Sears warranty repair rant

Back on Wednesday, April 21, our four year-old front-loading Sears Kenmore Elite HE4t washer broke. It was in the final spin cycle and somehow got unbalanced which caused the inner tub to spin erratically. It made a loud grinding/squealing noise and then stopped with an F06 diagnostic code.

I called Sears customer support and was told the F06 was some sort of electrical malfunction. The service rep was able to fit us in for the next day and it would cost the basic $129 for the on-site visit/repair.

The next day after just 15 minutes the repairman determined that the entire inner tub assembly of the washer would need to be replaced. Luckily the tub was still covered under the warranty, but it would take a few days for the three big parts to arrive. He estimated he could come back next Thursday to finish the repair.

On Tuesday, the 27th, we received an automated message on our answering machine from Sears asking us to call back about rescheduling our service appointment. No parts had arrived yet. We called and were told one of the parts was back-ordered and would not make it in time for the Thursday appointment. Instead, they wanted to reschedule for Monday, May 3. If all the parts arrived earlier, the service rep told us, we could call back and try to get an earlier service appointment.

Now, according to the receipt for the parts left by the original repairman, the cost of these replacement parts was almost as much as the washer cost us new back in 2006 (over $1,200!). Rather than have to wait another 6 days to have a working washer again (it’s already been 6 days at this point), we asked the service rep if it made more sense for Sears to just give us a whole new washer that could probably be in our home in a day or so. We figured in the end it would save Sears money since there was the cost of the parts plus the time and labor of the repairman. The rep told us that wasn’t their warranty policy and our only option was to wait for the parts. Nice, thanks.

Thursday evening (April 29), all three parts of the tub assembly arrived. They came via UPS Ground from the Sears Parts/Outlet seven miles away from our house! I probably could have driven there and picked up the parts faster, or at least the repair guy could have. Why ship them UPS Ground a mere seven miles? Whatever, fine, the parts are here. We call Sears and are told there are no available appointments for Friday the 30th so we’ll have to stick with our original Monday window. Grrrrr.

Monday, May 3 arrives and we’re joyously anticipating the return of our washer usage later that evening. After lunch, my wife calls me at work: the guys arrived and discovered that more parts are needed! Yep, day 12 without the washer and we have to wait on another $60 in parts (which are probably going to ship from that same center down the street).

Those additional parts are expected to arrive tomorrow and the next service call is scheduled for Thursday (day 15). Of course we just happen to have out-of-town guests arriving on Thursday, and our laundry room is part of the guest bathroom, so that’ll be yet another inconvenience. If the parts don’t arrive tomorrow and we have to re-schedule the service call again … well, I don’t want to think about that right now.

I’m pretty upset with how Sears has handled this so far. They could have (presumably) saved some cash and (definitely) saved some customer frustration and loss of goodwill by just replacing the entire washer.

Leaping with the Lucid Lynx

Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) was released last week so over the weekend I completed three installs.

I did a clean install (from a USB thumb drive) onto my sandbox EeePC 4G Surf that was running an older build of Chrome. Ubuntu now calls this smaller build the UNE (netbook edition) instead of the UNR (netbook remix). It looks basically the same as before, except for the new purplish color scheme.

On my EeePC 900A, I did an in-place upgrade install via the Update Manager:

I had to free up about 200mb on the 900A in order to download the upgrade since the 4gb SSD in that netbook was too full, but once I did that, the rest of the upgrade was smooth and painless.

On my server, I did the normal command-line upgrade I’ve used for the past few releases. Having done this quite a few times now I have excellent notes (if I do say so myself) so it’s relatively easy to put back my customizations and settings where necessary. I did run into two post-upgrade problems, however. First, I was getting blank pages from Gallery and seeing segmentation faults in the Apache error log. I was able to work around this by switching from the ‘mysqli’ driver to the ‘mysqlt’ setting. Next, nut would no longer recognize my USB-connected UPS but I found this bug on Launchpad and was able to download a patch to get it working again.

Let’s go Cavs!

My Cleveland Cavaliers open up the second round of the 2010 NBA Playoffs tonight in Cleveland against the Boston Celtics. The big news, of course, other than LeBron James becoming the 10th player in history to win the MVP award two times in a row, is James’ elbow, which started giving him trouble at the end of Game 5 against the Bulls (leading to a missed left-handed foul shot). Will “The Elbow” be added to Cleveland’s list of Championship Frustrations?

