Jeep Fuel Problems

My Cherokee ended up needing a new fuel pump recently and the whole situation was rather inconvenient.

Back in August it failed to start for the first time ever when I went to drive home after work. It would just crank and crank. I poked around for a little while and figured the problem was fuel related. I had compression because the engine was cranking at its usual speed and I had spark because I pulled a plug wire off to test it (shocking the hell out of myself in the process). The only other thing required for that car to run is fuel. When you first turn the key to the on position the fuel pump is supposed to turn on for about one second and then turn off. I couldn't hear it turning on at all when turning the key. I took a look at the wiring, which all looked ok and checked the fuel pump relay which seemed to function properly, so logically it was a fuel pump. Since I was in Harley's parking lot on a hill I really didn't want to get into changing this part myself. The pump is inside the gas tank and not very easy to get at, especially with an almost full tank of gas.

I had the car towed to a shop I've used before for them to fix it. The next day they went to check out the car and it started right up! I talked to my dad who said from his experience fuel pumps tend to start getting weak and not able to keep up under high demand, like going up hill on the highway. He also said he didn't think they would start working again if they fail. So instead of spending $400 to replace a pump that was working at the time I took the car home.

Fast-forward to last week: I was driving home from work on 31F and just as I was passing the Wegmans in East Rochester my car seemed to lose some steam for a second and then came back. I kept going, but just as I crossed the canal entering Fairport the engine died completely. I can think of worse places to break down, but Church Street in Fairport is a busy road and at rush hour is even worse! Again I sniffed around for while and couldn't hear the pump turning on. I could hear the relay clicking on and off though, so I knew it was getting power. I climbed under the car and banged on the gas tank a bunch of times hopefully trying to shock the pump into working again. No dice. I had it towed to a local shop to replace the pump.

The next day when the shop went to look at the car, it started right up (surprise, surprise). I talked to the guy and told him all the diagnosing I did, and he said it sounds like a pump, but they couldn't guaranty that since they couldn't reproduce the problem. They ordered the pump from the Jeep dealer and four days later when it arrived it was the wrong pump! The dealer only had a listing for a mechanical pump and my car has an electric pump. Since the dealer didn't have a part, they got a cheap aftermarket one from a local parts place. They put it in and it died about 5 seconds after the car started. Then they put in a much more expensive Bosch pump which worked fine.

It kills me to spend this kind of money for something that I'm not 100% sure will fix it, but what choice do I really have? I can't keep driving it until it fails on the road leaving me stranded. With my luck it'll do that in some deserted area in the middle of a blizzard. I'm really going to be pissed if that thing dies on me again with the same symptoms. At least the shop that did it has a 1 year warranty on the part and the labor if it fails again.

I have the old pump and plan on taking it apart to see why it failed, I just haven't had time yet.

My poor jeep stuck on the side of the road :(

First Week Dell Problems

The first week of school is always crazy. Teachers show up after being MIA the entire summer and suddenly find all sorts of problems that they need fixed that second. One and half weeks ago was the first day of school for Harley and was no exception.

There was the usual "help, my printer doesn't work" and "my password doesn't work!!!", but I got quite a few messages about computers not turning on. Usually this is just them being unplugged or powerstrip switches being off, but sure enough some weren't working. Lights would turn on when I hit the power button, but no drives spun or fans blew. This was actually a well known problem with certain Dell models that relates back to bad capacitors used on the mainboards. This was an easy diagnosis and fix; you just needed a new mainboard. The annoying part was that I had 7 of these systems (Optiplex SX280) all fail at the same time with the same problem and all about 1 month after the warranty ran out.

You can see the top of the left capacitor is bulging compared to the two on its right. Sometimes this is enough to cause the board to fail. Sometimes they'll run for a while with a bulging cap, but eventually they'll explode:

This one went one step past bulging and started leaking.

