I generally loathe having to contact any customer support organization for any reason because I know I’m going to have to get into it with whoever I get ahold of to try and get something to happen that will alleviate whatever problem it is that I’m having.

I’ve gotta say, though, that I’ve been in touch with both Sony and Namco on customer support issues recently and both of them had outstanding customer service.

In Sony’s case, I made my primary contact over the phone, and the operators I spoke to were very helpful - they didn’t make me go through all of these ridiculous procedures, they talked to me to ascertain my level of knowledge with the product and when they determined that I didn’t need to do the “beginner” stuff, I was pushed through to the proper level of support. That’s awesome - do you know how long it takes to get to a real tech at Microsoft?

In Namco’s case, they have live online support so rather than waiting for an operator on hold, you’re instantly connected to a support person in an online chat scenario. It took me all of two minutes to get an RMA # for an item I needed to exchange, and I just now went in and used that service to check the status of the RMA. With a real, live person. No 24-hour-turnaround-time, no automated response.

I think if I’m ever in charge of a support organization, I’m going to use those as examples of the right way to do things. That doesn’t imply that the customer is always right, by any means, but the responsive nature of the service and easy manner in which the correct service was retrieved is invaluable.

I forgot to mention earlier that I was able to successfully spend several hours on the wireless network at home last night without any connection issues. I think the hard reset on the router fixed my problems.

I enabled Remote Desktop on the machine in the computer room and was able to connect to it from my laptop in the living room and work on my iTunes music library while watching TV. I can’t begin to tell you how cool that is. (I know, all you other wireless people are laughing and saying things like “Welcome to the 21st century!” but, in my defense, I use this stuff all the time at work, I just never got into it at home. Now that I’ve got it, I’m liking it. Next stop, tablet PC?)

I’m usually not too excited about programming stuff, but Visual C# Whidbey is just plain cool.

I have one of those apple slicing/coring devices at work. I hate eating apples whole, but love apple slices (odd? maybe).

I just went and sliced an apple and utterly destroyed this thing. The blades all bent and started coming apart…

Maybe I should purchase a higher quality of kitchen gadget. In the meantime, what am I going to do with all these apples?

After getting my wireless networking set up at home, it turns out it didn’t like something or another about how it was configured… I’m not sure exactly what that something might have been, but it was really pretty bitchy with me. I secured it down, set up my laptop, and everything would work great… except it would drop my connection roughly every 10 - 20 minutes, regardless of signal strength.

I have since reset the router (using the hardware button in the back) and reconfigured it to my liking and now I’m testing it. As we speak, I’m writing my blog over the wireless connection (don’t get technical with me about how HTTP is stateless and I’m not actually connected; the point is I’m watching the signal and connection on a status monitor). It’s been connected for 15 minutes or so now and I think it may be solved (knock on wood).

The other weird thing I found was that if I booted the laptop up with the wireless card in it, it wouldn’t connect to the DHCP server on the router to get an IP address. However, if I eject the card and plug it back in, all’s well. Apparently stupid things like that are reasonably common, or so I hear. I dunno. I think ejecting the card and pushing it back in is a pretty trivial thing on the large scale of things.