Of course, Cavs fans are nervous. They remember the disappointments of “Red Right 88,” “The Drive,” “The Fumble,” “The Shot,” and finally, Jose Mesa’s meltdown in the 1997 World Series. So, nobody here wants “The Elbow” to nudge its way into such infamy.

I hope not! I’ve already got lunch at the Cheesecake Factory riding on the Cavs’ winning the second round (I made a bet with a Boston fan colleague at work).

Let’s go Cavs!

WIJFR: Anathem

On the far-future Earth-like planet, Arbre, scientists, philosophers and mathematicians—a religious order unto themselves—have been cloistered behind concent (convent) walls. Their role is to nurture all knowledge while safeguarding it from the vagaries of the irrational saecular outside world. Among the monastic scholars is 19-year-old Raz, collected into the concent at age eight and now a decenarian, or tenner (someone allowed contact with the world beyond the stronghold walls only once a decade). But millennia-old rules are cataclysmically shattered when extraterrestrial catastrophe looms, and Raz and his teenage companions—engaging in intense intellectual debate one moment, wrestling like rambunctious adolescents the next—are summoned to save the world.

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s “Anathem.” Considering it took me about 4 months of occasional reading to get through the 761 pages of “Blue Mars,” completing the 981 pages of “Anathem” in just under two months was definitely faster than I expected.

I’ve read all of Stephenson’s previous work, so it was a no-brainer that I would read “Anathem.” I didn’t even really know what it was about other than it took place on another planet, which immediately differentiates it from all of his prior works. You also know you’re in for it when the book starts out with a “note to the reader” containing a detailed historical time line and almost Dune-like glossary. Oh oh! So the first few chapters were pretty rough, trying to wrap my brain around the new vocabulary and immersing myself in the world of Erasmas, the narrative main character. Arbre is a strange place, but luckily there are similarities to our own world. For example, can you guess what kind of person an Ita is from this definition in The Dictionary?

Ita: A caste dwelling in the mathic world but segregated from the avout, responsible for all functions having to do with syntactic devices and the Reticulum.

Sound like anyone you know? There’s a hint in the first two letters. 😉

While perusing Neal Stephenson’s website earlier this evening, I discovered that there’s actually a trailer for the book!

There are also some good interviews here where Stephenson describes how he came up with the idea (he even mentions “Dune” and the glossary!) and how it ties in with his other books at a philosophical level. If you’re thinking about reading “Anathem” take a few minutes and watch the videos, it’s worth it. In fact, all of the introductory information on his site of course does a better job than I could do here describing the book. Be sure to go back when you’re done too, he’s even got some of the avout chants there from the musical score.

I worked out to my benefit that I started “Anathem” during my trip to Arizona for Spring Training because it gave me the chance to really focus and get sucked into the story. If I had started reading it in 20-page chunks as I am wont to do, I probably would have been more confused and not as enthralled. Check out this blog post I found that’s pretty accurate in describing how it can be hard to “get into” this particular book.

To close out this post, here’s a funny quote from the book that I actually marked so I would remember to mention it. I found it to be a comedic, yet strangely accurate, summary of the novel:

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”
“Ok, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”
“That’d be great.”

More Wii homebrew: running games from a USB hard drive

I dabbled in Wii homebrew last year but didn’t do much beyond getting the Homebrew Channel working and messing around with a few apps. Then last week I saw this post on Lifehacker and thought, I have got to try this. The Lifehacker tutorial is pretty straightforward … the Wii hacking community has done some amazing work to make the soft modding process easy and (almost) risk-free. At least I haven’t bricked my own Wii, which is running the latest 4.2 firmware, yet.

I already had the HBC installed and working, but the first problem I encountered was during the DOP-Mii step. For some reason my Wii wasn’t able to download the IOS updates/patches from NUS (Nintendo’s Update Servers), the same issue as described here (even though wireless connection was working). I wasn’t able to figure out how to get the required WADs onto my SD card for a local install, and trying to re-run the DOP-Mii step was now causing scary crash messages, so I gave up. I noticed that after attempting this, when my daughter went to play Wii Sports Resort, the Wii re-downloaded a system update, so luckily that seemed to reverse whatever the failed DOP-Mii patcher had done to the IOS.

A few days later I found another guide at WiiHacks.com and decided to give this another shot. This time I had the required WAD patches downloaded locally on my SD card so the DOP-Mii step worked as expected. But then I ran into a problem trying to install the cIOS. After some more Google searching I figured out I had to use the AnyTitle Deleter to clear out IOS249 before the new custom IOS would load properly (it’s possible that this was something left over from my last experiment with homebrew). After getting past all of that, though, I was able to complete the rest of the Lifehacker guide as documented.