I called Dell to see if I could complain my way into some free mainboard replacements. After all, this is a manufacturing defect on their part and I personally feel they should have fixed the problem at their cost. My complaining didn't go as well as I had hoped. First I spoke with a lovely Indian in their out-of-warranty service department. She wasn't all that sympathetic and really didn't understand what I wanted. She said those boards are $280 each! So I pressed on and asked about getting a limited warranty extension. Again she didn't get it and quoted me $195 (each) for a 1 year warranty extension. Finally I just told her flat out, "I want these boards for free, it's your companies fault they failed." She told me I'd have to speak to general support for that. She transferred me there and I went through the same thing finally have to just spell it out for the guy. He put me on hold and talked to his supervisor who said no. I asked to talk to this supervisor who told me that Dell "took a stand" on this problem and decided to not cover any more claims after January 2008. I informed him that over years Harley has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with Dell and I thought they should cover $1800 in parts; he disagreed.

In the end I had to buy the boards from Partstock who gave me a more reasonable price. After I replaced all the boards I ended up stripping one of the dead boards of all its capacitors and used those to replace the single bulging or leaking cap on the rest of the boards. Assuming that worked, I now have 6 spare mainboards for when more of them fail (which they will eventually).

I also had another problem with one of the same models: it would halt on boot complaining about not being able to detect a heat sink. I had no idea these things were smart enough to know if the heatsink was present or not. After opening it up and taking out all the parts (these are very small machines with a lot of parts crammed in) I saw this:

This is the one side that was fine. Apparently that anchor is not just structural, but allows for a continuity check across the heatsink.

This was the other end. Either the machine got smacked around or just had some bad soldering, the anchor ripped right out of the board. I soldered it back down which ended up being surprisingly difficult. You can't remove the z-clip in between the two anchors, it had to be soldered down with the tension of the clip on it.

Stung, Twice!

Normally bees and wasps and all those flying stinging bastards don't bother me. Even if they come sniffing around I don't freak out like some people. Before recently I had not been stung in an extremely long time. In fact the last time I can remember was when I was probably 5 or 6 running around my grandparent's yard and got stung on my pinky toe. 

Two weekends ago while mowing the lawn I felt something hit my calf, so I swatted it and it landed on my forearm and stuck me. I was not pleased. There was no stinger stuck in my arm, so I was thinking it was a wasp or hornet. I'm not deathly allergic, but my arm got really sore and swollen.

Last weekend I was mowing again and in the same exact spot I felt something on my leg again and went to swat it, but it stung me on the back of the knee before I got there. Same MO, no stinger and seemly out of nowhere. I was really pissed this time. I spoke some choice words rather (extremely) loudly.

We looked online to see what makes nests in the ground and it looks like it was probably a wasp. The only thing is I can't find the nest. Typically they look like little piles of dirt and are pretty obvious. This weekend when I mow, I'll be ready to kick some wasp-ass.

Doing the Dance

It's that time of year again, where I have to order replacement workstations and servers for the school. Nothing is more annoying than playing the quote game with manufacturers. You email/call some guy from some company and say "Hey I need 40 computers with these specs, send me a quote", and get an email later (hopefully that same day) with some outrageous price. Then you repeat the process with a different manufacturer.

Once you have quotes from a few different places, you start setting them against each other. You take the lowest price and tell others that companyX is beating them and see if they can do any better. They'll usually come back with a slightly better price. Then you repeat the entire process over and over again until you can't squeezing any more deals out of them and you finally go with whoever gave you the best price.

One of the companies I'm looking at for servers this year is HP, and I'm kind of astounded how difficult it's been to get an accurate quote from them. I went on their website and chatted with some support rep, gave him the specs I want and he said someone would be in contact with me about it. Later that day (at 10pm) I get an email from some rep with a quote attached. The quote was for $4k and the specs were no where near what I asked for. She quoted me for 1 dual-core processor instead of 2 quad-core processors and 1GB of memory instead of the 24GB of memory I asked for, among other incorrect specs. I replied reiterating the needed specs and asked her to update the quote. When she finally got back to me, the new quote is for $20k!! Obviously something was messed up since that was more than twice what everyone else (Dell and IBM) gave me, but I couldn't tell since the quote isn't itemized. Finally a few days later I got an accurate (and competitive) quote from that HP rep, I can't wait to see how hard it'll be to get the price down.

