The Random Thoughts Review

It looks like they’ve finally found Steve Fossett’s plane, and this news caused me to go back and look at the pictures that I took of him at Oshkosh for the EAA Airventure a few years back.

He had just flown around the world, non stop, and they were showing off the aircraft that he used. He really was quite a guy, with some truly amazing accomplishments. If you haven’t read up on him, you should do so. For your viewing pleasure, the pictures from EAA Airventure:

You can click on any picture to get larger versions.

Godspeed, Steve.

Official Google Blog: Our position on California’s No on 8 campaign

Google, you disappoint me. And I don’t know that I’ve ever actually said that before.

I fear that you are starting to channel your inner movie star. I fear that you are starting to think that, because you are famous, that you need to make a political statement about your stance on political issues. This disappoints me. You aren’t a PAC. You are an internet company.

I’m not going to discuss what I think about the stance you have taken. Whether you come down on the side of gay marriage, or the side against gay marriage isn’t relevant to this blog post. I’m just disappointed that you felt that, as a company, you needed to choose a side in an issue that isn’t relevant to your business.

Focus… Focus.. Eye on the prize, G.. Eye on the prize.

I sometimes need to look at a cookies.txt file and figure out what the entries mean.

Basically, you have a line in the file that looks like:

www.someURL.com FALSE / FALSE 0 VNAME v,value,and,more

• www.someURL.com - The domain that the cookie applies to
• FALSE - can other webservers within www.someURL.com access this cookie? If there was a webserver at blah.www.someURL.com, could it see this cookie?
• / - more restrictions on what paths on www.someURL.com can see this cookie. Anything here and under can see the cookie. / is the least restrictive, meaning that any (and all) requests from www.someURL.com get the cookie header sent.
• FALSE - Do we have to be coming in on https to send the cookie?
• 0 - expiration time. zero probably means that it never expires, or that it is good for as long as this session lasts. A number like 928934729 would correspond to a number of seconds since the epoch (Jan 1, 1970).
• VNAME - The name of the cookie variable that will be send to the server.
• v,value,and,more - cookie value that will be sent. Might be comma separated list of terms, or could just be a word.. Hard to say. Depends on the server.

In case you aren’t aware of craigslist, it’s a great place to find stuff that you might need.

And, if you have stuff that you want to get rid of, it’s a great place to post stuff.

If you are going to post, though, don’t be dumb about it. Use some common sense and follow the terms of usage when you do your posting. If you don’t follow the rules, you will likely find craigslist readers flagging your post as being wrong (in one way or another) and it will disappear on you.

To that end, here are a few things that I’ve noticed recently…

• Post to the right craigslist. Craigslist communities exist for most medium to large towns. If you don’t know which one to post to, go to Google maps and plot the distance from where you are to where the possible craigslists are for. Find the closest one, and post to that craigslist. If you post in others, you’ll likely find yourself flagged for not posting in the right one.
• Craigslist allows you to have a single running post for a given item. If you want to “bump” your item up on the listing page, delete the old posts for that item first. If you have 2 or 3 going at the same time, that’s a great way to get yourself flagged. Why should you be able to ignore the craigslist rules when everyone else tries to follow them? Oh, and changing the way the ad looks, but still advertising the same item just makes everyone think that you’re trying to be sneaky. Craigslist rules don’t say that you can advertise the same item as long as you change the presentation. They say you can’t advertise the same item multiple times. This also goes for the price. You can’t put up multiple ads for the same item with the price changed by a buck or two. Still the same item!
• Oh, and even if you delete other postings for a given item, Craigslist still has rules that say you can’t post a single item more frequently than every 48 hours. If you try to post the same item every day, expect to get flagged.
• Speaking of items.. Every post you do needs to actually be about an item! If you have a furniture store and want to write a post about a terrific new, one of a kind bed that you have, that’s great! Post it in the furniture section. Good luck, and hopefully you’ll find a buyer.

  However, if you decide to post a generic ad saying that you “sell furniture and would love to help people out” in the furniture section… Prepare to be flagged. Craigslist says that item posts need to be about an item. If you want to tell everyone that you sell furniture, put it in the Services section.

Good luck! Have fun using craigslist. Just follow the rules, and make it more enjoyable for those of us that use craigslist to find the stuff we need and want.

A while back, I bought an all in one printer/fax/copier/scanner to use with my business that I’m getting started.

I bought the Canon imageclass mf3240 laser, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. My only complaint has been that it basically took over my phone line and I haven’t been able to use my home phone to receive calls. If someone calls, I have about 2 seconds to answer a phone or the fax machine thinks it is getting an incoming fax and starts playing annoying beeps in the ears of those that are calling.

My problem seems to stem from having multiple phones on multiple extensions. Supposedly, it can be fixed easily enough if you hang the answering machine and main phone off of the fax machine.

Tonight I decided to get this fixed so that it worked as it should, and I would be able to get phone calls or faxes.

After looking through the manuals for the Canon, I found that it has a ‘Receive Mode’ that can be set to various things, from FaxOnly to AnsMode to FAX/TEL. I first started out with FAX/TEL. I thought that it would take care of my problem. But, it didn’t work right when I called from another phone. Then, I tried AnsMode. That worked right for a regular phone call, but I needed a way to see if it would receive incoming faxes properly. So, I started googling for fax back services. The first thing I ran across was a San Francisco Rent Board website that would send out faxes. So, I decided to try it. I called the number up, told it send me the annual statistics (on something) and waited. The phone rang. The answering machine picked up, said a couple of words and went quiet. Then, the little ‘Processing/Data’ light on the machine started blinking.. and blinking.. and blinking..

