Dan Hagen

On the morning of December 24th I was excited to hear the UPS man ringing my doorbell with a new CPU cooling fan. After retrieving the package from my porch and cutting it open, my heart sunk as I realized that a large section of the fan was crushed into about seven different pieces. Crushed. I’ve always known that UPS isn’t the greatest shipping company by any means, given the fact that any package delivered by them looks like it was carried not in the truck, but dragged behind the truck. Nonetheless, I have never actually received an item victim to severe carrier damage until now. I didn’t rage though. There’s many reasons why I order from Newegg, and one of them is their customer service. I would simply go straight to my account on the Egg and request an RMA.

I had an interesting set-back though. When I specified that the problem was due to carrier damage, I was told that Newegg did not accept RMAs due to carrier damage and I would have to call customer service over the phone instead. With their offices closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, I had to wait until Sunday before I could make the phone call.

After clearly explaining to the customer service rep that it looked like carrier damage, she was swifted in issuing an RMA process for me. Which is funny, because the website clearly stated they don’t do RMAs for carrier damage, but I guess they do when you talk to support one-on-one. Whatever. I trust that customer support knows what they’re doing and I should probably have a new fan early next week.

I actually already have the exact same fan, which I ordered last spring, and it’s running in my computer right now. It’s a Startech 70mm “CPU replacement fan” that works perfectly if you want to keep your stock AMD heatsink but replace the crappy fan. This is one of my few complaints with AMD’s stock coolers. They work fine, but the fans always turn out to sound like shit. This is why I bought the Startech fan last spring, and it’s worked great, but I think I’ve played with it so much that it’s beginning to sound crappy now. It’s the loudest fan in my system and it produces noises that it shouldn’t. I’ve reinserted it about ten times and reapplied new linseed oil and stickers to the back of it about ten times as well, so it’s probably my fault. Once I get a new unadulterated fan I will simply swap it while refraining from doing anything else to it, and then put my current fan into my AM3-socket cooler computer downstairs which still uses the fan that came with the CPU.

Speaking of, I should probably sell that computer anyway, since it’s not getting any use and I could use the money.  Readers, if you need or you know anyone else who needs a new computer, let me know. You know who you are. All two of you.

I stayed up late last night playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a deep, visceral horror adventure title. Then I went to sleep and dreamed about a similar game. In the game I played a man on the run from someone, through a building, through industrious corridors. I found the high school library where I met a cute girl. We picked candy bars and snacks off the shelves and threw them at each other. The game had a physics engine. She talked to me and I talked to her. When I told her something, she responded realistically. I coughed and she listened. She laughed and conveyed emotion. Perhaps this is possible through some sort of speech-to-text algorithm. It was a surreal experience.

Christmas, Channukah, and so on. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand the suicidally-cheerful tone, and I can’t stand how every single artist feels they have to re-record Christmas music into overdone and overproduced remakes. We don’t need another rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. 38 different arrangements are enough.

If I wanted to listen to Nat King Cole sing about chestnuts or Adam Sandler sing about Channukah, I’ll buy their shitty albums in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart.