Local Insanity

Kelly and I were on our way back from Dad’s in Portland, and we were off to a good start. My flight was scheduled to leave at 9:11am, Kelly’s around 3pm. We arrived around 8am in plenty of time. The first problem: Kelly’s flight was too distant to allow checked bags, so she had to lug hers around with her. This created complications later.

Portland

Upon arriving at my gate, we noticed that my flight into San Francisco had been delayed until 11:30am due to bad weather at our destination. This was annoying, but as PDX has free WiFi, I didn’t complain much. I even bought Kelly a new phone on eBay. Woo hoo.

My flight eventually left at around 12:20pm, with Kelly still in PDX. This time is approximately the time my flight to Bakersfield was supposed to leave from San Francisco.

San Francisco

Upon arriving in San Francisco I made for the pseudo-gate 87A, annoyed by the fact that the next flight to Bakersfield was scheduled to leave at 6:10pm. I began waiting in line at the gate so I could get a new boarding pass, since mine was obviously no longer valid. An usher was shooing people along into the stairs down to the shuttle, seeming to speak little English, and shooed me along as well when I told her my flight was to Bakersfield. I tried to convey to her that I needed a new boarding pass, but this affected her not at all.

So I got on the shuttle, and was shuttled across the gloomy tarmac.

In the pseudo-terminal, I went up to one of the desks and got a new boarding pass and was told what I already knew: that my flight would be at 6:10pm at pseudo-gate 3. It was now about 2:30pm, and the food selection was not appealing to one who had had no lunch.

So I got on the shuttle, and was shuttled across the gloomy tarmac. Again.

I ate lunch at Firewood, an overpriced but still decent pizza place at a sort of bend-turned-bubble in the airport. At this point I was still naïve enough to believe that my morning delay would be the worst of it.

I scooped out the next arrival from PDX at gate 68, but Kelly was not there. Meanwhile, at various gates in Portland, Kelly was getting on standby lists that were as ineffective in getting her on board as a door is as a window. The next flight from PDX would arrive after my flight was scheduled to leave.

So I got on the shuttle, and was shuttled across the gloomy tarmac. Yet again.

Over the hour leading up to my third shuttle trip, I watched the departure time of my flight to Bakersfield jump to 7:30pm, then 7:40pm, then 7:50pm. After waiting near pseudo-gate 3 for a while, they announced the flight had jumped from 7:50pm into a black hole - in other words, my flight to Bakersfield was cancelled. I went up to the counter and had a talk with a woman there, who was pretty nice and sympathetic, and gave me boarding passes through LAX and meal vouchers for me and Kelly. Things were looking up in spite of the change of plans, but I now had to leave from a different gate.

So I got on the shuttle, and was shuttled across the gloomy tarmac. Part IV.

Making my way to gate 73 to meet Kelly, I watched as her arrival time went from 6:30pm to 7:00pm, and eventually she came out of the gate. I told her about the rerouting and we were on our way, but Kelly then remembered that she had to get her bag because they’d checked it not at the ticket counter but at the gate, so it was different somehow and she needed to pick it up in baggage claim. When we got to the area at baggage claim, I held her stuff so that she wouldn’t have so much to go through security with.

After reading for a few minutes, I realized that she wouldn’t get through security at all without her boarding pass, which I had with me. I asked a reluctantly helpful TSA agent who eventually directed me to a White Courtesy Telephone. I explained the situation to the paging woman, and Kelly eventually appeared at an exit where I could pass off her boarding pass, not directly, of course, but through the TSA agent, who had to stand between us and check her ID. Ridiculous. These are layers of security that do not make us truly safe. If I had actually wanted to blow up part of the airport or something, I would have made it past them easily. But since I only had a desire to do the right thing and be on my way, my progress was encumbered. It turned out that Kelly’s bag was checked through, and that she’s been misinformed: the first of many times on this trip.

We went to eat. I got Dim Sum, which turned out to be not such a hot idea because the oils made me a little sick. Not nauseous, but where you feel like your stomach acid wants to come up and say hello. Kelly got soup in a bread bowl, a better choice. We went over to gate 81 where our flight was to begin boarding at 8:16pm. Well, the plane was on time, but the crew was a few minutes late. They told us the flight crew would keep us informed of the progress along the way and make us aware of connection issues. They most emphatically did not do this.

