.

Oh! I should have some new Kaily pictures up tomrrow or friday.

Well the bulb showed up on Tuesday, put it in, nothing… Shit. Took it out reseated it. Click, everything is hunky dory again and dam I must say the picture looks spectacular when it it’s working right. If anything I would say it’s even brighter then before, but maybe my eyes just got used to a partially functioning bulb or something.

Still no call from the service person.
Still no check.

It’s only been a couple days though, I’ll wait until the end of the week to give them a call back.

Edit: Got a call from teh service person on Friday, they will come out next whensday and replace the Ballace. They think that it might be causing the problem. So that will be Two ballaces and two three bulbs I have now had in this thing.

Well they called again this morning. Apparently the order fell part way out of system and they lost the credit card information to secure it. They ran it again and said the bulb should still ship today and arrive tomorrow. Will see, maybe the 3rd time is the charm. Seems their system could use some work.

Well, I’m still pretty mad but slightly mollified.

I found a special 800 number for the consumer affairs department. Apparently they do answer the phone on the weekends. Took about an hour on hold but I expected that.
I was ready to entertain myself with a slow and painful roasting of the person on the phone. I figured I would get a rock or some minimal have to talk to a supervisor type noises for Monday.
It’s hard (at least for me) to be a big mean jerk when the person on the phone with you is totally professional and starts by immediately apologizing and telling you how they will fix the problem. At the end of the day I am all about solutions.
I spoke with Doreesha, it took her a long time to pull up the original case notes (system problems) but she was totally direct about acknowledging the problems as being unacceptable and out of scope.

I faxed her my recite for the replacement bulb and faxed a copy with the case number over to a special 800 fax number for bulb exchange. Where it’s the old we ship you out, then you ship us the old one while we hold a credit card number hostages routine. Fine, everybody has done with mobile phones now.

What Panasonic promised to do:

Process my refund for the first bulb replacement. They said it should not take more then a couple days and they will send a check.

Overnight me a new bulb, this of course won’t go out until Monday, but I certainly understand that. I was impressed I got anyone today actually.

Have a service person contact me to arrange inspecting the set at my home to see if their is some sort of other mechanical failure or defect that is causing these ridiculously short lived bulbs. If any problems are found then get them fixed. All on their dime.

This is all good, and I didn’t feel like I had to push or prod for anything. Also good and different then the last couple times I had to deal with Panasonic.

We will see if they actually deliver all these things, and in a timely manner, and without more bumps.

I’m still feeling very down on projection technology and Panasonic quality control…I don’t think I would recommend rear projection to anyone now given my experience despite the cost to picture size being very favorable. I’m a bit more upbeat out the Panasonic support model though. Previous experiences where not so good, it was like pulling teeth and then only to get a little response.

One of the things that stuck me was that Doreesha was in sync and aware of the warranty changes, although she said the bulb had one year not 18 months (hmmm interesting). Still that is a lot better then 90 days, which is pretty much a joke IMO.
The warranty changes and a few other small cues I picked up makes me think their is going to be a class action suit over bulb life on projection sets at some point, whether against Panasonic or somebody else I have no clue… I can totally see why though.
My position is simple. If the bulb is rated for 10k hours then it should be covered under warranty for that life time or the equivalent amount of average or even high average usage time in years (which is something like 7 years). As a customer having gone through this rigmarole twice now I don’t think I would ever consider accepting something less then that now.
If it’s as Panasonic claims and they see very few issues outside of the one year mark for most owners then they should have no problem stepping up to the plate and supporting the full life expectancy, any thing else is just hot air.

There was one little glitch, after I got off the phone with them they called back about 10 minutes later to say they had a systems crash and Doreesha needed to get my information again to resubmit the order. Hmmm well OK, hopefully it went through the second time I guess I will find out on Tuesday if I have a bulb.

I give Doreesha high marks though, I was all set to be mean and just couldn’t be, given the feedback I was getting from her. That takes some talent when handling a very upset customer who wants a solution and a pint of blood.

I didn’t even get to start yelling. Ah well I’ll save it for the next customer service fiasco.

