December 2004 Archives

Back in our days of living in the Medford/Somerville area, I used to be a customer at a small local bank called US Trust before it was swallowed up by Citizens Bank. V banked with Fleet, a rather large local bank which had itself gobbled up Shawmut and BayBank. When we got married, I switched over to Fleet for no particular reason, and just recently, Bank of America merged Fleet, which means that the only way Bank of America gets acquired is if Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia decides to go into banking as a side project. But unlike other horror stories I've heard, we've had little to no blips in our service despite the changeovers, mergers and whatnot. Maybe it's because we don't do much more than use the ATM and do the occasional coins-to-bills conversion.

Today, I pulled down my last paycheck of 2004. Not as much as good ol' Alwaleed, but I got paid. Our company is too small to do the direct deposit thang, so I stopped by my local BayBank of Fleetfooted Shawmut American Indians branch, walked into the ATM vestibule and grabbed a deposit envelope. Picked up one of the pens attached to the counter...no tip. Picked up the other pen...no ink. Fortunately, someone had left a RED (?) pen there, so I was able to fill out the envelope and make my deposit; equally fortunately, I had signed my check at work with black ink (somehow I don't think it would be valid if signed in red) so that $$ is now on its way to our checking account.

And then, on my way out of the building, I saw another envelope, stuffed in a crack on the right side of the plexiglas counter, which someone had scrawled on in bright red lettering:

Mental note: When moisturizing hands after washing hands after going to the company bathroom, make sure to open door of said bathroom first. Hand lotion makes it very difficult to operate doorknob of said door of said bathroom.

Mental something: Boss calls secretary's desk. Secretary is in bathroom. Phone rings seven times. Boss hangs up. Boss calls one of my co-workers. He says "ok", walks over to the printer and brings her the two most recently-printed sheets of paper. If it weren't so painful to do, I would be tearing my hair out right now.

I have a cousin from Australia who is currently living in Charleston, SC, for reasons probably known only to him. By accounts of several of the females I know who have met him, they have deemed him to be "cute", especially with the ever-so-cool Australian accent he sports, so if I were cute, single and sporting an Australian accent, I'd likely go somewhere other than Charleston, SC to sow my wild oats. But that's beside the point. The point is that he lives there with one of his cousins (on his mother's side, so not part of my family).

A few months ago, my mother found out that he wasn't planning on doing anything for Christmas - since returning to Australia for a weekend really isn't an option - and offered to take him in for a few days. In the spirit of the season, and in light of the fact that he's working at Applebee's and isn't exactly rolling in dough, she even offered to pay for his ticket from South Carolina to Maine if he got back to her soon enough. This, of course, was met by complete and total silence until early December, when he finally accepted, far beyond the ticket purchase deadline, so he had to make his own arrangements. Which he did, placing him in Maine for a whole 36 hours. He would be touching down at 5pm on the 24th and departing at 6am on the 26th, flying from Charleston to Portland via Cincinnati and back the same way.

Well.

Christmas came and went, the snow came and stayed, Cincinnati turned into a complete airplane graveyard thanks to two feet of snow, and when I called my parents after Christmas dinner, I heard three words that told me Daniel's odyssey had just begun:

"Daniel flew ComAir."

In case you missed it, ComAir is a subsidiary of Delta who apparently runs their reservation systems on an abacus. And on Christmas Day, someone dropped and broke the abacus, and their entire flight control systems got FUBAR. So instead of cheerful Christmas greetings and the exchanging of holiday pleasantries with my mother, I found myself instead on my brother-in-law's computer trying to find alternate numbers for ComAir and going on Delta's web site to see what was up with his flight. Daniel, meanwhile, was in the midst of spending nearly 3 hours on hold trying to get the same information, only to find out that nobody anywhere knew anything because of the stoopid dropped abacus.

