We Saw a Chicken …

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  • Grocery gateway: now with added uselessness

    I used to be mad about Grocery Gateway. Now I’m mad at them.

    Our last (and by last I mean final, never again, not just most recent) order was a disaster:

    • the delivery was made 15 minutes before our delivery window, at 5:45am.
    • the driver did not call beforehand.
    • the driver was discourteous to Catherine.
    • only 2/3 of the items we ordered were delivered.
    • some of the items appeared to be dirty and badly handled.
    • they’ve put an extra inexplicable charge of $75 on my credit card.

    I e-mailed a complaint on the morning of the delivery, and an automated reply promised me a response within 24 hours. A week later, an anodyne semi-human response trickled in, hardly worth the bits it was printed on.

    The whole Grocery Gateway/Longo’s debacle has caused quite a stooshie on GTABloggers, with voxpopgirl more than sharing my outrage. A self-described PR-flack for Longo’s tried to make amends by saying how much in debt GG was, how Longo’s pride themselves on exemplary customer service, how hard a job it was, blah blah, rhubarb rhubarb. No ice was cut.

    Longo’s cancelled the order of a person with disabilities. Is it possible to get worse PR than that?

    Good riddance,Longo’s Grocery Gateway. I won’t shop with you any more, and I’d strongly recommend other to take their money elsewhere.

  • .info – wasn’t that an Amiga thing?

    It’s sad, but it was free: http://scruss.info.

  • PTC is go

    Last night, the US Congress voted to extend the Wind Energy Production Tax Credit (PTC) to the end of 2005. This should allow approximately US $2B of projects to go ahead.

    This should help stabilize the whole wind industry in North America. It means that manufacturers don’t have to deal with such a boom and bust market. Pity it was all buried in such a shamelessly vote-winning tax cut package, though.

  • Phew, redirects are good!

    So I think I’ve got all the old articles appearing at their old urls using .htaccess Redirect rules. This is a modification of a method described in the WordPress MT-Redirect method.

    I had a directory of the old numerically-named MT archives, so I used the following script to create a .htaccess file:

    for f in 000*html
do
 v=`basename $f .html`
 g=`echo $v | sed 's/^00*//;'`
 echo 'Redirect Permanent' /blog/archives/$f 'http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p='$g
done

    which looks like:

    Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000001.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=1
Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000002.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=2
Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000003.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=3
 ...
Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000322.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=322

    I put this .htaccess file in the root (top level) directory of my domain, and it all works! Everything I set out to do when reindexing my old MT entries has been completed — see, lookit: http://scruss.com/blog/archives/000214.html

  • Do You Wanna Be In My Clan?

    If you play Kingdom of Loathing, and like Robyn Hitchcock, may I invite you to join my clan, The Worshipful Company of Fegs?

  • It Takes A Different Kind Of Bravery To Face These Troubled Times

    Just back from a meeting of War Resisters Support Campaign, where Jeremy Hinzman was speaking. He comes across as quietly brave, and somewhat fazed by all the attention he’s getting. It didn’t stop him answering a couple of rather pointed questions very well, though.

  • Which part of … do you not understand?

    'do not bend', bent outta shape
    Yay Canada Post, for bending my hard-earned BCS charter certificate out of shape.

  • Filled with Oaty Goodness

    Caroline Smith calls my blog “It’s Oaty!“. I’m not sure why, it must be my thick, heavy accent …

  • Saved by the hat!

    Last week, I rather foolishly left my wallet in the company truck when I came off site. Not merely did it contain all my money and cards, but it also had my TTC pass, so without it I couldn’t get home. It didn’t contain my GO train pass, which meant I could get an inconvenient distance from the office truck before realising I could get no further.

    Stranded on the platform at Union Station, I suddenly remembered the advice in my Tilley hat‘s manual about putting “a $10 bill into the plastic bag in the pocket of the crown“. Hurrah!

