I finally recently managed to get in touch with Dell to set up an appointment to fix my laptop.

For those of you that don’t know, my laptop’s screen was malfunctioning about a month ago, and I got it fixed under my warranty. I told them that I had a good idea that the problem was the connectors between the screen and the base of the laptop. I made this diagnosis because the webcam didn’t work well, and the screen flickered frequently.

Instead of sending a replacement for just the screen connector, they also sent a replacement for the LCD screen, inside cover, outside cover, and some weird device that went in the side of my laptop. The technician replaced everything that Dell sent him to replace, so he ended up replacing parts that weren’t broken. The worst part was that my screen covers were in new condition before, but the replacements had small scratches on them.

I didn’t make a big deal about it and just used it, until my laptop broke again. This time, instead of the screen flickering, it just completely died. I literally could not see anything that was happening with my laptop.

This happened about a month ago, and my winter break came right after the screen broke, so I just took an external monitor home and used my laptop with the external monitor. After I got back to my university campus, I talked with Dell Customer Support Chat to try and arrange an appointment with a technician.

The first representative that I spoke with was named Raghu. I explained my problem to him, and he kept giving me responses such as “Adam, I understand your concern and I will personally attend to the issue. I assure you, that I will do my best to provide you quality service.” and “Please accept my sincere apology for the inconvenience caused to you. I assure you that I will utilize all my experience and knowledge to resolve the issue to your satisfaction.” I got sick of those canned responses, so I said, “You can stop sending me canned responses and just set up a technician appointment for me, thanks.” Then he disconnected the chat.

I restarted the support chat system and got a representative named Tinny. I asked her to reconnect me to Raghu, but she claimed that doing so wasn’t possible. (I think she was lying to me, because I’ve used chat support systems before, and most of them have a feature to transfer chats among support representatives.) I had to explain my situation again, and she finally got an appointment for me set up.

A few hours later, I got a confirmation email about my support request, and I saw that she used my home phone number for the support request. This happened previous time as well – I told the support representative three times to forward my cell phone number to the technician, and not my home number, but she forwarded my home number anyway. I had to once again reconnect to the chat support to correct the problem. After the representative claimed to have changed the phone number, I said, “Could you send me another confirmation email showing that the number given to the technician has been changed because the last 2 chat support representatives claimed that they will update it but none of them actually did.”

She said that she couldn’t.

I said “I will be very disappointed if the technician dials my home number again,” and disconnected the chat.

Another interesting piece of information? While I was typing this blog post about how bad Dell’s support was, my laptop made a blood-curdling noise and randomly froze.

-___-

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 4

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0

Earlier today, I got back to my university’s campus in Madison, Wisconsin. I already have an interesting story to share.

I went to the Badger Herald office today to fix some of the problems that came up over the break while I was back at home. I got most of them solved pretty quickly, but one of them was being particularly difficult. While I was gone, the Photo Department started backing up their archives on the server, and it eventually ran out of space. Everything had to be backed up, but the sever was on critical space shortage, so something had to be done about it as soon as possible.

When I tried to connect to the server from my office desktop to attempt to fix the problem, another problem came up – my desktop couldn’t find the network. The internet was working perfectly fine, but none of the internet networking connections would work.

Eventually, the server space shortage problem became a networking problem, and I decided that the best thing to do at that point was to connect to the network from my laptop, transfer some older files onto my external hard drive to free up some space on the server, then copy the files over to to my desktop, which had a few terabytes of space free. The only problem was, my external hard drive was back at my apartment.

I didn’t want to wait for the bus to arrive to take me back to my apartment, then wait for the bus to get back to my apartment to bring me back to the office, so I took the Badger Herald’s car back to my apartment.

This was the first time I drove in Madison, and after this experience, I never want to drive in Madison ever again.

It seemed simple – drive west on one-way University Avenue, then turn left onto Randall Road at the intersection until I see my apartment.

What Google Maps didn’t tell me was that the intersection is the most confusing intersection on the planet. Not only is it an intersection of east-west University and north-south Randall, but it is also the intersection of a random street named Campus Drive that comes in from the northwest and cuts through diagonally. It forms a ridiculous triangle shape in the intersection, and it’s impossible to accomplish anything in that area.

So I passed it.

And kept driving into the University Bay area.

And I thought that the only place that had a bay was San Francisco.

I soon approached the University Hospital, and I finally realized that I was going the wrong way. I frantically looked for a place to turn left and turn around, and I found a random parking lot to turn into, do an awkward u-turn, then get back onto the road going in the opposite direction.

