Trapped in Hp-double toothpicks…

It’ll be a cold day in you-know-where before I fork over any more money to Hewlett-Packard for a printer or a computer.

I don’t want to get into a war of words on product quality with one person saying that hp products are the best around and me saying the opposite. In fact, I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. Hp has had a reputation of quality for decades. My printer, a 990 Cxi DeskJet prints fine. I like the features of the printer driver and the fact that I can do automatic 2-sided printing. My laptop has had plenty of troubles but it was an insurance replacement “factory refurb” so I don’t necessarily want to judge the quality of all their laptops from that.

No, it’s not their quality that I necessarily question, it’s their corporate indifference toward their customer…their business practices that makes owning one of their products more trouble than it should be. (I speak specifically of the public consumer and not necessarily the business client. I’ve no experience there.) My experience is basically the following:

• With the laptop, and I assume it’s no different with their desktop models, one does not get full operating system CDs. One gets “system recovery” CDs. These should definitely be labeled differently. One can’t “recover” from a problem with them at all. Their is only one thing that you can do with these CDs…destroy all your data and installation customization and start from scratch. Thankfully we have 2 computers, as I have had to do this twice and have not lost much in terms of personal data because I’ve been cautious to transfer stuff to the other computer ahead of time. Time and energy and frustration however…that’s another story! What I’ve seen on their forums is that hp’s policy is to not sell you the license to XP (you are told this in their fine print), but to only give you the right to use it…on their terms. You need to re-install a .dll? You need to run a special utility? You want to exploit some feature that’s not installed but is on the XP disk? Well, unless you have access to another XP disk, you’re out of luck!
• Printers – hp has built a reputation about their printers, but their rhetoric is growing tired. Many printers are just as good. The market is full of quality printers. That isn’t the defining selling/buying point anymore. Now it’s cost of ownership. Cartridges…need I say more? The expense of owning an hp printer is nuts. I own one. I’m nuts. I know! ;c) Because of this expense, I chase my tail trying to re-fill the cartridges (half the time in vain…printer rejects them) and buy re-cycled ones. The color cartridges are 3 colors in one so that if you run out of just red…well…you need to do something with the whole cartridge. Hp discourages re-filling by the way it designs their cartridges and their ink-level detection software doesn’t take into account any re-filling you might have done either. I’ve known for some time that my current hp printer will be my last one but have figured that I’ll wait until it dies to replace it. I’m beginning to think that that I’m wasting too much money to keep going like that. It may be cheaper to simply switch now!
• Drivers – Is your product obsolete? Don’t expect to find drivers for it at hp.com. If you’re not up-to-date, you’re out of luck.

This sort of customer relations, which pretty much shouts “customer is hostage!” rather than “customer is king” basically turns me off and, I think, increasingly turns off the rest of consumer public. We’re looking for companies who will work with us in the complexity of computing. Complexity insures that there will be problems. I’s rather buy from someone who works with me to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Technorati : Hewlett-Packard, cartridge, customer, hp, inkjet, laptop, printer, refill
Del.icio.us : Hewlett-Packard, cartridge, customer, hp, inkjet, laptop, printer, refill
Ice Rocket : Hewlett-Packard, cartridge, customer, hp, inkjet, laptop, printer, refill

Entry Posted on: 24 December 2005 at: 8:53 am Comments (0)  PermaLink Computers, Personal

Strength and Wisdom Shamed…

…God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong… (1 Cor 1:27)

My musical “career” ain’t much, but I can say that it’s been marked by moments where I felt that I actually succeeded in making some good music! ;c) When I go to a performance of any kind, I’m very appreciative of excellence. Even in a worship setting, I am frequently emotionally “undone” sometimes by excellence in the human creative endeavor. God has made me to resonate in a certain way when I encounter creative excellence. I think that God can be and should be praised for creative excellence. It reflects His creation and the way that He created Man.

This week, however, I’ve had the distinct opportunity to see God’s hand in some performances that, had they been practiced 1,000 times, might never have reached “very good“, let alone “excellent” status in their “human creative endeavor.”

Tuesday morning, at a nursing home in Guebwiller, France, a group of pre-school, kindergarten, and special-ed kids from the Christian school where we volunteer (and our children go), The Daniel School, put on a small Christmas show for the residents of the nursing home.

Another father and I trucked over the scenery and sound equipment. We did the set-up and ran the sound gear…an amalgamation of equipment from 2 different churches, The Daniel School and some of my own stuff. Two mothers did non-stop costume changes. The music teacher was accompanying for songs where the “soloists” sometimes seemed to be making a Magi pilgrimage to find the melody. There were 3 or 4 teachers, continually guiding, cajoling, handing out microphones, making sure people were in their right places, prompting for lines, answering questions from all of us who were doing the “technical support” and watching over the children before and afterward.

What I witnessed and took part in was a tremendous effort and coordination so that one group of “weak” people on the earth could proclaim to another group of “weak” people on the earth that Jesus decided that divine status was not something to be clutched onto. Rather He would choose to be weak too! He choose to identify forever with human weakness in the most real way possible…become a helpless fetus, fully dependent upon a young, not-quite-married girl, born into a relatively poor family at a time when birth complications were generally fatal, and then walk the earth as a man. He chose to be vulnerable in every way when it looked that that could only get Him killed…

The message transmitted was, and is of supreme importance:Jesus is Lord.

In many ways, it’s a well-known message. Especially to the modern Church. For me, however, the way in which the message was transmitted spoke even louder, though it is perhaps less well-known to us. For our day and age, as for that of Jesus, it proclaims a message as well…arguably nearly equally important. Caesar isn’t.

Would that we could hear the two messages in harmony…

Technorati : Caesar, Jesus is Lord, foolish, shame, weak, wise
Del.icio.us : Caesar, Jesus is Lord, foolish, shame, weak, wise
Ice Rocket : Caesar, Jesus is Lord, foolish, shame, weak, wise

Entry Posted on: 23 December 2005 at: 6:09 pm Comments (0)  PermaLink Culture, Ministry, Reflection