That is IT. I am going to war on Panasonic.
I bought my Pany LC13 on 04-30-2004. Within 6 months the ballast went out. Naturally my in-laws where visiting at the time, just make my life even more miserable. This rendered the TV out of commission for a month, and it would have been a ‘lot’ longer if I had not called and made a big fuss with Panasonic. The service department was claiming 3 months to get the replacement part. Magnolia would not step up to the plate and give us a loaner even though this turned out to be relatively well know issue and common failure (yet Panasonic kept shipping?).
OK no more business for Magnolia, apparently they would have done something if I had shelled out an extra five hundred bucks for an extended warranty, what a joke, it was like a $3k TV full retail. This was all a total pain in the ass but I wrote it off as water under the bridge.
05-23-2005. The bulb blows. Just poof, gone. No reason. It had less then 2,400 hours on it. This clearly is a serious failing on the design of all rear projection sets be they DLP, LCOS or whatever. A single major point of failure like this is totally unacceptable in design when it is subject to totally random regular failure. The Bulb is supposed be rated to 10,000 hours, not great but a manageable life. Sure some things might cause that to be a bit lower but anything less then 80% is nuts.
Notice the date, this was almost exactly 13 months after purchase and just outside of the Panasonic warranty window. They warrant the replacement bulbs for 90 days. 90 days on a critical system element that apparently is heavily prone to spontaneous and seemingly regular failure with only a small fraction of it’s rated life spent. A part that is expensive and can be time consuming to get. This is absolutely unconscionable. This also demonstrates that Panasonic knows the bulbs won’t come close to living their rated life.
Magnolia service (*sigh*, the only one’s who had the part or I never would have given them more money), charged me $325.16 for a new bulb, on my just over one year old set.
I was pretty mad but stuff does some times happen. I did some research and apparently this has been sever enough of an issue that some Pany Consumer Affairs anger (Michael Marino Jr.) had made an open statement about what they will do for poor folks like me who apparently are just unlucky (because this is not some huge profit maximizing scheme designed to defraud customers out of money… hmmm 90 day warranty, $325.16 part, hmmm). He stated they will warrant the sets for 18 months and that all new bulbs will have a 18 month warranty. Mine said 90 days on the package and that is what Magnolia stated too. He also said in his open letter that Panasonic would reimburse anyone who had premature failure.
Anyway, so I called and tried to get reimbursed for the bulb. Panasonic was amendable enough on the phone and asked me to fax over my recites and what not. I did so. Nothing, not a word, not a hey we can’t read the fax. Not a we looked this over and just going to say no. Nothing, zip, zero zilch. I have a case number though, so I guess on Monday I will start there. Like I have time to chase people *sigh*
Why make this fuss, because tonight 11-05-2005, less then 6 months after I threw good money after bad, because I was just ‘unlucky’, with their bulb, the dam POS blew out, again.
Now I’m going to have to endure god only knows how many days of Kaily crying because she can’t watch Sesame street.

Anger does not begin to describe my state of mind.

Do not buy Panasonic rear projection TV’s. They are rigged to fail regularly and cost you hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
Don’t give companies money that act like this, vote with your dollar or they will not learn. That is what I will be doing from now on. Panasonic is dead to me regardless of how they handle this situation, which given past experience I suspect will be poorly. Another $325.16 out of my pocket? This set is not even two years old and I’m going to be into it for over $650 in repairs? I’m coming for you Panasonic and I’m bringing hell and possible (is that implicitly?) lawyers with me.
These bulbs should be warrantied for their full rated life, nothing less should be considered remotely acceptable on such an expensive TV set. The fact that they claimed to have changed their warranty shows this type of failure is clearly either a design flaw or revenue stream mechanism. This should be addressed through offering customers a full refunds or replacement/upgrades to new sets.

I’ll update on Monday I guess when I have had a chance to grind the bones of the customer service person, naturally they are not open for business on weekends.

I just discovered BlogsBridge. Techcrunch had a short write up. This is perhaps one of the best free RSS clients I have played with.

What’s cool?
It’s Java so nice cross platform compatibility.
If you setup a free account your clients will stay synced. Best feature IMO.
There is a bunch of social web 2.0 type stuff but that doesn’t really grab my attention much.

So it’s like using a web client but instead it’s a fast smooth local client. This means you can read your stuff offline too. Not to shabby.

They have some weird things to sort out with fonts though. It is anything but intuitive on how to set override or default fonts and font sizes. Also not sure why anti alias on fonts shows up some times but not others in the prefs on different but similar systems… Fonts also do not look as good as they should (contrasted to IE or Fire Fox). No tabs either. All that aside it’s pretty neat.
Not sure how it’s put together, off hand I would say they need to use the mozila engine or get a newer version of it. That would probable help a ton.

I have been using a combo of RSSBandit that has some weird resource hogging going on, but is a slick client aside from that. As well as newsgator, which is cool but I can’t get syncing for offline viewing without giving them monthly money, not going to happen. I would shell out for a client but never monthly fee’s, I’m so done with the never ending service push.
The number of feeds I reed makes this setup a pain, so maybe blogbridge will help with that. No MCE plug-in client though (something newsgator has), and since they are java I doubt there will be.

