Apparently when Dell support schedules a dispatch, it is only an estimate. And not only that, but if that estimate turns out to be wrong, it is the customers responsibility to track down that info.

So they know they are going to miss the date, but I wasn’t able to find that out until I called them up and sat on hold, and went through the whole process of giving my service tag number, phone number and email address to the technician. Then I needed to give him the dispatch number for the service (shouldn’t that be in their database next to my service tag number?). And he tells me, they had a stock issue shipping the part to the local technician and they estimate that the part will be in the techs hands on Monday March 3rd.

So a timely email with that information is beyond the capabilities of the mighty Dell

Apparently Benjamin Curtis isn’t the only guy associated with Dell who is is guilty of low cognitive ability.

The laptop I acquired as a going away present from one of my previous employers finally gave up the ghost. It is a Dell Inspiron 5000e. Got it working very nicely with RedHat, and the fact that it can do 1400×1050 is really nice. It was even a suitable machine for playing Unreal Tournament

But anyway the motherboard seems to be shot, It won’t progress from the BIOS POST screen any longer. Luckily it has onsite support until October 2003. So a Dell dispatched technician will be at my house today to replace the motherboard, CPU and Thankfully the cooling fan. The fan in this machine has always rattled rather noisily, causing me great irritation. So hopefully the light dusting of snow today won’t keep Dell from their appointed rounds.

So far I have been generally pleased with MT. It makes it rather easy to add content, I have been able to simply and effectively change the layout. (Well it is currently one of the example layouts, but I get the idea) It has introduced me into the wonders of CSS, and through an entry on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog found myself looking at Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive into Accessibility.

First I must compliment Mark on providing such a detailed yet easily read and understood explanation of many of the accessibility issues faced on the Internet. Second I must compliment Ben and Mena Trott of MovableType for implementing the majority of Mark’s suggestions into verstion 2.6 of MT. The only change I can remember making is the one on Using relative font sizes.

I highly recommend that all who are maintaining an information store on the web at least review the Dive into Accessibility site.

I was working on fixing a computer for Michelle’s Nan, and it was immediately apparent that her machine was pretty crappy. I decided I would just buy her one of those cheap Microtel machines for $200 from walmart. So I got the most inexpensive one I could, as they were all better specs than her HP Pavillion 6343 with a 300MHz and 32 MB ram. And it turned out the most inexpensive came with LindowsOS pre-installed. So I figured it would be a good opportunity to check it out, since I am a huge Linux fan and I had been hearing some hype about Lindows.

Well I immediately decided LindowsOS is BAD. This is because the default account that is logged into their slightly private labelled KDE instance, is the root user! No really, the honestly seem to want the user to do everything as root. This is nearly as bad as cobalt running their administrative apache instance as root.

Lindows.com, Inc. is counting on the fact that their users don’t want to know anything about the operating system, they just want to send email, use a wysiwyg text editor, and use a web browser. And to give them the ability to very easily accidentaly destroy their whole system is counter to the entire security structure which most Linux based distros rely on. It is very windows 95. So if you are looking to get grandma on linux, and think Lindows might be the answer…. think again. You are just setting her up to destroy all of her data and her computer, and a nice weekend for you while you go over there to re-install windows for her.