Los Angeles

To their credit, they did assist a man who had a particularly tight connection, zero minutes, to get off first. We were made to taxi an additional 15 minutes because our gate was occupied, making our arrival time about 10:35pm. Our flight to Bakersfield was at 10:45pm, and the gates were quite a bit apart.

We ran.

But in the end it didn’t matter. There were seven of us at the gate at 10:44pm from that same flight going to Bakersfield, but they didn’t bother to hold the plane. We later found out that there were 10, perhaps even 11, people who were supposed to be on the Bakersfield flight on the one from San Francisco. The plane had left without us, and we were told to go to ticket counter 39 for reassignment.

Ticket counter 39 apparently the one that usually deals with these situations, however at the time we arrived there, about 11pm, it was closed, with nothing and no one to tell us that. We were told to get in the main ticket line, so we did. When we finally got to the front, we were presented with a choice: go to a hotel and take a morning flight, take a shuttle bus up tonight, or take a voucher for that part of the flight and go on your way. None of us were thrilled, and we all agreed that we wanted some sort of reimbursement for the delay. For me it was not because of the delay per se, but because of the preventable and poorly managed nature of it. After all, bad weather is out of our hands, but poor planning and negligence are not.

Of course the airline refused. The supervisor came out, and was actually quite friendly, but she claimed that she was not authorized to perform reimbursements of the kind we were asking. For that we would have to file a formal complaint with the main office in Chicago. When asked why the flight was not held for 10 minutes so that we could make it, they replied that they needed to examine the big picture, including connections, and especially international connections. I tried to make them realize that there were no connections going out of Bakersfield later that night, and that Bakersfield, from what I know, does not fly internationally.

And so it went. It was now 1:30am, and the airline was still vacillating over the existence of a shuttle to Bakersfield. I decided that it was not worth discovering whether this shuttle actually existed, and to just take the hotel and the morning flight.

Oh, and they had no idea where our bags might have gotten to. This part, at least, had a happy ending.

We went to the hotel, slept for three hours, and then came back. We took the flight, arrived, found our baggage without too much hassle, and went home.

Analysis

United acted extremely poorly by not better managing their flight schedules. As I suspected, there were no connecting flights leaving Bakersfield from the one arriving at 11:30pm, the one we barely missed. It’s no wonder that domestic airlines are going broke; they have no common sense and seemingly no business sense either.

Which is worse: to delay a flight by 10 minutes so that 10 connecting passengers, at least a quarter of the flight, are able to make it without causing cascading delays or to send that plane on time, but then have to put up all 10 of those people in hotels, give them refunds, and spend several man-hours to do so.

The plane is going to Bakersfield; it is a sunk cost. It does not matter (much) whether they have 0 people on it or 40 people on it, so I cannot fathom how they thought it a good idea to leave on time and piss off 10 of their customers and pay their hotel bills.

The moral of the story: avoid domestic air travel if at all possible, and if you must travel, avoid connections in SFO if there is the slightest chance of bad weather.

Technorati Tags: letter, airline, travel

A judge in Pennsylvania has set a wonderful precedent that I hope will keep ID at bay. The document describing the ruling is quite good, even if it is a dry “legal” document. I found a few quotes from it that I like quite a lot.

First, defense expert Professor Fuller agreed that ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology.

Do these people really want to make science into a farce? Do they want to turn back time and make us all ignorant and god-fearing, huddled in a cave, afraid of the world? Do they want to undo the progress we’ve made since the Renaissance? I sincerely hope this is not their aim, but I firmly believe that if they have their way, that’s what we’ll get.

ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed. This argument is not brought to this Court anew, and in fact, the same argument, termed “contrived dualism” in McLean, was employed by creationists in the 1980’s to support “creation science.”

Creationism -> Creation Science -> ID -> ?

In summary, the disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.

The judge in this case did a very thorough job of showing the defendants to have acted outside the realm of their authority by attempting to teach an inherently religious idea as science. How long are we going to have to put up with these clowns before they stop? I believe the answer is “forever”, but that these events take place in waves. From my own experience as a high-schooler in Bakersfield several years ago and watching the attempt to make Christianity cool with slogans like “What Would Jesus Do?”, I perceive this and the Kansas issue as the crest of this most recent wave, which has been building for at least the last 10 years.

It helps to keep in mind that the waxing and waning of the Creationists over the last 100 years or so is only a ripple on top of a great wave that began with the Renaissance. Like this small wave we’re calling ID, the scientific revolution that began more than 300 years ago will eventually wane, collapse, and perish. I only hope that the period of darkness is swift, and not within my lifetime.

