Category: Geekery

Some random thoughts about the blog

Last night, lying in bed trying to get to sleep, I had a few random thoughts about my blog.

  • If I were to just put the already generated pages of Maddy’s blog and the memorial blog, and not allow new entries or comments, then it doesn’t need a blog engine behind it, and so therefore I could upgrade *this* blog to the newest version of MovableType or TextPattern. I can’t currently upgrade MovableType because the current version’s free license only allows one author.
  • I should make a new category for a pain diary, but not put it on the main page. Sort of like how on Maddy’s blog only her entries go on the main index, but other stuff posted about her by others goes in the category index on the side.
  • I should put all the updates I’m doing to the navaid.com site into a blog, either this one or another one. I should also transition the copilot-announce mailing list to Gradwell.

MovableType bug or feature?

This entry is posted at 8:20 local (12:20 GMT), but the the index.rdf entry will show the date as

<dc:date>2004-09-29T08:20:00-05:00</dc:date>

That seems to imply that the GMT offset is 5 hours, when (thanks to daylight savings time) it’s really 4 hours. So should MovableType put the current offset in there, or should anybody attempting to parse that file have to know about DST?

Been there, done that

Read this for a taste of what it’s like to be a maintenance programmer: Friday Feature: You’re all Morons. Read it quick, because I bet it will be taken down as soon as the honchos at Star Wars Galaxies find it.

My lusers aren’t as stupid as his, but what they don’t have in teenaged arrogance and stupidity they make up for in type-A personalities and ability to throw around purchasing power. “Oh, your last release had a bug in it? I guess we’ll take our $45 million contract somewhere else then instead. I bet your competitor doesn’t have bugs.” I bet they do, fuckwit.

This is one reason I hate using eBay

My dad gave me his old camera because mine crapped out. The lens he gave me with it didn’t include filters, and the filters on my old lenses don’t fit. So I thought I’d get the bare minimum, a 1A Skylight filter and a polarizer, from eBay. There was a guy selling a whole bunch of camera stuff, and he said in his actions that if you used the “Buy It Now” feature you didn’t have to the shipping, and if you bought two or more, you could take 50 cents off of each item as a “bulk discount”. He was an eBay power seller or whatever they call it, and he took PayPal so it should have been dead easy.

So I did the “Buy it now” on the two filters I wanted. The eBay checkout procedure would allow me to remove the shipping cost myself, but not the bulk discount. So I emailed the guy and asked him to update the price so I could send him the money. No answer. So the next day I just calculated how much the total should be and Paypal-ed him the money. But he still hasn’t answer any of my emails, nor has he acknowledged me in any way whatsoever. It’s been 4 days so far.

At what point do I say to myself that the money I paypal-ed to him is lost, he’s a fucking rip-off artist, and buy another couple of filters?

Oh, and just to make my life complete, his site advertises that he’s got “autofeedback”, so if you leave him a negative feedback on eBay he’ll automatically leave you a negative feedback.