Author: Andy Scheffler

For the love of all things holy, people!

It’s spelled “lose”! One ‘o’!

Not “loose”!

(Okay, maybe not getting enough sleep and not eating enough are making me slightly cranky.)

So my amazon.com order has been sitting doing very weird things. It’s been sitting as “ready to ship” for the last three days, with an estimated delivery of August 1st. For a week before that, it was complaining about delayed items, when all of the items “usually ship in 24 hours”. So I emailed customer support.

They said, yes, there had been weirdness with the order, here’s a $5 coupon, your order has shipped and should be there on the date listed on the webpage, August 7th.

Huh.

A last minute update. The webpage is a bit confused. It appears that they are now using time machines to deliver their goods. It’s a shame I didn’t have mine shipped to 1999, I could have included a gift wrap with a note that said “sell all your Yahoo! shares now!”

Saw three movies over the weekend.

Still waiting on my Amazon.com order that was mysteriously delayed for a week. (That was the third thing I was going to mention last time.)

We had a group meeting today, the whole group under our V.P. There are 113 people in the group now, and most of them were in that room (some of us are spread out over the various international offices). When I started here, there were 11 of us (including one who started on the same day as me). Scary.

I think I found the problem that was causing my fuse to blow on my car… there were some exposed wires on the front right turn signal control wires, where the bumper fell off… it was probably shorting and causing the circuit to blow. I wrapped it up in electrical tape and affixed it to the bumper so it won’t rub against the tire to re-expose it, replaced the fuse, and I’ve been fine for a while. Further proof that duct tape can fix anything.

But the conservation of aggravation theory still stands: Just today, the power went out in our house. I thought it was the DSL going down again until bigdumbthing messaged me.

I forgot the last thing.

Well, that was awfully quick. I just got my laptop back!

I also just bid on a copy of PageMaker 7.0 for the Mac on eBay, for a fraction of its actual cost. It would be nice to get this out of the way rather cheaply so I can actually do the newsletter at AXNY.

According to Apple’s customer website, my PowerBook went in for repair a week ago, and has been waiting for a part until today. I’m guessing it’s getting a brand new screen. Hooray.

Is it possible for people on the road to be too nice and considerate?

My car keeps blowing out the same fuse. I’ve now bought three “variety packs” of car fuses because everywhere I go they don’t have the pack of just the kind I need. Each time the car has blown the fuse, and each time it’s happened more quickly. This is the car’s way of telling me something’s wrong.

So I’m driving on the road without instrumentation lights, a clock, and, most importantly, no rear lights.

So of course, whenever I’m driving at night (which isn’t much) at least once, usually twice, I’ll have someone flash their lights at me as if to say “hey, buddy, your lights aren’t on.” When I was driving back from the city with Hank two weeks ago, I had two people actually roll down their windows to tell me.

Hello, world? Yes, I know my tail lights are out. Shut up.

In other more mundane news, I finished watching The X-Files DVDs up to Season 5. I’m now caught up on what I bought. Of course, my Star Trek Season 3 DVDs are arriving soon, and I’ve still got a bunch of movies I haven’t watched, then there’s the pile of books I need to read, and Mario Sunshine comes out in a month…

I’m still PowerBook-less. It’s like I lost an appendage I never knew I had a month ago.

I don’t wanna go to work tomorrow.

I suppose I should note that the DSL came back on as I left this morning to go to work.

Uhh.. yippee.

That’s the only explanation.

You heard my story about my problems with my car. I may have mentioned that I just had to mail off my PowerBook because there were an insane amount of stuck pixels on the display. On top of the random stuff at work (like my computer spontaneously restarting), we just had another weird failure. On Thursday night, our phone stopped working. On Friday, it hadn’t come back yet, so I called up Pac Bell (once again) and once again, the problem was fixed on their end automatically.

Unfortunately, this time when they fixed the voice line, the DSL stopped working… even though it was working while the voice line was off. This started another nightmare of Tech Support that has bounced me within different divisions of Pac Bell / SBC Global, each thinking it’s the other’s department until I finally get someone who tries to piece together exactly what happened.

So, we’ve been without DSL for three days and counting, and from what I gather from the last person I talked to, probably at least one more. Oddly, though, the IP address of our DSL modem (which shouldn’t be online, as it’s been sitting in the room trying to sync with the DSL for the last three days) is actually responding to pings. Whether or not that’s our actual modem, or someone else’s DSL modem that got assigned the same IP will be determined tonight by some of my own “diagnostic tests”.

So the electrical problems with my car continued yesterday, I had to replace the same fuse again, which struck me as odd… but then the car wouldn’t start at all. I got a jump and drove straight to the auto parts store, and replaced the battery (or “core” as they like to call them). Car started up fine, but the fuse blew again driving out of the parking lot. I’m hoping it’s just because it was mostly melted through from before. Now I’m out of 10A fuses again. Made it to the comic store after they closed, but since I’m such a regular customer (and since I spend quite a bit) they let me in because they were still there. They both happened to work in the auto industry for their “real” jobs, and they suggested removing the positive contact from the battery while it was running… if the engine cut out, I had a bad alternator, otherwise it was the battery. I got home and tried it, and the car kept running. It also started this morning with no problems, so I’m hoping I’m out of the woods (besides not having dashboard lights and clock until I get more fuses).

I also donated blood yesterday, which is funny because they tell you “no heavy lifting” afterwards, and I think “I never do any heavy lifting anyway” and then I end up having to lug a battery around later that day.

And on a completely separate note: Yoko Kanno is coming to AXNY!

*does the happy hamster dance*

Yoko Kanno is coming to AXNY!

*does the happy hamster dance*