Technorati Tags: evolution, id, lawsuit

I ran across a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia today, and the letter on the front page put me into one of those moods where I just have to tell people why they’re being stupid. Here’s the letter:

Welcome!

There is a problem with the operation and functionality of Wikipedia. The basic problem is that none of the Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., nor any of the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible and therefore accountable for the content.

They believe themselves to be above the law.

WikipediaClassAction.org is currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, etc., who believe that they have been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia.

Alternatively, if you are aware of postings on Wikipedia that are either untrue and or potentially libellous to another, please contact them and make them aware of the offending content and this website so that they may file a complaint with our group.

Our intention and the purpose of this website is multi-fold. Specifically, we seek to achieve the following:

• Expose the inherent faults and flaws of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia
• Force Wikimedia Foundation Inc., through legal action, to change its current practices that permit anyone to post content to their website, without formal attribution and without recourse back to Wikimedia Foundation and or the author of the content
• Recover substantial monetary damages, on behalf of those who have suffered as a direct result of Wikimedia’s flawed business model
• Establish a precedent that will ensure similar websites are held responsible for their content

Recent news articles have exposed the growing problem with Wikipedia’s methods. Untrue information posted to Wikipedia, as fact, by an anonymous ‘volunteer’ (Brian Chase, 38, a resident of Nashville, TN was later exposed as the person behind the lie) suggesting that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy was eventually removed by Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales, but only after more than four months anguish and hard work by Seigenthaler.

If you are interested in joining in our planned lawsuit, please contact us.

Here is my response:

Hello,

I just finished reading your open letter on the home page, and wanted to address a few things that came to mind while reading it.

The style of your letter is quite inflammatory, not the fair and unbiased style you claim you would like Wikipedia to use. The guidelines posted on Wikipedia for article creation and modification point out that articles ought to be unbiased, especially on controversial issues.

You claim that the Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation and those who volunteer content do not “consider themselves responsible” and so are therefore not “accountable for the content”. I have added content to Wikipedia, and I do feel responsible and accountable for it. If I am to take your letter literally, I would have to conclude that you’ve just lied or that you would claim that I am lying now. At best your aim was to get people fired up about the situation, regardless of whether they suspend reason and rationality in doing so. The claim that “They believe themselves to be above the law” is in the same vein.

Your first aim for the lawsuit is that you wish to “expose the inherent faults and flaws of the WIkipedia online encyclopedia”. What do you believe to be the “inherent faults and flaws”? I believe it is that there is too little accountability - people ought to stand by what they say on an issue or in the article they’ve written on a scientific topic - but that doesn’t mean the system is irreparable or even legally requiring change.

Your second aim involves accountability. What measures would you have imposed to keep Wikipedia from falling prey to vandals, yet keep the anyone-is-an-author trait that has made it a great resource?

While legally speaking there may be something to your third claim, I do not know what it is. I am not extensively knowledgeable about the laws regarding libel. I like to believe that I possess common sense, however, and I believe that common sense says that seeking monetary damages in this situation is ridiculous. If my name were smeared on Wikipedia, as John Seigenthaler’s was, I’d simply edit it to reflect the truth. Why did he have to wait four months to do have someone else do this when he could have done it himself? If you are referring to a period of four months when he was not aware of it, then your letter is at best misleading and at worst an outright lie.

People who come to the site and read something like that and believe it without checking the source, or even going to the front page and seeing “Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, are probably not the ones you’re worried about. If you’re seeking monetary damages, you must think that a person or a business lost out on a potential customer or business deal because of it. I doubt the people who would be so gullible as to believe whatever any nice-looking website tells them are the ones conducting business deals, and I speak for myself when I say that I do not want any of them as customers.

If you wish to help improve Wikipedia’s reliability, then I believe that a lawsuit is not the best way to go about it. Make your complaints known and provide a solution or at least some discussion on the issue. If you’ve done this and received a negative response from Wikimedia, say so. This lawsuit appears to me to simply be an attempt to leech off of a successful organization and exploit its high profile for your own benefit. Am I wrong? Then tell the world why.

Brian Donovan

Much ado about nothing eh?

Technorati Tags: lawsuit, letter, wikipedia

Julie gave me a book at Thanksgiving called Digital Fortress, which she thought I might like. It sounded neat: tech-thriller seemingly similar to Neal Stephenson’s novels, which I really do like.

