Coast Plaza hotel has a broken(ish) DNS — most web sites won’t resolve unless you hit reload about 8 million times (or use a shell loop to ping many many times). Aargh!
But it does completely block my office’s Citrix connections, so no work e-mail for me!
You know how much Air Canada wanted for changing a short flight from Fort St John to Vancouver to an earlier one?
$500.
Yeah, that’s more than the entire YXJ to YYZ trip cost. Smooth one, AC.
I have an HP Photosmart C5180 scanner/printer thingy. It works fairly well, except when the drivers are being stupid under Windows. But it has one flaw so appalling that the first time it happened, I almost trashed the printer in a blind rage (yeah, I have some anger issues).
The power supply brick has a three-prong connector; pretty much the same as the “kettle lead” you get on PCs. But this thing, whether through vibration, heating and cooling, or just plain evil, slowly works itself loose. So you go to turn the printer on one day, and … nothing. You check the cables; all are plugged in. Check the wall socket; it’s (zap! ow!) live. After tearing some hair out, you troubleshoot every cable – all looks well until you notice that the plug is just a little farther out of the power supply than it might go. Snug it in a couple of millimetres, and a working printer is you.
This happens every few months. Even when I know it’s likely to happen, it still jars me. Wouldn’t have happened in Bill & Dave’s day.
Took the D70 in for a sensor clean to Vistek. Pretty decent that they they could do a sensor clean for $35, I thought.
But I’m back on the stretcar for a reclean - they missed a huge macule which is obvious even printed at postcard size. Add four TTC trips each visit, I guess I didn’t get such a bargain.
I’m trying to make Firefox on Windows XP like Firefox with the GrApple theme on OS X. I don’t have to have it look the same, just compress all the bookmarks in the toolbar into the width of the screen.
This is how I want the bookmarks toolbar to look:
And this is how it looks right now on Windows:
I can find any number of links about only showing the favicon, but none about turning it off to save space. Aargh!
Can I just say that the audio department of Long & McQuade at Ossington & Bloor is easily the worst sales experience possible? Not merely did the assistant (in the loosest possible sense) doubt the availability of an item that I’d previously confirmed with the distributor as being sold by L&M, but when I queried the go-away-and-leave-me-alone price he quoted, he aggressively queried where I’d seen a better price.
Sorry, but you’ve lost a sale. You may have lost me as a customer.
Update: I just got a Canadian price from RVA which is at least $20 less than the US web price that the loser in L&M said wasn’t possible. A-ha ha, you suck, Long & McQuade!
The Globe’s Margaret Wente is an effective opinion writer, in that she can get you riled about something without actually adding any valuable comment. Take yesterday’s piece “Yes, Virginia, there is a polar bear” (paywalled, but helpfully parroted by her friends) as a shining example.
In it she makes the following points:
So, Margaret: advocating medieval ignorance, superstition and misery because your “[a]bundant research [uncited, of course; can't have the taint of intellectual rigour here] shows that experts … are no better than non-experts at making accurate predictions”? More likely, you’ve elevated Prof Armstrong to be your seer. By his argument, then, you are your own sucker.
Instead, consider Advices & Queries 17: “… Avoid hurtful criticism and provocative language. Do not allow the strength of your convictions to betray you into making statements or allegations that are unfair or untrue. Think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
The Holy Modal Rounders documentary DVD, Bound To Lose is now available for us international types. But the price? $28 in the US balloons to $40 elsewhere. At that price, I’d expect Peter and Steve to deliver it in person!
OpenOffice doesn’t import the EOMONTH() function from Excel spreadsheets, but knows what it is when you type it manually. C’mon, people, get hep!
I’m liking In Rainbows. But sick of folks kvetching about the perfectly adequate bit rate.
Thinking of torrenting flacs made from the mp3s under the guise of a perfect bootleg. Would look forward to the musos banging on about the much improved fidelity. Losers.
