I felt it was time to upgrade my 12″ PowerBook from 512 to a nice healthy gig. Hawk suggested to me MemoryTogo. (I’m not linking for a reason) He had done business with them and felt they were a pretty good company.

I’d placed the order yesterday for about 144 dollars with shipping. I get a call from them this morning, saying I needed to verify my shipping address. You see my billing address and my shipping address differ, no big deal. They suggested I call my bank and have them add an Alternate address to my account, again, no big deal.

So as it turns out my bank doesn’t have any way of doing this. I’d have to actually change my account address then change it back. This takes five days… who knows why in this day and age, but five days nonetheless. I call back MemoryToGo explain to them my situation. They explain their policy to me, recently they have been experiencing charge backs. Apparently when the shipping and billing addresses don’t match the company can’t get their product back or their money back or something.

Okay well, I explained to them I’d given all my correct info, I’ll accept whatever risk. That turns out to be unacceptable. I’d either have to verify my shipping address or ship to my billing address. Both aren’t really options for me. A polite argument ensued as I’m sure Hawk, Ananth and the rest of the office can attest to.

I then got transferred to a manager. He asked me how far apart my shipping and billing address were, I knew almost automatically he wanted me to drive from one to another to pick it up. I explained to him I didn’t need to inconvenience myself any further by going out of my way for something I asked to be shipped to a specific place. We spoke for a few more minutes and then he told me he’d call back in 10 minutes at noon.

Well its one o’clock now. I haven’t heard back from him. I’ll update on the situation after lunch.

MemoryToGo, your policy is… to say the least stupid and inconvenient for your customers.

I’ve never experienced this in all my days of online purchasing, considering I have NEVER shipped anything to my billing address.

So if you’re looking for pointless hastle go do business with MemoryToGo!

Update #1: I have called back, apparently the manager has been in a meeting since noon. *rolls eyes* I was supposed to get a phone call at 7. I’m not really expecting one tonight. I have since done a little research on the site and I can’t seem to find the Term or Condition I agreed to that I am being forced to follow.

Update #2: I sold out.  As I saw it. I had 3 options.  First cancel my order and refund my money.  Second over night it to me at no cost to my billing address.  Finally ship it to my shipping address.  Apparently I forgot about this fourth option, ship it to your billing address with a 4 dollar discount.  I feel cheated on principle but I do just want my ram.

I’m sure most of you have already seen this over at Penny Arcade, but I thought it was worth pointing out here as well: a number of independent Mac developers have volunteered to donate all proceeds garnered on December 7th to Child’s Play. I think this is an incredibly cool thing for them to do, and heartily support it. If you’ve been on the fence with any number of neat Mac apps, tomorrow would be a really great time to give them a shot.

So, I get into work today, I pop open my PowerBook, check my email, browse a little digg and I see this article. Let me summarize. Scot Finnie is an idiot. He is a so called windows expert who decides to give several MacBooks a shot after being unhappy with Vista. That’s fine. Being a Windows power user myself, I am not really looking forward to how much Vista is going to suck, but as I am posting in AppleTalk on AppleGeeks, I won’t get into it.

A few fun quotes that I hope you’ll enjoy.

But my Linux experience, though not considerable, has helped me log in and out of root to change system settings on the Mac with relative ease (once I knew where to initiate the authentication).

So he’s had linux experience… and doesn’t know about terminal. A few months ago I was installing mythtv on kubuntu with NO linux experience and I knew about terminal. Scot, you’re a joke, buddy.

And I expect to wrap up with a final assessment of whether the Mac is a viable alternative for real people with real jobs.

Well, Scot, here I am at my real job, and last time I checked I’m a real person… using a Mac as my primary computer. Weird. Our office isn’t a mega huge corporation (thank god) but there are some windows based computers in the office that get along fine with our macs and visa versa.

In an odd little twist I went to the personal site of Scot Finnie. I won’t link it because I don’t want to give him traffic, just google it. His homepage is eh.. default.htm wow… I checked out his newsletter, eh. I think he develops his website in frontpage, ha who knows… .htm, this guy is at the bleeding edge of technology.

Professionalism aside, Scot add another t to your name and come talk to me.  I’d love to have a little chat with you about your outlandish and uneducated statements.

That’s just my scathing 2 cents for today.

I hate to shamelessly post a video like this… but its not stopping me at all.

The iphone… ah, perfection in cellular phone. I’m afraid not. We’ve all seen the rokr, a candy bar shaped… ugly phone that has itunes capable of holding 100 songs or so.

So this is what I’ve heard about the iphone… another candy bar. I hate to say this but the last time I owned a candy bar phone was in 10th grade. Its personal pref but… I mean look around are you using a candy bar phone? Yeah I thought not.

Next rumor. GSM only. Boo His. I’m on a cdma network, its called Verizon, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. Its probably the best network in and around DC, also I feel that it is the largest network, member wise.

So what do I suggest? I’d like to see the full screen 80 gig iPod capable of phone calls. Why you ask? Well, why not? I have an mp3 capable phone, I think integrating the two would be a logical progression and also would eliminate another device that I have to carry around. That’s just my opinion.  Then maybe I’ll buy it.

In other news…. here’s a list of apple’s black friday sales:

“Joy to the Wallet” sale only on black friday ‘06:

iMac: $898-$1958
MacBook: $998-$1398
.Mac: $68
iPod Nano (except Reds): $138-$228
iPod: $228-$318
Wireless Mighty Mouse: $58
Shure earphones: $78-$238
Contour iPod Cases: $14-$24
Belkin TuneBase FM: $58
JBL On Stage Micro: $78
JBL Spot Speakers: $108
LaCie Hard Drives: $148-$888
Incase Sling Pack: $48
Xtreme Mac Micro Memo Voice Recorder: $48
Sonic Impact Video-55 Display: $238
Nike+iPod Sport Kit: $24

Hi everybody… my name is Dave, I’m an unfortunate coworker of Hawk and Ananth. They asked me to write some Apple news so here I am writing Apple news…

Apple shares were up. This is mainly because analysts are predicting that 10.5 will beat out Vista. This on top of rumors of iPhone and strong iPod sales, as usual. So if you want to make a lot of money by some Apple stock, though if you take my advise and lose money, don’t come crawling to us.

Many of you have probably heard of Disco. There has been quite a lot of marketing for this app, and many even bought it on MacZOT sight unseen.

But lately, many people have had some not so nice things to say about Disco.

The interface is awash in lifeless grays, and the functionality isn’t all that attractive — it doesn’t do much more than the Finder. After playing with it for 20 minutes or so, I can’t say I was impressed. And the much-touted “smoke” feature really doesn’t seem very cool at all. It looks pretty cheezy and is clearly limited to a square box.

My recommendation: Don’t bother with Disco. There are a host of disc burning apps besides the 900lbs gorilla, Toast. Instead, try Burn. It’s open source, has a simple, standard looking UI, and best of all, is a non-smoker.

As a final note, check out this cool hack by Jonathan Wight. Warning: it’s a bit technical, but the movies definitely do impress :)