The premise is that the NSA deputy director, a dedicated and patriotic man, brings in his head cryptographer, a beautiful woman with a 170 IQ, to show her an encrypted chunk of data that TRANSLTR, their 1.9 billion dollar code-cracking computer, had been working on for 15 hours. This is a computer that could crack public key cryptography in about 6 minutes and ran with 3 million parallel processors that also did some vague “quantum” thing. Naturally, 15 hours is startling for such a computer, leading them to believe that the creator of the algorithm used to encrypt this data, a former associate of theirs called Tankado, had created an unbeatable code.

Tankado had posted a copy of this algorithm, Digital Fortress, on his website for everyone to download. The catch was that it was encrypted using Digital Fortress. He was going to auction off the key to decrypt it and sell it to the highest bidder. If anything happened to him, his partner, North Dakota, would publish the key to everyone.

Trouble is, Tankado suffered a heart attack while on holiday in Spain. The NSA didn’t want Digital Fortress to get out because it would leave them in a complete blackout of intelligence. As it was they could decrypt any message in less than an hour - they didn’t want to lose this ability.

This is the plot as we are introduced to it in the first 100 pages or so. I won’t get into the rest so that you can read the book if you want without already knowing the ending.

Perhaps it’s just because the last book I read was the excellent Quicksilver, but this book sucked. The characters and events, despite what the reviews say, are implausible. The author tries to address the interesting issue of individual privacy, summed up in the phrase quis custodiet ipsos custodes?: who will guard the guards? He utterly fails. No real conclusions are drawn, no reasons are given as to why it might be a good or bad idea to have an oversight agency like the NSA to read our mail and police our behavior.

The characters are implausible because they are supposed to be, for the most part, highly skilled crypto-analysts yet they get tripped up on the “distinction” between numbers and letters (on a computer, letters are represented as numbers within the system), they mistake the obvious interpretation of the words “elements”, “difference”, and “prime” as they relate to a clue given by the algorithm’s author, and other things besides.

The computer-related problems in this book are many. At one point, a character uses what’s called a “tracer” to track down the true recipient of a ndakota@ara.remailers.org, an address that acts as an anonymous go-between so that the recipient can conceal his identity. Supposedly, this tracer can be sent in an email to the address in question, be received by the party in question, and report back its final destination all without being detected anywhere along the way.

Bullshit.

This program would have to be written to work in one of three places: 1) the remailer’s servers, 2) the various routers along the way from there, or 3) the recipient’s computer.

Number 3 is absurd, unless you’re willing to rely on a particular operating system and/or email client. Not all email clients even have known vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code to run to, say, phone home. If you write the program for Outlook on Windows, then it’ll work as long as the person is running that setup. If not, tough luck pal. The only way to ensure this would work is to force all email client manufacturers (Microsoft, Mozilla, etc) to include this back door for the government (oh and that wouldn’t work with web-based email like GMail), which is very unlikely.

Number 1 is not as absurd, but it still relies on the government knowing about a bug or introducing a back door into every available email server in existence, so it is still absurd.

Number 2 is basically the same argument as number 1 with the added complexity that most routers are pretty dumb and do not know nor care what data they’re carrying - only where it goes to - making it extremely unlikely that anyone could coax them to do something like parsing an email and phoning home.

Aside from this and other impossibly dumb examples, the book was not even well-written. Most of the time I laughed was at, not with the book. I hope the Da Vinci Code is a vast improvement, or it could never have deserved the attention it received.

Technorati Tags: book, review

Sarah and I went to Mojave, Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, and Death Valley for a week of winter fun. We froze a bit in Grand Canyon with -13°C! That is frickin’ nuts. Update: The slideshow can be found here.

Day 1 - Bakersfield to Mojave

We spent the first day driving out to Mojave from Bakersfield, a decent drive along highway 58. We stopped in a campground, paid our dues, and set up camp. It was cold, but not too cold. We went on a quick hike that day and then did dinner - the corn chowder from Trader Joe’s.

Day 2 - Mojave to Grand Canyon (South Rim)

This morning we had the freeze-dried scrambled eggs - not so good because I’m bad at measuring water and following directions.

I drove. Brian talked. I pretended to pay attention. Then it got cold. brrr.

Thanks for that Sarah… We drove for a long time to get into the park, then drove around a while longer until we found a campground, which we weren’t sure was open because there was, almost literally, no one there. We parked two spots away from the Almighty Bathroom and set up camp again.

