Buying a TV and the manufacturers warranty.

  When buying a TV there is a trap that most people don't know about and that is the manufacturers warranty. Most TV's come with a 1 year parts and 90 days labor warranty. But when you need to use it after 90 days you will find that the labor to fix most repairs cost nearly as much as the TV did or sometimes even more.

As an example, I had a $200 small TV and after about 6 months of use it stopped working. I called around to see where I could get it fixed under warranty and there were several places locally. I told them what it was doing and they all agreed it was likely the power board. They said the part was free but the labor would be between $225.00 to $275.00 dollars.

They told me to just buy a new one as it would be cheaper and I get a new warranty.
This may not seem acceptable but it's a fact. That coupled with the fact that the TV's today no longer last 10-15 years or more like the older ones. Yes they are built cheaper and life expectanty is now around 5 years or less.

So, what should you do when you need or want a new TV? Well the best option is an aftermarket warranty but that is touchy subject as well since many of them are total ripoofs and fail you when you need it most. How? Well like having a high deductable or declairing that abuse or misuse was involed.

What then is the best course of action? Buy a warranty from a known reliable source. As an example, Best Buy has their Geek Squad warranty that they sell and handle in store. Issue here is that it's only good on products purchased at their stores. Not a really bad thing as they tend to be a good source for TV's but if you do want to buy elswhere then look into SquareTrade as they are known to be a good source of warrantues that can be claimed nation wide. Either way you can expect to pay an additional 15-20% on top of the purchase price for a 3-5 year warranty so just think about that when you consider buying.

Customer service in Corporate America. Or the lack of it.

Customer service, this use to mean something in the U.S. and still does to a few small companies but it's lost to most others.

I run a small home based business and I purchase a lot of different items. In the past month I have had product shortages, wrong products, products packed incorrectly causing damage and more from no less than 6 vendors. I pay up front for my products and it would be nice to actually receive what I order in good condition. But alas it seems I cannot anymore.

Restaurant service, well this one has been an issue since the economy here took a down turn. You would think that owners would take better care of customers to keep the few they have happy. You would think with jobs hard to find that servers in these places would go the extra mile to assure they keep that hard to find job. Alas you would be wrong. Service has gotten so bad that I started using tips as they were meant to be used, tips are for service above and beyond normal. (originally tips were given before service to assure you got prompt attention).

Anymore I walk in with a tip amount in mind, the staff can raise or lower that amount by their actions. If I don't get a drink refill the tip lowers, if you take a long time to take my order the tip lowers, if you are pleasant, expedient in your service and don't make mistakes the tip goes up. Lately my tips have been lower and lower.

A few days ago I was hungry for some eggs so I headed to our local Denny's. Normally I get pretty good service at this Denny's. This trip was different. My eggs were over cooked, my hash browns were burnt and I never got a drink refill despite the fact it was empty when my meal was served (my meal was dropped off as the server went by at Indy car speed with no time to ask for a refill. At the check out they asked how everything was and I voiced my complaints, the cashier just looked down and gave me my change, not one word from his mouth after that. Oh, and I left no tip.

Now, you might think there might be extenuating circumstances that were responsible, however, the place was not busy (maybe 4 other tables) I saw 6 employees walking around (not including cooks). Only 1 seemed actually busy as he was wrapping utensils in napkins, the rest were chatting with each other and the occasional customer they seemed to know personally.

In my small business I pride myself on customer service above all else, if I do make a mistake (and it happens) I make up for it right away. Over the years running my business I have received hundreds of emails thanking me for  my great customer service and for going above and beyond when there were issues. I guess I just treat customers like I would like to be treated when I am the customer. No matter how hard I try though I just can't seem to get a response from corporate America.

As a side note, I have noticed that most mom & pop businesses still over service that goes above and beyond. I try to always frequent these establishments whenever possible. I hope you do the same.

CFL Lamps to avoid

CFL or Compact Fluorescent Lamps are becoming more and more popular these days. Partly because they are suppose to last a lot longer but also because they use a lot less electricity for a given amount of light they put out.

