Amazon’s Kindle screen failure and warrantee woes

Kindle WTF

Not cool.

I finally got around to calling Amazon about this. They claim it’s “impact damage not a manufacturing defect” so I have to pay $200 to replace it. “Amazon trains us, we’ve seen a lot of reports of just this sort of thing, and they say when we see diagonal damage, this is caused by impact and we don’t replace it. If you had horizontal or vertical lines it’s a failure of the circuitry and that’s a manufacturing defect.”

Let me be the first one to call bullshit on this.

Continue reading about How the Kindle failed after the jump

Bag rack

A year and a half later:

Bag rack

Why is it that a notebook computer is designed completely differently from a dSLR camera? To torment me?

Any other photo/computer geeks and nerds out there way too many bags?

And yes, I recently gave away four bags before this photo was taken.

WWRD?

What Would Ronnie Do?” asks the conservative blogs. My favorite response comes from Martin:

Reagan would have nuked them, of course. So would have Jesus. If we are so lucky to have them resurrected at the same time, they’ll do their wonder-twin ring power thing. Reagan would take the shape of a B-1B low altitude tactical bomber and Jesus would form into a payload of nuclear radiated holy water. They would then disburse over Iran, ridding the region of their non-pentacostal elements and creating a new holy land for displaced GM and Chrysler dealership owners (the wingnut Holocaust).

Classic! The only problem is I don’t think Jesus and Reagan would ever engage in a terrorist fist bump.

Here is another classic from the comment thread:

and:

Is there a doctor in the house?

John Cole points out that there is a segment of the “intelligencia” out there who don’t know that a Ph.D. entitles you to the honorific “doctor.”

“New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman—who I’ve noticed some econ bloggers refer to as ‘Dr. Krugman’ with no hint of sarcasm—says now’s the time to up our daily allowance of stimulis.”

He got his Ph.D. in 1977, so I don’t understand why people are supposed to be sarcastic if they call him Dr. Krugman. What context am I missing here that would explain this?

Which reminds me, I’m the only member of my family without a Ph.D.

Which reminds me that when I was a kid, answering the phone, I often would be asked, “May I speak to Dr. Chay?”

To which, I’d have to ask with no hint of sarcasm, “Which one?”

PHP Engineering positions in Sunnyvale

I think this is different from the last one, since this one has three openings, instead of a single senior one.

  1. PHP developer, version 5, production environment, ideally with the ZEND Framework
  2. 6 years of overall PHP experience with a minimum of 3 years of development within a production environment/10 years of overall development experience
  3. Bachelors degree required
  4. Would be nice to have the following: Agile, MVC
  5. Needs to have the following: Creative, passionate, intuitive mindset
  6. Reason why the position is open: rapidly growing
  7. Location: Sunnyvale

Contact information:
Carl Kenny, Yoh IT
408.654.9192 Extn:25
carl.kenny [at] yoh [dot] com

Senior Engineer in PHP (Sunnyvale)

A small, but promising company in Sunnyvale is seeking a Sr. Software Engineer with the following skills:

  • Recent deep experience with the LAMP stack, particularly object-oriented PHP5 and command line Linux skills.
  • Experience developing large, transactional web sites.
  • Any e-commerce experience is a big plus.

Projects that the candidate will be working on depending on their mix of skills are:

  • Web application development
  • Platform services and integration
  • Business process and workflow tools
  • Data analysis and reporting
  • Real-time optimization and heuristics
  • Release engineering and site operations

Contact Urmila Bhide, Talent Space, Inc., 408-330-1905

No man is an island

…except “Coach

Craig T. Nelson explains the Killer Ape hypothesis. The part anthropologists missed is that, while nobody helped our Third Chimpanzee forbears, they did have access to welfare and food stamps.

(Here is the full segment just in case you think I’m taking this out of context.)