December 2005

Apple Store dis-service

December 30, 2005

I haven't blogged about this before hoping it would go away. Today however it became even worse. About six weeks ago I got a new iMac iSight. The computer is great. For the first few weeks it worked fine. Then the DVD drive stopped working. Kaput. Done. So just over two weeks ago it went in to the Apple Store Fashion Show in Las Vegas.

This was the first problem. I'd called Apple Care. They had diagnosed the problem. We were pretty sure what the problem was. I called the Apple Store to see if they had the part in. They patently refused to help save one of their customers a 100-mile drive to a pre-Christmas mall teeming with people. Using the flimsy excuse "what if it's not the optical drive" but a cable or some other part. So we already know that the primary purpose is to make the customer bend to the rules of the shop.

Wednesday night they finally call, as promised, and say the part is in. Today the machine goes in. The 10-minute job of replacing the optical drive, OK make it 40-minutes with extensive testing, will apparently take the store two-days. So they will have the machine back in a week. A week to replace the optical drive component in an iMac G5 - a minor variation on the machine that Apple allows customers to do themselves.

So the new computer that I need to get work done has been inoperable for half the time I've owned it.

Of course I could have saved all this headache by simply buying their Pro Care offering which would have cut the repair time to overnight. What this really means then is that the Apple Store, once a customer has spent thousands on computer equipment, and purchased an extended warranty, is made to wait three weeks for a repair that if I'd pay the extra fee of Pro Care for would be overnight. Somewhere along the line they have failed to take into account the thousands (hundreds of thousands that is) of dollars that have gone Apple's way at my direction over the past few years because we normally avoid just such these tactics.

RegisterFly Free!!!!

December 30, 2005

Well, not quite. But with the move of this domain tonight I'm now much closer to being free from the headaches of RegisterFly. Now off to write down those elusive new year's resolutions.

New gizmo

December 28, 2005

One of the many generous gifts I received this year is a new iPod -- one of the video types. That means it's time to clean up the iTunes music library and get things in order. The iPod is an indispensable tool for me. On the way to work I tend to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. While the good folks over at Audible have more than a few good books, there are others that I'm not able to get from them. The biggest problem with the songs that don't come from Audible is that they don't have bookmarks and when I rip them from CD into the iPod there are many many files. This is where a great applescript comes in handy. With this script it is easy to join together the AAC files and make them protected or "bookmarkable" files.

Who knows with all the music files cleaned up I might just have to move on to all the data on my hard drive... Or make a resolution to do it next year.

The Holiday Spirit

December 28, 2005

I wanted to share some pictures with you from the past few days. You will see attached to this entry the following:

Two photos from our command post here at Speicher. Notice the festive decorations.

A few photos from the midnight Christmas dinner we had at the Forward Operating Base Warrior chow hall near Kirkuk when we got stranded there. There is a picture of Floyd using his leatherman to crack open some lobster and another of me standing next to an odd food sculture.

A photo of the tent we stayed in Christmas night (also the first night of Chanukah). It was drafty but cozy.

A photo of the actress Kelly Hu (X2 and Scorpian King) sigining one of our pilot's (Anna) helmets. She is writing. "To Fly Girl - you go!". Anna, you will notice, is not wearing an Army issue hat. We flew Kelly Hu all around Iraq to meet the soldiers before we got stranded.

Hope you all are enjoying the holiday season.

The never-ending Register Fly problem

December 27, 2005

Having waited a few months longer than the required 90-days for keeping a domain with a new registrar it is time to be done with RegisterFly. If you've read this site for a while you may recall problems I've had with Register Fly. On the other hand Go Daddy has been a pretty good service. They lack a couple of features, like DNS wildcards, but are pretty good otherwise and I can live with the limitations.

Of course no Register Fly transaction would be complete without hang-ups. They don't want to provide the authorization code necessary for moving .org and .info domains. At no point have they said "no" but they don't respond at all. The picture in this post shows the lack of response from the supposed 24/7 live chat support. To top everything off of course there is one domain where the authorization email won't go through. And of course it is a domain I use and have owned for more than a decade. I'll be quite happy to be rid of the terrible eNom reseller. All of this does make one wonder that an ICANN accredited registrar is willing to continue to allow a reseller to besmirch their name.

War of the Worlds

December 24, 2005

When I saw the movie version of Phantom of the Opera earlier this year I thought it would be impossible to see a classic story so badly made into a movie. Of course I hadn't seen War of the Worlds which definitely makes it a tough choice for worst DVD of the year.

Christmas eve

December 24, 2005

The computer is consipring to make sure I don't work too much on Christmas. The two-year-old 15" PowerBook has decided to stop working... mostly. Of course it works just often enough to convince me that it might be salvagable. In the end it seems to be a problem with the display though. We're also taking advantage of the slow time before the new year to make some infrastructure changes. If all goes well the changes will be little noticed. If not the site will possibly be down for a time. Either way email may be a bit slower than expected and instant messenger will be abandoned until next year.

Compliments

December 20, 2005

After a brief flight today one of the crew chiefs asked me who had been at the controls during the trip. When I told him I was he said that I had improved a lot since we last flew together a month ago. "You were flying like one of the more experienced guys," he said. He made my day.

I am attaching a few photos. One is an aerial view of my current home. The other is just a nice twilight photo and third will be especially appreciated by those of you who used to be on the Search and Rescue team with me.

Moving mailman from one server to another

December 18, 2005

Yesterday brought the much anticipated (dreaded) task of moving mailman from one server to another. The move was necessary to retire a FreeBSD server and consolidate services on a Mac OS X 10.4 Server box. There are good documents on the web about setting up mailman on OS X 10.4 Client but not as many on the setup of a standard mailman install on the server platform.

The first question that may jump out at folks is why? Mac OS X 10.4 Server comes with Mailman already installed. Why not use it? The installation included in OS X is highly customized in order to work with Apple's server administration tools. Also in my case I was moving a Mailman 2.1.6 installation on FreeBSD and the OS X Server version is still 2.1.5 (though it has been nearly six months since the release of the security patches in 2.16). Looking at the documentation there is little suggestion changes would have prevented the newer files from working but as a Nevadan I prefer the house's odds to those of the gambler.

Done With Planning

December 17, 2005

I spent the last week and a half on the "planning cell". That meant that I was working at night preparing the maps and GPS loaders for the next day's missions. The work was moderately interesting but it meant I did not fly during that time. My time on the cell, however, finally ended and I was back in the air yesterday.

I flew a relatively short night mission - about 3 and half hours under goggles. We are starting to get some winter weather here. There was a dust storm and some rain the morning before I flew. Night time temperatures are in the 40s. It is getting into the 70s during the day. The change in weather led to some interesting flying. The air was "soupy". I could see objects on the ground fairly well but all of the haze made it difficult to pick out details or make out the horizon in flight. That is not a big deal since I can use the instruments to determine whether I am level but it takes some getting used to.

Other than the brief flight, there is not much to report. Most days are pretty much like the ones before. Our miniature CHU christmas tree has a few presents under it and the twinkling lights in our little window still great me when I come home each night. Two of my CHU-mates are away for a while so its just me and Floyd. The box we live in is a lot more comfortable with two people than with four.

Thank you all for staying and touch. Enjoy the holiday season.

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