Once we left for home on Sunday, around 5:30, I called my mother to find out the latest in the saga, and she informed me that Daniel had decided to take a bus to Boston to try to fly out of there instead. He had left at 2 to catch a 2:30 bus, putting him in Boston around 4ish, and his flight was due to leave at 5:50. Unfortunately, as you've already read, Boston had already gotten 4 inches and was expecting twice that. She was hoping we were at home already, having seen the forecast (oops), and had thought we might be able to house him if his flight hadn't made it airborne. When we got to the CT/MA border 5 hours later, we called again to see if there was any update - there hadn't been. We checked our home voicemail just in case, since Daniel had been given our number. No message, so we assumed Daniel was on his way.

No such luck.

When we arrived home at 1:30, we saw the light flashing on our voicemail...he had left a cheerful message at 11pm, saying that the earliest he'd be out would be Wednesday morning, so he was looking for recommendations of things to do in Boston during his "free day". With a FOOT OF SNOW ON THE GROUND. We considered having him paged in the airport, but it was 2 in the morning by now, we had no idea which terminal he was in, or if he was even IN a terminal, or a hotel, or sleeping outside in a snow bank. He did say he'd be back in touch Monday morning since he hadn't been able to get a hold of us.

The next morning, an email from my brother - disregard the previous night's message; Daniel was on his way. Ten minutes later, an email from my mother, who apparently DIDN'T know Daniel was on his way. Communication among family members was not a strong point during this entire episode. But then nothing for the rest of the day, no information on exactly where he was. Then last night, one last message came in, this one from Daniel's aunt, sent to his mother, forwarded to MY mother, forwarded to me.

After Daniel couldn't reach us Sunday night, he called Kati, the cousin he's staying with in Charleston, to explain his plight. She immediately looked up train and bus schedules to both Pittsburgh (near where his aunt lives, and where Kati was for the holidays anyway) and Charleston. Turns out he could catch a train from Boston to Pittsburgh on Monday morning, arriving at 10pm Monday night. Kati would then be leaving on Tuesday morning to drive back to Charleston - a mere 600+ miles away.

So to recap...Daniel flew Charleston>Cincinnati>Portland, intending to fly Portland>Cincinnati>Charleston 36 hours later. Took a bus Portland>Boston, intending to fly Boston>Charleston. Took a train Boston>Pittsburgh, and as I write this, is likely in a car from Pittsburgh to Charleston, a mere 48 hours and 3 forms of transit after he was scheduled to be leaving. I think I need to take a nap just writing all that out.

(that would be the Slavic version of a beeotch)

The one meal we ate out of the house during our weekend of eating was at PJ's Pancake House (where, apparently, you can get "mapel syrup", according to their <title> tag...oops). Usually there's a line going down the block of people waiting to get in, but when we rolled by at 10:30, we were surprised to see that there was nobody waiting. Viv and her brother went to park the car, dropping me off with his wife, two-year-old, and mother. So for those of you keeping score at home, that's a babe in arms, a woman who's six months pregnant, a grandmother (who really doesn't look like it, but it works for the story, so bear with me) and me. We went in to get a table and were told by a rather burly gentleman - a bouncer! at a PANCAKE HOUSE! - that there was no space for a party of five, but they could split us up. Being a family outing, we declined and said we'd wait. "Ok," Mr. Pancake Bouncer said, "but you'll have to wait outside." I kind of looked at him, looked at them, raisde an eyebrow, and got no response.

So out we went - the aforementioned two-year-old, pregnant woman and grandmother, out in the 15-degree cold. Fortunately, the wait wasn't long, and we were let in just as the car parkers came back. After plowing my way through a half order of chocolate chip pancakes (insert Homer drooling sound here) and what was termed a "ridiculous outburst" from our nephew by his mother (but which registered about a .03 on the Richter tantrum scale...that kid was so well behaved this weekend, he was doing some serious ovary whacking), it came time to pay and leave. As I was walking out the front door, I held it for whoever was behind me, then saw there was nobody there, so I let it go...and then watched in super-slow-mo as it swung backwards, and directly into the shoulder of PJ's Pancake Bouncer. That had to leave a mark.