Anyone know another solution for universal synced feeds plus ability to read things offline?

Bah, we are all pretty sick. Kaily got Croup some sort of nasty cold/flue/throat/hacking cough thing. Kaily has had a good fever going since Saturday. We hit urgent care saturday (pointless, but safe), and then saw her Dr. today but not much to-do about it. Now Charise and I have low grade fevers… oh and one the cat keeps making nasty sneezing noises. *sigh* It’s just going to be a long week and this is just he ramp up to Charise’s wrist surgery.

Steve from Akimbo was nice enough to stop by again and made a few comments.

In retrospect I have such a weird mix of personal/family news and general tech comments that maybe I should split the blog or something….

Anyway, Steve Mentions that they don’t think the MCE Akimbo interface is ugly. Well ok, ugly is of course relative.
So more specifically my issues are, it’s blurry. The fonts are blurry the edges on pictures and boxes are soft and not well defined. The colors are more washed out (more then MCE). Everything has a weird low contrast, making for zero pop. The fonts being soft is particularly is bad. This makes it pretty hard to read from the couch when contrasted to the standard MCE interface. So, maybe ugly is the wrong term, how about less usable then it should be ?

This is on a 50″ Pany rear projection LCD LC13. This set runs at a native 720P and that is what I have windows outputting. MCE looks very good. HD Tivo shows look incredible. Games look good both at 720p and 800×600.

I was explaining to Charise how the Akimbo system works. Charise and her friends (other moms) have talked at length how they would be willing to pay to get a good quality commercial free kids network (not smoltsy GI Joe, transfer toy selling shows, but Sesame street and what not). I suspect this could be a big thing if done right, you should her the moms go off about this type of thing.

I’m going to have Charise poke at the system. When I described the monthly fee she was emendable. Then added how “a LOT” of the other shows have additional fee’s her reaction was a swift “That is not right”. I love using her as a sanity check, some times I can go a bit around the bend, then wonder if it it’s just me thinking funny things.
So there you go, from a non techi mom a first reaction to the price schema.
Then she asked something I hadn’t really though about. “Could I pay 12 or so dollars and have no fee’s?”. No, but maybe that is something akimbo should think about, I imagine it would be more like $15 though. I bet they could grow a lot more market share if folks didn’t feel nickel and dimed.

Being nickel and dimed irritates people. Paying for access to pay… is not a customer friendly model. The Akimbo folks like to point at the volume of other free stuff they offer but it’s hard to find and well… mostly seems to be crap (certainly with some acceptations). Volume is irrelevant, relevant free content is what matters. Really though if you are paying an access fee to get it, then it’s NOT free in the first place so I sort of object to the way that term is being used, but oh well.

On the HD side, it’s great they are going to be offering something. My question is will it be inside the window of their preview? I doubt I will pay to get a look at what I imagine will be a bunch more pay to play content.
Being wrong about that last part would be a good thing.

HD things I would like to see?
Kids shows, even if just unconverted
Anima
Adult swim (if it ever managed to show up on MCE)
Mmm everything else? I hate standard def :p. Really what I’m looking for here though is an excuse to watch the Akimbo content rather then my sat feed. Give me stuff that is relevant in HD. Stuff that my cable/sat company is still sending in SD and you have a big win.

The subscription feature as available needs some work, I’ll just leave it that. It also seems to mainly be available for pay content (I don’t think I noticed it on any free channels but I didn’t kill myself looking). Tivo like power words maybe? Don’t know but it doesn’t impress.

I use rollup2 so I don’t think my experience has been impacted by not being up to date, something Steve also mentioned was generally needed… Can you even get Akimbo without it?

I realize a lot of this read negative. So, some good things
It is nice and efficient to go hit the web site to setup shows. In fact it’s way better to do this then trying to use the akimbo MCE interface IMO.
Down loads seem pretty snappy, bandwidth is not overly choked (then why the time outs on page access through MCE? Need cluster?)

Fix it:
How about this give pay content a different color box or font so it can be seen at the top level instead of forcing people to drill down and then be annoyed about something that sounded interesting but no way would you shell out for it? A small graphically icon at the top level for mixed channels in the same color font as pay stuff would add identification for mixed bags? It all seems like a no braining. Honestly I can’t help but feel the obscuring of payed vs. not um… already subscription payed (Free) content is being made deliberately blurry, that bugs me.