The only problem is, University Avenue is a one-way street, and the street right next to it going eastbound is some other random street that leads off into the abyss.

After somehow making it back to familiar areas, I saw the Chemistry building, which made me ridiculously excited, as I finally knew where I was. (Last semester, I passed the Chemistry building every school day to get to my lectures.) In my excitement, I quickly turned right because I knew that my apartment was to the south of Chemistry.

A few seconds later, I realized that I turned right into a northbound one-way street, and that I was going the wrong way.

I managed to wiggle my way out of the one-way street and kept driving until I finally made it back to my apartment.

After picking up the external hard drive from my apartment, I got back into the car to drive back to the office. I felt more relieved because on the way back, I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near University Avenue, as University Avenue is a westbound road and I had to go east. I got on eastbound Johnson Street and started driving.

Until I saw flashing police vehicle lights behind me.

I pulled over to the side of the road and waited for the police officer. I had no idea what I could have possibly done wrong – I don’t speed in general, but I definitely don’t speed in an area that I’m unfamiliar with, so I knew it wasn’t that. It was possible that the Badger Herald car itself had a problem, and that seemed to be the most logical explanation, so I calmly waited, assuming that there was nothing wrong with anything that I myself was doing.

The police officer approached the car and asked me to pull down the window. The only problem was that I barely knew how to use the Badger Herald’s car in the first place, and couldn’t find out how to lower the window. I opened the door instead, and the police officer said,

“I pulled you over because your headlights and back lights are not on.”

Then I realized that the Badger Herald’s car was about a decade old, and the headlights and back lights were not automatic, unlike like all the other cars that I’ve driven in the past.

He asked me why I didn’t have them on, and I told him about my situation. He told me to turn them on, and I think that at that point it was clear to him that I really didn’t know how to use the Badger Herald car when I went to turn on the headlights and accidentally turned on the windshield wipers. After verifying that it was actually a mistake and that I had no malicious intent, the officer went back to his vehicle, and after a few minutes, came back with a pamphlet with information about the Madison Police Department.

I was let go, and finally, in about three times the amount of time that it should have taken me, I finally got back to the Badger Herald office.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 2 (+2 today)

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0

This is a text-heavy and imageless blog post, so if you only visit my blog to watch my videos or look at my photos, then this blog post probably won’t be of very much interest to you.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog lately for the past month or so, you will have realized that I have been experimenting with my sidebar over to your right. At first, I listed some of the other websites that I used and put some custom advertisements for websites that I supported. However, after I made my own profile page, that became redundant and unnecessary. As a result, I put a link to my profile in the sidebar.

After a while, my profile page aged like the rest of my website, and it became less worthy of being featured on the side bar. Earlier today, I decided to remove the link and add it to the navigation bar at the top, like all my other links.

But then the sidebar was blank again.

Sadly, the only other thing I could think of to add to the sidebar was an advertisement. If you have an advertisement blocker enabled, you probably don’t see the awesome advertisement for Amazon.com. You should add Parkzer.com to your list of domains that are approved to display advertisements, because my advertisements are never obnoxious, intrusive, or malicious.

If you have any other suggestions for what I should put in the sidebar, let me know by either contacting me using the information in my profile page, or using the contact page.

Also, yes, I did ponder putting that in the Site News section where it seems to belong, but it seemed too small and insignificant of a change to create a new article for it. So I put it here.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #10: How do you stay entertained when you are snowed in?

This isn’t a very good question, because I pretty much never get snowed in. Even if I do get snowed in, I would carry on my regular schedule indoors regardless.

I’ve noticed in the past several years that getting snowed in, or having a “snow day” as most edu­cational institutions call it, occurs very ironically. You would expect places in the north, such as where I live, to have more snow days because it snows a lot more. You would expect the more southern states (from a USA perspective) to have less snow days because it snows significantly less. I’ve realized that this isn’t exactly necessarily the case.

Places like Madison, Wisconsin (where I go to university) get heaps of snow each year. Even my state of birth, Illinois, gets plenty of snow all throughout winter. However, an Illinois or Wisconsin resident won’t exactly see that many snow days, as these areas are accustomed to massive amounts of snow, and everyone is prepared to fight it off. At my university, there were snow plowing trucks and salt prepared before the first snowfall. Even if it’s not prepared in advanced, there are already sufficient investments in the necessary equipment that in the case emergency action is needed, doing so will actually solve the problem.

