Is there anything as exciting as getting a new electronic gadget to play with? Alright, so there are hundreds of things that are more exciting (winning the lottery, for example). However, at the moment that you have that new piece of technology in your hand, it’s like Christmas morning. Unless, of course, that piece of equipment busts…which brings me to our stories for today.

Many of you will remember all of the problems that I had with the Treo 700p in late 2006 and through the winter/summer of 2007. These problems are so widespread in the Treo 700p owner-base that many disgruntled owners have taken to posting their problems on the official Palm blog.

My last experience with Palm was sending in my busted 700p for the third time for a third weird technical failure (the touchscreen stopped working and the phone stalled on the welcome screen). That was last summer. For their part, Verizon Wireless (another bunch of crooks) sent me another replacement Treo 700p and it sat in my desk drawer, untouched, until about 2 weeks ago. It was at that time that I decided that I could no longer let this $250 – $500 piece of equipment just sit there and collect dust.

So I switched back to the Treo 700p. Stupid move.

The phone had a bunch of technical problems to start with in terms of incoming calls. With the help of an online forum, though, I was able to fix that problem (why should the end-user be fixing technical glitches). As you can tell, I wanted this thing to work so I went the extra mile. And then let me give the devil his due – the phone worked fine for about 10 days. Then, out of the blue, the headset connector stopped working. In other words, I would plug my earpiece into the phone and while I could hear the person on the other end, they couldn’t hear me. For a guy who drives at least 2 hours per each day as a part of his commute, that is prime communication time for me to catch up on a bunch of my personal relationships. If I’m silenced for those 2 hours, forget about it!

And once again here I am…I’ve have another broken Treo 700p and I don’t know what to do with it. Sure, I could go through the motions with Verizon Wireless again and receive a replacement phone in the mail, but the truth is that I want nothing to do with another 700p. I could go through the motions with Palm again and have them tell me that the problem is on the service provider’s end and not theirs and that there is nothing they can do. Quite frankly, I’m not interested in playing that game. I’m not interested in playing any of these games, really. I want my money back or I want a free upgrade, period. Verizon Wireless refuses to give any refund (even a discounted one) on faulty equipment – even if you’re going in for your 4th replacement phone. Palm won’t even listen to the argument. Could I bitch and moan and argue for an upgrade? Sure, but that does not guarantee that I’ll be getting an upgrade so I’m not willing to put in the effort.

Any advice out there on what to do with this faulty piece of garbage? I tried to sell it on eBay for half of what it’s worth and even THAT didn’t work!

As for my other technical problems, I don’t know if any of you heard about this, but Activision released Guitar Hero III for the Nintendo Wii with no surround sound support. Dopes. I have my GH3 disc in to Activision and I am awaiting a replacement. Not that it matters if I receive the replacement disc right away…my Nintendo Wii is back in the shop! Some of you may recall that my Wii had a faulty graphics chip. Well, I sent it in to be fixed in December and instead of fixing it, they sent me what had to be a refurbished Wii – complete with a broken door on the top of the machine and scratches on the side (and a new serial number). I procrastinated calling them to complain until about 3 weeks ago. When I did call, however, they were extremely friendly and helpful on the phone. They sent out a shipping slip right away and I sent them the refurbished Wii for repairs. The repaired product should be coming back to me this week sometime.

When I have kids, I think I’m just going to give them wooden blocks to play with! No worries about lead paint, no worries about something breaking, and hey – they may even learn something!

Hey everyone. I had to delay adding some entries to the Journal since I just completed a major switch from a third party hosting service for this website to my in-house, Usable Web Solutions hosting service. This will afford us a much cheaper annual rate (nearly slicing it in half or making it free, depending on your view) and it gives me more control of how TBL is organized and operated.

I’m looking forward to being on the Usable Web Solutions hosting service and if you’re reading this, then the switch that I planned for over the last 72 hours went off without a hitch!

While I was busy the last few weeks, Joe’s Journal eclipsed 100,000 spam comments captured by Askimet. Talk about pathetic, right? Not only are there losers in this world that are sitting by a computer hitting the “send” button as spam, but there are uber-losers who create software robots to do this automatically!

Talk about people who need a life. As I write this we’re at 102,000+ spam comments. And that’s my sad commentary on sad people.