Category: Geekery

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.

If you discover a bunch of old files in /var/mailman/qfiles/shunt, do NOT run unshunt. It doesn’t get rid of them, it delivers them to the mailing lists that they’d originally been rejected by since they came from non-members and are spam.

I just sent 18 peices of spam to the members of the Upstate Aviation Mailing list. And they’re all helpfully tagged ‘[UpstateAv]’ in the subject line so people know where they came from.

I just heard a little “beedely-beep” coming from the general area of my desk. Oh oh, my cell phone is showing “Low Battery”. That’s weird, I plugged it in before I went to bed last night. And when I went for a pee in the middle of the night and again this morning, I could have sworn that the backlight was on, which it generally only does when it’s charging. So why didn’t it charge?

Personally, I blame The Connector Conspiracy. The connector on this cell phone is little, and fiddly, and doesn’t make a very good or reliable connection. I don’t know why they have to make a different connector for every single cell phone brand out there, but it’s either:

• greed – they could save a few cents per phone by using this new funky connector instead of something simple and positive like an RCA-style jack or
• greed – they realize the real profit is in making the chargers and car adaptors and the like, and the only way to make you buy their chargers and car adaptors is to use a different connector than everybody else.

Either way, it’s damn annoying. And I’m cellphone-less for the rest of the day because the only cell phone charger I have at work is for my last cell phone. Not that I’d have anywhere to plug it in – I’ve already used the only slots in my power strip for my PDA and my iPod. The fact that at work you can only use power strips that have been attached to something in a vertical orientation is rant-worthy, but maybe for another time.

Take a look at these graphs: Free Disk-Space for ‘/usr/lib/news/spool/articles’ on freenet9, especially the “Monthly” graph, and see if you can figure out what happened. And then look at the “Yearly” graph and see if you can spot when I made the same mistake and didn’t spot is so quickly.

Sheesh, I feel like an idiot.

…the installer for the latest update to Photoshop Elements thinks it has to kill every other application running on your computer? Even bloody Terminal! Don’t they realize that Mac OS X is a modern OS, not Mac Classic or Windows 9x where an inadvertent gnat fart could crash the computer?