Peter's Place

If you want a great lesson on how to alienate your customers and destroy brand loyalty that has taken years to build up, take a close look here... Y'know this is really a very sad story. Hewlett Packard makes some really great products--that's not the sad part. What's sad is that if you ever are unfortunate enough to find yourself in a position of having to deal with their tech support, consider just junking the equipment and buying something else. Unless, of course, you're dealing with re-installing or upgrading your printer drivers. I don't know what's going on at HP these days but after the last ten or so contacts I've had with their tech support department, I can unfortunately no longer recommend that people purchase their products. And it's a damned shame, too, because they make some of the best printers out there. Case in point: I own an OfficeJet Pro L7580 and an OfficeJet Pro L7680. When I went to upgrade the printer driver for the OJP7580, it w...

“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” ~ Phil Donahue (1935-) Emmy Award winning American media personality and writer “Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live” ~ Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832) English sportsman and writer “The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over” ~ Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Pulitzer & Nobel Prize winning author “No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.” ~ Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) Italian Poet, Critic, Novelist and Translator “To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.” ~ Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Scientist and Physician Today (10 September 2009) is World Suicide Pre...

Today, 10 September 2009, is World Suicide Prevention Day . I am a suicide survivor. My first attempt was made when I was a teenager, because I couldn't come to terms with being gay and being Catholic. I just responded to someone on Facebook who inquired about this. Here's what I wrote: I was raised in a very conservative, very religious Catholic Democratic household, by my very religious, very conservative Democratic Grandparents . I didn't know that there were gay people growing up. Then I started going on-line, and I met my first gay person, my Unca Uni . He got me to realize that all the fantasies/what not I'd been having were b/c I was gay. I couldn't reconcile being Catholic with being gay. One night, whilst on the phone w/ a fellow young Republican from Yonkers, I came out to him. I was also taking sleeping pills. But having led an extremely sheltered life, I didn't know that you're supposed to take the whole bottle all at once, not one at a time (wh...