But that would be too much work. Mustn’t betray the expectations of society on my generation.
I’m trying to book tickets for Catherine online at aircanada.com. The site does something bad in Firefox, so the helpdesk person said to use Safari (after suggesting “Tools -> Internet Options”, which in my case I have not got), which is supported. So on I go to the site with Safari, and I’m redirected to:
Unsupported Browser Warning. We have detected that the browser you
are using is not able to view some of the more advanced elements of our website, and may prevent you from completing your booking.Supported Browsers:
- Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0 and above (Windows 98 and higher)
- Netscape 7.2 (Windows 98 and higher)
- Firefox 1.0 and higher (Windows 98 and higher, Mac OS X)
Yup, so the browser I had been using is supported, but the one they recommended isn’t. After many retries (’You failed to check Futile Checkbox #36, and therefore must restart your booking’) it finally worked. Took the best part of an hour. The booking is almost as bad as the flying.
If you’ve ever tried to work with emission coefficients given by the US DOE in “pounds CO2 per million Btu”, you get to feeling this way.
I was trying to send a largish promotional image to our marketing department yesterday. It was too big for e-mail, so I put it on the department share, assuming that marketing could read it. Nope. Moved it to a company FTP site. User has no access to ftp. In the end, I had to send it on a CD, even though I’m pretty sure it originated somewhere inside the company.
I also had to point an (internal) reviewer to an engineering report on our servers. Again, it’s on a share - you know, those things that people are supposed to be able to, y’know, read. No dice. I think the reviewer ended up requesting hardcopy from the original consultant, even though I know the file’s on a server in the very same building as the reviewer. Aagh!
If one company that spends a truckload on IT can’t get communications right, there is no hope for us.
I now have a 16:9 LCD monitor for the front room computers. The Ubuntu box needed a little reconfiguration of the X Server to work perfectly, though I think the bandwidh for 1440*900 might be a bit high for my old KVM, as I’m getting some sparklies on solid colour.
The mini-ITX box was another story. It resolutely refused to see the wider screen. Then I found out I had to update the BIOS. Yuk.
Since Catherine is of the teacherly profession, she bought a USB floppy drive with her iMac five years ago. The drive hasn’t seen much use, but it was essential here. First I had to find a floppy that worked (discarded a couple), then I found that Windows XP’s “make bootable floppy” option doesn’t actually make a disk that boots. I had to go off to bootdisk.com to find a super-minimal floppy boot image. Once I got that, I installed the bios tool and the flash image onto the floppy, and rebooted.
At this point I got really annoyed. The bios tool linked from all the VIA pages is too old to recognize the new bios file format, so exits with “It is not Award BIOS” error message. Once I found the right link (thanks, filupn), I was in business. Or was I?
I then discovered that my SP13000 had its BIOS protect jumper on. This meant dismantling the box. For most PCs, it’s not such a big deal, but for mini-ITX, it’s a horror. I had to remove the DVD drive, the hard drive, the PCI card and riser and many cables just to get down to the motherboard. Putting it all back together was hard, with the expected amount of squtcha, squtcha‘ing on the cables to get everything in.
The BIOS upgrade, the machine rebooted, and now all I need to do is update the graphics driver. Unfortunately, there are many that are described as the VIA/S3G Unichrome Pro Integrated Graphics Driver. Argh.
Bought an RJ Tech DVD player today because it has VGA output, and we have a spare 19″ monitor. It seems that you need a composite video display to be able to use the on-screen menu to select VGA Out on this unit. This is teh smrt programming.
Update: Yup, the RJ Tech RJ-800DVX does need to have the VGA output enabled from a composite video source. This is very strange, as the composite does seem to work with the VGA enabled, so why not enable both out the box? I’m glad I still had my Plextor TV tuner from my abortive attempts to run a PVR. I hooked it up to the PC and DVD player, fiddled with it until I got an image, then selected VGA video output. It works beautifully now, playing every region of DVD, MP3 CD, and downloaded MPEG I can throw at it.
