Not too swift

Here's what I wrote to Swiffer Customer Support today:

I'm disappointed to report that my second Swiffer Wet Jet mop has broken in the same place as the first one – where the two aluminum shafts of the handle are joined together.

This is an inherently weak design because of the flexing that occurs at this point due to pressure applied to the grip. The aluminum shaft is weakened by a hole in the tube. The metal fatigue that results from the pressure at this point causes the shaft to snap.

Otherwise, I like the product, but I cannot purchase another replacement because I'm convinced it too will break in time.

I know you're trying to keep costs low and having customers replace broken units is good for business – to a point – but you've lost me as a customer for the mop, fluid, and cloths.

I eagerly await their reply. My guess is that they will deny that there is a design defect and they will say that I'm the first customer who has ever had this problem and that I shouldn't press so hard on the mop.

Face it, this scrawny aluminum pole just isn't made for regularly cleaning. It's for very light duty cleaning done by weaklings.

“Our catalog lists everything you can't get”

Dear PC Cyber,

Please tell me why you have this huge catalog of items, but everything I try to order from you is not available and has to be back ordered.

While you're thinking up an implausible excuse, please tell me why you quote a delivery date and keep missing it.

And, not to overburden you or anything, but tell me why you never call me to tell me you're going to be late with delivery. Then, when I'm forced to nag you, you then sound like you've never even ordered the products. You promise to check with your suppliers and call me back, but, but, you never do.

Why do you behave this way? Don't you want my money? Is business so good you can afford to piss off your customers?

Regards,

Mr. Curmudgeon

I'm glad you think my order is perfect

A few words of advice to all waiters and waitresses. When I give you my meal order, please don't respond with, "perfect", or "no problem." I really don't care if you agree with my order or if it's anything less than your idea of perfection. And of course it's no problem for you to take my order, or refill my drink. That's your job.

Do you understand? Perfect.

The best Christmas tree stand ever?

I first saw the Omega Tree Stand on CBC's The Dragon's Den last week. That's a TV show that has budding entrepreneurs come on and see if they can convince the Dragons to fund their venture.

Unfortunately, this product didn't get any funding because the Dragons thought that it should be licensed to companies like Noma for a paltry per unit fee.

I bought the product.

The quick clamping system replaces the screws that are a pain in the butt to screw in while lying on the floor with someone holding the tree plumb. The screws in my 23-year old stand are difficult to tighten and requires a screwdriver through the eyebolt to get some leverage.

I placed my order by phone and the stand arrived by FedEx a few days later. The price was $30 for the stand, $10 for shipping and $5.60 for taxes for a total of $45.60. Not cheap, but this stand is much better designed than anything else I've seen.

As soon as it arrived I opened the box and assembled it looking for defects or broken parts. It was in perfect shape, went together simply but required a bit of muscle getting the legs into the bucket. That should loosen up some with use, but it was nothing terrible.

The stand looks very sturdy and I can't wait to test it out on the tree this year. Check out the assembly video on Omega's web site.

If you buy this product, let me know what you think. If I change my mind after using it, I'll update this posting.

Update 2007-12-15: We put up the tree today and did have some trouble. It didn't go up as smooth as in the videos. I found that the clamps were just snug, not tight, so the tree wobbled. Then I found out that there was a branch stub caught on a clamp that prevented the tree from touching bottom. Once I corrected that, I could then stop most of the wobbling.

To make it solid, I had to use a little technique. I put both thumbs on either side of the back of the clamp in the slots where you squeeze them together to push them in. Using my fingers, I grasped the plastic can and, while squeezing and pushing with my thumbs, I pulled out on the can. This set the clamp much tighter. When I had done all four clamps, the tree was perfectly stable.

I found out that our automatic tree waterer didn't work with this stand and I'm still futzing with it to get it to work. With our old stand, I could coil the required 10" of hose into the stand easily because it was a wide, shallow pan. But the Omega stand is high and fits very tight so it was difficult to get the hose in. The wicking action of the automatic waterer was not working. I pulled the hose out and fed it in at a shallow angle that helped it coil better in the can. I also raised the watering stand a bit. No doubt, it will take a bit to get used to this.

Overall, I'm still very happy.

I've been framed!

I recently purchased a Kodak EX811 WiFi Digital Picture Frame as a gift for my exceptionally non-technical mother. She'll never own a computer so this was a nice, simple way for her to see our photos that are taken from our digital camera.

The experience was a total disaster. I simply cannot recommend this piece of junk.

First off, the box and all supporting documentation says that the image size is 800x480 pixels. That's a lie. They also say it's a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, although that fact is much less emphasized. Do the math. Take 800, apply 16:9, and you wind up with 450 pixels. That's the truth.

I found this out the hard way after cropping 267 photos for this non-standard screen format. Most cameras use a 4:3 aspect ratio resulting in what would be 800x600 pixels. The widescreen format short changes us on the image size and is a lot cheaper for Kodak.

Whatever, the image looked really good in the store, primarily because it has a matt finish compared to many other brand's glossy image that results in lots of reflections. The display was bright and this unit promised to play back videos in MPEG-1, MPEG-4, MOV, and AVI. Bullshit!

Using these standard formats I could manage to get decent video only after much pulling of hair, but absolutely no audio. I have quite a collection of tools to transcode video and the only format that would work with audio was motion JPEG-A, but the image was awful. I could export from EyeTV or iMovie, but could not get anything that worked with both video and audio. I gave up.

But the final straw that forced me to return this turkey to the store was the fact that the claimed 128 MB of internal memory (of which a paltry 100 MB is actually available) could only be filled to about 60 MB before it complained that the disk was full. I tried different copy and sync tools in Mac OS, Windows, and Unix to no avail. The damn thing would only fill to some random amount and then say it was full.

Kodak's implementation of this technology is simply not ready for prime time. And their tech support is a joke. I sent them specific questions asking about what audio/video settings I should use since their documentation is useless. They replied quickly without answering the questions and simply pointed me to the tech sheet.

Stay away from this lame ass piece of junk.