I usually get terrible customer service. Especially when I buy products from companies that I’ve worked at for 5+ years. Stupid Apple.

But lately we’ve had a couple really great customer service experiences. First, we broke our Wii playing too much Super Smash Brothers. Apparently, the GPU overheats(?) when you play too much, or when you play too much over wifi, or something. This caused our Wii to always show flickering black vertical lines. I called up Nintendo on a Sunday, explained the problem, and after 18.5 minutes on the phone, they said I would have to send it in for repair. They emailed me a FedEx ship label, which I printed out. I sent the Wii in on a Tuesday, and a fixed one arrived today, just three days later!

Even better was our experience with Philips. The charger to our awesome Sonicare toothbrush stopped working. Jess called up Philips, spent a couple minutes on the phone, and about a week later, an entire new toothbrush and charger arrived. YAY!

Filed under: support | 0 Comments
Tagged: sonicare , wii

They sent me 9 consecutive text messages this morning, alternating between “Wiis are in stock at Amazon! Grab one!” and “No Wiis available :-( they were up for 8 seconds.”

I’d pretty much given up until the 9th msg came through and I got one! yay! I can’t believe that it’s been a year already and it’s *STILL* so hard to get a Wii on Amazon. Yes, I know it’s possible to get one at a store if you live in Missouri (or just not in the Bay Area)…or if you wait in line at Best Buy at the crack of dawn, but I really didn’t want to do that (cause I’m lazy). I just wanted to get one online for the office and WiiMe came through!

Filed under: no code | 5 Comments
Tagged: amazon , twitter , wii

Check out this awesome project:

Using an IR led array and some reflective tape, you can track fingers in thin air using the Wii Remote by Johnny Lee, Carnegie Mellon University

Filed under: tronix, video | 1 Comment
Tagged: multitouch , wii