If Dan would give up his footage.

Indy States Anyone?

I havn’t been to a yo-yo contest for a few months, so I was really excited when i got an email from Takeshi asking me to be a judge at Indiana States. I missed the Mid-East Regional contest earlier this year so I am looking forward to getting out that way to see my friends in that region. The date is tentativly December 2nd and I’m planning to drive so ifn’ ya live around here or between here and Indiana and want a ride just let me know (limit 3).

In other news, magic occured on my HTPC and I now have both Linux and XP installed. I opted for Fedora Core 6 which just came out and showed full support for the jmicron raid controller that my mother board uses. I paritioned with Norton Partition Magic, which was a breeze, and then ran the install DVD for Fedora Core 6 which was a snap.

Now I can’t figure out how to boot to that partition…. but that’s a grub problem… I’ll figure it out later.

-Josh

Subscribe me? Sure!

You might have noticed a new link on the side bar that says “syndication”. That means that I am the member of a larger blog syndicate called “large blog syndicate”. Of course that was a joke, syndication is just a fancy word for what rss feeds do. If you use an RSS reader, like Google Reader (or Google homepage), Bloglines, or Myyahoo then you can just click those links to add schalicto.com to your reader. This is all made possible by a widget called “Subscribe Me”. I’ll be adding other rss reader options as I figure out how.

[Update: I figured it out! Now you can subscribe with (probably) literally any rss reader]

-Josh

Revenge of the customer service! Part 2; The Resolution

Best Buy, Best Buy, Best Buy. On Tuesday night I went to Best Buy to try and figure out this order debacle and I want to thank Eric in the video camera department and the store manager of the Magnolia home theater department, Dan. Eric has only been working there for a few weeks, but he said and did the right thing “I don’t know what the problem is, but I won’t leave you until we get something figured out”. I ended up being in the store for about 45 minutes while they tried to figure out how to find the order, fix the order, cancel the order and re-ring the order. What they ended up doing was canceling the order out and selling me the 30gb model that they had in stock at the lower price of the 20gb. Now I am a happy customer and all I had to do was wait paitently for (what seemed like) a long time.

There is a good punchline to this story too, yesterday I got an email from the Best Buy customer fulfilment program telling me that the video camera that I ordered had been shipped and that I will recieve it on 10/27/2006. I guess the Best Buy saga is not yet complete, but I’ll bring you more updates as they happen.

-Josh

Making some Coffee Time - GO!

This is a quick and dirty short film that I made yesterday to play around with my new video camera and the editing software that came with it. I hate using youtube because it won’t properly display the widescreen aspect ratio of the video, but I am having trouble figuring out how to encode to flash video and post it myself. Enjoy!

[Update: I figured out my own flash system with the help of freevideocoding.com. /update]
-Josh

Revenge of the customer service!

*Sigh* I just can’t win sometimes. Yesterday I blogged a little about my new videos camera that I ordered from Best Buy, this morning I called 888-Best-Buy to find out the status of the order and when I can expect it to show up at my house. Well they told me that there was a problem with the order and that I needed to contact the store that I ordered it at. I called them, and they are all confused and customer service transfered me to cameras and they wanted to transfer me back to customer service. *sigh* Now they are going to call me when they figure stuff out.

Mistakes are going to happen, and I understand that, I would just rather someone take ownership of the situation and tell me they will resolve it in a timeline. Is that so hard? “I’m not sure what the issue is Mr. Schalicto, but let me take your information and I’ll contact some people and see what I can find out. Then I will give you a call this afternoon, how does that sound?” That would be pretty cool, someone should pay me to train people in customer service.

-Josh