The drive from Massachusetts to Jersey is a fairly uneventful one in good weather and light traffic - in our Saturn, with the gas mileage we get, it's possible to make it on exactly one tank of gas, in a shade over four hours (that is, if I'm driving solo - if not, the wife and I switch off a couple times, she obeys the speed limit more closely than I do, and we make it in closer to five). Toss in some holiday traffic, maybe six hours.

But toss in some heavy, wind-driven snow, then make it fall so quickly that the plows can't keep up, and you have the eight-hour epic that was last night's journey from Jersey to the Mass homestead. The snow was so in our faces the whole time that it looked like we were driving into a Koosh ball. It's not the worst we've ever experienced - there wasn't enough slushy crap on the ground to be blinded when your average trucker, driving LORD HAVE MERCY THAT'S CLOSE to the side of our car, kicks up enough crap to coat our entire beleaguered windshield in gray snowy munge for the next 500 yards while we yank on the wiper handle like a one-armed bandit with a two gazillion dollar payoff on the way...but it was still pretty bad.

Fortunately, we'd had a nice, pleasant, fulfilling Christmas at home with my mother/brothers/sister-in-law and our two-year-old nephew who has a sister on the way. And by fulfilling I mean stretch-mark-inducing quantities of food. Because it's not enough to have a turkey, stuffing, gravy and mashed potatoes for Christmas dinner, but also salad, soup, lasagna, cheesecake, a box-o-chocolates, and anything else we could raid from the fridge. Oof. Urp.

But amid the stuffing of the faces and the ~100 rounds of mahjong (which, despite my newly-acquired Doctorate of Mahjong (I shit you not) I did not win (I shit you not again)) and the playing of tennis ball and dump truck and Thomas the Train Engine with the aforementioned cute (and extraordinarily well-behaved) nephew, I did manage to get some good gifting in. The wife has already listed hers but I'll say I was quite pleased to come up with the six-pack of Guster related CDs (although one of them has already been relegated to "only if we're in the car for eight hours in a this-is-scaring-the-shit-out-of-me snowstorm and we've already listened to all of the other CDs...twice" status), and the knife block, which was an odyssey worthy of its own entry. Oh, and then there's my haul:

- Items for the new car, including but not limited to an ice scraper (which I actually used last night on the old car, which is technically newer than the new car...I think my brain just broke), a 20-disc CD holder, and a gift certificate for a complete car detailing...schweeeet...
- Clothing, including AND limited to: a gray Polo sweater, new brown shoes (the soles on my old ones are disintegrating), both from the wife, and an FBI Academy T-shirt, thanks to my brother who may or may not work for the gub'mint.
- Also from the aforementioned brother, the aforementioned certificate for my Doctorate in Mahjong.
- An autographed Wally the Green Monster and matching Adirondack chair (if you've never watched a local Red Sox game, you'll have NO idea what I'm talking about...but feel free to ask).
- Not one, but TWO Best Buy gift cards, which will soon be transformed into a DVD burner, courtesy of my mother-in-law, brother-in-law and his wife (I wrote the last phrase of that sentence about eight times before it even sounded half-right...argh).
- The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, by Joshua Braff (Zach's brother). Books. Brain food. I like. I mean, it's not Milton or Longfellow, but I'd forgotten how much I like just devouring a book every so often.

There may have been other items in there, but since we got home at 1:30 and went to bed at 2, I've given my brain a break for most of the day. Though in closing, I will say this - one of the best things about 12 inches of snow on the ground was the 2-foot wall of snow at the bottom of our driveway when we got home. I veered out to the left side of the road, then swung around to the right, gunned it, and BLASTED through it, sending a plume of snow up into the air. I swear, it was like one of those winter truck ads on TV, where a pickup is randomly driving through the forest and encounters, by chance, a perfectly-sculpted wall of snow which happens to not just be snowfall accumulated on, say, a brick wall or log which would severely damage the truck's undercarriage. But we plowed right through it, then did a little off-roadin' on the lawn next to our driveway before coming to a stop, grabbing only the bare necessities and traipsing upstairs for some much-needed sleepytime.

