Weekend in Hocking Hills

Stephanie and I spent the weekend in Hocking Hills with friends. Here are my pics and videos:

2008_02_22 Hocking Hills

And here are Jeff's pictures from the weekend.

Weekend in Cincy / Oxford

Stephanie took me down to Cincinnati & Oxford this weekend for my birthday. It was fun to roam around Miami and revisit my college days.

Click for full album

Vista after 2 months - Prognosis: poor

It's been two months since I got my new work laptop that came with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. During these past two months, I've endured a countless number of system hangs, windows crashes, program crashes, poor performance, and lots of headaches.

I thought it was nice, however, that Microsoft includes a tool with Vista to show you just how crappy of an experience it is. It's called the "Reliability Monitor" and it is a running graph that plots your system stability on a scale of 1-10. My system started off from the factory at an 8.92 (even Lenovo can't get this machine to a 10) and has tanked ever since.

As of yesterday, my system was rating itself as a 1.62 out of 10. It will probably be even worse tomorrow since I've already had Firefox crash on me about 6 times as well as Windows Explorer freeze and require a hard reset.



(note: you'll have to excuse the pasted-together image, but Windows only lets you see about 3 weeks at a time on the graph. I stitched the past two months together into one image)

Mail non-innovation

I recently took advantage of an offer from HP where they will send you a "skin" (big sticker) for your laptop for free. Why not, right? I'm not planning on putting any stickers on my laptop, but you never know when a 10" wide sticker of the Miami Redhawk might come in handy.

I ordered the sticker back in mid-January and recieved an order shipment notification email on 1/16/08.

After 3 weeks, I finally called the company SkinIt to inquire about the status of my free sticker. The British (?!?) gentlement who answered the phone verified that my order shipped back on 1/16 via UPS and that I should expect my package by 2/7/08.

Now, I know that sometimes UPS ground shipping is slow...but over 3 weeks? That's just crazy talk! I asked for a tracking number, since one was not provided in the shipment notification email, and was told the following: "Your tracking number is your order number followed by 'skinit'". Huh? What happened to the familiar 1Z* format of a UPS tracking number. Then I was given a non-UPS website that I need to use to track my package (www.ups-mi.net/packageid/).

If I hadn't made this purchase through HP, a pretty reputable company, I would have assumed at this point, that this is some kind of weird phishing website since it's obviously not UPS.

Skeptically, I visit that website (which is branded like the UPS site) and enter my tracking number. The results that were brought up are displayed in this post.

As you can see, my package was shipped via "UPS Mail Innovations", not really by UPS. I had never heard of this service before, but after reviewing the tracking information, I'm convinced that it is completely worthless.

UPS (the real UPS) transferred my package from California to Columbus, OH in less than two days. Columbus was the "UPS Mail Innovations Destination." Apparently this is a new fancy term for the dead-letter office, because that appears to be the end of the line for my package. After making it across the entire country in two days, my package is trying to journey up I-71 from Columbus to Cleveland. A trip that usually takes about 2 hours by car has now taken more than 17 days. Did they send it via pigeon?

I'm failing to see how this process is any sort of innovation. If UPS had just kept my package, it would have been delivered in 3 days. However, the innovations part has caused my package to get lost somewhere down in buckeye country.

I suppose I don't really care if this package ever shows up or not - since I have no idea what I'm going to do with my free sticker, but at least now I know to avoid the Mail Innovations.