There Will Be Boredom!

I made a promise to myself a while ago, that I would only give one more chance to oscar-winning movies to prove they all don't suck. I gave them a chance, and they failed again.

This weekend we watched There Will Be Blood, a turn of the century period-piece about oil. That description is a little more exciting than the actual movie was. To give you an example, I'm pretty sure no words were spoken at all in the first 10, maybe even 20 minutes. It was just Daniel Day Lewis (DDL) in a hole with a pick ax, setting dynamite, not being able to pull up his tools in time (you'd think he would've done that before lighting the dynamite...), falling down the shaft breaking a leg, dragging himself up out the hole and a bunch of miles into town on his back to confirm he found something in the hole.

It didn't really get much better as it went on. DDL's character seemed like a normal guy making a killing in an emerging market, but he seemed to get crazier and crazier as the movie went on. He seemed like a good father in the beginning and then decides to abandon his son after an accident. Then he started threatening to kill people who inquire about his family and beat up priests.

Speaking of priests, one of the somewhat major characters is a priest. We met him early on when he told DDL that there was oil coming up out the ground on his family's ranch. He said his name was Paul when he first met DDL, but when DDL got to the ranch he introduced himself as Eli. Maybe they were supposed to be twins (they were both played by Paul Dano from Little Miss Sunshine), but during the movie you never see Paul again, even in their family's house. There wasn't even a place set for him at the table for dinner. I thought maybe it was really Eli the whole time and didn't want DDL to know his name at the beginning. But at the end DDL and Eli started talking about Paul. The other idea was that Paul was a separate personality of Eli's, but that just seemed completely random. Either way, it was unnecessarily confusing and in my opinion didn't do anything for the movie.

This was the last chance I gave oscar winning movies. I swear movies like this only win oscars because the academy feels bad knowing they suck and won't win any other awards.

Random IT Surveys

I hate phone surveys. Not a week goes by that I don't get at least one random phone call from some ESL call-center slave. These surveys take like 20 minutes and are made up of these ridiculous 15 part questions with things like having to rate on a scale from 1-9 how specific phrases apply to our infrastructure or how likely we are to purchase technology X in the next 3-6, 6-12 and 12-24 months.

Today I got 3 of these survey calls. During the last one I finally said that something came up and hung up on the girl because I couldn't stand it anymore. Sometimes it's so tough to understand what these people are talking about since they're speaking a mile-a-minute and with terrible accents; it was giving me a headache.

Sometimes they offer money to take these surveys, which is really the only reason I even consider wasting my time doing them. Sometimes they don't tell you until after if that is the case, but it's usually between $10 and $30. At least that's what they say, I can only honestly remember getting a couple of checks and a couple of Amazon Gift cards.

"BBQ Done Blow'd Up"

It pained me to type that title almost as much as it pained me to listen to it on a Subway commercial for their new BBQ Beef Brisket sandwich. What could they have possibly been thinking when they came up with that slogan for their new sandwich? Maybe it's based off of some pop-culture tidbit I'm not aware of, like those little Quiznos creatures, who knows. Maybe they hired Cletus from the Simpsons to write their commercials. Either way, my IQ dropped a few points when I heard it.

Voice prompted

OMG, I can't stand voice-prompted phone systems. I'm not talking about a recorded voice saying "for support, press 1", I'm talking about a recorded voice saying "what time will your pickup be ready?" and expecting you to say your answer. Every time I get involved with one of these calls I get a sudden urge to kill.

Before today, the only one I had to deal with regularly was Dell. They are at least manageable: "Say or type the express service code of your system." Most prompts could be handled by an appropriate keypress on the phone. The only exception being the "do I have this right?" question where you have to say "yes." By the time I have to say that, the computer can't figure out what I say because my answer is so heavily wrapped with exasperation. The fact that I usually do this over the speaker-phone probably doesn't help the situation.

