I tried to reboot a VM under Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1  — only to have the virtual “hardware” fail….  It has been a bad few weeks for hard drives….

So this shipment was supposed to be here on Monday and today is Friday.   We called and they say it was delivered like their web site said — but what was it doing on their truck 3 hours later?!?!?  Hmmm…..

I’ve been using a local Firestone shop — # 029319 — for around 15 years now.  I had Bridgestone G019’s and they were about worn out.  And I have been getting their lifetime alignment service on each car, so I stopped in and didn’t get much help on finding a new tire…

So I stopped in store #029300 — they had been friendly to my grandmother and I appreciate that.  Turns out the G019’s were discontinued and didn’t have a direct replacement so I had them balance the G019’s and align the car The manager said they would install anything I brought in, and since he was helpful and they did a great job of balancing the tires and aligning the car, I  went ahead and ordered tires and then called back.  Of course he was out and the service advisor wasn’t so helpful….

So Back to #029319  on 12/10 to let them mount the tires.  On the way home I could tell the car was horribly wrong.  Air pressures varied from 30 (low) to 50psi –and a center cap was missing — and lugs overtightened…  (Always check, it isn’t fun to have a flat and discover this!)   Since this is the 3rd center cap they lost on this one car, I went right back up there and complained about it all.  The manager acted like I was crazy at first but said buy a new one and he’d pay me back.  Then I got the car out on the freeway — and found a horrible vibration….

The next weekend (12/17)  I took the car back over to #029300 and they rebalanced the tires. Turns out the vibration is still there, just relatively minor…. Then I went back to #029319  get reimbursed for the center cap and explained how bad it was and I had to go to another store to fix it.  He looked up records, refunded the money, and assured me the problem was “taken care of” and I “won’t ever have that problem again” and to ask for him next time I come in and it will be right.  Great, I think…

A few weeks later, I found myself helping taking apart a Kia to replace a stud that #029319   ruined….  This put me in a great mood, too!  And a co-worker had his lugs way overtightened at yet another Firestone…

I then put new struts and shocks on my Legacy, and went back to #029319   on 2/19/2012.  The manager helped me when I stopped in, but they didn’t bother calling me back to let me know the car was ready.  Instead of the number I gave them, they dug out a cell phone number from about 10 years ago  — and when I finally get the car back it is worse than before…. Great…This was the last straw here…

So maybe I found the 2 bad locations; I’m just a lucky consumer after all.  So lets go try shop #009954.  I walk in and tried to explain I had tires put on at the other store I’ve been using 15 years and took it back and it wasn’t right.  I was hoping they could straighten it out so my whole family could bring their cars there instead of looking for another shop.  I guess I was interrupting their morning coffee or something because they were grumpy.  I get the car back and guess what?  Tire pressures way off — which I found out when the car started to slide on a freeway junction….. So I fixed that; at least the lugs weren’t over tightened.  But the alignment still isn’t right — and I found a nice grease spot on my carpet….

That same day we took the Forester to a local Goodyear shop.  It drives smooth and tracks great!

Once upon a time I had a panasonic 5-disc dvd changer — back before there was HDMI and component with progressive scan was the thing.  It even played dvd-audio.  One of the great things was if watching a long movie or a TV series I could switch to a concert disc or CD to have music — but when I went back to the movie or TV disc it would remember where I last was!  And if I left it on pause, it stayed on pause.  Granted leaving a player on pause for 2 days straight may not be the most “green”, at least I could come back and pick up where I left off.

Today I have a 3D blu-ray player that plays netflix and youtube and even has so-called “games”.   It even uses a SD card to download content from bd-live.  So we have all these options for extra low-bitrate content on our high-def players — but they lose a simple resume feature.  And to make it even more insulting, the “green” features these days mean I can’t pause a film to do the dishes and start dinner cooking without it losing my place.  So I come back, spend 5 minutes cycling through chapters or titles looking for which episode I was in, then it is time to go check dinner or the phone rings.  And the cycle starts again…

Is it too much to ask for a simple resume feature? I’ll even give up crappy youtube videos on my HD screen if that helps.  I’ll even throw in weather, stocks, and your crappy ideas of “games”.  Just go back to playing discs and do it right!  Quit dropping features that make its primary function even more useful, and quit adding more low-quality, stupid, and crappy features…

I’ve been using Pidgin for years and I’m really fed up with the memory leaks.  Ok, it really doesn’t leak, RAM just floods away.  Every couple weeks my computer seems to slow to a crawl and after looking around at RAM usage, guess what’s at the top?  No, it isn’t Firefox being the bloated RAM hog like everyone complains about — Pidgin has managed to eat up 800MB of RAM yet again today… I don’t know if I’m the only one who runs into this stuff, but it isn’t like I chat with that many people over the course of a week….  When Firefox is using 400MB of RAM with plugins and a bunch of tabs running and never closing it, I have no problem considering that is what I use to access the internet these days.  (Which will lead to another rant, the internet isn’t web only!)  But Pidgin, seriously, you guys need to do some serious work… I haven’t even coded a memory leak that bad — and my code isn’t released or used widely!