Rants

Peacock, We Hardly Knew Ya

Earlier this month, somewhere, somehow, I found out there was an offer for a year free of Peacock Premium just for Specturm subscribers. So I signed up. Here is the welcoming email:
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Thank you for signing up for Peacock Premium.

You now have access to thousands of hours of classic and current TV hits, movies, Peacock Originals, Dreamworks titles, live sports and more—included with your offer until 01/05/23 at no extra cost.

On 01/05/23, your access to Peacock Premium at no extra cost will end and you will be charged $4.99/month plus tax on a recurring basis unless you cancel before then. To cancel your Peacock Premium plan before you are charged on 01/05/23, please visit My Account.
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We downloaded the Roku app, signed in, poked around a bit and then exited. Never went back. Then 2 days ago, 01/18/22, we got another email from Peacock:
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Your Peacock offer has ended.

We hope you’ve enjoyed Peacock Premium at no extra cost. You no longer have access to Premium content but you can still watch Peacock for free. Restart Premium for only $4.99/month plus tax!
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Wow, that year went by fast! Seemed like just 13 days.

Santa, All I Want For Christmas Is A New TV

Downstairs in Family/Entertainment Room we have our old 50″ Samsung TV that came with us from Aiken. Since its arrival from the east coast it has started to develop some vertical lines on the far left side of the screen. We have been able to ignore them mostly, but they are now starting to get on both our nerves.

It is Christmastime, so we thought maybe we should give ourselves a present of a new TV that has a nice complete picture. There are only a couple of places in town where you can buy a TV, but that is not really helpful as they would be no way to transport it home, so I went online to see about getting something delivered. Found a sweet Samsung 50″ UHD on Best Buy for $379. The best part is free shipping with arrival early next week. I was going to bump up the size to 55″ for $20 more, but the free shipping changed to $190!

I stuck the TV in my cart and headed to checkout. I filled out the requested personal info, entered my charge card info and hit the buy button. I got a screen telling me they couldn’t process my card and I should try another one. Thinking I may have entered the number wrong, entered a “new” card. Really the same one, but I made sure I double checked that everything was correct. This time when I hit Buy, I got a confirmation saying my order was placed.

About then I heard a couple of notification beeps on the phone. I figured it was Best Buy because I had signed up for order/delivery texts. I was right, there was one from Best Buy, but there was also one from Chase, the Fraud Department. They had declined the charge. They wanted to know if it was me. I responded with Yes. Chase sent back another text saying that the transaction was not completed and I should ask the merchant to reprocess the transaction.

On the Best Buy website, it showed the order as in process, so I tried contacting Chase. Instead of waiting for a representative on the phone, I tried their chat bot. After 7 minutes, I got started chatting with Doris Brown (who I’m sure was actually Prisha Banerjee) who after asking a couple questions to ensure I was really Brian Bogardus (not Changying Zhao) before asking what my issue was. Then she said give me a few minutes to look into this. Couple minutes she returned to tell me that I needed to contact billing to get them to reprocess a transaction and gave me that 800 number.

I dialed the number and navigated through the menu and then I was informed that billing was closed. Fast forward to this morning. I went to Best Buy’s website and my order was still showing in process. I went to the Chase website and the charge showed as pending.

So, is Santa bringing us a TV for Christmas, who knows. This morning I called Chase again. This time it only took a few minutes before I got a Customer Service Representative, and after a couple of questions was told that the transaction was actually approved and everything is fine. We’ll see.

Adventures in Online Ordering

On the afternoon of June 15th I ordered a couple items from Home Depot online for our continuing effort to put our stamp on the new House of Bogardi. One item was a matching bathroom mirror for the vanity we bought at the store because they didn’t have one there. The other item was a small flush mount LED light to put in the hallway to replace the ugly contractor grade item that hung from the ceiling there.

The mirror shipped on the 17th with an expected delivery date of the 21st, but there was a late truck so it was delivered a couple days late. No big deal.