It's a terrible day in the office chair
A bothersome day in the office
Would you shut up?
Could you shut up?
It's so irritating to have a neighbor
Just like you
It's a mind-numbing feeling to be in a cubiclehood with you

So...

Hang up the phone and please shut the hell up
Turn off your music, shut IT the hell off
Wouldn't you please?
Couldn't you please?
Why are you my neighbor?

There are times I'm glad I live in a school dormitory because the school takes care of the shoveling, sweeping and plowing of our steps, sidewalk and driveway. Then there are times I wish they weren't quite so overzealous or careless during their plowing duties.

When the town decided to redo the curbs of our street last summer, they made the grass between the sidewalk and street slope at a roughly 45-degree angle, so that nothing could be placed on it without it tumbling down into the street. Why, you ask? I have no idea. Nobody does. It's like they wanted a ski slope for the earthworms. Also, they uprooted the "2-hour daytime parking" sign, threw it into our hedges, and never replaced it, yet they still write tickets despite the obvious lack of signage.

At any rate...the wife went outside this morning to discover that Mr. Plow had knocked over the HUGE recycling bin I had carefully (but precariously) perched on said strip of snow-covered grass - assiduously located to permit the plowing of both sidewalk and street without obstruction. Thanks, Mr. Plow!

I would say without hesitation that in the list of things I like to be doing when it's 8 degrees out, picking up an entire recycling bin worth of used plastic, glass and styrofoam off of a snowy (i.e. UNPLOWED) street has to rank somewhere around 987234698172346123452345th, if not considerably lower.

Talk about a short pilgrimage. The iBook arrived back home safely yesterday, a mere five days after I had dropped it off at the Apple Store. Turns out it wasn't even the logic board at all, but just a faulty cable in the hinge of the case, which they replaced, along with a brace (not sure what/where that is) and one other random piece. So unfortunately, we don't get a new logic board, nor do we get anything else replaced (I was hoping the hard drive would act up and start clicking, at which point they would say "Dear God, we have erred! Let us replace it forthwith!", but no dice), but hey, it was free, and damned fast, at that.

Welcome home, iBook.

Ever since Apple started opening its retail stores, it's been really hard to avoid poking my head in whenever I pass one in the mall - they're so unlike any other store that it's fun to wander in, look at the shiny new toys, kick the tires, etc. And in each one is an area way in the back called the "Genius Bar". I'd always wondered what it was for, as while I'd never really paid attention, I couldn't remember see anyone sitting there and doing anything. Do they serve drinks there (Apple Martinis? Sour Apples?), or what? Last week, I found out.

Viv's laptop had been acting up for a while; not enough to concern us too much, really...a screen flicker here, a not-so-efficient battery there, that sort of thing. Last month I randomly visited Apple's web site and stumbled upon the Expanded iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program there. I noticed that screen flicker was one of the symptoms, and who am I to turn down a free replacement logic board? Toss in the fact that I'd heard good stories about people who sent in their computers to fix one particular problem and got a whole host of other things replaced, and I was sold.

Then last week, bad things started happening. Suddenly the hard drive started making random clicking noises, and startup took five, ten, fifteen minutes. Programs would take minutes to launch, then freeze for no reason. I verified/repaired permissions, ran Norton Utilities, defragged, everything I could think of. It semi-sorta-quasi-fixed the speed problem, as the machine's speed increased from "customer service" to merely "inconvenient", but I did have a couple of near-heart attacks, once when the drive randomly disappeared after Disk Doctor crashed, and the other time when I rebooted into OS X and got a black screen that said this:

/etc/master.passwd: not a directory
/etc/master.passwd: not a directory
-sh: /etc profile: not a directory
-sh -2.05b#

Ew. Fortunately, I was able to figure out that Disk Doctor had simply screwed up the symlink between /etc and /private/etc (don't ask) and repaired it using this article, while also running fsck (no, not "fuck", File System ChecK) in the process to see if that helped the machine any. And thanks to my heroic efforts, lo, the computer did resuscitate. And yea, verily, I stopped fucking around with it (not fscking around with it), and backed the whole hard drive up onto my desktop.

