Aargh, couriers! %^$%&$!!!

What took two hours out of my life, involved my getting lost in a snow drift in the middle of nowhere, and is ultimately only the size of a postage stamp? This:
256 MB Memory Stick PRO Duo

When I registered my Cybershot, I got a $20 coupon for the SonyStyle store. The coupon was about to expire, and I noticed that I could get a spare Memory Stick for less than any of the stores. So I paid on the website, and expected the thing to turn up.

Wednesday evening I came home to a Purolator delivery note. Catherine was in the house when they tried to deliver, but the courier didn’t make enough effort to actually check. When I called them to reschedule, I was dealt with someone who knew exactly how much of a mess of my day they could make by being wilfully stupid and obtuse, and used this knowledge to its fullest.

So in the end, I trogged out to the depot. This is hardly in a central location; Silver Star Boulevard is remote. It didn’t help that the street sign was missing if you were heading north from Finch Avenue East, as I was. So I ended up half-stuck in a snowdrift just south of McNicoll, plaintively calling Catherine from my mobile for directions. Sidewalks run out just north of Finch on Midland, you see. Also, Purolator’s customer service line shuts down before their depots do, so you’re stuck if you call between 8–9pm.

When I finally got to the depot, there was a huge line. It took about 20 minutes to finally get my package. This was a pretty sizeable box; it could easily have held a good-sized telephone directory. In it was about ten of those air pillow packaging things, and my tiny Memory Stick. It was, of course, ensconsed in one of those ridiculous PVC blister packs that weigh at least 5× the product inside.

I’m regretting that I scarfed a Harvey’s indigestiburger at Union station before setting out. Silver Star Boulevard’s one saving attribute is that it’s right in the Agincourt Chinese Restaurant Zone. I’m sure I could have had all the food I’d have wanted for about 2/3 the price of the processed muck I had.

Next time I’ll check before ordering if a company plans to use Purolator. If they do — see ya later! It’s not worth wasting 2½ hours of my life on again.

linksys, bittorrent, and ports

Just so I don’t have to answer this again. If you use a Linksys router, and appear to be firewalled when you use BitTorrent, do this:

Go to Status / Local Network / DHCP client table. See what your local IP address is. It’s likely to be between 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.150.

Go to Applications & Gaming / Port Range Forwarding, and enter:

Application: bittorrent
Start: 6881
End: 6999
Protocol: TCP
IP Address: (your local IP address that you found earlier)
Enable: Yes

and save changes. Your ports will be open!

iPod Shuffle works under Linux

Very pleasantly surprised to find that Paul’s iPod Shuffle appeared as a bog standard USB mass-storage device on my Linux laptop. Of course, there’s the small matter of the metadata required to get it a Linux box to make acceptable playlist, but it’s a start.

I susect I’m being sad and old when I say I remember the COOL It Works With Linux logo scheme …

How To Fix A Crashed & Screaming QuickBooks Timer

We use QuickBooks Timer to track our billing hours. It seems to crash with great regularity whenever you finish entering an item. When it does this, its usual two note happy acceptance chirp turns into a squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that goes on and on and on …

I’ve found a way of fixing this without rebooting:

  1. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and call up the Task Manager
  2. Select QuickBooks Timer, and ‘End Task’ (it may take several tries)
  3. Open a command prompt, and hit Ctrl-G, then Enter
  4. After beeping, and complaining that ” is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file, the beeping will stop.

This has been a public sanity announcement.

got it bad

That retrocomputing itch … sometimes a guy just gotta rediscover the Commodore Amiga of his youth.

If Burlington = 95, Toronto = ??

143; if you’re Environment Canada’s Weather Office, that is.

Completely against the concept that Cool URIs don’t change, the Weather Office appear to have arbitrarily changed the URLs for their 5 day forecasts. In the old days, if you knew the local airport code, you could find the weather report, for it was at (f’rinstance): http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/forecast/city_e.html?yyz. (And yeah, I grew up with siblings obsessed with these guys, so I’ve known Toronto’s airport code of old.)

Now the same page is at http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/city/pages/on-143_metric_e.html, and for Burlington, it’s …/on-95_metric_e.html. It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Canada has weather that can kill you. Somewhere, someone will have scripted a page that scrapes the Weather Office’s data, and so somewhere I’m sure there will be a weather report that’s not updating. I can see no good reason for this change; I’ll see if Environment Canada has one.

thinkpad t21, linux 2.4.28-gentoo-r5, and ACPI

If you find yourself running this kernel, make sure you remove all ACPI support from the kernel if you want to use the onboard 3Com Tornado 3c556B CardBus ethernet adaptor. You used to be able to get away with the acpi=off kernel parameter with 2.4.26-gentoo-rn kernels, but this doesn’t work any more.

This has been a Nerd Public Service Announcement.