I just got off the horn with DHL Express to schedule a pickup of a Dell return part. DHL used to have a great system: "Type your phone number", "enter how many packages", "enter the weight", etc. Now they have some POS that makes you say everything. The ONLY redeeming feature of the new system is that it uses Caller-ID info to know who you are and what address to use. Other than that, it took 25x longer to schedule a pickup. I had to say and spell my first name, say what time we close, say how much it weighs; absolutely ridiculous. Even though I'm from Jersey, I'm proud of the fact that I don't have an accent. I would expect anyone with an accent or who doesn't speak English well to have a very tough time with their phone system. I even tried to enter the number of packages (1) with the number pad, but it just sat there and waited for me to say "one".

Circuit Shitty

There once was a reason why I avoided shopping at Circuit City, but I don't remember it anymore. I think it has something to do with not being able to find a sales associate when I needed one, or maybe I hit a monster pothole in their parking lot. Either way, I never really consider CC for making an electronics purchase.

Today Rachelle went there to pick up my birthday present after seeing it on sale on their website. They also had an ipod case on sale that she wanted. She gets there and finds that the products in the store are more expensive (by like a 3rd) than they are online. So she asks an associate if they'll honor their online prices at the store. He says yes. She goes to the service desk and the guy there starting ringing her up. Then this chick manager comes up and says that it's against store policy to do that. So she could have purchased the item online and picked it up in that store for the cheaper price (with no shipping), but they wouldn't just give her the price. So she says she isn't going to buy either item and the chick is all like "have a nice day!"

So she comes home and then calls their customer service number to get the scoop on their policies. According the "Rose" over in India, they should have given her the online price. Rose also calls the store and talks to someone about something for like 20 minutes finally coming back on the line and says that we can go back to the store to get the merchandise for the online price. Rachelle then asks them to express ship them to us at no cost. Rose doesn't go for that.

So we go back to CC after dinner to pick up our wares. We find my present (I already knew what it is) and her ipod case and head to the first goon at a register. We gave him the stuff and a print out of the pricing on the website. With no arguing needed, he rung them up and adjusted the prices. He had a little difficulty when it came to charging her credit card, almost charging her $11,000, but we finally got there.

This will probably be my new reason for not shopping at CC.

Not a Fan of Lowes

Ok, Lowes has been irritating me lately. There used to be 3 different "home centers" in multiple locations around rochester: Home Depot, Chase Pitkin and Lowes. Two years ago all the Chase Pitkins closed, which really annoyed me as I lived about 2 miles away from one. Now that we live in Fairport, we're equal distance away from all of them. We were looking to buy a ceiling fan for the bedroom, so we ended up in Lowes looking at the fans. We found one on sale (and we had an additional coupon), but there weren't any on the shelf. Nobody was around, so I hit the "press me for assistance" button and waited 15 minutes for some guy to show up. We tell him what we want and he proceeds to spend like another 15 minutes looking around for the fan. Then he checks the computer which says they have 2 of them in stock. He then states that the system could be out of date, as it gets updated once a day. That just seems ridiculous for a big company inventory database to get updated once a day. I can't believe it isn't updated with every register transaction. Anyway, he says they must be out of them, but they get a shipment in a couple of days. He asks if we want to reserve one from the new shipment. We say yes and he puts our info in the computer. We walk up to the cashier, give her our phone number to pull the order up and then pay for it (in cash).

A few weeks before this we ordered some custom mirrors for our bathrooms and did the same thing where you pay ahead of time and they call you when they arrive. So we expected Lowes to call us when the item we reserved and paid for arrived. They didn't. So we go to pick it up when they said the new shipment would show up, starting at the service desk. We give them our phone number and nothing shows up. At least we find a couple of the fans we need on the shelf, but they never reserved one like they said, they just sold us a fan and never bothered making sure we got it. The problem was I didn't bother bringing the receipt, since the last time we just gave them our phone number and they handed us the mirrors, we didn't need a receipt. And if you remember I mentioned earlier that I paid in cash. So I hit the "press me for assistance" button again in the fan department and wait for 15 minutes again for some guy to show up. He looks in the computer and also doesn't find anything, no record of us "reserving" a fan and no record of us paying for one either. Finally we end up back at the service desk with some other chick and she pulls up the record no problem. I ask her again just to make sure I heard her right, and she was able to pull up our proof of payment in about 4 seconds. I don't know what was wrong with everyone else, but that took like forever when it should have taken 5 seconds.