This was the first night we had the freeze dried dinner. It was the spaghetti with meat sauce, and it was actually pretty good. Mountain House++. This was the freezing cold night which was colder than most standard freezers. Our sleeping bags were not quite up to the task, and we kept waking up.

Day 3 - Grand Canyon

This morning was spent thawing out mostly. I made scrambled eggs again - better this time - and that helped. Hot cocoa++.

This day was the South Kaibab Trail, which we took down to Skeleton Point: 3 miles from the start, and about 2000 feet down. They warn you over and over again not to attempt to go from the rim to the floor and back in a single day. I can see that, as in the winter the days are short and in the summer it gets really hot. Still, it’s not exactly a superhuman feat, and I suspect I could do it with some Prior Planning.

The trail was nice, except for the horse/donkey/mule crap. Sarah spotted some cross-bedding in the rocks which excited her and sorta interested me. We ended the day with hurt knees and sore legs.

Next thing you know we’re at the visitor center where we learn how cold it was last night (Really Cold) and that it’ll be even colder tonight (a frosty -14°C).

We decided to spring for a lodge, and Bright Angel lodge had the right price: $55/night (of course we ended up spending even more than that on the dinner at the fancy schmancy El Tovar restaurant).

Shower. Bed. Light. Warmth. Not the most I’ve ever appreciated those things, but close. My dreams were disturbed by the extremely dry air that night.

Day 4 - Grand Canyon to Zion

Another day of driving took us along the very looonnnnng drive from Northern Arizona to Southern Utah around the Grand Canyon, past the Vermillion Cliffs, and into the Sandstone Jungle that is Zion.

On the way we ran into some trouble.

‘Round about Page I thought it’d be a good idea to take a short drive on a gravel road to a scenic overview where we could overlook Lake Powell. Sarah’s car is, by nature, a low-slung beast. Being loaded with lots of camping gear, food, and two passengers made it even more so. Thus even the simplest gravel driveway becomes trouble. For some reason the engine light came on, and stayed on. We stopped in Kanab, UT at a service center. They pronounced the engine in good health but pointed out that the rear tires were worn all the way to the tread indicator, or whatever it’s called.

Uh oh.

So we bought new tires for the rear and went on our way. The engine light eventually went off and things were looking up. Zion was pretty warm and looked beautiful when we arrived.

We set up camp at Watchman Campground near the west entrance to the park and made another freeze-dried dinner, which was again pretty good. I believe this time we did two: Mac and Cheese and Chicken Teriyaki.

Day 5 - Easy Hikes around Zion and the Legend of Zorro

After the fiasco of the really cold Grand Canyon night, we decided to buy fleece inserts for our sleeping bags. This, combined with Hot Hands air-activated warmers, a propane-powered catalytic heater, and two Duraflame logs turned out to do the trick, and kept us warm at most times of the day.

We walked along the paved path leading up to the Narrows, snapping pictures and being wowed by the ice that had formed on the rocks.

We went into Springdale later to watch the Legend of Zorro on the Giant Screen Theater, mostly to keep warm and to stay up to an hour that would make us tired. We had an electric lantern but we didn’t have full charge on it, so reading was difficult.

Day 6 - Angel’s Landing

We started the hike around 10am, and we were cold. After only a little while of hiking we began to get warm, and started shedding layers. I was down to two, and Sarah to three. We made it up to the point where the trail splits off into other places, with 0.5 mile of chain-aided scrambling to the top of Angel’s Landing.

Angel’s Landing is, at the end, broken into two chain parts which I call Round I and Round II. Round I is like scrambling over any normal non-flat, sometimes-narrow rock, except that it is accompanied by not-too-long-but-still-deadly drop-offs on one side. Round II is not much worse except that it’s steeper and has, in parts, drop-offs on both sides which are quite far down and can be very vertigo-inducing.

Sarah made it up Round I, but decided not to go any farther. I went all the way, since I’d done it before and didn’t want to miss the view nor the excitement of getting to the top. Though this trail is only 5 miles round trip, 1 mile of it is somewhat tricky.

Our nights in camp had become somewhat routine up to this point, so I’ll omit the details except to say that I was quite getting into my book, Quicksilver.