For my initial testing, I used an old 40gb laptop hard drive I had laying around connected to a barebones USB adapter (pictured to the left) but I’ve since switched to a 320gb WD Elements drive split into two 160gb partitions (one WBFS, one exFAT).

Using the amazing USB Loader GX app, I backed up all of my games to the hard drive and then had it download the various box and CD cover art. It looks fantastic:

I tested running a few games from the hard drive and they worked just fine (even the online ones like Mario Kart). Sweet! Check out this little video I made to see it in action.

A helpful note: I kept having problems where the USB Loader would crash. It turned out that while moving the SD card back and forth between my PC and Wii, at some point the lock switch moved down slightly so the card was effectively read-only. Fixing the switch resolved the crashes. Just something to keep an eye out for!

Maybe we should have played P-I-G

My daughter’s basketball practice was canceled this evening so we drove over to the local park to shoot some hoops so she could still get some “practice” in.

After some warm-ups and basic practice, the three of us decided to play H-O-R-S-E. Needless to say with my daughter being relatively new to basketball, she quickly fell behind. When she missed another shot and got her “S” she cried out in frustration: “stupid hors!” (read that aloud if you don’t get it).

My wife and I looked at each other for a second, then couldn’t help ourselves and burst out laughing. Of course my daughter thought we were laughing at her and got even more upset so we had to try to (delicately) explain why what she had said was funny.

We’ll definitely play with a different word next time. 😉

One of the scariest things I’ve had to do

I’ve been skydiving (twice!).

I’ve evacuated from a jet (on the tarmac) and gone down the emergency slides during a passenger-initiated evacuation (back in 2003 when someone thought there was an engine fire).

I’ve been to a GWAR concert.

All of that pales in comparison with what I had to do today: coach a bunch of 9- to 12-year olds in a basketball scrimmage. 😯

My daughter has started taking basketball lessons at a local rec center and on Saturdays there are league games. This was the first day of the league so the coach who runs the program did a rundown for the parents and kids present of how the games work, the schedule, the rules, etc., etc. Then it was time for the game. There were only 13 kids there so they were split them into two teams (red and blue). One dad had already volunteered to be a scrimmage coach for the spring season, but another volunteer was needed for the other team (the guy who runs the program is the referee). Before any of the other dads present could jump in (assuming they would have), the head coach/ref points at me in the bleachers and says “you’ll help me out, right? Come on down.” I tried to protest that I know nothing about coaching basketball but he wouldn’t hear of it (and it didn’t help that I was wearing a Dayton Flyers t-shirt, so he probably knew I had been watching the recent NIT tournament). Talk about being on the spot!

Now, I obviously enjoy watching and attending sports … but that’s where my “expertise” ends. I can’t really talk sports, I don’t follow statistics, I’m not that familiar with rules, I don’t know strategies, and I especially know nothing about coaching!

But before I knew it, I was on the sideline helping the kids get into their red team and blue team jerseys (luckily I didn’t have my daughter on my team). The game consisted of two 20-minute halves, with mandated substitutions every 5 minutes (to make sure everyone got to play). I had a team of 7 so I had to do two substitutions each time. The kids were wide-ranging in skill levels, so I had two strong, older players, two intermediate kids, and then 3 real beginners (“just keep at least one kid on the court who knows how to dribble” the coach told me). I stood on the sideline trying to shout words of encouragement while mentally juggling who I had to take out/put in, what the score was, etc. I knew I was in trouble when during a time-out one of the older kids said to me “Coach, can we switch from man-to-man to zone?” and all I could say back was “uh, sure?” You know how you should never show fear? Yeah, well, I think I failed at that … these kids knew I had no idea what I was doing and I was stressed out.

I think the game ended in a tie, but man, that was a harrowing 40 minutes! The other team’s coach obviously had more experience than me, which probably made me look even more incompetent to the parents in the bleachers on the other side of the court. I could just imagine the grumblings going on over there, but as my wife told me after the game: if they didn’t like it, they could volunteer next time.

Whew.

CyberPower CP1000AVRLCD UPS

My wife called me at work the other day to report she couldn’t get on the wireless network at home and that there was a loud whining coming from the computer closet. It turned out the UPS (an APC BX800 I bought in 2004) had bit the dust and all of the equipment (server, router, cable modem, NASes, etc.) was off. I had replaced the original batteries (with spares from Batteries Plus) in this UPS back in December 2008, but apparently after 16 months they were dead!

