Lenovo: a fall from grace

I used to be very happy with my Thinkpad X60 Tablet, and was practically an evangelist for the Thinkpad line. Just in the past year I practically sold two systems, a laptop and an iPad-style tablet, for the company. However this good feeling only lasted until my latest purchase. As things stand now I am pretty certain that I will never buy Lenovo again.

My mistake was buying a Thinkpad X220i Tablet in August of 2011. Said laptop stopped working in November, when I tried to start it Windows crashed with a 0x00000e9 error (unspecified I/O error, but more specifically a hard disk problem). Whatever, these things happen. They sent me a set of startup disks (DVDs) to try and make sure the HD was the problem. Those startup disks didn’t work (couldn’t boot off any of them), so I called Lenovo again, they apologized (they’re a very apologetic company, to the point that it becomes annoying really), told me they would send me another set of startup DVDs.

So I waited… and waited, and waited. After a couple of weeks (today) I decided to call and see what was up. The first support call seemed to go well, until I got disconnected. So I called again. The lady took my case number, told me Lenovo had a tracking number for the disks, gave me the tracking number, but it was pretty clear that she was refusing to do anything else (wtf is up with that?). I look up the tracking info through purolator (the most useless delivery company IMHO but that’s another story) and it’s clear that the package was returned to Lenovo. Couldn’t the lazy lady have at least looked that up instead of just wasting my time?

So I call for the third time on that day, and finally I get to talk to someone who knows what he’s doing. He is sending me a new hard disk and recovery disks. Well, hopefully he is. You’ll excuse me for not holding my breath until they get here.

Now, if the problem were only the service, passe encore. However the X220i Tablet is a piece of junk. It feels cheap and flimsy, the weight is unevenly balanced, and the build quality is terrible — I can pull the battery in an out of its housing by a couple of millimeters when it’s in the locked position! What’s more, the touchscreen has never worked properly, and that’s kind of the point of owning a tablet PC. Why does the 5 year old X60T I have feel so much better and more solid? Is it perhaps because it’s an IBM-branded product?

I once heartily recommended Lenovo to friends and family, but I can no longer honestly do so. The quality of the company’s products and service has taken such a nosedive that it’s really not worth endorsing anymore. It’s a shame because Thinkpad used to be the brand to go to for a first-rate experience with laptops, but clearly they’ve taken the road well-travelled of cheaping out on the design, cheaping out on the manufacturing, and cheaping out on the service. All of which I wish I could say to Lenovo customer service, but try as I might I cannot find an actual customer service number for them anywhere. I guess that’s representative of the company’s recent attitude towards the people who give them money…

On giving advice to people in internet forums

Here’s an old story from the internet on why you shouldn’t bother giving advice in the first place…

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OP: “Help! HELP! I’m stuck in a well!!!”

Biggies 1-4: “Climb! Climb up and take our hands!”

OP: “I’m thinking I should dig… should I dig?”

Biggie 5: “NO! I was trapped in a well, and digging is a bad idea! Climb out!”

Biggies 6-8: “We’re lowering ropes! Take hold of a rope!”

Biggie 9: “I’ve even tied a harness to the end of this one!”

OP: “I can feel the ropes, but I don’t want to hold onto them… should I dig?”

Biggie 10: “No! If you dig, you’ll hit water, and then you’ll be proper fucked. I should know, I almost drowned.”

OP: “I dug a little bit just now, and I haven’t hit water. I’m gonna keep digging…”

Biggies 11-18: “No! Climb! Climb out!”

OP: “Guys, I’m seriously stuck in this well! Help! HELP!!!”

Biggie 19: “I was trapped in a well once. It took me two years, but I managed to build a climbing machine that pulled me to safety out of a well bucket and a pocket watch. I’m dropping the blueprints, extra buckets, and an assortment of pocket watches.”

Biggie 20: “I’ve engineered a jet-pack that will rocket you to safety. Stay where you are and we’ll lower it down!””

OP: “Thanks for your help, guys. I’m gonna keep digging. I’ll find the Mines of Moria and I’ll just walk to the surface.”

**Biggies 1-20 piss in the well**

Biggie 21: “Guys, seriously… stop pissing in the well.”

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My first Porsche…

This year I’ve become middle-aged and as I am a man who has money in greater measure than sense I’ve decided to treat myself to a Porsche… Design pipe, model 909 in black to be precise.

Porsche Design 909 Pipe in Black

It really is a lovely piece of work. The “fins” on the bowl are (by design) reminescent of the fins on an air-cooled engine, which as all petrol-heads know is what Porsche really built its reputation on.

Don’t its ultra-modern exterior fool you into thinking that this is made of some experimental material: Porsche design pipes are made of good, tried-and-true briar. It’s a fairly large and heavy pipe; I really don’t feel comfortable holding it with my teeth alone while I smoke, for fear of cracking the stem. It’s definitely a pipe made more for a pipe smoker of experience; smoke this too quickly and the bottom of the bowl will get quite warm, although not enough to burn you of course. In that sense I guess I could see it as a pipe which reinforces slower and calmer smoking habits. Besides that, well, just look at it. I am pleased as Punch with my purchase.

Porsche Design makes four models of pipe, two straight-stems  (one with a round bottom and the other square) and two curved-stems. The sticker price on all models in the range is in the mid-400s, although you will find new ones on Ebay for a lot less. They are available in two wood tones, two titanium schemes, and two black versions (the Spirit version has gold metal rings at the stem instead of silver). It’s definitely an excellent addition to one’s pipe-rack.

Whatever you thought you knew about the 2008 bank bailout is wrong…

…because the reality is over 10 times worse than what was made public at the time. In fact a total of $7.7 trillion in loan guarantees and lending limits were issued by the Fed, which makes TARP seem like a trifle in comparison.

A solution to a fabled problem

We’ve all heard the story in school — when chess was invented in India the local King (they had lots of kings back then apparently) was so impressed by the game that he offered its creator whatever he wanted. The man (who was rumored to be wise but somewhat of a smart-ass) responded that all he wanted were a few grains of rice. The number of grains was to be determined as follows: using a chessboard, place 1 grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, 8 on the fourth, etc. To which the King immediately assented, until one of his ministers told him that not only was this more than he had to give, but was in fact more grain that was produced by the entire known world at the time.

So, being somewhat of a smart-ass myself and being in the middle of learning the python programming language I figured I’d come up with a neat and efficient way to calculate exactly what that number was. It’s not that difficult. Basically because the chessboard has 64 squares, the number you’re looking for is the sum of the solutions for 20 through 263.

Since Python is loosely-typed you don’t have to worry about declaring the right type of integer to hold the final result, which is astronomically big. Here’s the code for it:

numTotal = 0;
for numExponent in range (0,64):
    numTotal += 2**numExponent
    print "Total at", numExponent, ": ",numTotal
print "All done."

Note: even though I declared the range 0 to 64, 64 is not itself included.

So what’s the final result? It’s 18446744073709551615. 18 quintillion, 445 quadrillion, 744 trillion, 73 billion, 709 million, 551 thousand and 615. Quite a large number indeed and assuredly more than the King could deliver.