Category: Activities

Forgot to mention…

That this iPod came FedEx. And everything that I complained that you used to be able to do with UPS, FedEx does right. The door tag had the address of the local depot, their hours, and the information that you could come by the depot after 5:30pm to pick up the item, or if you didn’t come, they’d re-attempt the delivery the next day, and if I wanted I could sign the door tag in lieu of signing for the package. You could even give them information on a secure place on your premises for them to leave it, if you wanted them to put it behind the door or in your garage or something.

I got the same information when I phoned from work (before I saw the door tag). No muss, no fuss, no bother.

Good things to hear from your boss, number NNN in a series

I just got a phone call from my boss. “So with everybody else I should multiply their estimates by four, but with yours I should divide them by four?”

How did this happen? He had called me a bit earlier and said that they’d changed their mind about postponing a “PCR” (probem report) that had been assigned to me, and wanted to know how long it would take to fix it. Since I hadn’t really had a good look at it before they’d postponed it, I said “Maybe four hours.” “Can you have it before you leave for the day?”, he asked. I said that I’d do my best. I looked, and found that 90% of what I needed had already been done elsewhere, so I needed to cut and paste some code, do a tiny bit of tweaking, and Bob’s your uncle. I did a very rudimentary test, and it worked, so I checked it in and marked the PCR as “Resolved” about an hour after I’d given him the four hour estimate.

As Scotty said, “how else would I keep my reputation as a Miracle Worker?”

Long kayak trip

I went kayaking this afternoon. It was quite a long trip because I had nobody with me to make sure I didn’t do something stupid. The Google Maps Pedometer (sometimes you have to fiddle with it to get it to show my course line) shows I went 5.7 miles.

It wasn’t the most exciting trip I’ve ever taken, but the creek was sure different after the Katrina-spawned rain we got a few days ago. Not a lot higher, but way, way faster. Going up stream, there were places where I was paddling as hard as I could and barely making any progress at all. Lots of people on the river today because of the great weather and the Labour Day holiday. When I got into the bit upstream of Browncroft Boulevard, the bit I’ve never been to before, there were a lot of people in the park, most of them throwing sticks and balls into the river for their dogs to retrieve. Luckily none of them mistook me for a stick. One person did annoy me by throwing the ball right to the opposite side of the creek just as I got there, meaning that both I and the dog had to take evasive action to avoid hitting each other.
On the way back, I stopped to take some pictures of a couple of swans that were preening and feeding. One of them did a big display, unfortunately I paniced a bit because I thought he was going to come after me, and didn’t get the picture.
 
Later on, I met another couple of swans, one of whom had a neck tag. Man, those things must suck to carry around.

By all means, Paul, fsck with the hard drives

This morning, as Vicki was about to leave for work, she dumped her laptop on me, saying it wasn’t booting. It was stuck on a blue boot screen, with nothing much happening. So I did a three finger salute and forced a reboot, and it went to the OpenDarwin login prompt. I put in her userid and password, and it said “Invalid login” and started doing a normal graphical boot. Then it popped up a warning about something wrong with the Tablet driver (which is odd, because we don’t have a Tablet). I acknowledged the warning, and it booted some more, and then it went back to the OpenDarwin login prompt. After a few attempts at different userids and passwords, I remembered how to boot these guys into single user mode (splat+s).

In single user mode, it gave me an error with replaying the journal. So I did an “fsck -fy”, and after it said it finished fixing everything, it sort of hung again. So I did another boot into single user mode and another “fsck -fy” and it didn’t find anything wrong, so I booted it normally and it came up fine.

So I pulled out the external firewire drive and copied her entire /Users/vjrnts directory over to it. Good thing it’s still under AppleCare.