It’s not excellent service. But it was service in the end.

My scanner died, after years of trusty service. So I went to Harvey Norman armed with a catalogue of a basic model printer and scanner.

The salesguy was good. He convinced me to upgrade to a better machine. And to move from HP to Canon. So I brought it home, battling the traffic, and got ready to install.

There was so much packaging, it was incredible. Literally dozens of pieces of little red sticky tape, holding the printer together.

And then I turned it on. Error 6a80.

Hm. According to the installation menu, it was supposed to show a menu, letting me choose my language. But hey, at least it powered up.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt, and installed the ink cartridges. Powered on and off. Still got error 6a80.

Started Googling. Hm. It’s not in the error manual, and there were a significant number of people who seemed to get this problem on various Canon printer models. The two causes were generally paper jam, or foreign object inside the printer. And if this didn’t help, to get it serviced.

Well I hadn’t got as far as putting paper in, and there were no objects inside. I’d wasted over an hour stuffing around, and it was a new machine. They’re supposed to work out of the box. And there was no way I was going to wait for a brand new machine to get a service call. Not if they had sold a faulty product. This was going to be a return.

So I rang Harvey Norman. Got put on hold several times. Got passed around several times. The tech department wasn’t answering the phone. So they took my details, and said the tech department would ring back. They didn’t.

Hot, unhappy mum. Not recommended.

So the next day, I battled the traffic again, and set out to return the machine, by hook or crook. Maybe with a little attitude.

Tech guy one wasn’t much help. I was polite, despite being grumpy inside. But tech guy two had a Canon printer at home. And he said those lovely words: It’s not you – it’s a lemon.

They replaced it with a new one. That’s the way it should be. So I wasn’t going to be unhappy with HN after all.

I have hardware issues. Machines break when I touch them. I much prefer software – at least those are problems that can be fixed.

So I got the new printer home, and this time it did what it was supposed to do – it powered on and came up with a menu asking my preferred language. Success.

Almost. The installation CD wouldn’t run. Apparently I didn’t have admin rights to my own laptop. Even though Vista agreed that I was a member of the Admin group. And the usually faithful “right-click and run as administrator” didn’t work.

So I did it the old-fashioned way. Connected the printer to my laptop, and let it source the driver online and auto-install.

Printed the standard file: “hello world”.

Now to try scanning….

In the last two weeks I’ve been having a lot of FireFox crashes. Strangely they have happened 9 out of 10 times whilst using Google AdWords.

Not what you expect from two leading software providers.

But the absolute winner for me has to be Macromedia Dreamweaver. Without fail, if I import an STE (site definition) from our standard library at work, it will crash. I take care to do each click slowly, and ever since I move to Vista Premium this year, Dreamweaver has crashed without fail doing an STE import.

It usually takes about 3 or 4 attempts to import the STE. Maybe it need to warm up the wiring. Doesn’t make sense.

Vista has caused a few problems for me:

My old HP scanner doesn’t have a driver for Vista, so it’s basically a piece of junk now.
My original Canon IXUS camera doesn’t have a driver for Vista.

I finally managed to download a version of Palm Desktop for Vista, to run with my old Palm m505.
However the Documents to Go program that runs for Vista, doesn’t cater for the old version of Palm OS I am running, so I had to ditch that.
Luckily the Adobe Reader for Palm worked, so I can still copy PDFs from my laptop to my Palm, so I can read them on the bus on the way to work.
And Avantgo still works, so I can download the Sydney Morning Herald titles onto my Palm, again for the bus.
Not a lot of memory left though.

I’m dreaming of a luxury HTC Touch SmartPhone though. Feel welcome to drop one my way, if you’ve got a free one.

I was updating my online shopping site, to get rid of dead links and add new shops, and I ended up peeking at all the shops.

I have to say this page of cool gadgets tickled my fancy – a dot matrix watch, flashing t-shirt and LED belt buckle were sadly tempting. For the kids, of course.

And the margarita kit at Fun Gifts looked so easy I could be tempted away from my home-grown frozen strawberry margaritas. Almost.

Latest Buy was making me waver between the desktop clock/digitalphoto/thermometer/calendar, and the USB missile launcher and Equaliser T-shirt again. Guess I’m doomed to an electronic Tshirt at this rate.

I finally got my first iPod, courtesy of frequent flyer points from a few years back. So until last week I had a cheap radio/CD player in the kitchen with really bad speakers. It really didn’t inspire the best cooking experience.

 I was tempted to use my son’s old speakers connected to my iPod, on top of the freezer, but I didn’t like the idea of missing out on radio. Sometimes you need to hear the new stuff. And they were 20 year old speakers.

I went to Myer and asked if there were any speakers that catered for radio and iPod. No, can’t be done, said the confident young guy. Too much interference.

 I went to the Apple store and asked for their advice. Get yourself a good sound system, and use the iTrip to connect the iPod.

Well we’d tried tuning my son’s iPod to the car stereo using an iTrip a few years back but gave up out of frustration. It wasn’t the greatest car trip. But I bought an iTrip anyway. And still haven’t spent the time in the car to find a clear frequency.

But casually walking through David Jones the other day, I saw a very affordable radio/iPod speaker set by Cygnet that also charges your iPod. I thought about it, did some research online, and decided that this was probably the solution I was looking for. I went back to DJs and bought it, and it works wonderfully.

Of course there are other solutions, like Creative’s Zen Vision MP3/Video/Radio player, but I was hooked on the iPod thing, now that I’ve got one.

I just finished reading Time Magazine’s top inventions of 2005 – a little late, as it gets passed to me from my father-in-law in a pile a few weeks after he’s finished with them.

The magazine’s top nomination was for the cloning of a dog. Woof.

At Time.com, there is a list of the top inventions as voted by online readers, with the Fukuda Automatic Door coming first, followed by the stunning Lifestraw, a personal water purification straw. You can check it out at lifestraw.com.

The ones with the most practical use for me were:
- Roomba – a robot vacuum cleaner
- Sony’s Ebook Reader

The roomba is apparently available already in Australia, that can sense stairs and basically do all your vacuuming for you. And apparently it happily copes with dog hair, which is the bane of my existence. My beautiful gold labrador just has to walk through the room for it to be absolutely covered with dog hairs. It doesn’t look so bad on the cream carpet (apart from the footmarks and the red dye from where he peed on the red leather pouf), but on the kitchen floor, it constantly looks hairy. Not good, Jan. So I’m definitely saving up for a Roomba this year. Along with everything else.

Sony’s Reader was apparently a hit, because the screen is made from an electronic paper that makes it look almost as clear as paper. Not being backlit, it reduces glare, which can strain the eyes. It’s about the size of a paperback, and shows one page at a time.

Personally, I’d almost kill for an electronic music display device. Currently when I play the piano, my old much-loved music books are propped open with a diary on each side, to stop the pages from flipping open as I play. And then when I try to change pages I have to quickly rebalance the diaries, usually dropping them, and half the time the whole book falls on the floor.

As I write this, I did a search on Google for electronic sheet music display, and found the Music Pad Pro Plus.

It sounds like heaven. An electronic touch screen (or you can use foot pedals) to turn pages that can store 1000s of pieces of sheet music.

The only downsides I can see are price ($1200US), weight (around 4 lbs), and my preference to have two pages open at a time. Although it says you can use landscape mode to have two sheets displayed, I wonder how easy they would be to read.

Oh well. Maybe one day I’ll win the lottery, and have every gadget I could ever want.

And a new kitchen.

cheers.