Category: Annoyances

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I always knew salespeople were audacious. I didn’t know until yesterday that some of it stems from the audacity of their higher-ups. We went to South Coast yesterday in search of, well, lingerie. So we found the Victoria’s Secret. I went to look for my size in a rack of something and a cute, sparkly-faced saleschick interposed herself asking what size I was looking for. A dialogue ensued regarding weight loss and undergarment entropy and how many different sizes I had been found to need in the last few months. I was about to do as she was implying was The Way here and go try on their samples rather than sully the merchandise when she brought up the “Angels Card.”

“You get over $75 in potential savings over the course of a year, and two years of our catalog!” she chirped.

I pulled out my standard response. “I wouldn’t use it enough.”

“Oh, you don’t have to. It’s completely free.”

Fine. “Eh, why not.”

“Fantastic! It’s just five easy questions.” Uh-oh. The catch. “Do you have a credit card for reference?” I did. Swipe. “And can I have your social?”

Riiiiight. Like I’m going to give that out to someone I don’t know, who doesn’t work for the SSA or my employer, in the middle of a store full of strangers. “I’m sorry, I don’t give out my social.”

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone look so confused in weeks. “But–but we don’t give your information out to anyone.”

“That’s fine, but I don’t give out my social.”

So, no Angels Card. Not that I want it, at that price (or the price they charge for underwear, either). But I’m left wondering, what the fuck does Victoria’s Secret need with my social? The credit card should be enough, and handing that over was borderline. If it’s free, it’s free. You’re not promising them any money or business, and in fact you start out by costing them in paper and printing expenses. You don’t need to be a citizen to buy underwear. What gives?

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OK, I’m not one of those purists who thinks all computers should be encased in beige boxes. That said, 4 of the 5 computers in our apartment are fairly plain – but two of those are because the case predates any sense of design, one was an ultra-cheap computer, and one was an ultra-cheap case.

Last week, while looking for that ultra-cheap case so I could build Red Shirt, I looked at the more expensive cases, thinking I might replace the case on my main computer, and then reuse the old one for the new machine. And while there were several really nice cases, none of them really struck me – unless you count the ones that exhibited the two trendiest offenses in case design:

  1. Hiding the drive bays. Someone got the idea somewhere that drive bays, especially on a case with room for expansion, are ugly. And I can certainly see the point. But people who design cases often forget a key factor about those drive bays: people use them. That means either you’ve got to open the entire front of the case every time you pop a CD in the tray, or you end up leaving it open. Now it’s not so bad if it’s a sliding door, but if it’s hinged, then you have to worry about this huge plastic door hanging sideways in front of the computer. Not only does it get in the way every time you have to reach down with a CD, it’s uglier than just showing the drive bays would have been!
  2. Shoving the front USB and Firewire ports all the way to the bottom of the case. The idea of having these ports on the front is to make them convenient. And while putting them at the bottom may work for people who put their computers on top of their desks, a lot of people put them underneath to save space (whether for writing or for a giant monitor). That USB mini-drive isn’t so convenient when you have to get out of your chair and kneel down on the floor to plug it in. And I’ve seen cases where the ports are less than half an inch from the bottom – not so bad if you’ve got a wood floor, but if you’ve got a carpet, now you need to worry about the carpet getting caught in the ports. I’m sorry, but this is only marginally better than leaving the ports on the back.

In the end, I decided I didn’t want to assemble two computers, just one, so I bought the cheapest, smallest case I could find. (As it happens, it manages to make the USB situation worse by putting the ports on the side of the front panel – but I wasn’t expecting to use much in the way of USB devices on this box anyway, and it turns out the only ports this motherboard can handle are the built-in ones.)

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For several months I’ve been providing installable RPM packages for the Dillo web browser. Since many different distributions use RPM packages, I’ve been getting requests to add various Linux distributions. I started out just installing to extra partitions, but then I started building virtual systems with User-Mode Linux.

Well, people have been requesting RPMs for Conectiva, a distribution from Brazil and partner in UnitedLinux. I built a UML virtual system, but was never able to get Dillo to compile or to get the imitation network driver working. So, tonight I decided to install an actual copy.

With most Linux installers, you can choose where to create a new partition, and set it up to add existing ones to the system. This has worked fine with every version of Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE I have installed. The installer will create the new partition, leave the others alone, and mark them to be visible in the system you’ve installed.

Conectiva didn’t leave the existing partitions alone. Each partition I had marked was gone: my main OS partition (currently Red Hat 9), my home directory, and all my download and media files. Fortunately I had backups of the most critical files from last Saturday, and I was able to recover my entire home directory with Tomsrtbt and Parted‘s rescue function. And I don’t mind losing my main OS, since it’s not that hard to re-install it – all I need is the configuration, and I’ve got that backed up.

That leaves my entire download and media archive. I always figured, “I can just re-download all of this, right?” And most of it I can. Much of the rest either isn’t important, or hasn’t changed since the last backup (which I’ll admit was a long time ago), or can be recovered from CD, or can be re-scanned. The few photos that hadn’t made it into last week’s backup turned out to still be in a temporary folder on my website. Still, there are things that will be hard to find again, and probably some that will be impossible.

Just in case, I’ve got a recovery tool scanning the lost partitions in hopes that it will come up with something.

I’m not touching Conectiva again – or any other distribution I’m not already familiar with – until I get a spare system set up, or maybe spring for something like VMWare. And I’m seriously considering picking up some sort of backup solution that will hold more than a CD-RW, so I’ll be more inclined to save everything instead of picking and choosing what to put on a few discs.

Update 7:45am: I got the download/media partition back. The tool I ran overnight didn’t seem to find anything, but when I ran parted again this morning (after remembering that it was on PAUD, the Parted And Utilities Disk, not Tomsrtbt) it was able to find the partition.

So now all that’s missing is the primary OS (I’m running off of one of the “extra” installations right now), and I can reinstall that easily.

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Yet another call of “I can’t retrieve email!” Always from Outlook users. If you use Eudora, Netscape – hell, even Outlook Express, you’ll get some sort of error message if it stops working. You can usually solve it by closing the program and starting it up again. But Outlook… Outlook will get into modes where it says it’s connecting, but it will never actually contact the server. Outlook will decide it needs to ask you for your password over and over again. And if you close Outlook, it’s not necessarily gone. Even “Exit and Log Off” doesn’t always do it. No, you have to reboot the %#@! computer. And if you’re lucky, you don’t have to track down the elusive Inbox Repair Tool (which might be in the Start menu. Maybe.)

I swear, if Outlook didn’t have the name Microsoft in front of it, no one would buy it. Maybe the latest version is better, but everything I’ve tried to use or troubleshoot is still just Schedule+ on steroids with email thrown in. Calling Outlook an email program is like calling a big clunky van a race car because you’ve replaced the engine. Outlook Express, for all its rampant security problems, is a much better mail program than its namesake.

Yecch!