Why My Life Sucks

From the Times of London on line

INS Tabar, an Indian frigate dispatched last month to the area to protect the country’s merchant fleet, sighted the pirate vessel late on Tuesday. Indian officers said they spotted pirates moving on the deck with rocket propelled grenade launchers and automatic weapons. “On repeated calls, the vessel’s threatening response was that she would blow up the naval warship,” the Indian Navy said in a statement. “INS Tabar retaliated in self defence and opened fire on the mother vessel. “As a result of the firing by INS Tabar, fire broke out on the vessel and explosions were heard, possibly due to exploding ammunition that was stored on the vessel.”

First, Ethiopia, now India. Looks like the founding members of the “non-aligned” nations are going to fix the West’s biggest loss (so far) in the GWoT. Speaking of which, I need to come up with a nice punchy thing to call it, other than GWoT. The US military is leaning towards “The Long War”, but I use that for the 1917-1989 war against Russian communism. The Neo-Crusade? The 10th Crusade?  The Arab Wars?

Well, I got a new battery.  Actually, I got two.  Let me explain.  I go into $CarPartStore across the street from where Darling Wife works and next to where Redheaded Girl used to work. At $CarPartStore, I speak with Clerk Dude about my need for a battery.  Clerk Dude does some computer fu and comes up with a type of battery I need and said that if I bought a 1 dollar “mounting kit” (two felt thingies that go under the cables and some sort of portected goo/lub stuff) he could install the battery.  Sounds good to me, not dealing with heavy toxic acidic crap inside a car is worth a buck, plus I get the little felt thingies under the cables, score all the way around.  He even yumps the battery out to the car for me.   He undoes the battery, puts in new one, plus mounting kit and tells me to start it up.

Nothing.  Not even tick-tick-tick etc.   He putzes about with the cables.  Tells me to try again.  “tick-tick-tick-tick”  Really weeny tick-tick-tick, I might add.

“Oh, that’s your starter.” sayth Clerk dude.

“No, It’s not.  If I hook up the Jump Buddy to it, the car will start.” sayth me.

“I don’t think so, but let’s try it.“  At least he was willing to listen to the customer, unlike the last “expert” I had to deal with (see rant about Vonage VoIP provider below)

Hook up “Jump Buddy”.  Car starts, as expected and predicted.  Clerk dude, to his credit, shrugs and takes my old battery into the store and puts it on on the battery tester.  It’s dead Jim.  Highest value, 6 or so volts, at any sort of amps.

He takes the portable tester out and hooks it up the “new” battery.   It’s even more dead, Jim.  Highest value, 4 volts, and dropped to under 2 under load.  It wouldn’t even power the clock whose display at least, is a 7400 TTL based system, which means 5 volts or it’s dead. (It bothers me some times that I know things like that, but don’t remember what the syntax of a SQL insert statement is.  It’s not like I’ve done any IC works since, oh, 1978 or so.)

He takes the portable test in to the store, takes battery number 3 off the shelf and test it.  Good to go.   Replaces battery number 2 (i.e the one I just bought) and has me do a “turn in” paper work thing.  (zero days on a 3 year pro-rated warranty, comes to, oh, full price….)  While he’s doing that, the store manager type (aka PHB for you Dilbert fans out there) wanders over and asks what’s going on. Clerk dude explains.  PHB looks amazed that a product that is known to have a life span is dead.  Shocked and appalled even.  Really appalled, at one point he was standing with his arms out at 45 degree angle over his head [heralds don't pun, they cant] {rim-shot} Thanks, be here all week. Try the fish...)  PHB doesn’t think clerk dude knows how to run the tester correctly.  (It’s not hard.  I can do now.  Hook up battery like you were jumping it, i.e. red clamp on the positive terminal, black on the negative. Push test.  Enter the Amps of the battery.  Watch LCD. Wait 45 seconds. Read result.  I could train Velifer to do it, if he had the thumbs to hook up the battery.)  PHB putzes with cables.  Pushes Test etc. Still dead.  Reads, if any thing, lower than it did out side attached to the car.

I sign the papers and leave, while PHB and Clerk dude start talking about checking lot numbers and who gets to do what with this issue etc.  That sounds like a load of fun and games. But Not My Problem.