The very next morning, it was off to the Apple Store - nimbly navigating the mall parking lot, swerving through the mallways and hallways (people need to consider the walkways of a mall to be more like a highway...if you must stop, move to the shoulder, or I WILL REAR END YOU, and with no qualms, either), etc. I walked in, went up to the counter in front, and asked the nice cashier person (who was surprisingly un-swamped) whom I should see about sending a computer back to Apple. "Oh, you just need to make an appointment at the Genius Bar."

Aha!

We strolled over to one of the new iMac G5s (VERY handsome, by the way), punch up Apple's web site, and made an appointment right then and there. There's a few other people ahead of me in line, but they've stupidly decided to go wander the mall (at Christmas! Are they INSANE?!) so when one of the Genii rattled off three names before coming to mine, I was magically next in line, and the patient was brought out to perform.

You know how when you're watching ER, and someone brings out a rib spreader, you wince and grimace anyway, even though you know it's not real? That's kind of how I felt when he pried up the keyboard to get at the serial number plastered atop the innards of the iBook. Then he whipped out a scanner, grabbed the bar code to get the serial number into his computer's form, and we were on our way. A bit of a hangup when he realized it was a refurbished machine instead of a factory original, but it still qualified for the program. 15 minutes later, it was packaged up and back on its way to the homeland, a visit to Cupertino, hopefully to return soon with a clean bill of health...

First, on December 1st, I make my second appearance in Tom Caron's mail bag. Unfortunately, he didn't print the entire URL of the article, which can be seen here. Good times.

Then, today, a mere two months after I sent in the link, I make "Links of the Day" on ESPN's Page 2 (a daily column written by Bill Simmons' intern) - I submitted the Carl Lewis video after seeing a link to it on a message board I frequent. No, really. That's how I found it. Seriously.

Pete Townshend...former frontman for the Who, now shilling for JC Penney. Does anyone else want to take a running start and Vinatieri one of those stupid talking gifts right in their lack of a nose?

Aerosmith...now allowing "Dream On" to be butchered to sell Buicks. You want a good use of "Dream On", try this one.

Three Dog Night...now consenting to having "Joy To The World" be mashed-up, remixed, cut, rearranged, rewritten, disemboweled and stomped upon by Target. People. It's not a holiday song. They did not write "No where else I'd rather be" or "Everybody's rockin' 'round the Christmas tree". Don't make me hunt you down and kick your ass.

One thing I will say about all three of the above - the only thing they have going for them is that they're not Old Navy. Dear God...whoever released that plague of commercials on the eyeballs and eardrums of the world should be strung up by their toenails.

I feel like I'm a float in the Macy's Day parade, and that if I lean over too far one way or the other, gravity will overtake my gargantuan head and I'll go toppling to the ground. Seriously, I feel like someone shoved a grapefruit up my nose and it's sitting behind my eyeballs...

One of our sites at work is hosted by a web server company that I THINK may have just been spawned by the devil himself. Or at least, one of the lesser demons of Thanatos, this much is clear. Totally unreliable, and the only thing it does with any degree of consistency or reliability is to go crashysmashybashy once a week in its earlier days.

The person in the office in charge of dealing with the product of Satan's loins is someone who actually went to school for this kind of stuff (or at least, we pay him to know this kind of stuff), but unfortunately, things are a bit slow in the office for the design department, so he got himself a nice cushy side job in Boston and only comes in here twice a week, after hours. Of course, when you have a web host that's as reliable as a leaky condom, this is nothing but a recipe for disaster.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the server did its predictably crashysmashybashy thing, and instead of loading up our half-dozen carefully-crafted pages, it simply burped like it had eaten the entire site for an early Thanksgiving dinner, and said "Permission denied", as if the Internet as a whole had forgotten to get its hall pass signed. Since our guru was out (supposedly for the entire four-day weekend), we clung to the hope that the site might have just gone off early to visit its relatives in USENET land or something, and would be back when we were.

