Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I was sitting out front of the house the other night with my brother (he was cutting 4″ PVC tube so I'd have a more useful grip on my pullup bar) and a chubby racoon hopped out of the fence and wandered over to us, sniffing around the edges of the houses for garbage. Jon noticed one of the raccoon's lazy relax-in-the-sun places on a chimney in the houses south of us. Click for a closeup if you want.

I'm making a few software changes to the way images are processed (running an experiment!) over the next week or so, so I might not be able to get the update posted tonight. I've been debating changing some of the image quality guidelines, so Phil and I are fine-tuning the software to handle that.

We cleaned our house top to bottom today because Nefarious is back soon from her adventures with Rachel and her grandmother. Other than that, I'm continuing to plug away at this database project, but somehow I've introduced an error in one of my string parsing routines that's making me bonkers, mostly because I can only test it at a late stage in the build, so every time I miss a bug I waste ten minutes watching a build crash.

So about two months ago I bought a Pinnacle 500-USB video capture device. I have a relatively full schedule, so sometimes I pick up hardware but don't have a chance to use it for some time. Anyway, I waited a bit over a month to finally install this device (so the return period was over, and I had already filed the receipt for my accountant anyway), and when I went to install it, I discovered that there was no serial number on the CD or on the product or included in the box.

First I went to a couple serialz type sites to see if I could quickly just find a number to drop in, but that didn't work… I went to the official Pinnacle support site, and I guess this is a common problem, because they have a set of FAQs specifically about missing serial numbers. To get a new serial number assigned, they say they need proof of purchase attached to the request email, so I used their “contact us” form, selected “missing serial number”, and included a picture of me holding the product, with links to my sites so they could confirm my identity if they needed to. When I hit submit, it told me something along the lines of “we're sorry, your answer has already been answered on this website.”

And that's it.

No instructions as to where this hidden cache of serial numbers might be hidden. So then I send the email again (and once manually), and attempt to not include any keywords that I think might get me spit back to the automated “your question is already answered” bullshit. I waited two weeks and received no reply from Pinnacle to any of my queries. Total ripoff.

So this morning I went into Future Shop (where I'd intially bought it), pulled one down off the shelf, opened the packaging, pulled out the serial number, and took a photo of it. Fuck Pinnacle. Requiring a software serial number to install hardware is total bullshit.

What it should do is just install itself as a capture device and let you use your own software (even Windows Movie Maker if you want) instead of whatever they try to force on your harddrive (and since this is a device that's best for laptops, that's not cool). I'm not the Linux guy. Sorry Pinnacle. I'm not coding my own driver for your dumb product.

My apologies to whichever customer tries to install the product. I told the employees at the store what I was going to do as I was leaving, but they didn't care. I think someone's going to get sold a non-functioning product because I got assigned their flair, and I feel bad about that. If I ever have to do this again, I'm going to include a note in the product explaining that the serial number is invalid.

Or maybe they'll find this post when they do a Google search to try and find a serial number for Pinnacle Studio. I hope I didn't mess with the wrong yuppie.