Got the new D&D group’s first game tonight, I’m all sorts of happy about that.

Let’s start with my car.  Well, the battery.  It’s dead.  Need to get that fixed ASAP.  dur.  Should have done it this weekend.

Which brings us to “I feel like shit.”  More or less literally, given that I’m taking a crap about once every 45 minutes or so.  For the last 3 days.  “Lots of that virus going around” the doctor says.  My crapping eating habits, due to the various anti-freak out meds I take may also have something to do with it.

Then there is my VoIP provider.  I’ve got 2 routers, and two number, one one each router.  Each router has two phone ports.  I wanted to add a 3rd number to the second phone port of the first router.  This should be simple.  It wasn’t.  6 (six) calls, average time 40 minutes each, and 2 (two) supervisor level personages.  This did not make me a happy camper.  There service if first rate, assuming you don’t have to change any thing.

The Craptop’s hard drive died.  However, I have a cunning plan, and the fact that I know what to do with Gentoo now should make it an faster rebuild.  Bonus, the cunning plan will make the hard drive bigger.  Score all around!

Got a Doctor’s appointment later this week.  Need to tweak my Cymalta I think.  Current load doesn’t seem to be working quite right.

$WeSellUsedMacs is becoming more and more surreal.  Average life span of a tech working there seems to be about 3 weeks. When I’m the most knowledgeable person about Mac hardware/Software in the building they have problems.

Google.  Go back to the way iGoogle was before you fucked it up.  It fails to read RSS titles about 70% of the time and each freaking tab has it’s own settings.  This does not make me a happy camper.  Actually, just fix the RSS feed issue and give and option to apply setting and theams to all tabs and that would fix it.   I may need to go look at my Google Lab stuff, this might be a side effect of those.  More later.

Spammers.  “Comment Spammers” in particular.  Please use software to comment spam that at least tries to make it look like a real comment. The “comment” on the top of the Spam Karma reject pile is ‘22gy2zo5g0a0f8lg paucyh yhtrg’. This, of course, is really a link to really random web sites, but, come on, what happened to “This is very interesting web site. I will be back later” comment spam?

Well, off to see if the Jump Buddy has enough juice yet.

It sucks now.   Cold wet and raining.   It’s like it’s the middle of November or something….

Makes my knees feel like, well, painful.   Thank God I’m back on diclofenac.   I don’t want to think about what I would feel like with out it.

You know yet another reason why my life sucks.   The boss and I can’t seem to be in the same building at the same time long enough to get my invoice turned in and a check issued.   Caused a lot of bills to pile up, the server bill being one of them.

Fixed for a year, so that not going to be a issue, however I might start with a donate button some time.

No, not that damn, this is a Craptop damn. First time I’ve need to recompile the kernel since day 1 of the Gentoo era. Seems sound wasn’t enabled. grrr…

I’m posting this from Firefox 3.0.3 on the craptop.   All I’ve got left to do is get the sound working and I’m done with this machine.     Woot!     Now to get my mother’s working….

Well, the machine isn’t dead.     I did figure out why it went into thermal shutdown however.   The speaker grills on the front of the machine are also the inbound air intakes.   Closing the lid, with the machine running isn’t a good idea.     Of course, NOT closing the lid when it’s running something in back ground isn’t a good idea with as many cats as I have.

Solution:   Don’t let it run in background mode unless I’m in the room so I can keep Pip and/or Velifer off of it.

The Craptop project may have just hit a freaking wall. I finished the current emerge, and issued a ’shutdown now -h’ command, then moved the machine from the living room to my desk in the bed room. Machine will not turn on now. Turns on, does a memory count, detects the hard drive and DVD drive, then turns it’s self off. I’m hoping that it’s an over heat situation and letting it cool down will fix it (it has been running full bore for several days now), but just in case, I’m installing the rest of the LAMP stack on the andLinux part of the DellBookâ„¢

Finished fixing the fucked install dumbass attack, plus got PHP/MySQL/Apache2 and the like playing nice with each other.   Now attempting to get XFCE4/The Gimp/Firefox/DigiKam running.     The emerge to do that results in 119 items to install.   Off we go!

After that, I’ll re-run the update the world, and declare victory.