Monday morning, no dice. Permission still denied. I call the main number, and am pleased to hear that I'm #1 in the queue. So I kick back and listen to the hold music - I notice that they're playing all blues, which I find mildly amusing. 30 minutes later, it's ironic and annoying, as I'm STILL #1 in the queue, and STILL on hold. The worst part of it is the automated voice that pops in with a click every five minutes to remind me that I'm still on hold - that stupid click makes me think I'm actually about to be attended to. Finally, an actual human comes on, I explain the problem, and he says "Oh. You're not on the geranium server, are you?" Fighting off the urge to say "Do I SOUND like I'm on the geranium server, pal?", I simply tell him I honestly have no idea. "Yeah, it looks like you are...it went down last week and we restored as much as we could. Looks like we weren't able to restore your site."

Let's play make-believe for a minute. You're an Internet bigwig. You own a hosting company. You have a server that crashes, potentially affecting dozens if not hundreds of your customers. Do you tell them? Congratulations! You're smarter than ShitCo (yes, it's an anagram).

They do restore our account's directory to the server, and we re-upload the backup site we had locally, so we're back up and running. Sort of. For some reason, the person in charge of monitoring and answering email was getting far fewer messages than she should have, despite me restoring her account. Turns out that one of the cgi scripts that submits an online form was missing, so I re-uploaded it. Then the dreaded "Internal Server Error" comes up, which, of course, could mean ANYTHING. All week long I've been hacking away with not much success, to the point where even the directory we use to submit tickets for web site problems got hosed.

Then this morning, I created fire. Turns out it was a permissions problem with the directory when I re-created it, coupled with the formmail script itself being hosed somehow. Change the permissions, grab a new version of the script, and now I know what Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away felt like.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving we went to do our regular grocery shopping run. Waiting at the deli counter, I watched in amazement as not one, but TWO people asked for at least a pound of turkey. A full three days after every man, woman and child supposedly stuffed themselves silly with the fat fowl.

Also from Sunday...apparently the Boston Globe is accepting advertising in the comics. Ugh. Yup, down at the bottom of one of the interior pages is an ad for the execrable movie Garfield. Is it too much to ask for a kid to be able to flip through comic strips without seeing ads? Then again, any parent who sees that ad and actually BUYS the movie probably deserves what they get.

There's a Christmas movie airing on CBS this weekend whose summary reads thusly: "As the holidays approach, a man learns his wife, who is having an affair, wants a divorce." Entertainment Weekly beat me to it, but I'll say it again for the record...nothing says happy warm fuzzy holidays like watching a movie about adultery. There's another one featuring Stephen Weber and Molly Shannon...it's good to know they'll be in the same place so I can avoid them BOTH at the same time.

I almost never quote myself, but I couldn't resist. The Mets are apparently making overtures to Pedro Martinez to put him on their pitching staff. On a board I frequent there's a debate about whether the Mets are serious about pursuing him...and my position is, with the shape that team is in right now, it's like putting a big shiny bow on a pile of dog shit. It may look fine from a distance, but up close, it still smells like ass. Not that I'm particularly passionate one way or the other about him coming back...nor is anyone else, apparently. Right now, Theo is the man who can do no wrong and he's garnered himself about the largest grace period anyone has ever had in this town. He could send Johnny Pesky out to play shortstop next year and most folks here wouldn't bat an eyelash.

When I went out shopping for the wife's birthday present - this is during the first week of NOVEMBER, mind you - they had already torn down the Halloween decorations and were setting up the Santa village in the middle of the mall, fake snow and all. Apparently Thanksgiving just doesn't push the widgets out the door, so they just skip it. And then the day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas songs start on the radio. RADIO PEOPLE. I BEG YOU. STOP. I like Christmas music at my own pace, on my own terms. If I want to listen to it, I put on a CD, or my mother can play a few tunes. But the month-long assault on my eardrums is just too much to take.