::A Geek in Korea::

Last week, my Cowon D2 died. Luckily, there is a service center in the city, so my wife could get it repaired the same day she brought it there. Unfortunately, when she got it repaired on Friday, they told her she needed to replace the entire motherboard, and that the repair would run close to 30% of the price of the entire player. She complained a lot, so they threw in a free battery replacement. Since my old battery was showing a little wear and tear from daily use, I was happy with this compromise.

Happy, until I noticed that whoever had replaced my motherboard had incorrectly hooked up the audiojack, and I only got mono sound in my headphones. For a company that prides itself on having the best quality sound and service, this was infuriating. I was upset that an expensive repair didn’t even get a proper diagnostic check as simple as LISTENING TO THE PLAYER to make sure it worked.

My poor wife had to return to the store Monday for me while I was at work late and get it fixed a second time. The service technician said that since we had only gotten it repaired two days earlier, it probably wasn’t our fault, just a defective product. Gee, thanks, you mean it wasn’t our fault you installed something that didn’t work right? They waived the fee for fixing the product since we hadn’t caused the problem, but my wife was still a little angry about having to go down to the service center twice for their mistake. They didn’t even apologize for their mistake either. Annoying.

According to them, I wasn’t cleaning the usb slot well and it might have caused some dust to get inside and damage the motherboard. I have no idea if this is true. I checked the local electronics store, and there is still NOTHING on the market close to the Cowon D2 in terms of battery life, features, and design. Even though I had to pay for a repair, I would have only ended up buying a new one of the price was any higher. It’s still the best in it’s class feature for feature in my opinion.

I’ve got my D2 back in time to avoid being bored on my long 2 hour break today, and I didn’t have to ride the subway without something to listen to. I’m catching up on a few of the podcasts that updated that were too long to listen to at home on the computer. Listening to short fiction at home, and not with the privacy of earphones is weird to me now. I also got my political fix during my walk with Yoshi, which is another one of my podcast related habits. I tried a few Linux podcast products. gPodder was the one I ended up using most often since it had a GUI and wasn’t difficult to figure out. It was easy to import my OPML list into it, which is less annoying than copying and pasting 23 podcast URLS. If I was big into automation and command line, I would have used hpodder (I didn’t check to see if it did OPML lists though).

I’m glad I can get back to listening to my podcasts now.