Update #2: Just got this e-mail from RJ Tech:
N/P won’t solve the problem.
You need to press V-mode to change the dvdplayer setting to VGA mode.
I’m sure I did this and it didn’t work, but props to RJ Tech for answering in one business day for a $50 player.
Update #3 - 12 August: I’m now on my third RJ-800DVX. The first one fell over last night, with no disk being recognized and a nasty screeching sound as it tried to seek. The one I got in return from Canada Computers was DOA with the same problem. The new unit is quite different - it has a much cheaper looking remote, and now has a SCART socket as well as VGA on the back. This one works, for now at least.
I was mildly incensed to see an ad truck tootling about downtown. What was even worse was that it advertised cleanourair.com, a site purporting to help individuals reduce their carbon footprint.
Get this: the founding sponsor of the site is VisionAdz, a company whose sole purpose is to have ad trucks tootling about downtown, polluting our air and my eyes.
Bill Hicks was right about advertising types.
Flying - especially to the US - is such a tawdry experience. You trail out to a part of town that noone would otherwise go to, you wait in line, ticketing systems malfunction in ways that airline staff accept blindly, you wait in line again, a bored immigration official grills you half-heartedly, you wait in line again (this time without shoes), then you look forward to some dinner in the departure lounge - and have to make do with some cardboard pizza, since the only other choice is a hockey bar. And all of this is a good 90 minutes from your departure time.
Why does anyone put up with this?
I was a little bemused about Ontario wanting 21 extra MPs, so I did some sums to see how many MPs each province/territory should have:
| 2005 Population | ‘Fair’ Ridings | Actual Ridings | %age over/under represented | |
| Canada (total) | 32,270,500 | 308 | 308 | |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | 516,000 | 5 | 7 | +42% |
| Prince Edward Island | 138,100 | 1 | 4 | +203% |
| Nova Scotia | 937,900 | 9 | 11 | +23% |
| New Brunswick | 752,000 | 7 | 10 | +39% |
| Quebec | 7,598,100 | 73 | 75 | +3% |
| Ontario | 12,541,400 | 120 | 106 | -11% |
| Manitoba | 1,177,600 | 11 | 14 | +25% |
| Saskatchewan | 994,100 | 9 | 14 | +48% |
| Alberta | 3,256,800 | 31 | 28 | -10% |
| British Columbia | 4,254,500 | 41 | 36 | -11% |
| Yukon Territory | 31,000 | 0 | 1 | +238% |
| Northwest Territories | 43,000 | 0 | 1 | +144% |
| Nunavut | 30,000 | 0 | 1 | +249% |
The population data is from StatsCan for 2005, and the riding counts from Wikipedia, and checked on CBC’s election 2006 site. My analysis is a bit simplistic; everyone counted as population gets the same federal representation.
Ontario, BC and Alberta are getting stiffed. Quebec is the fairest of them all. But if you really want your vote to count, and you can’t handle the Territories, move to PEI.
For the upcoming midwestern trip, I’d ordered some Mapsource maps from GPS Central to help navigate across the mitten. They said they were in stock; indeed, they still do at time of writing:
I was very disappointed to get a note today saying that they were really out of stock, and they can deliver after the time I need it. GPS Central had previously been great, but they let me down by misrepresenting on their website. I cancelled the order.
Prairie Geomatics came to the rescue. They’re shipping tomorrow, for the same price (and cheaper shipping). I spoke to a real person to confirm.
I’m trying to get all the bits of my Sony Cybershot P100 kit together, and I can’t find the dad-blamed USB cable. It’s a weird connector, and two reputable camera dealers have cried ixnay on the vailabilityay. So I have to find it.
I have already turned the house over looking for it. Yes, I know that the recipient could just use a card reader, but it wouldn’t be so good.
Gah! Things! They’ll get you in the end.