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.

For various reasons I needed a list of 3-letter country codes for all the EU countries. (These are "ISO 3166-1 Alpha-3 codes"). It would have been much better if this software had used 2-letter country codes like everyone else.

And because I couldn't find this list on the Internet anywhere I had to make it myself from some huge list of 3-letter country codes for all countries in the world.

In case anyone else ever needs this (including but not limited to me), here it is.

EU Countries, ISO 3166-1 Alpha-3

This article references this article which asserts that:

• When you copy a directory into a place which already has a directory of this name, Windows 95+ asks you if you want to "replace" the directory. If you say yes, it replaces the individual files, i.e. merges the new directory into the old
• On Mac OS X it also asks you if you want to replace the directory, but this actually deletes the old directory first
• That the Windows behaviour is better as it's less destructive, and other reasons

I have a number of comments about this:

• Independent of if the Windows behaviour is better, the word "replace" implies the Mac behaviour. I have been confused by this before (assuming that if I click "yes" to the "replace" question that it will delete the contents of the destination first, i.e. replace them)
• There are times when you want merge (merging photos from a digital camera) and times when you want replace (replacing one source tree with another)
• Nextstep would ask you if you want to replace the destination, or merge (or cancel)

Surely Nextstep's solution is the best. Maybe asking is annoying, but both Windows and Mac evidently ask a question as well, so Nextstep is not worse in that respect.

Just one more example of how technology gets worse with time. Or at least not better anyway, on average.

This guy living in Somalia, a country without government and thus by definition in anarchy, does his job but has to give half of what he produces to gunman, who "protect" him. He isn't really very up for this situation, but what is one to do.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4040889.stm#mahamut:

I get about 20 rods a day but I have to give half of them to the gunman who controls the area I work.
…
This hammer is very heavy and if I had a choice, I would do something else.
But if I could not go to school and had to carry on doing this, at least if there were a government, I would not have to give half the rods to the gunman.

Right. This guy has not tried living in a country with a government recently.

On all of my without-VAT income I pay 47% tax (average) to the government. Then there's the 20% VAT charged on top of the without-VAT income.

And now I have just got a bill because I paid some tax late. I've no idea which tax I paid late or why. I pay the tax bills immediately I get them. I am not a fool. (= I am scared of the government.)

This late penalty is €104.47. Which is quite a lot, I think, for paying tax late (which I don't remember paying late anyway). I mean what's this money for? I wish I earned enough, that the interest on my monthly tax, that the government lost because I paid something a few days late, was over a hundred Euros. But alas, unless interest rates went up dramatically and I didn't notice, that's not the case.

Or maybe it was the money they had to pay to process my lateness. In which case I wish I was a computer. Processing some database row, collect €104.47. That's a well-paid computer.

So it doesn't matter where you are, or what the style of leadership is in the country you happen to do your work. There's stuff to be paid and there's little you can do about it. And if they decide you've done something wrong and have to pay even more stuff, there's nothing you can do about that either.

We all know that advertisements on websites are annoying; for example those banner ads with bright flashing colours. It makes us want to use the website in question less. We all know that the way Google does its advertisements—”non-intrusively—”is much better for all concerned: the website (users are less annoyed), the users (they are less annoyed) and the advertising customers themselves.

Just now my computer was incredibly slow. I looked at the task manager and saw Firefox was at 70%. I had no idea why, but I looked at all the windows and one tab of one window was a consumer website with a big moving banner advertisement. I wasn't using the tab, but I like to have that website open (as I do many others).

Suspecting that was the reason for Firefox using so much CPU I closed the tax with the task manager open and indeed thereafter the CPU usage of Firefox reduced to 0%.

So that means that website is effectively preventing me from having its window open, as having its window open prevents me from working. So now I have gmail, Facebook, BBC News and a few other websites open, but not that one. I wonder if that's what the people running the website really want?

P.S. Safari reduces the speed of Flash animations on windows which do not have the focus, to save CPU consumption.

P.P.S. In addition to just making my computer slower, it would deplete my laptop battery faster.

This is a good term for a commonplace management error.

http://www.answers.com/topic/concorde-fallacy

Sony rang on Friday. They wanted to know the guarantee number (the number that I don't have, which should have been on the invoice; the invoice which originated from them, and I've sent them back twice already).

I took the opportunity to ask how the repair was going (as their website where you can track the repairs doesn't work). They told me the battery was broken and they had to send off for a new one, which hadn't arrived yet. There are two things wrong with that:

1. They are a Sony repair shop. They are Europe's Sony repair shop (as far as I know). Why don't they have any batteries available in stock? Maybe this is the first time ever that a notebook has needed a new battery, but I doubt it.
2. The laptop didn't work without the battery (i.e. with just the power cable connected). So I doubt it's the battery which is broken.

I am writing this on Wednesday (day 17) and still no news.