Category: Geekery

Sometimes you get a winner, and sometimes you get a loser

While I was away at Oshkosh, I got two emails from users of my Waypoint Generators. The first was from a loser:

Wow,

What a disappointment. Even though I have donated before, I see that you require a donation now for the waypoint generator. I made another donation (see below) and when I am halfway though the waypoint generation process, I get redirected back to the paypal screen. I have a trip to Canada in the morning and I guess I won’t be using Copilot…

First of all, everything he says is a total lie. I have never required a donation, and I never will. There is nothing that will “redirect…back to the paypal screen” other than user stupidity. Second of all, if you think you’re going to get me scrambling to help you, neither your lies nor your generous $1.00 donation (of which Paypal takes $0.33 in fees) is really going to do it. I wrote to him back and said that I was refunding his $1.00, but only on the condition that he never use any free software or free web services ever again, because the thousands of people who provide free software and free web services don’t need his kind of abuse.

The second email I got was much more welcome. It was from a man who had a commercial product on display at Oshkosh that is using my waypoint generator’s waypoints in it. He had some small suggestions for improvements, and he also offered to provide some improved data for South Africa. He is located in South Africa, so unfortunately he wasn’t at Oshkosh himself. I got the name of the company representing him on Thursday, but I never got to their booth on Friday, which is too bad. It sure is nice to see people using and appreciating what I do.

Computer Stupidities

I was spending some time reading Computer Stupidities, a fun little web site. Unfortunately some of the time you find yourself being more sympathetic to the poor “victim” of the story than the narrator because the narrator was being arrogant and not understanding of natural confusions that people new to computer might have.

One of the stories put me in mind of something that happened to me, and rather than submitting it there, I thought I’d put it here.

I was at Sun’n’Fun 2002, a large Experiment Aircraft Association (EAA) fly-in in Lakeland Florida. A local Florida ISP had put some computers that you could use to connect to the internet, with a time limit and no chairs to keep the line short. Not a bad idea, and best of all it was free. In 2002 I had a laptop, but no wireless card, so a wireless hotspot wouldn’t do me any good – this was my only access option.

Now as an aside, I should mention that I’m a bit of a dinosaur. I’ve been using email since the late 1980s, and as far as I’m concerned there are very few reasons to use HTML in email – I don’t care what font and colour you think your words should be, I’ll judge them on their content thanks, and I certainly don’t want to activate web bugs or see your spam. So accordingly, I use a plain text email client on my home machine, which I access through ssh or telnet. Pure text, fast as hell, and I can use extremely small and dumb clients like a vt100 emulator on a PDA.

So every day that I was at Sun’n’Fun I went into this area, fired up IE which was the only icon available, and typed “telnet://xcski.com/” which brought up the Microsoft Telnet client. I’d log in, read my email in less than the time limit and maybe also fire up my text-only newsreader and read a few newsgroups, log off, and leave.

The second last day of the fly-in, I was finishing up and about to leave when the guy running the booth that day came over and said “I know what you’re doing. And I want you to get out of here.” I asked what he thought I was doing, and he said “You know what you’re doing.” “Yes,” I replied, “I’m using mutt to read my email on my home server.” “You need to leave now.” “Why?” “You know what you’re doing.” “Yes, but evidently you don’t.” That’s when he threatened to call security. Since I figured Rent-a-cops would know even less than him about what you can do on the Internet that doesn’t look like Hotmail, I left. He must have seen a plain text window on the screen and somehow thought I’d gotten into the MS-DOS shell and was trying to do something on his screen, but trying to show him that I was on a different shell on a different system just didn’t register with him.

After I got home, I told my story on a newsgroup I participate in. One of the other participants used to work for that same ISP and asked me if it was “this guy” and sent me a link to a page on that ISP’s site with a bio and picture of their sales manager. I confirmed that it was. He said that while the bio on the ISP’s web site said he had 8 years experience with the Internet, it was more like 2 months experience 48 times over.

Suggestion for Apple

I’d like to make a suggestion for Apple: If you’re going to sell an HP Printer/Scanner/Copier PSC 1510, you should make sure that HP bundles drivers THAT WERE WRITTEN IN THIS FUCKING CENTURY! No shit – I hit the “Scan” button, and it launched “Classic”, the backwards compatibility program that allows it to run programs written for the old OS 9. It then fired up some limited edition of an ancient version of Photoshop.

Come on, you guys.

The Computer Doctor strikes again

As reported in Rants and Revelations : The Computer Doctor is IN, I did some major disk swappery when Stevie’s iBook died a few months ago. I put Stevie’s hard drive in Vicki’s iBook, and Vicki’s hard drive in a 15″ Powerbook Titanium that she borrowed from work. Well, Stevie graduated, and as a graduation present she was given a MacBook. So it’s time to reverse the surgery, putting Vicki’s hard drive back in her iBook, and the original hard drive back in the Powerbook.

Time to haul out the Torx and Phillips screw drivers, and most importantly the Fixit Guilde.

Putting the hard drive back in the Powerbook is pretty straight forward, except taking the ide cable off the hard drive is a little brute force for my liking. Only 9 screws, all the same head and general size. And after a little coaxing and swearing, it went back together and booted.

Putting the hard drive back in the iBook is a real pain in the ass. Lots of fiddly crap, including a bit where it says

Breathe deeply. Trying times are ahead, but we promise the lower case does come off.

and another bit where after about 30-45 minutes of work, you get to the bit where it says

Remove the following 16 screws:

But at least they put handy little loops on the ide cables so that they could be removed without bending any pins.

In progressThis is about that stage. (As you can see, I’m a firm believer that a clean organized desk is obviously a pre-requisite for doing good work.)

Actually, it was a lot easier having done this a few times now. But I still held my breath as I booted it up and make sure the fiddliest bits, the trackpad and speaker cables got hooked up correctly and it boots properly. And it did! Yay for me!

While dis-assembling and assembling this iBook, several of the Torx screws were getting very rounded off – I had a hell of a time removing one or two of them. I have my doubts that I’ll be able to get the screws off again. I guess next time it breaks, Vicki will have to get a MacBook too.