Check out the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain video
Absolutely marvelous.
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GE Profile Range – GE Customer Service Sucks
Our $1700 GE Profile range failed on Christmas day. Our oven stopped heating even though it showed that it was still at temperature. The duck for Christmas dinner was ruined.
We have had GE Service come out 8 (EIGHT) times and we still don’t have a working oven. They have made us bring and electrician in twice (to the tune of $364.89) to prove that there was nothing wrong with the house wiring.
They threatened to charge us for our next service call even though WE HAVE ONLY OWNED THIS RANGE FOR 9 MONTHS.
That’s right folks – for 1/3 of the time we have owned this range, the oven has not worked right.
We have spent approximately 24 hours at home waiting for repair technicians – that is three days of vacation or over $2400 worth of my billable time (according to my Chief Financial Officer).
I wrote the President of GE, James P. Cambell and never heard a word from anyone at the company. The didn’t even send a blow-off letter “We got your letter and are investigating your case. Thank you for your reply.”
Copy of the Letter to James Campbell, President and CEO of GE Industrial
So, everyone, do the following for me:
(1) Link to this entry on your blog or web site. Use GE Service in your entry. Let’s see if we can get this on the top of Google
(2) Go to this URL: http://www.geappliances.com/service_and_support/contact/ and let them hear your voice.
(3) Don’t buy a GE appliance (this includes the Hotpoint line as well as “several private labels”.
UPDATE: MARCH 18, 2006
Yesterday I convinced GE to replace our range (wait for it…). When I got home from work there was a message from Arlene at GE saying that Ron’s Appliance Services will delivery our new stove (wait for it…).
But….
Ron’s Appliance Services is in Milwaukee an hour away. 1 mile away is Home Depot, 2 miles away is Kennedy Hahn (I did give GE KH’s phone number). 5 miles away is American TV and Appliance (I gave them this number too).
Why pick someplace 60 miles away when you can pick from 3 people within 10 minutes?
And… The clincher…
Ron’s only sells…. PARTS! They don’t sell new appliances!
Every time there is a fork in the road and GE has to choose between functional and inept, they pick inept.
Stay tuned for Chapter XV.
UPDATE MARCH 23, 2006
Our mistake on Ron’s. It turned out to be RAS Appliance.
We did get our new range (almost 3 months after our old one failed). We have turned the oven on twice and it worked both times.
Short strange trip
I was back in the San Francisco bay area (south bay) last week. I lived in the south bay for several years right after college. I took a cab from SFO down to Santa Clara on highway 101. Each exit I passed had these little flickers of remeberance. “San Antonio… I liked San Antonio Avenue. Where did it go? Los Altos… oh that’s right”, “Rengsdorff… that feels industrial”, “Mathilda… don’t like Mathilda…”
It took me a couple of days before I figured out the details of the emotions. San Antonio – was where I lived in a nice bungelo. Rengsdorff lead out to Target Therapeutics, the small start-up I worked for. Mathilda was where I lived last and went through the my divorce.
While I was back there, I met up with Lisa Minshall which was most excellent. I haven’t seen Lisa for almost a decade. We were close close friends while I lived and worked in the bay area. It was really wonderful to see her again. I’m still smiling about it.
That same week (talk about synchronicity) Kathy Mah showed up on IM! I have been searching for Kat for years. I had googled and googled for her. I had contacted other friends who had old phone numbers. Kat was lost. I had added her last known AOL screen name to my chat list “just in case”. Suddenly she popped up.
“OH MY GOD! KAT! IS IT YOU!”
‘YES. TIS TIS!’
Wow. What a week. What a wonderful week of reconnecting with long lost friends.
20 years without McDonalds
I just realized that 20 years ago I swore off McDonalds (and Burger King et al). It has now officially been 2 decades without a Big Mac or anything like that. I only stop at McDonalds to pee on road trips because you can go in the side door, take a left and the Men’s room in on your right (usually).
Happy 20th Anniversary of sans Mickey Dees.
Dreamhost one-click upgrade: I
Just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.X via Dreamhost’s one-click upgrade process. Worked beautifully. All of my plugins and themes came across with the upgrade. I didn’t have to do a thing.
Dreamhost – I ❤ U
– Jim
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Sleepy = Good
Lola after several days of hard play and fun. Sleepy dogs are good dogs.
Cory Doctorow’s New Book – Someone Comes to Town
Cory Doctorow has a new book out Someone Comes to Town
I really enjoyed his previous books: Eastern Standard Tribe and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
Cory publishes his books as free eBooks and print books. As he said (can’t find the quote) – I’m selling more books because of the free publicity I get by people passing around the free eBooks. I might loose a few sales but I am gaining much more.
Cory used to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Looking forward to reading this new novel. Thanks for the good work(s) Cory.
50 degrees in January
Yesterday was sunny and 50 degrees – January 12th in Wisconsin and 50 degrees and Sunny. I took off early so I could take Lola out to the dog park to play. I was not the only person at the dog park and the talk was about the weather and how cute everyone’s dogs are. I was in North Carolina at Duke University last week where it was also warm and sunny. They were tilling the flower beds and putting in plants. All this weather makes one start to think about Spring. This is very dangerous when you live in Wisconsin. You don’t want to start up the Spring neurons until March… at the earliest. Our normal temperature for this time of year is 25 degrees. The record low for today was -24 degrees. One does not want to think about Spring in January unless one wants to to face a very long February and March.
But, I’m happy to take advantage of any 50 degree days that come my way.
Looking for a new Digital Camera
To be more honest – I’m looking for three new digital cameras but I will buy just one.
I have an Olympus C3030 zoom which I like quite a lot. It is a few years old. It is slow to start up and slow to fire. It does take very nice pictures but the resolution is low (3Meg) compared to today’s cameras. It is a good size for carrying around town or on hikes. But this isn’t the one I want to replace.
I would like to get a really good digital SLR like the Digital Rebel. But this also isn’t the camera I’m looking for right now.
I’m doing a lot of business travel. I would like to find a good small very packable camera. I have a 007 camera from Think Geek. This is very small and quite fun. It takes okay pictures but they are great fun to take.
There are a suite of thin form factor digital cameras. They all have tiny lenses which mean low light gathering capabilities which probably means mediocre pictures. So is there a good camera which is highly packable, travels well and takes good pictures?
I am at the Fuqua Business center at Duke University. The Architecture is gorgeous. The crowd is fun. The woods are pretty. I would like to have a camera with me that I could capture this stuff at reasonable (okay, what do I mean by that?) quality. I will not pack a Digital Rebel for these trips. I don’t even pack my Olympus but I might pack something slightly smaller. If there was a credit card factor camera that takes good pictures, I would just leave it in my laptop bag.
Jim Phelps 
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