Month: August 2002

On the value of wasting your friends’ time

I’m so proud of George. I felt bad when we were working together on a technology strategy project on the videogame console industry, and I got him hooked on MAME and vintage arcade games. Now at least he’s moved on to more productive obsessions: weblogging and home network administration. Don’t forget to keep up with the OpenSSH patches, George! It’s a brave new world full of new and exciting dangers…
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Amazon situation resolved…

…sort of. To recap, suddenly one day my massive Amazon history of purchases, product votes, wish list, etc. disappeared, leaving only my most recent transaction. Freaked, I dropped customer support an email. They reported that I had two accounts with the same email address! I was a little dumbfounded—after all, email address is basically the user ID for Amazon, as far as the end user is concerned. But I could verify what the support person said—I could search for my old wish list and see its contents. What happened? And how could I fix it?

I finally realized today that I just had to log into my new empty account and change the email address, log out, then log back in with the old email address. Worked like a charm—all my wish list and averything were still there.

I’m guessing two things about Amazon’s back-end system:

  1. Amazon’s system has an internal user ID that’s separate from the user’s email address. Very sensible—as long as it makes sure that more than one account isn’t created with the same email address.
  2. Amazon must have suffered some sort of catastrophic systems failure around the time I was trying to place my last order that temporarily rendered my account unavailable. Evidence? A new account was seamlessly created with the same email and password through the process of placing the order, although there was an error when I tried to submit the order. Also, my shopping cart in the original account still contained the items that I bought in my recent order on the “new” account when I finally logged back in today.

Weird, but strangely reassuring. Even through a major system crack-up, I was still able to place an order.

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Just when you thought the contractors were gone…

I’m waiting this morning for the carpenter and the electrician to do some elective work in our dining room. We have an awful little wood-paneled closet in the “solarium” portion of our dining room that we’d like to make usable. The carpenter is coming to rip out the paneling and install drywall if necessary so we can install shelving to hold—well, probably excess glassware, as we probably have enough to stock a small Beacon Hill pub. The electrician is just being asked to install a couple of sconce lights in the dining room.

I thought I was done with contractors in the house, but now that I’m waiting for them again the thought isn’t so bad. Nice to have professionals come in before you screw everything up.

Keep ’em separated

If you read manuals, you probably already know this. But apparently some cable modems—at least the model supplied to us by AT&T Broadband—react badly when placed near a wireless hub, such as my graphite AirPort Base Station. For me the problem manifested itself as dropped packets (meaning generally slow traffic) and ultimately a complete disconnect about twenty minutes after cycling the power on the cable modem. Ever since the broadband tech told me about the potential RF interference effect in the cable modem and I moved the base station further away, I’ve had no further problems—performance is back to really good.

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Puttering

Spent the day yesterday doing a lot of not much at all. Helped my mother-in-law and Lisa in the garden; took them to Ikea with us (most targeted visit ever: 45 minutes in and out), then to Ivar’s Salmon House for dinner. You can get salmon any way you like as long as it’s alder-smoked. Not a bad way to go, all things considered.

Today Lisa’s dad and I assembled the things that were purchased at Ikea yesterday while Lisa bought more stuff at Sears. Then we all basically collapsed.

When Copyright Attacks

I’ve been waiting to add this link until I found out more about the case, but I’ve finally linked to the website of Eldred v. Ashcroft over the issue of the challenge to the Sonny Bono Extension of Copyright act, which extended by 20 years both existing and future copyrights. The tradeoff of copyright is between the rights of the creator and the rights of the public, a balance which this suit alleges has been tipped unfairly in favor of the creators at the expense of the public’s rights. I urge you, if you are a creator or consumer of any kind of content, a user of libraries, or a reader of electronic texts, check out the site. The archive of materials about the case is richer than anything I could possibly say here.

Except to point to Aaron Swartz’s summary of the Justice Department’s response to the suit, which was essentially to say, “You don’t have a right to question this law.”
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Visitors from the East

My in-laws flew into SeaTac last night. Unlike our last flight, there was no lost luggage. We loaded them into my car and swept them to our house so they could ooh and aah before we tucked them into bed.

This is a big visit for a couple of reasons:

  1. This is the first visit by any of our family to the house.
  2. My father in law is the reason we went through all the renovations on our guest bathroom. It’s kind of a payoff to have him finally using it.
  3. This is also the first time that the older portion of the house (the guest bedrooms) gets a real shakedown.
  4. Finally, Lisa’s mom can help us figure out what the heck to do in our garden. We don’t know very much about gardening; she ran a $500K gardening budget at their retirement community.

They’ll be here for a couple of weeks, so my late night blogging activity will be curtailed. (It probably would be anyway, as AT&T Broadband has been really flaky recently–download speeds of 1.5K/sec last night, no connection at all this morning!)