Has anybody seen my cell phone? I’ve been going to all my normal haunts and dialing it to listen for the it ringing. I’d better find it soon because it’s probably only got two more day’s battery.
Damn, this is annoying.
Category: Rant
Customer Service, FBO Division
Because of the move, I evidently missed out on one of my chart subscription deliveries, so I have expired US charts. Also, I’m planning a trip to Springfield MA in a couple of weeks, so I need MA approach charts. Rather than order them on-line, I thought I’d do the right thing and go to the local FBO to buy them.
On Saturday afternoon, I went to Rochester Air Center, and the door was locked. That’s a bit weird during a weekend day, but the weather was low overcast and a bit drizzly, so maybe they figured nobody was going to be flying. I went across the way to Airventure Aviation, and the sign said they were open, but again there was nobody there. Hmmm. Not great customer service, I thought, not to mention being damned inconvenient.
Tonight, at about 5:15, I tried again. This time, Airventure was closed and locked, but Rochester Air Center’s door was open. I went in, and there was nobody around. The chart display case was open, I could have helped myself, but I didn’t think I had the sort of relationship with them that would allow me to do that, especially if somebody walked in while I was taking the charts out but before I wrote the IOU. (Yeah, I could have written the IOU first, but you know what I mean.)
So now I’m left with a dilema: Either I try again, and risk not finding anybody there, and the possibility that I’ve left it too late to order, or do I order on-line, or do I just download and print the charts I think I’ll need. I don’t like the latter choice much, because it means my options are limited if I have to divert.
The perils of automatic updates
Last night at 3:20am, I was awakened (awoke? woken up? woke up?) by a lot of beeping. Evidently every xterm open on the Linux server was getting a “wall” message from the UPS monitoring software. That’s four or five Terminal windows on my laptop, a couple on Vicki’s laptop, a few on the G4, and a bunch of VCs on the Linux box itself. Quite a noise. The messages were repeats of
Communications with UPS evolution@localhost lost
UPS evolution@localhost is unavailable
Communications with UPS evolution@localhost established
I couldn’t deal with it at 3:20am, so I just shut down NUT and went back to bed. Investigation this morning shows that Fedora shipped me a new version of NUT last night, and it doesn’t like something about my configuration. I still haven’t figured out what.
Financial paddlers
Somebody on Usenet described those girls who hit my kayak as “financial paddlers” because they go from bank to bank and leave you broke.
A company of idiots
I work at a company that employes thousands of people. Early this morning, Corporate IT send out a message to everybody at the company with a Lotus Notes (bleargh) account warning them that a couple of servers are going to be upgraded this weekend and Notes might not be available during the upgrade. That was immediately followed by a deluge of idiots using “Reply All With History” to ask why they were getting this mail, followed by a few dozen people saying “Stop using Reply All”, followed by more people saying “You’re doing it too, you idiot”, followed by the original few dozen saying “if I hadn’t done a Reply All, I’d only be talking to people who’d already done it”, followed by several petty flame wars, followed by still more people saying “take me off this list”. It’s the most traffic I’ve seen on Lotus Notes since I came to the company – as a matter of fact, it probably outnumbers all the Lotus Notes I’ve had in total since I came to the company.
Fortunately my Unix mail account is still working.