Something Eloquent

I moved my com­puter into the liv­ing room today and attached it to the tele­vi­sion screen, I also dug up my wire­less key­board and mouse. I may have to do this more often. 

I’m a little proud of my com­puter, it’s the first one that I built from scratch using all new and actu­ally decent parts. I’ve got an Antec 900 tower, a Gigabyte EP45-DS3L Motherboard, an Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo pro­cessor @ 3.00 GHz , 8 GB of PC8500 Kingston HyperX RAM, and an EVGA nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ graph­ics card. It’s big and lovely, and a pain to haul up and down stairs. I have a few laptops as well, I should sell two of them… I could prob­ably get a couple hun­dred dollars. 

Lindsay and I were watch­ing old epis­odes of CBC’s Marketplace on line yes­ter­day and there was one called “Gouged by Geeks” it was all about how on site tech­nical ser­vice com­pan­ies often do not employ tech­ni­cians who are actu­ally skilled. Of ten com­pan­ies that were called, only three were able to cor­rectly identify cor­rectly a prob­lem RAM stick in a bait com­puter. Most of them claimed that a dif­fer­ent part was at fault, then pro­ceeded to try to sell the “cli­ent” a whole new com­puter. A cer­tain squad of geeks stood out as the worst as far as send­ing a sales­per­son rather than a tech­ni­cian to the house call. A com­pany that sends nerds to your site stood out as hav­ing prob­ably the worst ser­vice of all that we are shown, the fel­low dia­gnosed the wrong part as failed so badly that I could scarcely believe it, then pro­ceeded to copy all of the cli­ents per­sonal data to his laptop without ask­ing per­mis­sion. I was quite dis­gus­ted by the whole affair.

It actu­ally made me feel kind of good about the com­pany that I work for. I may not know the skills of all of our techs. But I work there, and I know that I wouldn’t have mis­dia­gnosed the problem.