Shawn Sorichetti

Catching snow Hosted on Zooomr

While checking out applegeeks to see if this sketch was going to be coloured (not so far), I came across this example of corporate customer service at its best. The story made digg, which brought it even more attention (5206 diggs at the time of this writing). While the final outcome was favourable, there is no way a customer who purchases a “protection plan” should have to endure an experience like that.

The Best Buy store that this all took place in is the one that is local to me. I have shopped there many times, and purchased big ticket items. Out of the Gateway 21″ display, Xbox 360, Canon Rebel XTi, I only purchased the PSP program for the Xbox 360.

During the purchase I was asked multiple times if I wanted to purchase it, and was fed the line “they do overheat, and if that happens we will replace it”. This was before Microsoft extended the warranty to 1 year, and offered to fix the red ring of death. I still said no. After a week of using the Xbox and a couple of reboots while playing Oblivion, I caved in and purchased the PSP. The Xbox is still working great.

The service and staff at Best Buy have not always been the best, but they were leaps and bounds ahead of the other choice in town, Futureshop. There the sales people have no clue, will say anything to make a sale, the store is dirty and dingy and there’s never stock on what I want to purchase.

I had planned on purchasing a MacBook for my wife from Best Buy, they’re $50 cheaper than Apple and I can get don’t pay for 3 months with their card. After reading about this experience, I don’t think I’ll be giving them my business.

While searching for a method to move my Lightroom library off of the PowerBook hard drive to an external one, I came across this tip for nested keywording from The Luminous Landscape. I’ve always typed out my tag hierarchy. Pictures of Megan, would be “Kids, Megan” for example. After finding this tip, I moved my Megan tag underneath the Kids tag, and now I no longer need to type in Kids, or forget to add it. Lightroom will handle that for me. As a test, I found a picture that I’d tagged “Birds, Ducks”, and dragged the Birds tag under Animals, and Ducks under Birds. As expected, the pictures now show up with the other Animals pictures. Most importantly, when the photo is exported as a JPEG, Lightroom adds all the tags in the hierarchy to the photo. I used PictureSync to confirm the EXIF data was set (still need to find a good context menu EXIF viewer plugin).

This morning I decided to install MacFUSE. I’d heard about FUSE before, but only with Linux. I never mount remote filesystem Linux system I just ssh, or scp what I need. With my Mac however I am always connected to remote filesystems. When MacFUSE was announced I was quite excited. There are multiple boxes that I only have ssh access to, that I maintain various files on. The ability to treat my home directory on those servers as remote filesystems is very appealing.

There are binaries available but I wanted to do an install right from the subversion repository, knowing as MacFUSE spread updates would be made. Luckily Jay Savage at downloadsquad put together comprehensive instructions.

The instructions were excellent, and the install process went very smoothly. That is until I tried to mount a remote connection. I immediately received this error message:

kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/fusefs.kext is not authentic (check ownership and permissions)

It took me a bit to backtrack through the instructions, and check my work. I finally noticed the permissions on the fusefs.kext directory:

drwxrwxr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jan 19 08:27 fusefs.kext

I had previously set the umask for my user to 002 (the default is 022), to allow group access to different files I create on remote servers, and during the install process this umask was used when creating the fusefs.kext directory. OS X didn’t like group write access to a kernel extension. A simple sudo chmod g-w fusefs.kext and all was fixed.

It was hard to tell if it was my choice, the lure of fresh snow, or my wife kicking me out of the house, but I ended up taking walk at Thickson’s Point. I managed to get a number of good shots, and discovered a couple things along the way.

• I need gloves that don’t have finger tips. My hands were freezing, but I still need my finger tips in order to change camera settings.
• Vans are not the right shoes to wear in snow, ice or traveling off the beaten path. Falling down while climbing a hill with a camera isn’t good. Hiking boots would be better.
• Even though the sensor cleans itself, it’s still possible to get dirt in the view finder. Now to figure out how to clean it.
• I’m not comfortable taking pictures of strangers I see in public places. There were numerous dog walkers along the path, some of them would make nice pictures. Facial details wouldn’t have shown in the pictures, I just didn’t know how the people would react, so I didn’t take them.

On Friday, I was looking at the Canon EF 85mm f/1.8, today I tried taking a couple pictures at 85mm to see if I was comfortable with that focal length. I used the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6, dialed to 85mm, set to f/4. While I wasn’t able to get to f/1.8 I did like the focal length. Now I have some shopping to do.

Photos to come soon.