Rather than replace the batteries again, I decided to just replace the whole unit. Normally I would buy another APC using their Trade-UPS program, but after some quick research I determined I could get a better, more powerful UPS cheaper and faster via Amazon. I chose the CyberPower CP1000AVRLCD, a 9-outlet, 1000VA/600W UPS with a nice LCD display (which turns off automatically after a few minutes and allows you to cycle through various information such as load, input/output voltages, battery run-time remaining, etc). Not only does the CyberPower have more VAs (1000 vs. 800) and outlets (9 vs. 7) than the APC, it’s actually smaller and has more features:

APC on left, CyberPower on right

APC on left, CyberPower on right

APC on left, CyberPower on right

APC on left, CyberPower on right

I had no problem swapping the units and getting everything back up and running. I connected the UPS via USB cable to my Linux server and NUT recognized it without any problem. Now when I had replaced the batteries in the APC in 2008, NUT thought the UPS was in a constant low battery (LB) condition (maybe due to the third-party batteries?). So when the power would go out NUT would immediately think the UPS was drained and shut everything down. As a result, I had disabled all of the automatic shutdown features and low battery warnings back then. With the CyberPower now in the loop, however, I was able to re-enable all of those features so that’s a nice benefit too.

I did a quick power test (by unplugging the UPS from the wall) to make sure I received the notification e-mails when the UPS switched to battery power and then back to line power. Then to test the shutdown configuration, I pulled the plug again and let the UPS run on battery until the low battery condition was reached.

Everything stayed up for about 23 minutes, at which point the LB event was triggered and NUT gracefully shut down the server and then powered off the UPS. A successful test!

As for the old APC? I dropped it off at Staples for proper recycling (which cost me $10 plus sales tax, what?).

A day at Hollywood Studios

My sister came into town for the Easter weekend and yesterday we spent the day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios over in Orlando.

The park was really crowded, evidenced by how quickly the FastPasses were being distributed: we got there around 10am and went immediately to the Pixar area to get FastPasses for Toy Story Mania and yikes, our return time was 5:30pm! We also ended up with a 7:15pm time slot for the Tower of Terror and 9:15pm for the Rockin’ Roller Coaster.

We had lunch at the Sci-Fi Dine In Theater. My daughter and sister had never eaten there and my wife and I hadn’t been there since the mid-90s. It’s modeled after an old drive-in movie theater where you sit in little cars and watch old black-and-white movies on the screen while the wait staff roller-skates around.  It’s cute (cool ambiance) and the food is decent (I heard the milkshakes are great but I went with a flavored vanilla coke instead). I amused myself by MSTing the old movies and commercials while we ate.

Since we had all day before we could ride those “popular” attractions, we spent the rest of the day wandering around taking in the shows and other rides like the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular, Star Tours, the American Idol Experience, the Great Movie Ride, Beauty and the Beast,the 3pm Block Party Parade, and Drew Carey’s Sounds Dangerous. We even went through the “One Man’s Dream” exhibit that details the history of the Disney family and how Walt went from humble newspaper cartoonist to family media mogul, including dioramas and models and drawings of the various parks and plans.

After finally getting to ride Toy Story Mania around dinnertime, we split up for a bit. My wife and daughter went to see the American Idol final show while my sister and I went to MuppetVision 3D and also rode the Tower of Terror (or, as we renamed it, the Tower of Awesomeness!). We had gotten four FastPasses for ToT but since my wife and daughter ended up not going, we made two girls’ day by offering them the extra tickets so they didn’t have to wait in the standby line.

We met back up with the other half of our party to go to the 8:30pm showing of Fantasmic, which was great, but a little chilly. We were in rows near the front and the cool evening breezes were blowing some of the spray from the water screens on us. By the time we finally got out of the Hollywood Hills Amphitheater (Disney really needs to re-work the exit strategy on that venue) it was time for our last FastPass: Aerosmith’s Rockin’ Roller Coaster.

My daughter hadn’t liked the coaster the last time she rode it but I was proud of her for giving it another try. We even got to ride in the front car! My sister and I sat up front, with my wife and daughter right behind us. It was a blast! I love that coaster …

That was a perfect way to end the day. Considering how crowded the park was, really the longest line we waited in was to get our picture taken with the characters from Up! (Doug, Russell, and Carl). All of the FastPass lines worked out great and we got to see and do everything we wanted to.