Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

Remember that cool digital camera I ordered back around Sept 15? Nope. Dell's not going to ship it to me. After making me wait a month and a half for the Canon Powershot S2 IS that I ordered, they simply cancelled the item with no interaction with me. I found out this morning and I was fuming. I would not be nearly so mad if all the Dell people hadn't kept telling me to wait for the item to ship. I think I'd had about 8 well-mannered people in India reassure me that the camera will ship, I just needed to wait for Dell to be resupplied. Originally, the ship date was Oct 17. That was pushed back to Oct 24. That was pushed back to Oct 31. Monday I talked with the Dell people to confirm I wanted to wait for the order, but today it was just cancelled without any interaction with me.

So I log into Dell's Order Status chat application and talk with someone named Silpah for over 1 hour. For my trouble, he offers me a $35 concession coupon. I don't bite.
After impressing upon him how angry and disgusted I am with the service I've received from Dell, he ups the offer to a $75 concession coupon. He also confirms that the shipping for the DVD+RWs I bought as part of this order will be free, instead of around $20. Finally I accept. Silpah says Dell couldn't do much else for me, since they haven't been resupplied with Canon cameras since early September (why not?), and they couldn't fulfill any camera orders. Maybe there are lots of people out there in the same boat? If so, I share your pain.

So now I have a $35 concession coupon for having to wait so long in the first place, and a $75 concession coupon for having the order pulled out from under my feet. $110 in Dell coupons, unfortunately, I have to use them separately on different orders. Blah!

Posted by Wayne at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yes! Last week, a check arrived for about $130 more than I was expecting. This was great. I think what they did was refund me the full price plus tax of the brand new phone I bought. That's much better than just the original proce of my old broken phone. I couldn't imagne why they did this, but then I had an idea.

I bought a Sanyo 8300. My old phone was the Sanyo 8100, which is not sold in Best Buy stores anymore. So I effectively bought the closest thing to my original phone that I could find. I think they saw this, and decided that it justified refunding the full new phone price + tax.

So now I'm very happy. Thanks, Best Buy!

Posted by Wayne at 11:46 AM | Permalink

Saturday I fixed the car door in the rain, during one of the 2.5-hour runs for a program at work. The stereo will have to wait a while. So my car is again rain-worthy. That's been good, since it's been really dreary and rainy in Raleigh for the past several days. I know we've been way behind on rainfall, so this is probably a good thing. It also has begun to feel more like October. It's been in the mid 60's to low 70's a lot lately.

Posted by Wayne at 11:41 AM | Permalink

Over the weekend, Erika transformed the ficus in the living room into a candy tree for Halloween.

Posted by Wayne at 09:05 PM | Permalink

I'm mad.
Last night, someone broke into my car and tried to steal my stereo, right in front of my house. They didn't know how to pull it out, so they only succeeded in breaking the non-removable faceplate. They got into the car by prying my driver's window outward enough to reach in (maybe with a wire) and unlock the door. When they failed at removing the stereo, they just left the car door open about an inch, so all the water from last night's rain soaked the driver's seat too.

So hooray. Now I have:
1) A screwed up window which I'll have to take the door apart to fix.
2) A broken stereo.
3) A growing concern about my neighborhood.
4) Still a huge deadline Monday which I'm behind now, since I had to wait on the police this morning.

Here's what I think happend. I had to go into the office last night to work from 6pm-1:40am. My car was parked in one of our two marked spots with an NCSU student parking tag on the windshield. Thursday and Friday this week are NCSU Fall Break. I think the criminal saw an empty parking spot beside my car and thought we were away on Fall Break, so there would be a better chance to break into my car.

So now I'm pissed off, and I'm thinking of what I could do to either secure my car better or try to catch a criminal if it happened again.
Here's some first-draft ideas:
1) Hook up a surveilance camera from inside the house watching the cars and recording movement.
- That might not be able to ID the person well enough, and wouldn't prevent the crime.
2) Get a car alarm
- My car's pretty old, it might not be worth the expense.
3) Make it look like I have a car alarm. I could build a tiny circuit to make an LED blink on the dashboard, or something similar.
- Might not trick anyone
4) Set a trap in the car with pepper spray/electric shock, etc and an alarm to go off if someone tries to pull out a stereo again.
- Could be dangerous for us driving the car if it went off by accident. Also it might be illegal.

I don't think i'll go for #4, but wouldn't it be great to catch a criminal like that? The trouble with lots of those are we'd have to be home to catch the guy. We like to take trips, so that's not always so likely.

I'll let you know if the police catch anyone. Apparently another car close by was broken into similarly last night.

Posted by Wayne at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been super swamped at work lately. I have a deadline Monday next week, and I've been doing everything I can to meet it. Erika's been busy too, she has a big paper due Wednesday for a class. Not much fun right now, but I guess we'll enjoy it when we're done.

On a lighter note, we're going to see the Julius Caesar play this weekend in Raleigh. Plays are nice, but I think I'll appreciate it even more since being there will mean I won't be working on this project - at least for a couple hours.

Posted by Wayne at 10:16 PM | Permalink

We went to Tracy and Adam's wedding Saturday, Oct 1st. Tracy's on my side of the family, so it was a reunion of sorts, which was nice. The ceremony was held at Pullen Memorial baptis Church, and the recpetion was at the Rose Garden behind the Raleigh Little Theatre. The Rose Garden was really nice, and had tons of roses in bloom. We'll have to go back there sometime. My mom's cousin John showed off some of his dancing moves, and I caught a clip with my cell phone. My parents, sister and grandparents saw our house for the first time, and we showed them around town a bit.
- Thanks for the correction, I can never remember everyone's relations.

Posted by Wayne at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)