Everything is Unfinished

Found this through Fark and it was just too adorable not to share.

China Opens Panda “Kindergarten”

I decided today that I might like to take a road trip up to Cleveland tomorrow. The main objective of this trip is a scrapbooking store, of course, but since it’s a 2 hour drive we figured maybe we’d make a day of it. Anyone have any must-sees in or around Cleveland? Even though I’ve lived in Ohio my entire life, I don’t get to the northeast part of the state much. So far I’ve found out that there’s a Natural History museum, a Children’s museum, a cool mall called Tower City Center, and there’s a showing of Menopause: The Musical. Last time we were there, 5 1/2 years ago, we did stop by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and I was largely unimpressed - mainly because you weren’t allowed to take pictures. Since it’s February, anything involving the lake is unfortunately out. What else you got?

The ongoing saga of the external hard drive has come to an end. No thanks to Seagate, I might add. As I said in my last entry, I left a message for an Operations Manager about the situation. Well he called me back the next day and fed me the same BS about the data, but again offered to give me the prices for data recovery. I said something to the effect of “thanks, you’ve been no help whatsoever” and hung up on him. Then I decided that I could recover the data myself. But apparently Seagate makes a pretty penny off data recovery, because the screws they use require a keyed torx bit to remove. That’s not your standard bit, and no one in my office had one. So finally yesterday I sucked it up, packaged the thing back in the box and took it back to Best Buy. It was almost 2 months after their 30-day return policy, and I’d cut the UPC off the box to send in rebates so I was expecting a fight. Imagine my surprise when they were just like hey, fine, you want a refund or another drive? We found another drive - a LaCie 250GB - for the same price. Brought it home, and it’s currently getting a copy of all my stuff.

Throughout all of this, I knew full well that very little of our data was lost forever. We had backed up both of our computers but not deleted anything from them, so no losses there. Johnny had ripped about 300 CDs directly onto the drive, so he’ll have to do them all again but we didn’t actually lose the music. Really the only thing we lost was about $15 in iTunes downloads. So we’re really not out much, but Seagate is out a customer. And I’m sure they’re heartbroken about it too.

So for Christmas this year, I bought Johnny an external hard drive. It’s a Seagate brand, 160 GB so that we could put all of our digital pictures on it, any important documents, and the upcoming videos of Jack. Johnny also wanted to rip all of his CDs onto it in preparation for the iPod he’ll be getting soon. He opened it up and started using it on January 1, and on January 20 it wouldn’t turn on. Of course their tech support is only open 8-5 Mon-Fri, so he waited until the next week to call them. Their solution was to send us a new power cord. Ok fine, whatever, maybe that will work. We got the cord on February 3, and it was the wrong cord - it wouldn’t fit into the drive. Well that weekend was the Superbowl so the next week Johnny certainly wasn’t worried about calling them, so finally today I brought the stupid thing to work and called them. I was told that I could either return the drive to the store where I bought it for a brand new one, or Seagate would send me a refurbished one. Uh, yeah, I didn’t pay this much for a refurbished drive. So I can take it back to Best Buy and get a new one, but #1 maybe I don’t want another Seagate drive if they’re going to be this crappy and #2 what about all of our data? Oh, well the warranty doesn’t cover data recovery, that would be an extra charge. Um, bullshit. I asked for a manager. After holding for 10 minutes, I talked to a manager who told me the same thing, and I told her the same thing from my side. I mean, I can see if I’d been using this drive for a year that maybe it would fail and my data would be gone, but 3 freakin’ weeks? No way. She transferred me to an Operations Manager and I got his voice mail, so you better believe I left a message. I also have his direct number so if I don’t hear back from him by tomorrow I’ll be calling again.

I was already mad this morning because of my boss, but now this has really pissed me off. No wonder my blood pressure gets high. I should preface all of my conversations with “Hi, I’m pregnant and very prone to mood swings, so please do your best to keep me placated.”

These just came to my office:

My phone doesn’t take the best of pictures, but there are pink, white and purple variegated carnations with some purple statice and greenery. The best part was the card though, which I won’t be sharing with you :)