Monthly Archives: May 2011

Mr. Counterfeiter, part deux

2 Replies
Mrs E’s taking the RMA box to the UPS joint after work today, and the Amazon seller in question (RetroSoftware) got back to me a few minutes ago. My hunch about it being an innocent mistake on their part is reinforced even further by their response. They were incredibly nice about it all.
They’re aware of the Chinese/Singaporean bootlegs on the market, and they actually do have a routine for spot checking and discarding bogus inventory. Unfortunately, the batch of CS5 Extended they got from one of their reputable suppliers came during a location move and accidentally made it onto the shelves. They’ve pulled all of their remaining inventory of CS5 Extended off Amazon for double-checking.
They’ve offered to source the real thing and honor the original $699 deal, even if it means a loss for them. I appreciate the offer, but I won’t be taking them up on it. My inner businessman thinks they’ve lost enough money already, and my inner customer is pretty much in the “once bitten, twice shy” camp. I’m going to send them a nice thank-you note in response and consider all this a lesson learned.

Well played, Mr. Counterfeiter!

4 Replies
Surprise of the day: Turns out that I don’t actually own Photoshop CS5 Extended, after all. What I bought was a very slickly packaged counterfeit with an invalid serial number. I’m talking the whole nine yards–box, inserts, shrink-wrap, stickers, everything. Normally, those people just flog the bootlegs at an obviously too-good-to-be-true price without going to all that bother, but this was packaged professionally and priced high enough to fool me. I’m normally good at spotting fishy deals from a mile off, but this one just reeled me in hook, line, and sinker. 
First, it was sold on Amazon, which is a place that I trust and have had a comfortable relationship with for years. Second, it was advertised as the full boxed deal, with none of the alarm-bells language that peg it as a fishy deal. Third, it was priced at $699.00, which is $300 less than full retail, but much higher than those fishy deals normally go for. Fourth, it wasn’t just sold by a marketplace reseller, this was one of those Fulfilled By Amazon products where Amazon itself handles warehousing and shipping. You wouldn’t think a bootlegger would go that far. Fifth, the seller had a good reputation and lots of positive feedback. Finally, my new notebook didn’t arrive until almost a week after the software did, so the unopened box was sitting on my desk the whole time and completely passed muster with me visually.
Well played, Mr. Counterfeiter. You got me good, you sly dog.
So, anyway, I found this out when installing it on my new notebook. There’s a step in the installer where you enter the serial number, and that’s when I found out the serial was no good. I got in touch with Adobe because I figured it had to be a glitch in their activation system and that this was all just one big misunderstanding that they could fix with the press of a button, and after that, we could all look up at the ceiling and laugh as the credits start rolling. 
Uh, yeah, no. That would be way too easy.
Adobe’s got this sort of semi-understandable “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. We apologize for the inconvenience. Sucks to be you. Next time, buy from us. For now, we suggest you contact the seller for a valid serial number.” sort of attitude towards the whole thing, but they did open a support case and requested that I send in some documentation. 
I did that, not because I expected them to make it right, but because I’m hoping that it’ll add one more piece of straw to the camel’s back–eventually, Adobe is gonna snap and go all Raving Rabbid on somebody’s ass for pirating their stuff. Heck, three people in New York got 5 years in the slammer for flogging bootleg Adobe software a while back, so apparently Costco quantities of bitching does have an effect. Alone, we are ineffectual whispers in the desolate wasteland, but united, we are a mighty hive whose earth-shaking bellows of righteous rage make Adobe’s eardrums meet in the middle of its collective head! Rah-rah-rah, up with the proletariat, fishcakes, blah blah, yadda yadda, et cetera.
I called the Amazon seller (RetroSoftware) twice today, and got the runaround both times, so I decided to just use their website customer support contact form to inform them that the software they sold me was bogus. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt–they liquidate old boxed software, and it’s very probable that they’re a 100% legit operation that just happened to get some bad inventory. The comparatively high price of $699 speaks to it being an innocent mistake on their part–most bootleggers tend to go for volume with scams, so they don’t charge anywhere near MSRP. Near as I can figure, RetroSoftware probably acquired the bootleg stuff through normal liquidation channels and simply assumed it was real. (The packaging fooled me too, so I can’t say they should’ve known better!)
I talked to Amazon customer support a little while ago, and they were really helpful and understanding. They’ve given me a return merchandise authorization form and a shipping label, and they’ll issue me a refund once they receive and process the return. We’ll see how that goes. It’s all boxed up and waiting for a trip to the UPS store tomorrow.

I’ll post an update as things develop.

I’m a bit dizzy…

11 Replies
My new notebook arrived yesterday, but I didn’t really have a lot of time to play with it. It arrived pretty late in the day, I had work to do after it showed up, updating new machines usually takes hours, and I had to get to bed early.

It’s a midrange Dell XPS 15 with a second-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a nVidia GeForce GT540M GPU with 2 whole gigs of video memory all to itself.

