I love Google. I love Gmail. I love Google Maps, Google Docs. Google always seemed to be run by the geeks (a good thing!) instead of a company like Microsoft – run by marketing MBAs. Stuff from Google has always been clean, clutter-free and just worked great.
So their Google Apps transfer procedure is a clusterfuck and a black eye on their reputation. I doubt you’ll hear about it much because I don’t think it affects a lot of people – or maybe you’ll hear about it more once they force the upgrade through in a few weeks (you can upgrade now or be automatically upgrade in a few weeks.)

Here’s my simple setup. I’ve got my leroyskibone.com domain. My leroy@leroyskibone.com email address.
I also have my Youtube account linked to leroy@leroyskibone.com
It was years ago, but I probably setup my leroy@leroyskibone.com email address on Gmail first, then decided it would be cool to use Google Apps for my email, so I setup Google Apps for my leroyskibone.com domain.

Now, as part of the Google Apps upgrade, Google is telling me that leroy@leroyskibone.com is a ‘personal’ account and my Google Apps stuff is not – so I can change that email address to an ‘organizational’ account and transfer over all my information. Cool. Oh wait – I can transfer over everything EXCEPT my email.

So I use one email address for two things – Gmail and Youtube. And thanks to their great transfer process – I would now need one account for each. That’s a pain in the ass. Very ungoogly of you, Google.

The only point of installing Google Apps was to ‘simplify’ and manage my email with Gmail. Now they have made it complicated. So Google Apps is gone. I’m back to having the fine folks at Dreamhost manage my email. But I guess for a day or two, my email is stuck in DNS-updating limbo. It’s a good thing I’m not popular. But where will my daily doses of spam go?

Thats right, CompUSA.

“But Leroy!”, you say. “CompUSA and their brain dead employees and their pain in the ass rebates closed a long time ago!”
That’s true. But then TigerDirect (who I thought had a pretty good reputation – could be wrong though), thought it would be a good idea to buy whatever was left of CompUSA and take their name.
That was a year ago or more.

So the last time I shopped at the Hoffman Estates TigerDirect / CompUSA, they had a good deal on a 1.5TB hard drive, but I had to mail in a rebate. That’s right – they took CompUSA’s name and said “Hmmm, what was the biggest complaint about CompUSA? Let’s bring that back!” Every damn thing you look at “100 bucks (after mail-in rebate)”. A hassle, but I’m cheap, so I bought it. Kept my receipt, photocopied it and mailed in the photocopy with the rebate.
8-10 weeks later, I get an email saying that the photocopy is not clear enough and they cannot process the rebate. If I want, I can mail in another one and start the 8-10 week process again. I take choice B – count my loss, forget the rebate, and never shop there again.

I would love to see the moolah they make from their bullshit rebate process. The percentage of rebates that are sent in. The percent of rebates that are rejected. The extra money they make in interest by sitting on your rebate for 2+ months.

Why bring this up now? I passed by the store this morning and I see that the CompUSA sign is gone and a TigerDirect banner is back. I’m sure they spent millions on ‘corporate research on brand name recognition’ that led them to believe that CompUSA would be a better name. And any geek on the street could have told them “What – CompUSA? The place with the idioitic employees who know jack shit about their products and tell you that you need their extended warranty in case ‘your printer bursts into flames’ (Yes, a Best Buy employee used that logic on me once.) The place with the pain in the ass rebates on everything? You want to rename your store to that?!?! Are you fucking crazy?”

And now it seems they are going back to TigerDirect. I’m sure they spent millions on that research too. Maybe they are going to change their name to CircuitCity!

George Orwell would love big chains like Best Buy and CompUSA. The doublethink they employ takes common sense, ties it in a knot and then bends you over and sticks it where the sun doesn’t shine.
I think the part that Orwell would like the best is that we are taught not to rebel against assaults on common sense, instead we are told – “Oh, that’s the fine print.” or “Thats company policy.” and we are supposed to be good little consumers and accept it.

Let’s examine my Best Buy encounter yesterday. We will stick with facts.
Sony camera on sale as an ‘outlet item’ for 69 bucks. You can order them and pick them up at the store. There are nice pictures online, but I actually like to take a good look at something before I purchase it. So I drive to the store and ask for the item. They have it in stock, but they say it is 110 dollars. Oh no, I say – here is the printout – 69 bucks. Nope, I am told (by the store manager). That is an outlet center item. I can order it and they will ship it for free, but I can’t buy it at the store at that price.

How much stupidity can we identify in this?
1 – the same item is being sold by the same store – at two different prices.
2 – Best Buy thinks its smarter to spend money on shipping instead of just handing me an item.

I thought I might get some satisfaction from complaining about this on Best Buys user forums, but the stream of stupidity that I got in return just pissed me off more.
Multiple people telling me – yup, the store can’t do a price match on an item like that.

Think about that carefully. Best Buy can’t “price match” against….themselves!

And I’m told I could have ordered the item and picked it up there.
Thats right – I could have spent 69 bucks on it, walked into the store and got a camera.
But if I walk into the store, it cost 110 bucks.

Orwell is alive and well and working in management.

I was chatting with JT during his show on Sunday. He said something like “I heard you had some problems with your equipment on your Saturday show….but then you always have problems, don’t you?”

I felt a little insulted – mainly because it was absolutely true.
I feel like me and my hardware are playing a zero-sum game lately. I upgrade one piece and something else breaks. I bought more memory and a new fan for my Ableton laptop – and my desktop monitor dies.
I get a new monitor – and my broadcast laptop dies.

I don’t know how old that laptop is, but it’s about 105 in human years. It can record and broadcast audio just fine, but a simple flash game will cripple it. Here’s a good idea of it’s age. I upgraded the RAM from 256megs to 768megs a few years ago.

5 minutes before showtime on Saturday, it turns off and doesn’t turn back on. (Maybe it didn’t like being vacuumed, but damn, it’s dusty in my basement!) It finally came back on later that day, so I guess it just wasn’t in the mood for house music.

For various reasons, I hadn’t done a live set on Infinity in what felt like ages. I did a house set with Ableton this Saturday and was quite pleased with it. 5 minutes before the show is over – BAM – Ableton goes down. So the set was lost.

I spent Sunday evening backing up my Ableton laptop, reformatted and reinstalled Windows XP, and reinstalled Ableton. Oh look, version 8.2.2 is out. Will that be any more stable? There is nothing in the release notes that hints that it will be. Bah.

Well, as long as I’m having a bitch session – Youtube is stuck as I type this. The two videos I uploaded are stuck in processing hell. All my uploads last week were processed super quick. It’s been my experience that if they haven’t processed within a few minutes, they ain’t gonna process. (I’ve waited 24 hours before with no luck.) So, time to cancel and restart.

And it’s frickin’ snowing outside!