You’ll need:

• An espresso T-Disc
• A hot chocolate T-Disc
• Either a latte or cappuccino creamer T-Disc

1. You’ll need a large mug for this – one of those coffee-house sized mugs will do, or a tall travel mug
2. Brew the espresso disc. When completed, remove the disc and carefully (the pod will be HOT) cut away the barcode.
3. Carefully place the barcode over the scanner window, then insert the chocolate T-disc. If you see all 4 lights flashing, the barcode isn’t properly aligned. Once you’ve got the “auto” light, brew the chocolate.
4. Learned a better way – just brew the chocolate pod normally, but watch the product coming out. When the water goes clear, press the button again to stop the water
5. Insert the creamer disc. While the water is heating, you may want to stir the espresso and chocolate together to make sure they mix well
6. Enjoy!

All this does is make the chocolate disc brew using less water, so you don’t dilute out the chocolate or the espresso.

(more after jump)

Lately, I decided to play around with it a little more. First, I tried to ensure the compass was calibrated (according to the manual, it should be done with every battery change). No dice – calibration sequence froze on the first step. Reset calibration? No dice. Advanced manual calibration? Still no luck. Ok, strike 1. Next up, I take a look at the weather stuff – the geek in me figures it’d be interesting to see what the air pressure does on a flight somewhere. Turns out, the unit isn’t logging temperature or pressure data either.

So, I e-mail Thales tech support via the web, figuring this would be a straightforward warranty service, as the unit’s got either a 1 or 2 year warranty. Takes ~2 working days to get a response. In one of the e-mails, their customer service rep indicates that I’ll need a receipt in order to get the unit repaired. Naturally, I push back – who gets a full-fledged purchase receipt with their Christmas gifts? Gift receipts often don’t even have a description of the item – just a barcode for store lookup.

CSR tells me to go ahead and send the unit in along with a written statement indicating that the unit was given as a gift new in 12/04. So, I sent it off, and got an e-mail 5 days later telling me that the unit will need to be replaced at a cost of $130 + S/H. Ths unit has not been subjected to abuse of any kind – it’s spent most of its life in a padded case on my desk at home, actually!), so this is unquestionably a manufacturing defect.

The unit costs ~$200 new. I know CostCo as a policy caps their markup at 15%, so they bought it from Thales for no less than $170. The manufacturer markup on consumer electronics is more than 25%, so they’re trying to make a profit on defective merchandise.

But, I figured there was one thing I could try. I went over to CostCo, and they were able to print out the transaction record from their systems that shows when the unit was bought, purchase price, method of payment, etc. They can even see that Marcie bought a box of Honey Nut Cheerios at the same time. So, thumbs up to CostCo for helping me out on this one. I called Magellan to get a fax number to send the receipt to – spent 30 minutes on hold.

Fortunately, the transaction record was sufficient, and I got a new unit shipped back a week later. Still the whole experience just rubbed me the wrong way. Requiring a receipt is a dumb policy, especially in the day and age of Photoshop. I could have taken an existing receipt from CostCo, scanned it in, and edited in the right information. What’s even more irritating is that this makes me feel like Thales / Magellan doesn’t stand behind their products. It’s pretty clear that this was a manufacturing defect in the unit, as the compass/weather system most likely never worked in the unit, based on how I can see the heading update in the new unit while standing still now. Not only am I pissed off and not going to be a repeat customer, but I’m not going to recommend Magellan GPS units to anyone.

Note to Magellan, if you ever see this – here’s how this transaction should have gone:
1) Customer Service should have responded within 1 business day of my original contact. First contact was a waste anyhow, as all they did was request information I’d already provided in the web form (and was even in the body of the e-mail they sent me!), so in reality, it took ~5 business days to get an RMA issued.
2) If I say it’s a gift, take my word for it. I shouldn’t need to bend over backwards to produce proof of warranty. I was lucky that this came from CostCo, and that they could look up the purchase information in-store
3) Phone service – 30 minute hold times are unacceptable, especially without providing feedback as to how long I’d be waiting.

To their credit, once Magellan accepted my receipt as proof of purchase, the replacement unit was on the way within 2 days.

In short, customers should not have to jump through hoops, before or after the sale.

Instead of getting repeat business (because face it, I’m a gadget guy – someday I’ll probably want to upgrade to a better GPS) from me, I’ll buy a unit from Garmin, TomTom, etc, and recommend others do the same.

Had a good two weeks in Germany. I think I got a few decent pictures which will be up on the gallery sometime soon, got to see some great sights, ate some good food, made some new friends, and even got a little work done.

The only problem with being online right now is that there’s really no one online to chat with at the moment – it’s just now getting to be Saturday morning back in Chicago. So, it’s just me and the friendly skies…

Fortunately, WordPress does have a pretty good system for moderating comments. If you put a link in the comment, it automatically goes to moderation. Then, if it has a banned word, IP address, etc., it gets automatically /dev/null’d.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Movie physics are of course not to be confused with the cartoon rules of physics I’ve blogged about previously.

Movies that get “good physics” reviews? Road to Perdition, Seven Years in Tibet. Movies that suck? Well, Star Wars Episode 1, Armageddon (I know Marcie, you still like it ). I’m adding 10.5 to the list.

Turns out that maybe Mom and Dad should’ve gotten me one:

Video Games Enhance Surgical Skills

All those years on the couch playing Nintendo and PlayStation appear to be paying off for surgeons. Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games.

Buy your kids a video game, and they might become doctors one day. If you don’t, they go on to do despicable things like food engineering

Blog Tips Archives

Part of tip 15 – “get involved in other forums” is how I get something like 80% of my traffic, looking at my logs (the rest is friends and family). Between iPod-related stuff, WordPress (the software behind this blog) and a few others, I get a lot of inbound traffic, just from a simple link like this: Ben’s Weblog

The other important one to me is having good content (in tip #11) and design. I don’t claim that every post has deep analysis or anything – sometimes I just see a funny article and want to pass it on. I’ve had over 1000 visitors to my iPod car install article, which is a pretty good example of how having good content will attract traffic.