The fan install was pretty easy, but putting in the box and the electric was sort of a pain as it required attic access and I don't really fit though the access hole to the attic.

Sony Fails Again...

So it's a Saturday night, we go out to dinner (we had a coupon!) and plan on watching a movie. When we get home I go and find the latest Netflix movie and throw it in the DVD player. After 30 seconds of "Loading..." flashing on the player's display, nothing happens. I didn't get the "Disc Error" message like when you have a bad burn, nothing at all happens. It was as if there is no disc in the player. So I eject the disc and rub it on my jeans to get any schmeg on the bottom of the disc off and I see the "Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Inc." logo on the disc. I try the disc in my laptop, doesn't work; then in my desktop upstairs, no dice; then in my work laptop, it works. Then I try it in my home theater pc and surprisingly it works fine. So we are able to watch the movie that way, but this is still really irritating.

I have a sneaking suspicion that a new version of Sony's anti-piracy BS is preventing my DVD player from recognizing the disc. Searching around online I find a few people having trouble with this particular title and other new Sony discs too.

It's one thing to try to prevent people from copying your DVDs, it's another when that prevents honest people from watching the DVDs.

Educational Software

Educational software is the worst! I'm not talking about its content, the little kids at Harley learn a lot from it, I'm talking about its development. It seems like all these companies wrote their software back in the late 80s and early 90s when computers were showing up in classrooms and never got around to updating it. By update I mean design it to work well on a contemporary operating system; something a littler more recent than Windows 3.1. It seems to me that these companies just apply some dirty hack to get the program to function (if it doesn't already) on newer operating systems like XP.

My favorite behavior by some of the ed software Harley has is to have extremely outdated multimedia requirements, like Quicktime version 2. The current (as of this writing) version of QT is 7. So if I'm trying to install some POS educational software it will ignore the fact that QT 7 is installed on the computer and insist that it installs the bundled QT 2 on the CD. Some of them you can trick, some you can't.

Then there is the way they store data. Many of these software titles have the ability to track multiple users (think class) and track their progress, etc. That was great for the classroom with a single computer that everyone used individually. What about when 15 kids go into a computer lab and all use the software at the same time? And then the next day they each sit down at different computers and try to pick up where they left? That's what a network is for, but this software is so old it won't let you use the "\\servername\datafolder\kidsfiles" notation of specifying a remote location to work from. Even some of the "Network Versions" still require you to map a drive letter to work from. This is better than nothing, but completely useless when you have a bunch of titles that each requires their own mapped drive, it becomes a maintenance nightmare.

This week I found something else out about some of our educational software. One title in particular which worked decently before started turning the screen upside down! Apparently it messes with the video drivers or something that causes the screen to rotate 180°. Sometimes it's when you start the program and sometimes it's when you quit the program. Since it started doing acting stupid this week, I can only assume it was a Windows Update that screwed everything up. Go figure.

American Idol

What the hell is wrong with the people trying out for American Idol this season? I really don't like the show and never watch it past the "audition" episodes because that's where they show all the train-wrecks. This season seems like a never ending stream of absolutely terrible auditions. I don't understand what makes people want to possible land on TV zero talent. There is no way some of these people could possibly think they stand a snowball's chance in hell; why waste everyone's time making a fool of yourself on TV and bother getting upset at the judges when they make some rude comment? I think a significant percent of the rejects on this show are actually mentally retarded, which make it that much worse that FOX is serving them up just to be laughed at.