After several minutes I decided to call the home phone from another phone.. Got a busy signal. Then I picked up a home phone. It was just quiet. I could talk, and hear myself. So, I unplugged the fax machine from the phone line. After a few seconds it beeped the “I’m done receiving” beep and started printing. 14 or 15 pages later, it had finished.

So, I thought that I had things going. But, I wanted to find another faxback service to do some additional testing. More googling led me to:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00259105&cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&product=351106&dlc=en&lang=en

Basically, that’s a two way fax testing service. You send a one page fax to 1-888-hpfaxme and a few minutes later you get a fax back. You know that your machine is sending faxes properly, and you know that your machine is receiving faxes properly. How cool is that? And useful.

I recently switched from Verizon to AT&T. I wanted a phone that AT&T has. Mariya has AT&T. I have a brother that has AT&T. So, I switched.

I’ve been with Verizon since 1999. I’ve been pleased with the coverage. The phone selection stinks. Verizon is very annoying with locking their phones down, and I got my most recent phone on November 5, 2005, with a two year contract. In early October I was billed for the October 6 through November 5 billing period and the bill was paid.

I got my new phone on October 26th and ported my number to AT&T. Earlier today, I got a verizon bill in my email for $191.49. This was strangely high, since I am on a $32.80 a month plan.

My suspicion was that I had been hit with an early termination fee (ETF). So, I called up Verizon customer support and talked with Deandre (pronounced Dee Andre). I explained the situation to Deandre and what I suspected had happened. He confirmed that I had been hit with the ETF. I explained to him that this didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I had already been billed for the total of my contract period. His stance was that I had technically terminated service before my anniversary date of November 5, so it didn’t matter what I had been billed for. My only option (let’s call this option #1), according to Deandre, was to port my number back to Verizon, leave it there until November 5 and then cancel. I could “get away with this” because Verizon has a 30 day guarantee where things can be “undone”. I explained that this is something that would just cause a lot more work for their system and for me, for not positive gain at all. Why do it? Why just just get rid of my ETF and we could call it good. He said he couldn’t do that. The system had it in there. So, he put me on hold for a few minutes.

So, he presented another option. He said that the best he could do was to credit me half of the ETF in liu of porting my number back and forth. So, it was now a $87.50 charge. So I said that I was basically going to have to pay $90ish to cause more trouble for both Verizon’s system and for myself. I tried to emphasize that this just didn’t make any sense to me.

He put me on hold again for a while. Came back. $50 fee. To get this, he had looked over my account details and had put me on a “variable” ETF schedule, where you get $5 of credit (towards an ETF) for each month you have your account in good standing past 6 months. I told him that I had been with Verizon for 6 or 7 years, so I shouldn’t have any ETF at all, based on that. He said that there was a $60 minimum ETF normally, and he was waiving that. Additionally, he said that the “variable ETF” schedule normally didn’t apply at all if you were porting your number to another carrier.

I told him that the purpose of an ETF was obviously to make sure that Verizon got its money. I had completed the terms of my contract, monetarily speaking. I had paid all of my monthly bills. I didn’t expect to get any proration of the last month’s bill. I had paid up to November 5, and I was totally happy with that. The ETF just didn’t make any sense to me.

So, we started looking at my bill. He said that it was $191.xx. I asked where the extra $16 had come from. I suspected taxes. He said there were something like $22 in taxes. I did the math in my head, and that meant $169 or so. So, I said that didn’t make sense with a $175 ETF. So, he looked farther, and saw that my account had been prorated to the tune of an eleven dollar credit for October 26 through November 5. At that point I said, why not just charge me the $11 and we can call it all good?! I said I couldn’t fathom what the difficulty could be with that. I had expected to pay the bill through November 5 all along.

He said that he’d put in to get it waived, since I was only a week away from having my contract completed. I told him that I’d like to fill out a survey or something telling that he had been willing to work with me on this. He said they didn’t have that, but he put me through to the voicemail of his supervisor. I then left a message on her (Marilyn Vinson) voicemail, saying that Deandre had done a pretty good job of helping me.

Satisfied? Well, I guess so. Bummer that I had to stay on line for 30 minutes to get this done. If I hadn’t been persistent, I would have been out the $175. So, internet readers.. pay attention. Put in your time, and you, too, can have proper outcomes to your difficulties.

Strange things are afoot in Kirbyland. The parking garage is probably 0.2 miles from my actual office here at Beckman. This morning I had made it into the building and was walking down the hallway towards my office.

I was apparently thinking about something else, and when I got about 20 feet away from my office door, I pulled out my car key and pressed the ‘Unlock’ button on the transmitter. Needless to say, my office door didn’t automatically unlock, and I think I was probably far enough away from my car that I don’t have to worry about it, either.

First time I’ve done that. Wonder what today holds…

I run firefox in Linux, and I’ve noticed a problem with the facebook extension. It seems like, if firefox ever shuts down abnormally (from dying, or from X-windows dying, etc.) the facebook toolbar gets stuck in a semi-bad state. Normally, after you login to facebook, the question marks shown below (next to the pokes, friend requests, and messages icons) disappear, and the toolbar notes the name of the person logged in.

Once the toolbar gets confused, this transition doesn’t occur. The look of the toolbar stays in a ‘not logged in’ condition. The toolbar will continue to popup little windows when certain events occur, but it won’t tell you if you’ve been poked, have friend requests, or messages.

Some background information…
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