Rob Hayes's dashboard

twice now I have closed my new macbook pro and stuck it in my bag and when I got home and pulled it out it was so hot i could barely touch it. I pull it out and plug it in and after about the minute the fan starts to slowly ramp up. Clearly the processor is not shutting down when I close the lid, but it only happens very intermittently. Any idea what I should do?

Oy, ordered some toys for my kids on December 6 and just found out that half of the shipment won't arrive until December 26. And I had to jump through hoops with customer service to figure out that they won't arrive in time...they didn't bother to let me know on their own.

I never use GSFN for rants but forgive me this time. Yes, they will refund my delivery fees but c'mon. Retailers are going to have enough trouble staying afloat this holiday season....do you really think it helps to provide such horrible customer service.

Stay away from this company until they get their s*** together.

I sold a car with an XM radio in it a few months ago. I had paid with a check for a three year contract, but knew I had a few months left on it so not worth the time I would spend on hold to see if I could get a $40 refund.

Big mistake.

I received a couple of invoices from XM and, of course, ignored them. I knew I hadn't given a credit card and hadn't signed an auto-renewing contract (or any contract, for that matter). Then a few days ago I received an invoice from XM "collections" saying I owed them ~$150 for a year subscription.

Huh?

So I picked up the phone and made the call. On my vacation, of course, since I have no time during their business hours to do such things.

Waited on hold for about 15 minutes for a rep. Once she came on, I explained I had sold the car, yada yada, and that I wanted them to stop sending me invoices. No problem, she was happy to cancel my account after trying to upsell me on some other products. So all I owed them was $16.39 and I would receive a bill for that balance. I explained that there was no balance, I had let my account run out and had not agreed to an auto-renewing plan. She explained that was true, which is why they sent out a (watch for it) "welcome letter" explaining how I would be charged automatically at the end of this contract.

At this point I am explaining to myself in an internal debate that the sixteen bucks is not worth the time it is going to take me to solve this, but unfortunately I never listen to myself.

20 minutes on hold later I am talking to a supervisor, who is explaining to me that yes, I never signed a contract but that they had sent me a letter after I had signed up explaining that unless I informed them that I did not agree to the terms of their non-signed contract within three months of receiving the letter, which would include me canceling the service (and ripping the radio out of the dash, I suppose) that the terms would stand.

It only took another 5 minutes of arguing to get her to cancel the charges and hopefully be done with it. We'll see. Grand total of about 50 minutes of my life that I will never get back.

The real crime is that troglodyte businesses like this can actually affect my credit rating and I can't do a damn thing about it without wasting more of my time than is worth what I am fighting over. Is this really where we have come to?

The horrid thing is the car I replaced my old one with also has an XM radio with a three year contract. I can cancel it and feel good about myself but much less good about the paperweight in my dash, or I can keep it and know that I am funding these criminal goons.

Is the only option venting a little, which I have never done here, or is there something illegal about what they are doing and anything I can do about it?

So I'm charging my Jawbone for about the third time ever and when I pulled the charger off the Jawbone it pulled the whole top off of the device. I am pretty sure this is not supposed to happen as it exposed a mini-circuit board. Now every time I charge it, the little plastic part on top comes off and sticks in the charger. Is there a way to glue the plastic on top? Or should I just be returning it for warranty repair? Or am I hosed?

About half the time I perform an action on my BB 8810 there is a long (and sometimes very long) pause. It can be opening up email, using the "backup" key, or just about anything. Seriously, sometimes it pauses for over 60 seconds. I have tried to power down during one of these big pauses and have received a long hourglass, then a shutdown. When restarting, the email queue is cleared out but immediately sync'd back from the server. Is there any sort of "task manager" on this BB to understand what processes are busy off where? Would it even matter given the modal framework of the software? Or is there an OS upgrade I should be getting.

All my desktop icons are missing from the desktop. One day I noticed that my Desktop was perfectly clean....no icons, no nothing. The files are still there, I can navigate to them via the Desktop folder in the Finder. This has persisted even when I upgraded to Leopard. Any ideas?