I believe in them and when I built my new home office about 5 years ago I installed 6 of them in the ceiling. I do a lot of graphics work so I needed good lighting and the color temperature matters. You can't get a real good color temperature with standard incandescent bulbs but you can with CFL's.

Anyway I have been happily using them in my office for 5 years now. I have had to replace 2 bulbs in that time. When I had to replace a third one I ordered 2 so I would have one spare. Well the brand I got was called Overdrive.

So I installed one Overdrive lamp in the place of the 5 year old one that burned out. It burned out in about 4 hours. Things happen and I figured I just got a bad one so I installed the second one, well it lasted all of a week before burning out.

Wanting to make sure it was the lamps fault and not the fixture, I purchased another brand and it has now been working for more than a month with no problems.

I have to say that this tells me there is an inherent flaw in the Overdrive brand lamps. I for one will not be purchasing this brand in the future and I suggest if you do, save the receipt so you can return them (I did not).

If you have had good or bad luck with this brand let me know. If it's a major issue we need to spread the word, and if my case is a fluke then I would like to know that as well.

A tale of 2 water filter pitchers

If you read my previous posts you probably know I had a bad experience with the ZeroWater filter pitcher. Well this is an update to that as well a revue of a Clear2O water filter pitcher.

It turns out I had a bad filter with my first ZeroWater pitcher, the company replaced it and the water was better and lasted longer (about 3 weeks with heavy use).

That being said I thought I would do a few comparisons between the ZeroWater and the Clear2O pitcher. First off the ZeroWater has a much more sophisticated filter with 5 stages and the Clear2O is a single stage with solid charcoal filtering. Don't confuse this with other charcoal filter pitchers as none are solid, they use powdered charcoal and that does not do nearly as good of a job. To get water through a solid charcoal filter you must have water pressure not just gravity feed.

So which of these is better? Well that is up for debate but the bottom line is, if you are filtering your municipal water it is already considered 'safe' to drink. So why filter? Simply for taste and smell, as well as the unlikely but possible contaminates in the water.

They use chlorine to kill off bacteria and other nasty critters in our municipal water system, and it works pretty well but sometimes things get into the water after most of the chlorine has done it's job. A filter that stops these bacteria and other health hazards is just a good idea.

The main problem with water treated with chlorine is it tastes bad. Well both of these filter pitchers will make the water taste good as they get rid of the chlorine equally well. Both will get rid of most strains of germs and bacteria, at least the most common ones found in water supplies.

The ZeroWater can get rid of some nasty chemicals that the Clear2O cannot but municipal water supplies are tested for these chemicals several times a day so in reality this should not be an issue unless you get your water from a well or other un- monitored ground source.

So for healthy water I feel that both pitchers will do the job and both fix the taste and smell equally. However there are some differences in their use that make one stand out.

First the ZeroWater unit is a gravity fed unit, meaning you put water into a top reservoir and gravity pulls it down through the filter. Problem here is that this is a slow process and since the top reservoir has less than half the capacity of the bottom one (the drinkable water one) this means to get a full pitcher you need to fill it, wait, fill it again then wait then top it off a little. I found this to be the biggest drawback of this pitcher.

The Clear2O has a unique filling system unlike any other filter pitcher I have seen to date. It has a hose on it that attaches to your faucet with a quick connect fitting that then uses your water pressure to force the water through the solid charcoal filter. This is more in line with the way larger installed filter systems work, basically you can have a full pitcher of ready to drink water in under a minute.

The ZeroWater comes with a testing unit to see if the filter is still good. The Clear2O has an indicator window on the pitcher itself to tell you when it needs a new filter. Green means you have up to 40 gallons left, yellow 10 gallons and red when it's time to change the filter.

While the ZeroWater tester should be more accurate I found it showed time to change way too early, and the taste of the water is what I used to tell me when it needed to be changed.

Both units have easy to change filters but the 5 stage ZeroWater filters do cost more due to their complex 5 stage process. Both should in theory give you about the same amount of good drinking water (if you ignore the meter and go by taste).

One feature the ZeroWater unit has over the Clear2O is it has a spigot on the bottom so you can fill a glass without lifting the unit out of the fridge. But the overall size and weight of the Clear2O pitcher is smaller so it's easier (and quicker) to take it out and pour a glass.

End result, if you are on municipal water and drink a lot of water I recommend the Clear2O unit. If however you have certain health risks (auto immune) or are on ground water you might be better off with the ZeroWater unit just as a safeguard against other contaminates that the Clear2O won't take care of.

Snow Leopard Continued

Well I have had Snow Leopard up and running for about 2 weeks now so I thought I would give a quick update.

Spell checker is working for most items now thanks to a script provided by the author. Basically it only works on programs running in 32 bit mode so you must do this first. Second it must be activated anytime you go to a 64 bit environment and back to a 32 bit one. The script they wrote takes care of this.

The only negatives I see now is Safari, while it does seem a little peppier the JavaScript and Flash is quirky. I submit photos to several stock sites and some of them I can no longer use the flash or Java methods for various reasons.

I have decided to keep the new cat installed and have plugged my time machine drive back in so it will start backup the new system. I still have 2 backups if disaster strikes and will keep at least one as a 10.5.8 for a month or more.

I will update this info if I find any more good or bad news on Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard Install

As many people know I am a Mac user. Well last night I bought the new Snow Leopard operating system. This operating system takes a leap as it is the first Intel only Mac operating system. This upgrade along with all future system upgrades no longer support the Power PC chipset.

This upgrade will allow true 64 bit operation for those with 64 bit machines (most Intel Macs). Basically for $29 you get a leaner faster machine. The install was flawless on my Intel iMac and so far only a few bumps in the road.

I did have to buy an upgrade for Phone Valet to make it compatible. Now to be fair the upgrade has been out for some time now and I just lagged behind. I must have Phone Valet as it is my business voice mail and call logging system. If I could not get Phone Valet to work it would have been a deal breaker and I would have gone back to Leopard.

Now I did plan for the worst. First off I have a full backup by Time Machine, then I also had not 1 but 2 total clones of my system drive so I have 3 methods of going back to Leopard if needed (Yes I am careful).

The only other glitch I see right now is Spell Catcher my system wide spell checker. It works but you must activate it every time you switch programs (PITA). They are working on a total rewrite of it that will work with the new input system and I guess I can wait for that.

I am a big Battlefield 1942 game fan. This is an older game but in my opinion still one of the best ever made for Mac, especially with the Desert Combat ad on made by other fans. Well it was pretty crippled on my Intel machine since it was designed to run on the older Power PC chipset. To get a descent frame rate I had to run the video quality way down to keep it from lagging. It was just usable but I have played it like that hundreds of times.

Well I kind of expected it to not run on Snow Leopard at all. I was very surprised that it loaded up and ran just fine, in fact I noticed the frame rate was up a bit so I started taxing it by increasing the video size and quality. Basically I was able to just about double the quality and still get a descent frame rate so it's like having a new game.

I will post more info good or bad as I stumble across things with the new operating system.

Lightwave 3D and Stock Photography

I create a lot of high resolution images that are sold on stock photography sites. What I make are not photos but these sites sell images for the advertising industry and my images fit that need.

I have been using Lightwave and Photoshop since the early days of Lightwave. I think my first version was 1.4 or something like that.

While I love creating the images, I hate some of the rest of the procedures. You see I have to add key words so people can find the images, each image must be given a unique name and each must be categorized.

Then I must upload the images to the sites where I sell them (about 6 sites right now) and each site works differently and each has there own set of categories and requirements for keywords and names. So almost every image needs a bit of work on each of the different sites.

Now this is not a real big deal if you are uploading each image as I make them but as I am finding it's a very big deal when I need to upload all my images to a new stock site.

I just started with Dreamstime.com a few days ago and while their setup is pretty strait forward I still must edit every image to match their setup and I have close to 1,000 images.

Over the past few days I uploaded 200+ images and I can say that I hate this part of the job. I worked on it for many hours but it feels like I have been doing it for months. And I am not even 1/4 of the way through my portfolio.

I'll post more on this later.