I like the new Mac ads picking on Vista. Link to more ads at Apple.

OwHLG1tapLc

When I refer a friend to our dentist, he send us a gift card to a local restaurant. Along with the gift card is a hand written note thanking us for taking the time to make the referral. That tells me he appreciates the referral. He’s an excellent dentist and I’d refer him even if he didn’t send the gift card. But it’s a classy touch.

And it doesn’t end with the first referral. When I refer a second, third or fourth person, he sends more gift cards. It can’t take him very much time to track who makes referral, but it shows that he’s trained his staff to ask how a new patient found out about his practice. This doesn’t just happen. It’s an attitude that permeates the office. I feel like everyone at his office has my best interest in mind.

This got me thinking about how our business thanks customers who send referrals our way. I don’t believe we do a very good job compared to my dentist.

Does your company do a good job of thanking those customers who refer people your way?

I finally got around to removing Vista from my laptop at work and my home desktop. I still need to find the time to remove it from Whim’s computer as it’s still being a huge pain in the butt.

This weekend I installed this game (which is very addicting) on my computer and my kids computer, both of which are running Windows XP. The game ran just fine. But when I tried to install it on Whim’s computer running Vista it coughed up a number of errors. When my brother-in-law tried installing it tonight on his Vista box, it gave him similar problems.

I’m convinced more than ever that Vista is big crappy piece of bloatware. I have two machines less than a year old that should have no problem running Vista, but Microsoft screwed the pooch with it’s heavy handed DRM and performance killing bloat. Add sketchy driver support and you have an operating system that’s guaranteed to provide you with hours upon hours of frustration.

–Link to the Bad Vista Blog

I just had this exchange with the young man working at the drug store across the street from our business. I brought a Diet Pepsi to the counter:

Cashier: That will be $1.75

(I hand him two dollars)

Cashier: Would you like to buy a Scratch (like lotto) ticket for a dollar?

Me: No thank you.

Cashier: Sorry, they make me ask everyone

It’s a good thing I wasn’t on my way to a gamblers anonymous meeting!