Dave and Tammy out and about.

It’s been a while since I made an entry. The mugs came back from paint the earth a long time ago. They turned out really great. Here are some pictures of them.

For Valentine’s Day, Tammy and went to this ceramics studio in Chapel Hill.  Basically, you pick out a piece of unfinished pottery and then paint it with colored glazes.  Then, you leave it for them to fire in the kiln.  In about a week, you go back and pick it up.  Tammy made a hippo mug and I made one with our pets.  I’m excited to see how they turned out!

We took a quick trip up to Washington DC for the day for a family visit.  We joined Dave’s parents, his sister, Tammy’s grandmother and her brother for a present exchange and dinner at Buca Di Beppo.  We had a good time, although a long drive since we went up and back in the same day.

We did stop for a quick shopping trip at Ikea on the way up to break up the drive.  Everyone was happy to see us get back home although I don’t think the animals missed us very much.

Last year, I bought Tammy a new computer for Christmas. Well, a few months ago we started having problems with the Lightscribe DVD burner. Since the computer was still under warranty, we gave HP customer support a call. Since then, I’ve spent hours and hours on hold trying to get them to replace the DVD burner.

The first thing that they wanted to do was blame a virus or new software installation for causing the problem. When that was ruled out as the problem, they insisted that I delete the entire hard drive and restore it to “factory” defaults! I just about lost it at that point — especially since their tests showed a hardware failure!

So, after making a system backup and running system restore that “surprisingly” didn’t fix the hardware failure, I called and told them that the system restore didn’t fix the problem. This wasn’t good enough for Hewlett Packard support, though. They insisted that I do it while on the phone with them! Deleting your hard drive once isn’t enough — now you have to delete it over and over again.

After about a month of this BS I was able to convince them that the broken drive was in fact broken. Now that they’ve agreed that the part is broken, it should be simple to get it replaced, right? Wrong. They placed the order to ship the new drive and then cancelled it — TWICE! Now I’m waiting on hold for them to figure out that I didn’t receive the new drive or cancel the order and that they need to send me a new one! All this for a drive that CompUSA has for sale on special for $7.
This brings me to my other beef with their support — outsourcing support to India is bad enough when the staff can’t understand American English, but HP must have decided to skimp on the telecommunications line to India because the static is just terrible. I’m listening to Sitar Muzak and about every fourth note is lost to the static. It reminds me of when we tried making long distance phone calls over dial up internet while downloading e-mail & surfing the web.

I used to like HP — we’ve bought most of our computers and printers from them. I guess they lost our business.

Tammy and I joined the Pony Clubbers at Umstead state park to go on a trail ride. Umstead hosts some great bridle trails and a group of 8 Pony Club and Horsemaster riders took to the trails for a fun ride. While the group rode, I took the opportunity to go for a run along with the group.