The light was a different story. It was shipped the day after ordering it on the 16th with an expected delivery date of the 19th. It left Arcadia, CA (basically LA) on the 17th and then it fell into black hole.

JUN 16
11:21 PM
Arrived At FedEx Location ARCADIA, CA
JUN 17
10:35 PM
Left FedEx Origin Facility ARCADIA, CA
JUN 18
10:46 AM
In Transit MT SHASTA, CA
JUN 19
8:00 AM
In Transit TROUTDALE, OR
JUN 20
8:01 PM
In Transit TROUTDALE, OR
JUN 21
8:02 PM
In Transit TROUTDALE, OR
JUN 22
8:03 AM
In Transit TROUTDALE, OR
JUN 22
8:03 PM
In Transit TROUTDALE, OR
JUN 23
8:03 AM
In Transit TROUTDALE, OR

On Monday the 21st when I checked the status there was a note that said if there is no update after 3 days to contact Home Depot. So on the morning of Thursday the 24th I did just that and gave them a call. After only a couple minute wait I was connected to a very helpful Customer Service Rep. When I explained the situation, she thought the same thing I did, FedEx lost the package. She gave me two choices, she could open a ticket with FedEx or she could cancel the order and refund my money.

I said, “I’ll take the refund and probably just reorder the light.” She said, “Hold on, I’ll see if they are still in stock.” She said they are available and we proceeded to order a replacement. As she was telling me that I should get a confirmation email shortly, up popped the email. I thanked her and we hung up. Later that evening the new light shipped with an expected delivery date of the 30th.

This afternoon around 2:00 I heard a truck stop out front, we weren’t expecting anything, so I figured it must be for a neighbor, until the door bell ranWhe I opened the door a FedEx truck was just driving off. That’s right, sitting on the welcome mat was a small white box that could only be one thing, a small flush mount LED light.

Because my friendly Home Depot CSR already has the light marked as returned in their system, so she could refund my money, I guess I’ve got a free light.

Now I Can Be In The Same Room

Earlier this winter my trusty personal heater of several years quit working. I guess I finally just wore out the tilt-over safety switch. For the longest time I would have to lift it up and sort of manually push the switch in and out before being able put it down and have the heater work, but one day it just wouldn’t come on.

Because I’m naturally cold all the time, I wear long sleeves during the summer, having a nice little heater is important. The next day was our usual grocery shopping day, so when we got to Fred Meyer, before putting any food in the cart, we went to back and I picked out a small space heater. When we got home and I plugged it in it was a lot louder than the old one. But, it was compact, had 2 settings, high or low, and the low was heat enough. I vowed to get used to the increased noise.

After a week or so I realized the fan noise was going to be a deal breaker. I could still hear it when using the over the ear headphones and sometimes I’d rather not have the headphones on. A new heater was needed, but this time I needed to do a little research first

A bunch of online reviews and a couple of “best space heater” comparison articles pointed me to the Lasko 5307. Several reviews mentioned that it was was quiet enough be in the same room with it. We have a winner. It turned out it was actually cheaper from Home Depot than it was from Amazon even with paying for shipping and the wait wasn’t that much longer.

Now, upon arrival, either the reviews were wrong or this particular unit is slightly defective, as the unit makes an annoying vibration sound when the fan is running (which is anytime you are asking for heat.) The heater had an oscillation function that swept it through about a 40 degree angle and the noise would pause at each end of the oscillation. It did also stop making that rattle it you picked up the unit, so it had to be the connection from the unit to the base. I found that if you propped the front or back of the base on the electrical cord that would sometimes stop the noise.

So with a couple of thin slices of a pool noodle (why we have one of these is a post for another day) and some double stick tape to attach them to the base of the heater, I can now be in the same room as the heater and not be annoyed by the rattling noise.

Fixed #1

My tech skills have really slipped since I left work at The Valve Store® and stopped being the group’s informal IT Guy. Question: What is the first thing you should do when any piece of technology stops working correctly? Reboot! OK, maybe the third thing right after making sure it is plugged and turned on, but that is all it took to make the PC talk to the Kindle.