To stay under budget, I only maxed out the components that I couldn’t upgrade myself later on (the GPU and video RAM). It ships with 4GB of RAM, I plan to upgrade that to 8GB when we’re a bit more financially healthy. The processor is also upgradable, and the cheapest Core i5 option was still a huge improvement over what I had in my old workstation, so I didn’t max that out either.
Anyway, I’ve been loading my work software on it for the past hour or two, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to see how it handled. On my old notebook, rendering stuff took a pretty long time. Only one tile (a 128×128 square portion of the rendered image) is processed at a time. The new notebook renders four tiles simultaneously (2 cores x 2 execution threads each), and it powered through a 2400×1800 box art render in 1 minute and 19 seconds. It’s just nuts, and it left me feeling a little light-headed and dizzy.
It also handles much larger textures during realtime rendering–4096x4096px using the default Intel HD Graphics 3000, and up to 16384x16384px if the GeForce GT540M is used instead. That’s really good, because it means I can work on large paper models at full print resolution. Really large ones.
What little I’ve seen so far impresses me. Compared to my old desktop workstation, the new notebook is a monster.

Dear Automotive Industry: *raspberry*

10 Replies

Highlights of my day: $24,000 truck failing to start. Rolled out of bed without coffee, straight into hours of driving from auto parts store to auto parts store. Several misidentified causes. 50-cent piece of broken plastic. Regrettable meal from McDonald’s. It’s 9:32PM at this minute, and my morning coffee is finally brewing right now.

Okay, long form. Sara, my stepdaughter and landlord, set up this neighborhood event today where everybody living on our street comes together to clean out the alley behind our houses. Brush removal, garbage pick-up, tree clipping, and stuff of that nature. 22 people showed up, and they did a great job cleaning up the alley. Of course, being the night owl, I was out cold all day. Mrs E was doing dump runs in her truck (a 2007 Nissan Frontier pickup), and she stalled it on the last trip. It failed to start. Fortunately, this was like right down the street, so she didn’t have to walk more than 50 feet to the house.

She rolls me out of bed and asks me where the jumper cables are. I tell her they went with her old truck when she gave it to my other stepdaughter Gloria. She tells me her Frontier is dead out front. I crawl out of bed, brush my teeth, get dressed, and I see Sara in the living room, who tells me Mrs E is out front getting her truck jumped. Mrs E and the neighbor got her truck running again, so I put my shoes on and we left to get a new battery. Guess what? Battery’s fine. The lube monkey at Wal-Mart (we went there because that’s where we bought the battery) was really insistent that the culprit was the front blower relay, because it was hot and clicked when starting the engine. He also tested the battery, and swore up one wall and down the other, and on his sainted grandmother’s grave, that the battery was still good.

That didn’t really make any sense to us, but the guy works on cars for a living, so whatever. He knows what he’s talking about, right? We went to 3 different auto places, and only one of them had the right kind of replacement relay. So, I pull the old one, install the new one, and what do you know, the truck starts right up. Of course, I don’t trust my automotive repair skills one iota because my daddy was the grease monkey in the family, and he steadfastly refused to show me the ropes out of some misguided fear that teaching me how to fix cars would doom me to following in his footsteps. As a consequence of my dad’s irrational fears, yours truly is not mechanically inclined when it comes to cars, which tends to result in me standing next to a busted vehicle with the hood open muttering “Thanks a lot, Dad” and paying somebody else a king’s ransom to fix whatever broke.

So I tell Mrs E to turn it off and try again. My self-distrust is justified! The thing doesn’t start. I pull the new relay and put the old one back on. It starts! I tell her to try again. No dice, it doesn’t start that time. Okay, obviously, it’s not the relay at this point. And I’ve just about exhausted my automotive abilities, so I suggest we have the store test the battery, just to confirm the Wal-Mart results. Good battery. I’m flabbergasted. We have the starter and alternator tested. Guess what? Nothing wrong with either one of them.  I need a photo of Saul Tigh going “What the hell?” for moments like this.

Turns out that the culprit is a little 50-cent piece of plastic. It’s a grommet, actually. A frigging grommet on the clutch pedal that lets the clutch pedal ignition lock close the starting circuit when you push down the clutch all the way. The old one broke in half, so it was basically a 50-50 chance of the truck starting or not. That’s it, a broken 50 cent piece of plastic stops a $24,000 truck from working.

R.C., an employee of the AutoZone store at 9509 Manchaca, is awesome. He’s the one who found the problem and fixed it. Turns out the grommet is a dealer-only part (Really, Nissan? Really?) which Mrs E has to visit the dealer to get on Monday. He whipped up a MacGyver fix to hold the truck over until then. People like him go a long way towards restoring my faith in the human race and the retail sector.

And on that note, I’m going to go have my first cup of coffee.

Bonus!

6 Replies

I just discovered, completely by accident, that I had a $28.00 gift certificate to DAZ’s store. I don’t visit their website/storefront very often because I’m not interested in 98% of their catalog, which consists of 3D people models and props for their flagship software, DAZ Studio. I was looking for updates to Carrara 8 (the software I use to render most of my promo shots and instructions), and logged into my account to check my downloads, and there it was, a gift certificate for 28 bucks.

I didn’t think there was going to be anything I would actually want to buy with that unexpected windfall, but I was pleasantly surprised to find 2 packages of HDR images, for image-based lighting in Carrara, at $9.95 each. Some of ’em are kinda neat:

I normally hide the HDR backdrops with a solid color or a composited background image, but I left them visible in the images above so you could see how the colors and brightness of a particular HDR image contributes to the lighting on the model itself.

Edit: Oh, I forgot–I mentioned in a comment on another post that I wanted to reproduce a certain photo of a Mi-24 Hind gunship. I first saw this photo in, I think, an issue of Soldier of Fortune when I was a kid, and I was quite taken with the photo. I found it on Google Image Search:

And this is my take on it with the Despoiler: