Paul's Down-Home Page

For some reason, this month has been an unusually tough one for various components of my geek lifestyle. By extension, this has made it a tough month for me, as I’ve had to spend an inordinate amount of time in voice-mail hell. Here’s the rundown on what broke and how hard it was to get fixed:

• The plastic case on my ThinkPad has cracked in such a way that the back part of the case, just above the row of Insert/Home keys, is pulling away, threatening to spill the keyboard out onto the floor. I called IBM, spent about 2 minutes on hold, and got a case number. The shipping box will get here tomorrow, so I expect to have the machine back next week sometime. I give their support phone system a 4; it was easy and quick to get to someone who could help me.
• My PowerMac G4 Cube suffered a failed DC-to-DC converter, so it’s at the Apple body & fender shop. Apple’s phone support is legendarily bad, so I just took it to MacResource so they could fix it.
• The paddle to our bread machine mysteriously disappeared. I suspect my four-year-old’s involvement, but there’s no evidence to prove it, and he’s at Grandma’s this week. Sunbeam gets a -1 for their phone support process; first you call a number that says “Press 2 for breadmakers”, followed by a choice that says “Press 1 to order parts”. When you pick that option, the service center you get connected to doesn’t sell breadmaker parts. Ooops.
• cyclone, my primary Exchange & file server, has two disks in it. One of them started making an awful clunk, click while I was backing it up this morning. I’m heading to Gigaparts to get a replacement drive. No phone calls required!
• My Siemens 2420 phone system is “fencing” (clipping audio in a predictable pattern), but only sometimes. I suspected 802.11a interference, but it still occasionally does it even when all my wireless gear is off.

Granted, these aren’t major catastrophes. Thank goodness the air conditioning and refrigerator still work, both cars are running, and the septic tank isn’t plugged. Everything else is small potatoes.

Bob Thompson said:

The Inquirer reports that Microsoft may release WinXP SP1 sooner than expected, possibly as soon as the end of this month. As was the case with Win2000 SP1, the first SP is going to be huge, perhaps 120 MB. It sounds like there are a lot of bugs to be fixed.

This isn’t entirely fair. SP1 does include a ton of bug fixes; if it didn’t, the screaming penguins would be complaining that MS doesn’t fix their bugs. However, as part of the Strategic Technology Protection Program (that’s “get secure, stay secure” to you & I), MS is including new security functionality as part of service packs. There are a wealth of new SP1 features, including some significant enhancements to the way IPsec works and rollups that result from the Windows division’s security push. Of course, SP1 also includes changes to the OS that are required by the consent degree in the Microsoft antitrust case. Bob was too polite to point this out.

So, the blogosphere has exploded in volume, right? There are thousands of people, ranging from professional journalists to various unsavory types, creating blogs with a wide variety of tools– so how come I still have to copy-and-paste HTML to bring in archived content? I’m slowly porting over some content, including (eventually) my Travel Diaries.