    Sometimes it does pay to read the manual …

  • there’s a ghost in my house

    Robyn Hitchcock
    I just got Robyn Hitchcock‘s new album, Spooked. It’s early listening days, but it sounds a great one.

  • reminder of summer: field recording

    leopard frog, Lowbanks, ON
    A nice frog I saw when I was working in Lowbanks a couple of weeks ago.

    About the same time, and in the same field, I made a recording of crickets: Lowbanks Crickets, 15 Sep 02004. In the depths of winter, I’ll really need this sound as a reminder of what it can be like.

  • Not like you could tell

    Today’s World Carfree Day, but in Toronto and Burlington, you’d never know it.

  • gum mug

    What have they done with Wrigley’s Extra Peppermint Gum? It’s got a big Improved Flavour banner, but it tastes kinda cinnamony, kinda soapy to me.

    At least it doesn’t taste like Thrills Gum, the tagline of which is “it still tastes like soap!“. But Extra Peppermint gum was one of my favourites, and now I’ll have to try something else.

  • Singing is a radical act

    Would you call the singer of If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out a terrorist? The US Department of Homeland Security has just deported Yusuf Islam.

    What a shower of hopeless gits …

  • Reindexing old MT entries

    I’m not quite there yet, but I’ve got all my old MT articles with the same IDs as they had under that CMS. I basically used DrBacchus’ More about migrating from MT to WP method, but tried to integrate Scott Hanson’s Export from WordPress. It was not a complete success, but I’ll document what I did here in the hope that it’s useful.

    DrBacchus was using an older version of MT, while I’m using the most recent version. I found that the file you have to edit to insert IDs is lib/MT/ImportExport.pm — not lib/MT/App/CMS.pm.

    If you can avoid the temptation of adding blog entries to WP before importing from MT, do so. It’s a royal pain to add them later.

    I used the WP MT-export module to export all my blog entries, then trimmed out the existing entries which had been entered in MT. I then added entry IDs to the export file (an awk one-liner: awk 'BEGIN{id=323;} {print;} /^STATUS: / {print "ID:", id; id++;}' worked for me, as my highest MT article ID was 322). I then joined the export files from MT and WP in one big ‘export.txt’ file.

    If you have existing WP entries, you’ll have to get rid of them. I found that going directly into the database, and doing:

    delete from wp_posts;
    delete from wp_comments;

    would do it.

    Don’t forget to patch import-mt.php as per DrB’s instructions before importing.

    Here’s where the pain comes in — WP wouldn’t import the text from the entries created in MT. It restored all the metadata, but not the content. So I had to manually patch in the entries from the export file.

    I still have to work out rewrite rules for permalinks, but at least everything’s on the server where it should be. Maybe John’s Moved To WordPress rewrite rules will help me, as I think that my host (1and1) may not be doing entirely halal things with .htaccess support.

  • Normal Service Resumed, I think

    I just got my blog working pretty close to the way I want it to be again. I should be back up and posting.

    Big huge apologies to Catherine, with whom I was quite unnecessarily grouchy while this was not working. Sorry, Hen!

  • ***TypeBlog***

    typewriter blog entry, 19 Sep 2004

    — The above written on an IBM Wheelwriter 10 Series II, using the Thesis PS printwheel.

  • ping!

    Still alive, incidentally. Just been on site, and had lots of visitors.

  • two companies that don’t get it

    Please, online companies, whatever you do, don’t send users’ usernames and passwords in clear over e-mail. I’ve just ordered from Future Photo and delivery.ca, and both do this. Worse still, delivery.ca (or at least their Pizzaville service) allows you to save credit card information on their site.

    As one who is just recovering from more than $8000 of fraudulent transactions on his card, this does not inspire confidence.

  • Steve Weber abides

    Judith & Steve called me again. Steve treated me to a great version of ‘Skin Game’ (from Too Much Fun!) over the phone. I think having one of the elder statesmen of psych-folk play a personal concert for me while I waited for the Bathurst streetcar to take me to the CNE must be one of the weirder episodes in my life.