Undoubtedly the effects of hurricane Katrina will be felt for years to come, but here's one I didn't expect. I ordered a textbook for my EE 125 class from half.com, and have been wondering where it is (it should've been here by now). Well, today I got a refund notice. In particular, note the part in italics:

Dear --------,
 
We are writing to inform you that Half.com seller mowfoo has issued you a refund in the amount of $114.88.
 
To see more information about this transaction visit the Purchases page in the My Account section of Half.com. The funds should be credited to your credit card within the next two business days.
 
The seller has left the following note regarding this refund:
We have checked the status of the shipment, it seems that it has gone missing as we have lost tracking of the book after the damaging hurricane. The book had been idle in Jackson, MS for some time now. Since it has been quite a while, I do not expect you would want to wait for another replacement copy. Hereby I will refund you in full. Million apologies for any inconvenience arise.
 
This is a notice only, do not reply.
 
Thanks for shopping at Half.com,
The Half.com by eBay Customer Service Team

I'm very impressed that the seller was paying attention; I expected to wait until say, Tuesday, and then have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get my money refunded.

Well, I received my TV on August 30, 2005. I was using it without any problems until last night (Mon, Sep 5, 2005). A few days ago I subscribed to Comcast digital cable, including their HD PVR (a Motorola DCT6412 III). The PVR is no TiVo, that's for sure, and TiVo has announced an HD product with CableCARD support. But that's not the urgent matter.
My new TV has has failed! I was watching the PVR last night, on a standard definition channel (not that it matters). I paused, did stuff for about 20 minutes, then came back, only to find the image colors wrong. Basically, the brightest areas of the screen turn purple/pink! That is, whites turn pink, yellows turn red, etc. I've included some pics of the screen. The camera seems to wash out the pink a bit, but you should be able to see how it's not white. Furthermore, you should be able to see how darker colors appear relatively correct (although I suspect they're off from what they would be in a functioning model).
You can see from the pictures that it does not matter which input the TV is on (in all the photos, the signal is coming over the HDMI port); the Sony on-screen menus are affected, too. Also noteworthy: if I adjust the "Picture" setting, I can increase or decrease the number of affected pixels in any given frame. Thinking about things, it seems that the green color channel is shutting off for high green values. For example, yellow turns red. Yellow is red and green, so if it's turning red, it means that the green channel is being turned off. Similarly for white, which is red, green and blue together, if the green channel shuts off, you're left with red and blue, which gives magenta (or purple/pink). If the channel doesn't saturate, it doesn't seem to cause the LCD to turn off. I've seen greens in the images, so it partially works.

Click the images for the full-size version (very large)

I called Sony this morning. They were very kind, and in short order set up an appointment for a technician to come out, on Thursday morning. The lovely and competent CSR Lola recommended I call them (Elite Electronics of Alameda, CA) to confirm, and after some difficulty communicating the model number, they said they could be out today! So, I'm waiting for 6:30 pm to roll around, and hopefully they'll be able to repair it on the spot (although I doubt it).

A week ago today I ordered a Sony KDF-E42A10 42", three-lcd, high-def TV from Crutchfield. They said they'd get it here in 5-7 days. Well, this is day 7. At least Eagle Global Logistics is showing that it's in SFO. Hopefully tomorrow they'll call to arrange a time to drop it off here.
I suppose I can't really complain. $500 cheaper than the local Good Guys, no tax, and free shipping. Add to that 18 months of interest-free financing, how could I say no?
Isn't a consumer-oriented society great?

I hate PCs. I'm a Mac user for a reason. But I needed a backup solution for my Mac, and the miserable best I could find was to run Retrospect on a Windoze box. Sure, I could run it on a Mac, but that would mean dedicating a Mac to the boring and mundane task of sitting there all day waiting to back me up. Plus, a Windoze box is much cheaper, and I was able to set up an SATA RAID array to hold my backups.

Okay, so I started putting some other software on my PC. Not much, stuff like the TiVoToGo software that still isn't available for the Mac. Anyway, at one point, after a few weeks of reasonably reliable operation, networking on the PC started to go south. After reboot, it would work fine, but you could watch Retrospect scanning my Mac and see it slow...down...do a crawl. Just a few bytes per second. Nothing like the 100-200 MB transfer rates I was getting before.

After much poking, learning more about PCs than I ever wanted to know, and lucky Googling, I discovered that the on-board nVidia Ethernet hardware has some trouble with power management. So, I disabled that feature in the driver, and now it seems to work fine. Not sure when that feature got activated, or why it was only now giving me trouble, but who cares?

By the way, if you need more evidence as to why PCs suck ass: there are databases on the web explaining the function of various cryptic files you find executing on any Windoze box. In my case, I was trying to determine what piece of software might've been causing problems. There were lots of vague things in the process list, stuff like nSvcIp.exe and nTrayFw.exe. I knew my box had a lot of virus protection crap (wholly unnecessary on a Mac) from nVidia (they make the chipset on the motherboard), so I investigated some of these files. It's amazing how many entries in the DB were for the actual file (maybe one), and how many were for files of similar or same name that were the leavings of various trojan worms (literally dozens). What a piece of shit Windoze is.

Beautiful landing, Cmdr. Collins! Welcome home. Congratulations to all!