Week 17: improvements
05 February, 2021- Once this post has been made, I will have posted 998 blog posts since 2002. That rounds to about 52 posts a year, which is extremely satisfying, even if some of those first posts are just meme reposts, or me talking directly to people I knew at the time (I don’t advise reading them). Many links are now broken, many images have disappeared along the way (most of the early ones were hotlinks), but here I still am, ruining your day 🙂
- A good customer support story: in spring 2020 I bought a Chromebook. An Asus C434T. It was absolutely brilliant and I recommended it to everyone who was prepared to listen. Until it broke. The keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard stopped working, and sadly I am not alone. I’d bought it from Curry’s, but they spent 2020 struggling to keep up with the demand for support, and so I filed a request for repair with Asus since I was still in warranty. I did not expect much, but they were excellent! The laptop was collected the day after I filed the repair request, and it was back in my hands 6 days later fully working again, with a new keyboard module fitted. I have little doubt that it will break again since it’s obviously a hardware fault, but Asus did make the process of returning it extremely easy at absolutely zero cost to me. I think this is the first ever time I’ve made a warranty claim rather than going through the seller and was pretty delighted with the result.
- There is still not a better desktop photo manager and simple editor for Windows than Picasa, discontinued by Google 5 years ago.
- My work’s collaboration tool of choice is Google Docs. It is increasingly frustrating that although the multiple editors at once part seems fine, the rest is so weak.
- We have a jumbo robin who visits the garden. I estimate he is two to three times the size of a regular robin.
- The goldfinches have been back in the garden for a few weeks now, but whereas that was groups of 2 or 3, they’re now coming in charms of 7 or more. I love goldfinches, they’re so pretty!