I went kayaking for the first time in 3 weeks today. The weather wasn’t looking great, but I figured it had been too long. I was right about the weather – it started raining when I was about 2/3rds of the way to the weir, but it wasn’t a cold rain so I kept going. I was alone, so I was paddling as fast as I could. Probably too fast. Mostly I wanted to see how far I could go without pausing, and then after I had to pause, how few pauses I could take and still keep up a decent pace. That’s sort of how I built up my fitness when I first started cross country skiing and again when I started mountain biking – go fast, and work on increasing the range, instead of doing the more conventional starting with long slow distance and building up the speed, which is how I started running.
Continue reading “Wet one”
Month: May 2008
Thank you for calling AT&T, now go fuck yourself
Update: 3 hours later, it’s working again. No thanks to AT&T.
I have a Palm Treo. I’ve had it for over 2 years, and all during that time I’ve had the same cell phone plan, one which includes “unlimited internet”. And all during that time, I’ve used it at least daily to check my email – and since my employer cut off my access to my home computer, I’ve used it even more like several times an hour while I’m at work I also use it to check weather, check Google maps, and other things that require an internet connection. This morning, I’ve been unable to get to the internet.
So I called “The New AT&T”. And once again, their “trouble shooting” involved me taking out the battery and sim, trying and failing to read the tiny little 20 digit number on the SIM card, reading the IMEI number from the back of the phone, and then putting it all together and getting exactly the same results as before. The “helpful” AT&T tech said that one reason for my problems might be that my data plan is incompatible with the Treo, and I needed to switch to a PDA data plan. Except that she couldn’t make changes to the plan unless I could remember my wife’s social security number. I tried to explain that there is nothing wrong with the data plan as I’d been using it on a daily basis for more than 2 years, but she insisted that she couldn’t do any more trouble shooting unless i gave her my wife’s social security number so she could switch my data plan. I shudder to think how much more a “PDA data plan” is going to cost.
So the question in my mind is: is this a temporary outage on their network that the tech wouldn’t admit, a problem with my phone, or did they just notice that I’ve had the wrong data plan after 2 years and suddenly cut me off? And how does this affect the probability of me buying a iPhone when the 3G ones come out?
Construction project, Day 3.5
I had a phone call from a very nice person at PygmyBoats. She was calling me because I’d ordered the wrong size spray skirt for the kayak kit I’d ordered, and she wanted to know if I was ordering them for the kit, or for another boat. It turns out that the Arctic Tern 14 is a “medium” size boat, but the Arctic Tern Hi Volume is a “large” size boat. Also, when I saw the “1 hand toggle” on the order form, I’d actually ordered 1 pair. Oh, and I got the UPS tracking number – they said that I should get it Friday or Monday. I’m hoping it’s Friday for obvious reasons.
Question for Great Big Sea fans
Has anybody managed to do the pre-order thing for their up-coming album? Pre-sales were supposed to start yesterday, but when I tried it just now, I got a notice saying that the album was out of stock, and therefore my cart was empty. Well, of course it’s out of stock – it’s a pre-order, after all. But I’ve had other problems using non-IE browsers on their site before. If you’ve managed to pre-order using Firefox or Safari on Mac, please let me know.
That can’t be a coincidence, can it?
I’m reading the latest Analog (or at least the one on top of my to-be-read pile, which grows faster than I can read it down, but which usually acts as a stack rather than a queue), and came across a story “Sand and Iron” by Michael Flynn. I noticed the name “Slugger O’Toole”, and immediately started thinking of the song “The Irish Rover”. And as I read further, I realized that all of the names in the story seemed to correspond to names in the song. Here is the mapping, in roughly the order they appear in the story:
| Story | Song |
|---|---|
| Nagaraj Hogan | Hogan, from Country Tyrone |
| Captain Amos January | ??? |
| Micmac Anne | Mick McCann from the Banks of the Bann |
| Slugger O’Toole | Slugger O’Toole, who was drunk as a rule |
| Maggie Barns (aka Maggie B) | Barnie McGee from the banks of the Lee |
| Fighting Bill Tirasi | Fighting Bill Tracy, from Dover |
| Johnny Mgurk | Johnny McGurk, who was scared stiff of work |
As you can see, I can’t figure out “Amos January”, and the only unused name in the song is “Malone”. And the Maggie B to Barnie McGee mapping isn’t exactly a slam dunk either. But everything else works so well, to the point where Mgurk hides from work as well.