I remember the last few years when I was working at Tech Crew interviewing the newbies; I could barely make it through one of the 3 hour interview sessions. I can't imagine how the AI judges don't go crazy and kill everyone after a certain point. If I were on the AI panel I'd be the biggest dick to everyone.

Ink Cartridge Hell

Small yield ink-slingers are the bane of my existence. By small yield I'm talking about the home and small office inkjet printers. At work they are primarily used in the lower school. Each (LS) classroom will typically have one printer shared among the 3 or 4 workstations while the other divisions better utilize the bigger centralized printers like the networked lasers and copiers. Not a week goes by where I don't get a few calls about these stupid printers not working, jamming, dried up ink, etc.

Typically speaking, the smaller capacity the printer, the more expensive it is to run. We go through a decent number of ink cartridges so this year I thought I'd try to save a little money by using recycled cartridges. There is a pretty big effort to make Harley "greener" so I figured I do my part. I also decided to go with a local company (which shall remain nameless) to support local business and to get things moving a little faster by cutting the shipping cost/time out the equation. That decision is starting to turn around and bite me on the ass.

These recycled cartridges are less than stellar in performance. Don't get me wrong, when they work they work great but a significant percentage of them don't work. No big deal; I can just call up the local company I bought them from and they'll drive out replacements for any duds. Recently I've gotten a lot of duds. Between Friday and today (Monday was a holiday) I probably went though 8 cartridges between 3 printers and I still haven't gotten 1 of them working at an acceptable level. With new ink I can just hand the person a cartridge when they ask for one and they'll put it in themselves and it'll just work. With these refills I can't do that because chances are the first or even second cartridge won't work. It's infuriating; it takes like 1000 times longer to perform the simplest of jobs.

I've already decided I'm never going to use recycled cartridges after this year, but I'm still debating on trying to return what cartridges we've already purchased.

Inconsiderate Football

Yesterday was the second Sunday in a row where some stupid football game ran into overtime and displaced all the shows I had scheduled to be recorded. The Simpsons, American Dad and Family Guy all fucked up. Since all those shows are adjacent I can still watch the first two since they spill over into the next one, but Family Guy is my favorite and I end up missing the last 10 minutes! It makes me want to kill.

In-Stink-Erator

So last night I was watching Heroes, and like the big nerd I am, I look around online to see if there is anything worth reading about it. Many times with these new scifi-esque shows there will be a pretty big internet following with discussions about the questions on the show and possible theories. So I'm looking around and find an article about InSinkErator, the garbage disposal maker, and how they are suing NBC over the pilot episode of Heroes. In case you missed the pilot, one of the main characters has special healing abilities (**cough**Wolverine**cough**) where her body automagically repairs itself from any damage, and she stuck her hand in the garbage disposal (while it was on) to retrieve something she dropped. Guess what happens?!

Big surprise right? Well apparently the people at InSinkErator think it shows their product in a bad light and tried to have rebroadcasts of the pilot blocked. What kind of horseshit is that?

Let's think about this logically. You put garbage in the disposal and turn it in. The unit completely obliterates whatever is in it so the contents can go down the drain. Garbage, baby turtles, fingers or whatever should get pretty mangled if they are in the disposal when it's on. I would think that's a good selling point. I wouldn't want a garbage disposal that couldn't handle a few fingers. InSinkErator even has this slogan on their website: "Grind Almost Anything."

This is most likely more about the fact that NBC used the InSinkErator name in the show without permission, but this lawsuit is just stupid. How many movies, tv shows and commercials have there been with people sticking their hands in a garbage disposal and getting pwned?

Customers in Training

More like a-holes in the way. The Pittsford Wegmans has these tiny carts for little kids to "shop" along with their parents. They have this little flag that says "Customer in Training." The person that thought of this should be shot, but only after the parents who let their children use these carts. This particular Wegmans is always a zoo and it just makes it that much worse when there are 5 year olds completely oblivious to the world pushing little carts around getting in your way.

