Matthew's Attic

During the past year, we installed compact fluorescent bulbs throughout our house. One of the benefits of switching from incandescent to fluorescent is that the bulbs are supposed to last a lot longer - most are guaranteed for 5 or 7 years. Well, we had three bulbs (all of the same type - Sylvania CFL Globe 40) die within a year. We have several more of the same kind that are doing fine, so it must have been a bad batch. So I sent them back for warranty replacement on July 18. I received four new bulbs on August 10.

No hassle, reasonable turnaround time, and an extra bulb for good measure. Good job, Sylvania.

It sure is nice to have a good customer service experience in today's world. It seems that customer service hassles have become the norm, and the positive effects of good service on customer loyalty are often overlooked and undervalued.

Nice doing business with you, Sylvania - you'll get more of my business in the future.

Well, RapidWeaver 3.6 was released on May 24. Not too long ago, I was discussing some of my biggest complaints about version 3.5.1 with one of my friends. I just looked thru the details for version 3.6, and many of my complaints were addressed.  Wish and you shall receive, apparently.  Unfortunately it's $25 for the upgrade, but I won't be paying for it anytime soon - keep reading to find out why...

Here's a few of my complaints about 3.5.1 that were fixed in 3.6 (yeah!):

• Application Updates
• Pages can now be dragged and dropped between documents
• Added a feature to enable code to be placed in the header
• Duplicating a page now also duplicates the page’s attributes, including the sidebar
• Publishing and Export no longer use excessive amounts of memory

• Blog Updates
• Archive posts by Year option added
• Support for Multiple categories added
• The title of the post is now linked to it's permalink page
• Images added in the sidebar of the blog now display correctly in the archives

One of the outstanding issues (which has really bugged me for a while) is:
- Pasting in links appear correctly but do not work
though they claim they're working on this and other fixes, and will release an update "soon."

One serious downside to all of this is that Realmac redesigned their website, so you can no longer get to the Online Manual for RapidWeaver 3.5.  After discovering that and searching their website for a bunch of minutes, I find out that they have knowingly deleted the manual for 3.5 from their website FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS!!! Look at the post from Dan Counsell (founder of RealMac) - post #7 here. Yes, that's right, they deleted the manual for the version most people are using (3.5.x) and released a new version without a manual AT ALL!

How's that for encouraging loyal customers to upgrade? Also, it seems a fair number of people are having trouble with 3.6 (see RealMac's Questions Forum and Bugs Forum). Realmac better get things organized soon, or they're going to have a lot of frustrated RapidWeaver users looking for a new web development tool.

Way to go, Realmac Software. NOT.

Guess that's a sign that I should get an iPhone, right? We'll just have to see... If Apple decides to open up the iPhone for third-party application development, and it looks like that might be the case, the iPhone should be able to replace my Palm Tungsten E. If the iPhone can't replace my trusty Palm, then no iPhone for me.

According to a CNN article, the new USPS postage rates are making life more difficult and costly for junk mailers. Anything to cut down on junk mail is fine with me...