On the other hand, there are more southern states, such as Tennessee, where one of my good friends (who is also the owner of my current hosting company), Justin White, lives. They’re not generally accustomed to having large amounts of snowfall, so when they do get a little snow, their entire neighborhood goes crazy. Justin has been telling me for the past several weeks how much it has snowed, and from my perspective, it doesn’t seem that severe – large amounts of snowfall is not uncommon where I live. However, his town (and even neighboring areas) are on snow emergencies, dismissing their students early from classes and shutting down school districts. Even if we were to have theoretically gotten the same amount of snow (in Wisconsin as Tennessee), Tennessee is making a much larger deal about it because they are not as well-prepared as Wisconsin is.

That being said, I’m sure it’s clear now (and probably too clear, seeing as I spent three paragraphs’ worth of text explaining,) that I don’t really have that many snow days. However, that doesn’t mean we have absolutely no snow days at all – in the case where it’s consistently blizzarding throughout the day with temperatures far below freezing (as in negatives on the Fahrenheit scale or below -18 on the Celsius scale) and icy road conditions, there could still be a snow day where I live.

On those days, I usually stay inside and do what I normally do, as I generally don’t get outside as much anyway. I used to like playing in the snow when I was younger, but as I’m getting older, I’m disliking snow more and more. Another problem is that now that I have no choice but to drive more frequently, not only will cold temperatures and snow affect my health, it will also affect my safety. Because of this, and because I don’t like being uncomfortable in general, I stay inside a majority of my day during the winter, even if I’m not necessarily snowed in.

So Far in 2011…

(Note: these numbers will start going up once I get back to my university campus.)

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 0

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0

I’m actually a little bit too sleepy to blog today because I’ve been up since 7 AM (which is very early for me compared to my standard schedule) and haven’t taken my usual nap, but I want to see how long I can keep up with the WordPress Post a Day Challenge, so I’m posting today anyway.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #8: How do you stay focused on a task or activity? What do you do when you need to concen­trate or get things done?

I usually don’t have problems focusing in general. When I’m doing something that’s important, I know while doing the task that it’s something that needs to be finished. I also look for things that could happen immediately (or shortly) after doing this task that is considered a reward. For example, writing more content for my website will increase its popularity, or doing homework and studying consistently will get me good grades. (The grades motivator worked in high school, but now that I’m in university, most of my grades are composed of exams and papers, so that motivational tool doesn’t work as well anymore.)

If for any reason I can’t focus in a time when I really need to focus (such as when I’m looking forward to a large event that’s quickly approaching, or when I have a lot of things to do in a short amount of time and I’m constantly trying to organize them in my head), I listen to Brain Sync. Brain Sync is a form of brain wave therapy that sends various signals to your brain stimulating various mental states. For example, there are some that induce creativity, while others relax the body. I’m not sure if this is a psychological effect (similar to how sugar pills work), but they seem to be somewhat effective.

So Far in 2011…

(Note: these numbers will start going up once I get back to my university campus.)

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 0

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0

Thank you to the anonymous reader who used my contact form to point out that the link to the previous date at the bottom of my blog posts had the wrong year. That has now been fixed. Apparently you did not want to be credited by name.

Quote of the Day

I sent a text message to my buddy Malory Goldin on December 27, 2010, but she never responded. At 2:03 AM today, I received a reply:

Sorry, I was in Jamaica.

Best excuse ever for responding late to a text.

Picture of the Day

Azteca Restaurant

I took this picture of the Azteca Restaurant in Mundelein, IL a few days ago from my iPod Touch while I was waiting for my food so I could add it to its foursquare page. I had nowhere else to put this, so I uploaded it here before I deleted it from my iPod.

http://foursquare.com/venue/12210956

The Azteca Restaurant is a Mexican restaurant near where our family-owned business is. The prices are pretty high and it takes a long time for them to make your food, but I’m going to hold off on writing a full review on Google Maps until I go there a couple more times.

Merry New Year.

Quote of the Day

I was talking with a few people in the LiquidPHP IRC channel about a web design request I recently received to give to one of my friends, and That Hosting, a hosting company run by a friend of mine, Justin White.

Parkzer: Justin White rejected the web design offer, but said he would give her a discount on hosting with That Hosting

Garrett: Justin White gives you a discount if your name starts with a letter

Picture of the Day

That’s a Nice Bathrobe

Edward Lam playing DoodleJump on my iPod Touch while wearing his bathrobe.

I took this picture while I was at my friend Ed’s house. Random clips of my visit will be compiled into a video and released on my blog tomorrow. If you want to see it before everyone else, check out my YouTube channel.

http://youtube.com/adamparkzer