dailies

In the past month I have experienced more product and software failures, errors, and stuff just plain not working right than any person should ever. Everyday something new is f*cked up.

1. Sony XDCAM EX1: Yes, my brand-spankin’-new camera had to ship out to San Jose to have Sony techs fix multiple problems with the lens and camera. Including the fact that they won’t let users update the camera’s firmware, you must send it in. Blasphemy!

2. MacBook Pro: OS X Leopard (10.5.2) shipped on my shiny new laptop a few weeks ago, which included the latest updates from Apple, one of which caused system freezing due to a graphics driver issue. The machine would freeze randomly while I was feverishly trying to finish the tradeshow booth graphics for Integro. Luckily, I had the original release disc of Leopard (10.5.0) which didn’t include this erroneous update; had to reinstall the entire system.

3. Canon MP530 printer: April 14th, tax day-eve, trying to print my returns to get them in the mail… “Error U150 - Check Ink M.” Hmm, the magenta cartridge is brand-new, full. Apparently, it’s a known problem with Canon ink cartridges; the little electronic chip on the cartridge dies, rendering the cartridge dead, thus rendering the entire printer (and all it’s 5 “multi-functions) dead at the same time until you replace the rogue cart. Sigh. And of course I don’t have an extra magenta cartridge sitting around.

4. Belkin Vision N wireless router: Two days ago, this dumb thing decides it will just shut off completely whenever it feels like it. If you unplug it and plug it back in, it will startup and come on for a while, only to die again when it feels bad; sometimes not even making it through the startup process. An emergency trip to Best Buy for an Apple Airport Extreme gets me back online.

5. Western Digital 500gb drive: DoA when I took it out of the safe to do a backup. I keep dupes of all my info/drives and store them in a water/fire proof safe. This poor drive decided his time had come, even though he was less than 2 years old. Another emergency trip to Best Buy; I just can’t sleep at night knowing I only have one copy of over a decade of photographs and design work.

6. Apple Motion 3: Installed it and the whole Final Cut Studio 2 to start work on motion graphics piece for Integro. Motion just won’t play nice. It quits randomly too. I have no recourse, just lost work and time. Waiting for an Apple update to fix it.

7. DirecTV HD DVR: The whole DirecTV experience has been less than stellar, but this DVR box is just the icing. You only have about a 50/50 chance of your recorded program actually being watchable. Sometimes stuff won’t play at all, sometimes a half-hour show will be recorded as like 23 hours long, or sometimes they switch the channels on you and then programs just flat out won’t record. The best though is I restart the box when it’s misbehaving and it will randomly delete about half of the stuff you have recorded. This is a big deal for us because we never watch live tv; usually just recordings from Nat. Geographic or Discovery, sans commercials.

8. APC UPS battery backups: I’ve went through three of these in as many weeks. I bought a new one for more office; turned out it hummed and whined loud enough to be heard down the hall. Totally not able to work in the same room as it. After about 25 messages back and forth with APC customer support, a new unit arrived on my doorstep. Quiet, finally. Then the battery backup I use in the basement for my big printer started freaking out. It would audibly click-click-click for hours at a time, stopping randomly. Until finally it died one night, issuing a deafening flatline tone at like 3am. I left it unplugged for a few days and decided to plug the printer into the regular outlet, sans UPS protection for now. It will need replaced.

I’m pretty sure I have more, but that’s all I can think of right now. It amazes me who as technology “improves,” reliability decreases. Look at our fancy automobiles, computers, cell phones, and equipment all around; you’re lucky if it works reliably as it should without any quirks, bugs, or problems.