technology

It's such a rarity to encounter good customer service. We ought to mention it more often.

I had two good experiences in the past few weeks.

The weekend before last I rented a wood chipper at the Catonsville ABC Rental Center. The delivery charge had gone up a lot since I last did this a few years ago, but the woman behind the counter halved the charge since I live close by. Then, when I had an issue -- couldn't get the motor started after shutting it down for a break -- they gave me the choice of another session with it, or just charging me for a half-day instead of a whole one. I was pleased.

And I recently ordered a fan from Mouser Electronics, to repair my bug zapper. It apparently got broken in transit. No problem at all, they're sending me a replacement, not asking me to return the old one, and not charging shipping on the replacement.

I also want to mention that I've mostly had good luck with Dish Network customer service -- I've been able to speak to knowledgeable people whose native language seems to be English, a combination becoming more and more rare on help lines for tech products and services.

A five-foot Ethernet cable might run you about $20 at Best Buy. Less if you shop around on-line or get a bargain-basement cable. A cheapo cable is more likely to fail, but once you get up to a decent quality Category 6 cable, a cable is a cable is a cable.

But the folks at Denon actually have the gall to charge $499 for their AK-DL1 "proprietary ultra premium Denon Link cable". It's got all the bells and whistles: even "signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer." (Presumably the electrons read the markings to figure out which way to go, because moving under a voltage is just so out of style.)

Worse is that there are people who would buy this, the same sort of "audiophiles" who buy Monster cables and Brilliant Pebbles

More at Wired's Gadget Lab.

No, it's not a April Fool's joke: the Wall Street Journal reports on researchers who are trying to adapt technology from the old "Star Wars" laser missile defense, to target mosquitoes with death rays. If it works, it would be much less toxic and much more selective than insecticides.

LiveScience reports that researchers at the Scripps Research Institute have created molecules that bump right up against the boundaries of what we consider "alive". They synthesized RNA enzymes that replicate, mutate, and evolve:

Lincoln's advisor, professor Gerald Joyce, reiterated that while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not life as we know it.

"What we've found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts," Joyce said in a statement.

Joyce's restraint, clear also on an NPR report of the finding, has to be appreciated. He allows that some scientists familiar with the work have argued that this is life. Another scientist said that what the researchers did is equivalent to recreating a scenario that might have led to the origin of life.

Joyce insists he and Lincoln have not created life: "We're knocking on that door," he says, "but of course we haven't achieved that."

Brendan Gregg, from Sun's "Fishworks" team, demonstrates how shouting at a disk drive causes vibrations that cause latency (i.e., slows down the process of accessing stuff from the disk). Wild.

Majel Barrett Roddenberry has left us.

Majel played the Enterprise's first officer in the original pilot "The Cage" (later recut with a frame story as the TOS two-parter "The Menagerie"), then Nurse Christine Chapel in the original series. Then in TNG she played Councilor Troi's mother, Lwaxana, as well as providing the ubiquitous computer voice in TNG and later series. In fact, she has recenntly finished voice work on the forthcoming Trek movie.

She and Gene Roddenberry married two months after the final episode of Star Trek was aired. (According to Memory Alpha, they were in Japan and has a "Shinto-Buddhist" wedding!)

After Gene's death she did a lot to preserve the Star Trek legacy, and also worked as executive producer on two shows based on ideas from his archives, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda.

Here's why the American Century is over: while our "best" minds are busy Twittering about what they had for lunch and playing Guitar Hero, Chinese farmers with little education are building armies of walking robots. How do you say "Bite my shiny metal ass" in Mandarin?

This is just beautiful, makes me feel maybe this crazy bunch of monkeys might just work it all out after all. Yves Rossy, a Swiss pilot, flew across the English Channel on his homemade, jet-propelled, personal "wing" aircraft. The thing looks like a real-life "Buzz Lightyear" jetpack.

Sweet.

Sci-fi made real: a man who's been paralyzed for 20 years, walking thanks to a robotic exoskeleton. "The device, called ReWalk, is the brainchild of engineer Amit Goffer, founder of Argo Medical Technologies, a small Israeli high-tech company. Something of a mix between the exoskeleton of a crustacean and the suit worn by Robocop, ReWalk helps paraplegics - people paralysed below the waist - to stand, walk and climb stairs."

I didn't watch much of the Olympics, partly because the events I want to see never get covered, partly because I'm still uneasy about the whole Beijing hosting thing. But two bits worth noting:

• During the opening ceremonies, the Microsoft Windows "Blue Screen of Death" made an appearance. Ha, ha. "Perhaps this is simply Microsoft's idea of 'product placement', as the BSOD is one of the more recognizable features of Windows, and perhaps transcends all language barriers," quips macenstein.com.