The latest issue of Consumer Reports validates my previous rant on Fry's Electronics. Fry's placed dead last in places to shop for electronics, despite having an acknowledged wide selection. Their customer service was rated "well below average." Oddly, their checkout was also below average. I find the checkout system at Fry's quite efficient: one line feeds into many registers. It does take forever for them to get the rebate forms -- and it seems that everything at Fry's has a rebate tied to it -- but the overall experience is much better than Best Buy, where I invariably get behind someone with an unmarked, unknown item.

But I see that I'm not the only one who finds Fry's customer-hostile attitude a good reason to stay out of their stores.

In the aftermath of the election I've been thinking about patriotism and the USA. It seems that the current definition of a patriotic person is one who "supports our troops." Well I support them in the sense that I don't want to see them get killed or maimed. I certainly don't think they belong in Iraq, but that leads some people to think that I'm not "patriotic." On the contrary, I think that the United States, with its establishments of elections, free speech, freedom of religion, and a (mostly) free press, is one of the real pinnacles of human society. There are many problems, to be sure, but the core values of this country are stunningly good.

So back to this war thing. War should be a desperate measure. War should mean that you have tried everyting, nothing has worked, you are backed into a corner, and you are now ready to send your country's young men and women to death. And along the way you are going to kill untold thousands of the enemy, be they combatants or not. World War II was a desperate war. Everybody fought. FDR's son was a Marine Raider in the Pacific. Churchill's son fought in North Africa. They stood a very real chance of being killed. People at home had blackouts at night, they gave up meat, gasoline, nylons, and rubber. Cars were not manufactured. True desperation. We don't see that today. What sacrifice have the people at home made? What members of the Bush administration or of Congress have sons and daughters in harm's way in Iraq?

The fact that there is no sacrifice going on should indicate that this war was not necessary. It was not desperation that brought us to war, it was convenience and profit. That is wrong.

A true patriot stands up and defends the core values of his or her country. That's what John Kerry did when he returned from Vietnam. Incredibly, I have seen criticisms of Kerry's behavior -- that somehow he was wrong for criticizing a war about which he had first-hand knowledge. Who better to criticize it? The man volunteered, did his duty, and saw that the situation in Vietnam was a MCF. And he came home and talked about it. W, on the other hand, hid out in the National Guard. No disrespect to the Guard, many Guardsmen are on active duty in Iraq and it's an honorable post. And if I'd been of age during Vietnam I would've done just about anything to avoid going. But then I never wanted to be president, and I surely never wanted to send other young men and women off to fight a war of convenience.

How do people do it? How do people live in giant homes, drive expensive cars, buy every gadget known to man, and not go bankrupt?

I have a good income, I make low six figures. I think that's a good salary, but maybe I'm showing my age. My wife works, but she teaches, an occupation that is not financially rewarding. Nevertheless we do have two incomes. We live in a very nice home, but half of it was paid for by a chunk of Sun stock I sold when it was still worth something (that stock was obtained when the little company I was working for got sucked into the Sun borg). I drive a Toyota Tacoma (cost about $18K). My wife drives a 2000 Acura TL (cost about $30K). Nice cars both, but not extravagent. We have a 27" TV. We have a 3 year old PC at home. Standard stuff.

I look around and see people buying $700K homes (this is Southern California). They drive $50K SUVs or BMWs. They have 60" plasma TVs, three computers, a couple of TiVOs, a new cell phone every three months. How do they do it? I'm not jealous, really, just curious. Are they in debt up to their eyeballs? Or are salaries just a lot higher than I'm thinking they are?

At my new job we're using Office 2003, my first exposure to this version. I've been using Outlook since Christ was a corporal (that is to say, I used to use Microsoft Mail, then graduated to the first release of Exchange with it's weird instantiation of Mail, then on to Outlook through its various versions). There has always been something missing in Outlook. First it was the lack of IMAP support. I asked for years to have IMAP included because I wanted to talk to an Exchange server and an IMAP server without having two different clients. When MS added IMAP to Outlook, the let you choose one or the other. Boo. Finally in XP you could actually have two mailboxes in the same Outlook session, one talking IMAP and one talking to Exchange. That was a nice step forward.

Another cool feature in Outlook was the ability to use it as your local explorer. So you could navigate the directory tree, search for files, and launch apps all from within Outlook. An obscure feature, I'm sure, but one that I liked a lot. Well imagine my surprise when I went to do this in OL 2003 and found that I could not. They actually removed this feature. Why would they do that? It's innocous enough, isn't it? Sigh.

I've been involved in email software since 1990 and I'm still looking for that elusive perfect email client. I've tried a lot of 'em: MS Mail, MS Mail for Mac, cc:Mail, VMS Mail, PMDF Mail, elm, pine, Mulberry, the aforementioned Outlook versions, Netscape/Mozilla, and on and on. The search goes on.

I have to rant about this somewhere and my /. journal seems like a reasonable place to do it. I am getting thoroughly disgusted by poor software quality backed up by poor support. I'm not talking about the usual flames like "Windows is full of security holes" or "all tech support has moved to India and I can't get any help." I'm talking about would appear on the surface to do things the right way. A company that embraces the open source model. A company that I suspect at least a few /.'ers are customers of. It's called Slim Devices, a company that makes a gizmo called a Squeezebox that lets you stream music over your wireless network.

Now this is a very cool idea indeed, which is why I bought one. The hardware works well, but the software exhibits the usual problems of modern software. I don't know why software companies cannot seem to take testing seriously. Disciplined programming is a thing of the past, and now we get "release early, release often." Is that really better for the consumer? Is it really better for me to get a half-assed release of the server that may or may not work? Then I get to report the bugs that should have been found in the first place. If it's true open software that I am not paying real money for, OK, I'll sign up for this. But when I send money to Slim Devices I expect gear that works.

Now on to the support. As you can tell, I've had some problems with the server software. The simple problems got fixed quickly, and I got the impression that the support would be solid. This is certainly backed up by the discussion list, which is a veritable love-fest for the Slim Devices crew. But when I submitted a hard problem, the truth became evident. Slim, like a lot of software companies, fixes the easy problems quickly and lets the hard problems lie. The reasoning for this is obvious. If you fix the easy problems quickly, you create a reputation for "good support". Customers contact you with their problem, you respond quickly, the customer is happy because they got a quick response, the support tech is happy because they are solving lots of problems in a short time. All is good. Hard problems are bad because they take longer to fix, meaning that the customer gets upset, and the support tech is forced to go to the engineering guys, which he doesn't like to do because engineering would rather be working on fun new things than debugging their old crappy code. Answer: ignore the problems. You'll get a few unhappy customers, but you'll preserve your reputation for "good support."

Expectations for software are so low that people are generally happy to get software that pretty much works. They expect bugs, they expect to be misled by marketing that promises things that aren't there yet, they expect no real documentation. You can lay a big chunk of this problem at the feet of Microsoft, who have long over-promised and under-delivered. But let's step it up as consumers. Don't buy that new release if the old one works well for you. Return software that doesn't work. Complain in public forums. It's all we can do.

I went to a friend's wedding this weekend and it got me thinking about wedding gifts and registries. Now if you are fresh out of college (or still in college, for that matter), you're poor, in debt, and have nothing, then I get the wedding registry. You are starting a new life and could use things like dishes, pots and pans, bath towels, etc. This brings me to my friend's wedding...

Both he and the bride are in their late 30's, well-educated, and well-employed. Translation: they got money. And they've been living on their own for quite a while now. Do they really need a wedding registry? We bought 'em a martini set, cuz that's kind of cool, but you should have seen some of the stuff on that registry. Vera Wang china? Who knew?

Isn't asking for stuff pretty tacky? I know the idea of the registry is so that you don't wind up with twelve toasters, but can't you just say "toaster" on your registry instead of "$500 Bang & Olufsen Toaster"? Calling out specific brands and items bugs me. It's a gift horse, don't look it in the mouth.

I'm sure that most /.'ers that live in the western US know about Fry's Electronics. For those of you who don't live around here, Fry's is something of a geek's paradise: a giant "big box" store that sells everything from motherboards to washing machines to Mountain Dew. Typically geeks love Fry's because of the massive selection and good prices. They are reknowned for running loss leader ads in major newspapers, and indeed selected buys can be very good.

However it's all about price, and not about service. I've decided that Fry's could not care less about the individual consumer. I purchased a laptop (a Compaq Presario 3050) at Fry's in May of 2003. In December I spilled some coffee on it and it died. No problem with the disk, but the screen was blank and the neither the wired nor the wireless network adapters would work. I had purchased the $300 extended warranty when I bought the computer, so I trucked it back to Fry's and dropped it off. They gave me a loaner, but it was not a Compaq, it was a Fujitsu. Not a bad machine, but not as capable as the 3050 that I owned. So I spent the several hours required to configure the Fujitsu to my needs, and waited for the Compaq to be repaired.

And waited. And waited. Finally, after about 8 weeks I called for an update. Nobody answered the service line, so I left a message to call me back. Nobody did. So I called again, same deal. This was repeated three times before I finally got a human on the phone, who simply told me that the computer was "at the manufacturer" and would be done "soon."

Another week passed, and I called back for an update. Hey, my computer was back. Come and get it! I started to prepare the Fujitsu for return -- backing up all my data before wiping the disk -- when Fry's called me to say that the laptop was not fixed. They would need to send it back to Compaq.

Another six weeks later, and the computer was finally returned. I had to pay $620 to get it back, and they had wiped the hard drive. Luckily I had my data, but there was no reason for them to have done this. Plus, here's how the system work at Fry's when you return your loaner and get your box back:

1. Stand in line at "reception" to get your loaner tagged when you enter the store.

2. Stand in line at the service counter to get a rep.

3. Rep goes away for about 10 minutes to find your system. Brings it back so you can power it on and check it out.

4. If it checks out OK, you get to go stand in the returns line to return you loaner.

5. Go back to service and get in invoice.

6. Take your invoice to checkout to pay your service fee.

7. Go back to service to get your laptop.

8. Stand in line at exit to have them inspect your laptop and receipt.

Needless to say, I was not happy with the process. In the end I had to pay $620 since the warranty did not cover "liquid damage." I also received a laptop that had been wiped, and is missing the "sleep switch" (the switch that indicates the lid is down. I tried to register my dissatisfaction on Fry's web page, but the comment gizmo wouldn't work for me using Mozilla. So I wrote a letter teh old fashioned way. I actually got a response, but it said that the manager couldn't call me because he "didn't have my phone number." That's laughable, since home, cell, and work numbers all appear on my service receipt.

So what I take away from this is that Fry's is all about the low price and selection. If you want to take a chance, and feel that the low price is worth it, then you should shop there. If you expect any sort of consideration as a customer, forget it.