Mikkel Høgh

Coding the web since 1999

15 Sep 2006

Eventful days

I got my new camera yesterday, a Canon PowerShot A620. It’s brilliant. I’ll post some pictures some time. Shortly after getting the camera and playing with it, me and my colleague, Andreas went for a waterside lunchbreak. Which we came to regret.

We drove down there in a borrowed car, a two months old Toyota Avensis. A really nice car. Parked it on a side road to “Strandvejen”, the road that runs along the coast from Copenhagen to Elsinore. We parked next to a truck from norway. Then we ate a really tasty bagel each, waterside. Then we went back to the car and – you guessed it – the guys in the truck had managed to plow into our nice car. Bummer, but their insurance covers it.

To make matters worse, when I finally got the car towed to the Toyota shop, they refused to give me the advertised “loaner”-car. This rather large chain of Toyota-dealers, Krogsgaard, has signs and stickers on most of their cars, claiming that they’ll let you have one of their loaners for free, if your car gets damaged. But they wouldn’t give us one, since their loaners were all either in use or reserved.

And I was like “Hey, you guys have a car dealership - there’s cars everywhere - and then you say you haven’t got one for me?” and they were like “Yeah, basically”. So, we called them today, and they were just plain rude and patronising. And now I’m just feeling kinda stepped on. How come it’s my problem that they haven’t got a loaner for me? In our house, we have three small children, in three different kindergartens. Without a car, that’s not real easy. So take it from me. Avoid Krogsgaard in Gentofte. They are like 112% not okay.

On other things, I’ve been using the much touted Mighty Mouse from Apple at our video-editing computer at work, and it’s another big disappointment. If you rest your fingers on it, like you would a normal mouse, it can’t discern what “button” you are pressing, since there’s only one button, and the mouse uses pressure sensitivity to detect which side you’re pressing. So, basically you’ll have to lift the left side of your hand to right-click, which is only slightly less annoying than having to hold a keyboard-button to right-click.

I fail to understand why Apple are so stubborn, but probably it’s just a rather bad case of “Not Invented Here”, a syndrome that seems to be quite common in Cupertino, California.