Daley Ponderings

3/11 - Faith can count to six.

3/12 - Faith counted to ten.  She isn't consistent with this.  She'll get stuck after six, but if someone says seven, she can do the rest on her own.  I don't think she has quantity recognition past five, though.  And she sometimes likes to start counting with nine.

3/21 - We've been listening to CDs and tapes a lot on my old stereo.  Noah comments, "Mom, tapes are really cool.  But CDs you can skip to the next one.  But tapes you can stop it and then it starts right where you were."

Jonathan has been reading Greek myths and has made himself a Zeus costume, complete with eagle-topped staff and thunderbolts.  Then he discovered an old tape of mine with Holst's The Planets on it.  He was very excited to recognize the personalities of the gods in their respective movements.  He and Noah were marching around with invisible guns to Mars before I even told them what it was.  Holst sure did a good job!  It is fun for me to see me kids enjoying a piece of music that I enjoyed so much (well, I still do!)

Joy has been smiling a lot this week, mostly for her siblings.  I think her hair is growing.  It never fell out as her siblings' birth hair did.  Maybe her hair will start out brown?

Noah is learning simple addition and beginning to read.  He is enthusiastic about this learning and schooltime is fun with him.  It's so neat to watch them figure out things!  School with Jonathan has not been as much fun, but I think we need to find something that challenges him more.

I bought 6 Seagate hard drives from Amazon and Newegg, and both companies sent me drives that already had half their warranty expired.

Amazon, after waiting for the customer support guy to handle 5 simultaneous chat sessions, and so was quite slow at responding, did send out a mailing label with no restocking fee.

Newegg took a half hour on hold before they answered, and initially said that there is a 3 year warranty.  I pointed out that there was only two years left on the warranty, so even if it were true that Seagate only offered a three warranty (which they don't - they have 5 year warranties on their drives currently), this drive is still partially expired.  She then said that she could not accept a return because, "Unfortunately, we are unable to make the changes since the warranty was provided by the manufacture directly."  I asked if she was authorized to refuse a warranty claim and she said she would be sending an RMA form shortly.  She did, after request, provide a return shipping label and removed the restocking fee.

While on hold with the online chat folks, I called Seagate on the phone, and after waiting maybe 5 minutes on hold, got an English speaking person who offered to send out an email where I can take a picture of my invoice, with the appropriate serial numbers, and said that "usually, not always" they would update the warranty date.

She said that often vendors keep the items on the shelf and sell them with expired warranties.  So - now I know to always check the warranty right when I get it.

It's irritating that companies sell old devices without mentioning that on their product specifications page.