Today we did our shopping for the week. Even before we get into the store we have to wait for some little kid to push his little cart out of the lane. It's bad enough this kid's parents let him use the cart in the store, but what could they have been thinking letting him push it around the parking lot? We had a few other encounters with the mini-carts in the store, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Database Shitfest

The title says it all; it's the best way to describe what is going on at school lately. We have an enterprise-esque database system at the center of our school. This DB has its fingers in everything: scheduling, transcripts, grades, attendance, admissions, general ledger and all sorts of other stuff. It was (and still is) functioning fine, but is slightly out of date. We stopped receiving updates more than a year ago and nobody noticed. Then this summer we discover we are at version 803 when the current version is 816.

Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm having a hell of a time trying to get up to date. Not only are we trying to update the actual data and the programs accessing it, the server hardware itself will be replaced once the update is successful. One of the problems is the fact that this is a production database and is in use about 101% of the working day. Sure I can kick people out of it for a while, but a few people's jobs revolve around accessing this database so I can't keep them out for any length of time.

What I've been doing is kicking people out, copying the data to the new server and then running the updates on the new hardware. This way I can put the old server back in action if there are problems upgrading. The first time the update failed about 10 minutes after I started. It started barking about some missing column in some table. I called the support line and they had me send them a copy of the database so they can figure out the problem.

A couple days later they get back to me saying they fixed the problem. Today one of the support people successfully updated the old data I copied over the first time. So I try running the update on a new copy of the current database. Guess what happens? First I ran out of disk space on the drive that the data was held on. There were so many changes to the data to bring it up 13 versions it created thousands of log files (to keep track of transactions), each being around 1mb, and filled the disk up. I noticed this when I went back to work around 5:30pm today to check on the update progress. I made some more room and tried the update again (3rd time). Yup, failed again. At least this time it was in a different place and I was able to get the error messages. I forwarded them to the support people along with another copy of the database.

This update has been a real pain in the butt. I have to work around about 6 people's schedules, wait for the support people to figure out the problems and find time to work with them. And this is all on top of the 10000 other things that I have come up since the middle of August and need to be done by the start of school (8 days).

Garage Sales

I love garage sales. They're great for getting normal everyday things really inexpensively and helping the owners get rid of the crap they don't need anymore. I recently got a nice 100/140 watt soldering iron for $0.50, a craftsman 3/8 box wrench (open on one end box on the other) for $0.50 and a shovel and a rake (which I've actually used a lot lately) for $5.

The one thing about garage sales that I absolutely cannot stand is the way some people advertise the sale. Specifically the people who put a sign up on a street corner saying there is a sale Friday and Saturday from 8 until whenever. They don't put the actual dates like Saturday 6/3, just the day of the week. Then they proceed to leave the sign there for like a month.

There has been a sign on the corner of our neighborhood for a few weeks now. I don't actually know if they put the real dates of the sale on it because the sign is too small to read. Even when I'm in the car at that intersection leaving the neighborhood and the sign is maybe 12 feet away, I still can't read a single word other than "garage" and "sale" at the top.

Email Makes People Stupid

I saw a story (well at least a preview for a story) on the 6 o'clock news yesterday about emails supposedly from the FBI or CIA claiming that the recipient is in trouble for going to "illegal websites". I haven't personally received one of these messages but my boss has, so I've looked pretty carefully at them. It was just one of your standard "we think you're doing this, so open the attachment for more details" messages containing a virus as an attachment.

HOW IS THIS NEWS?!

Are people really that stupid that they think the FBI or CIA will get in touch with them about breaking the law via email? No, they'll send you a snail-mail letter. And what is an illegal website? Sure you can get in trouble for HOSTING illegal content on your website, but if you are a visitor you have every right to look at whatever is there. I should buy an email list of a few million addresses and send one out saying the draft has been reinstated and the first 1000 people to send me a $1 will be exempt. I could probably retire before christmas.

I'm assuming this story was on the news because a whole bunch of people got their panties in a twist thinking they are going to jail. I'd like to think people have more common sense than that, but I guess it was just wishful thinking.