Day 7 - Observation Point

We started this hike a little later, about 10.30am. It begins with a steep ascent via a number of switch-backs, keeping your point of origin in view until you come to the top of a small stream-canyon. The trail continues through this canyon up for a while until it begins another set of switch-backs, the top of which has a sheer drop off on one side which Sarah didn’t like one bit, but she did make it up.

The top is quite high, and is nearly in line with Angel’s Landing and the rest of the valley, giving you a similar, but elevated, view. This hike is 8 miles round trip.

We were done by about 3pm and decided to head straight to the Desert Pearl Inn, where we’d made reservations the day before. This is the same place I stayed four years earlier with my mom and sister, and it’s still a nice place. Expensive for the area (I’m assuming), but nice. The hot tub was quite nice, and then we ordered Chinese food for takeout and watched Back to the Future. The bed was nice but it got really dry here again. Must keep glass of water by the bed.

Day 8 - Zion to Bryce and Death Valley

We decided to skip Bryce in part because it’d be an extra 4 hours or so of driving and because we were unsure of the road conditions. Another time.

We went to Death Valley after a long day of driving and arrived at the visitor center to find it a warm 51°F! We set up camp at Stovepipe Wells and decided to do Mosaic Canyon via walking the next day.

Day 9 - Death Valley to Bakersfield via 178

We did the morning hike and headed out. We might have done more, but the Observation Point hike had screwed up Sarah’s ankle somewhat because of her less-than-great shoes. We’d both about had enough, and we decided to head home.

We took the 178 back past Lake Isabella along the Kern River. It’s a nice drive as long as you’re not in a hurry and don’t mind the windy roads. Sarah insisted on driving the whole way, so I was fine as long as I ate something.

It was weird arriving at 178 and Commanche cum Alfred Harell Highway from the other direction. Kelly was home, and we went to Mimi’s after a long unpacking. The next day (today) I finished my book and figured out how much we spent on the trip. It was more than we thought, but a lot of the expense is in reusable goods, so I gotta go again to make it worth it.

Technorati Tags: death valley, grand canyon, mojave, travel, zion

I’m sending in my PowerBook to Apple for what may be it’s last time. I wanted them to get it right, so I included a letter:

Apple:

It’s been 36 months since I bought my PowerBook, and I’ve been very happy with it overall. The design of the machine is sexy (though not as sexy as the new aluminum ones), it’s light, it’s portable, and it’s reasonably fast. The software performs equally well, and I’ve grown to love Mac OS X. I’m always pleased that newer versions of the OS actually run faster than the previous ones - something unheard of in the Windows world.

However, I am not so pleased with the fact that I’ve had to send the machine in so many times, and that each repair takes far longer than I think it ought to. The SuperDrive on this machine has been replaced twice, and the current drive still has trouble writing to DVDs that the older ones didn’t blink twice at. The hard drive failed once, and it took several weeks to repair. The logic board and other parts were replaced because they cause bizarre video problems on waking from sleep and on intense usage.

During the setup for the last repair, I was asked if I would like to have any problems with the casing (paint, bulges, etc) fixed. I was elated, since my TiBook has fallen victim (albeit not as bad as some) to the problem of paint bubbling and peeling at the corners and on the hinge, respectively. I was under the impression, both from sources online and from talking to this customer service representative, that this was covered because it was recognized as a manufacturing defect. When I got the machine back the problems remained. No one had even touched the paint.

This was highly annoying to me, not so much because I don’t like how my machine looks (it is still sexier than most PCs), but because your company made a commitment to a customer and then silently disregarded it. I don’t believe it was intentional, but my machine still has paint defects and a semi-defective SuperDrive.

My ideal outcome of this situation would be for you to ship one of the new Intel PowerBooks that are rumored to appear in January, or even a 15″ AlBook G4. But as I like to live in the real world, I doubt that will happen, so here’s second place: touch up all the peeling/bubbling paint, repair the bulge in the casing on the left side near the front (if you were looking straight at the machine’s headphone jack, just look a bit to the right), and do whatever testing you can on the SuperDrive and the rest of the machine. If you really feel there is nothing wrong with the SuperDrive, send it back as is. If there is a problem, please address it.

I’ve convinced a number of friends and family to buy Apple computers based on their wonderful appearance, solid operating system, ease of use, and great customer support. I hope the outcome of this repair will make me believe that last one again and, when the time comes, convince me that I’m right in buying another new Apple computer for my next machine.

Thank you,

Brian Donovan

Technorati Tags: apple, letter, powerbook, repair