I realized I never finished the story about Sony laptop Support.

The laptop was returned after about 5 weeks, and it did work. In the mean-time some plastic is coming a bit detached around the screen (that was one of the things they replaced), but if you handle it gently, it's OK.

It was returned to the wrong place. Well I asked them to call me before they returned it, as they picked it up from one of the offices I work in, but I work in lots of different offices so I wasn't sure I was going to be in that particular office whenever they delivered it back. But of course they didn't, I just got an email from the boss of the company in the office they picked it up from, telling me it'd arrived back in that one.

Then about 2 weeks later, they called me to ask me how satisfied I was with the service, on a scale of 1 to 5. That was wonderful. I just told him everything that'd gone wrong. Then he repeated: "no sir, I need to know your satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5". He wasn't actually interested in what'd gone wrong; he was only interested in this single metric! I also told him that I was happy to be contacted by Sony if they were interested in improving their processes. So far they haven't contacted me, so I suppose they aren't interested.

Cool

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/iphone_blackberry_excel.html

On my stereo at home it plays fine (although it doesn't work on my Windows computer) but put it into my girlfriend's DVD player and it reports itself to have 17 tracks even though the cover says it only has 15. I hadn't looked closely at the reported track count on the DVD player and just played the disk. After the peaceful ending of the last track on the CD i.e. the 15th, the speakers just erupted in loud white noise. I suppose that was the Windows "autorun" software being played…

… is not as easy as one might imagine.

I'm using Windows, and it seems that in one new aspect, I discover that Windows just doesn't work. (Or maybe it's the CD that doesn't work?)

Ideally I would have put the CD in the computer's drive and it would have just played it. This was Bill Gates' vision once. I think prior to Windows 95's launch, he said "I imagine a day when you can just put a Beethoven CD in the drive and Windows will play the song". (Although I couldn't find that quite on the Internet so maybe he didn't say that.)

So I put the CD into the drive and then some pop-up appeared inviting me to do all sorts of things. This was software on the CD, I think. It had a big friendly button "Play the CD" so I clicked on that but alas an error appeared asserting I needed to upgrade to a newer Windows Media Player. I should do that and the run "autorun" again, it instructed me.

I tried opening my old version of Windows Media Player and playing the CD. Then an amazing thing happened. It required me to enter a "license". It opened a small pop-up window for me to do so. At the bottom were two buttons, "Play" and "Cancel", but "Play" was in grey. In the middle of the small window was a web browser window, displaying some corporate homepage, No idea what I was supposed to do. Nor even if it had worked, what I would have done if I wanted to play the CD while not connected to the Internet.

So I tried downloading iTunes. I didn't want to do that as my notebook has physical buttons for "play", "pause" etc, and they only work with Windows Media Player. But iTunes simply didn't acknowledge the presence of a CD or CD drive at all. Possible it thought it was a data CD as opposed to an audio CD as Windows had probably mounted it as such.

So I figured, well, I'll have to install the latest Windows Media Player then, as per the original error message. So I went to Microsoft's site and downloaded it. But it wouldn't install, on the grounds that I hadn't certified my Windows to be Genuine. But I don't really want to do that, as if Microsoft software doesn't recognize the CD as genuine (and it didn't recognize a DVD as genuine once, so I had to use some software other than WMP to play it), I don't fully trust them to consider my computer genuine.

But it is genuine. All of it. I have a genuine computer with genuine Windows and a genuine purchased music CD in its original case with original cover art etc. And I indeed cannot just "play the song". I mean it all just doesn't work.

So I guess I'll have to listen to it on my stereo then.