I Hate Technology

1. Over the last weekend I went to add a book to my Kindle using the software called Calibre. I have used this program for several years on both our laptop and desktop PCs with great success. But for whatever reason, now, it did not recognize that I have the Kindle connected to the PC. Searching the internet reveals solutions that may or may not have worked a decade ago, but nothing of help for me. Most are hopelessly outdated as to software or hardware. Wait, I just had a thought, I should try a third USB cable…

2. Regular readers will remember that I am re-watching the 2018 Boston Red Sox baseball season. It has been our, well mostly my, after breakfast entertainment for the past several weeks. I watch it using the MLBTV app on the Roku Premire attached to the living room TV. On Monday when I went to watch Game 1 of their series with the Atlanta Braves and an error message popup up saying, “The content I selected is unavailable.” I tried selecting “jump to an inning” instead of “start at the beginning.” no dice. I selected a different game, “Unavailable.” I selected the game I watched just the day before. Nope, still unavailable. My first thought was, “Well, I guess they decided to stop access to the archives.” I tried using the app on my phone and, what do you know, the game was watchable. Went over to the PC and tried from there, available just fine. Fortunately, the MLBTV app that I downloaded for the TV works, so I don’t have to watch it on the phone or PC (my mid-range phone cannot cast to the TV.)

3. We went out and did a bit of driving to do some geocaching today. Loading caches to our GPSr turned out to be a big hassle. Just like the Kindle problem in #1 above, software and hardware that communicated reliably for years and years suddenly stopped cooperating. Suddenly GSAK will no longer send the .gpx files to our Garmin eTrex Vista Hcx. I tried updating drivers, but that was no help. So my work around involves transferring the cache files to a Garmin based bit of kit, BaseCamp (which I hate), that then will load the info onto the GPSr.

Shoot, I Still Need A Chute

In Aiken, we used to be able to pile our yard waste at the curb and the city would come around with a truck armed with the Jaws of Death to remove it. In Klamath Falls, Waste Management takes care of the yard waste along with the trash and recyclables. But here you need to bag the waste and put it out on the curb with your plastic trash & recyclable bins. You get three 30 pound bags a week for free. The first few pickups we used some bio-degradable lawn bags, but when we ran out we bought some paper ones from Home Depot. They are kind of tall and hard to get to fully open. And once you do, they don’t stand still or stay open while loading them, but still nicer than the plastic bags.

A couple weeks back we noticed that our neighbor uses the same Home Depot bags too, but to go along with them she had this cool green plastic chute that fit perfectly inside the bag. It both held it open and standing up straight. It also made it easy to make sure the debris got into the bag…

I just had to have one of those. It was Sunday afternoon and we were in for the evening, so I figured we would just go to the store early on Monday and do Store Pickup. I checked for local availability and the web site said there were 43 of the Plastic Leaf and Lawn Chutes on hand. Since I was paying by charge card online and the chute is a mere $8.97 I thought maybe I should order something else to make it come to something over ten bucks at least. We were down to just one yard bag, so I added a 5-pack of the bags, of these they had over of thousand in stock, for a whopping $2.47 more.

I placed the order and my confirmation came within seconds. A few hours later I received another email from Home Depot, they were cancelling part of my order, the Leaf and Lawn Chute. I guess their inventory was off, way off. So now I had a charge on my credit card and a Store Pickup for two dollars and forty-seven cents.

When we finally made it to Home Depot on Tuesday morning, I almost pulled into the “Pandemic We’ll Bring It To Your Car” parking spot, but my not wanting to be not rude about it made me go ahead and enter the store. When I arrived at the the Customer Service Desk there were two representatives working and both were helping people. So I stood back my six socially distancing feet and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally someone came free and and helped me, but it seemed like it took so long it might have been quicker if I had walked back outside, moved the car, called the number and had them bring it to me.

I still need a chute, but I guess I can hold off until fall when maybe they actually will have some in stock (the web still says 43 on hand in Klamath Falls.)