ChrisMerriman.com » father-in-law

I should have learnt from previous experiences buying hardware here in Kazakhstan, but I somehow just hoped that things would have improved.
Anyway, yesterday Ira, her Mum and I went to a couple of computer shops to order a new computer as an early Christmas present. I had got a copy of a PC spec that her work colleagues had designed for someone, made a few tweaks and improvements to some of the components, and then got a price for a complete system. Once we had all the details, I returned home to research some of the parts (if you’re intending to spend a fair whack on a large monitor, for example, you want to make sure that hundreds of people haven’t had serious issues with it.)
Eventually we had all the details, and returned to the one shop that had all parts in stock. Apparently. To cut a long story short, the suggested motherboard would only take DDR3 memory (which has a HUGE price premium, at least over here), not the DDR2 memory specced, the CPU wasn’t in stock, nor the case, nor the hard drives. All of this after starting our conversation with the (very nice) sales people by explaining we were hoping this shop wouldn’t muck us around, as Ucon had done last year. Anyway, after confirming we wanted a legal, licensed Windows XP installed, and that they could not source a specific A3 photo printer, we finally had an invoice printed (about the fourth or fifth version, after finding lots of parts were not in stock, despite being present on the stock/price list we were working from).
Anyway, I am getting picked up by my father-in-law’s new driver in a few hours, to go and check out the new PC, and make sure all is well with it. I wonder if I can suggest that they should swap their 24″ screen for my 19″ – purely for, ummm, hmmm, nope I can’t think of a valid reason. Life’s hard 😉

Tags: Astana, Christmas, driver, experiences buying hardware, father-in-law, Irina, Kazakhstan, Mum, Windows XP

Comments (1)

Jul 15 2007

Bad Advertising

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 6:57 pm

As my regular readers will know, I am not normally someone who slams another person’s website. However, as I was doing some research regarding the upcoming Google PR update, I found someone promoting their Web Design skills.
When I checked the site, I thought it was a joke at first. Although I can in no way claim to have good design skills myself, I do not try and sell these non-existant skills to others.
Seriously, take a look, replace the word DASH with the symbol – , and change the word DOT to a .

websiteDASHdevelopmentDASHindiaDOTnet

(it looks so bad, I do not want to link to it properly from this site!)

…
OK, so you’ve looked. Is it just me, or do all the pages just scream out DO NOT EMPLOY ME ?
The colour scheme is gaudy. I considered if it was maybe made for people with visual difficulties, but then I realised this could not be the case, as they used dark blue text on a light blue background in places.
I think my father-in-law could knock a site of this standard out in about 20 minutes in FrontPage, and he does not even use a PC!
Anyway, let me know if I am just being overly critical, or maybe my browser is some how rendering the page incorrectly.

Tags: father-in-law, Google, Web Design skills

Comments (3)