Two's Day's Two Days

Monday was uneventful, the shipping company did not make my phone ring so I went to work and had a nondescript day. BASFA afterward was one of the more fun ones, I came up with a few zingers, and was surprised to have someone outbid me on my birthday auction. There were a few active bidders, which also surprised me until one of them mentioned my photo skilz. The person who won the auction is one of the Secret Masters of Fandom, apparently someone who puts together a seriously excellent con suite - which is saying a lot. For the uninitiated, a con suite is where the fans can hang out, and get munchies and hydration between con events. A well-run con suite is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. I met satyapriya in a con suite at Denvention (Worldon a couple of years ago). I fell in love with someone else (satyapriya was occupied twice over by adoring fans by that time) but it was unrequited.  :-(

My biggest hit at BASFA was, when it was explained that the next SNMOFCon will be in Amsterdam, beating out Maui's bid, I found online Maui Massage near Amsterdam.  bovil got some big laughs with his happy ending follow-on.

Which brings us to today. First thing when I got out to the car, I tried to load the micro-SD chip into the GPS unit (last night I loaded it with a different POI file - the one I tried Monday said it was loading, but didn't actually add any of my addresses). Between my large fingers, the awkward location of the SD slot, and the tied-on dust cover, I managed to drop the chip. Found it after a short search, dropped it on the next attempt too. Could not find it. Screw it.

Another routine day of testing, except today's device kept locking up on me at a certain point which a real customer would only see once or twice during the lifetime of the product, but I had to run a suite of a dozen tests which all started at that point. Frankly I don't see where those tests are valid, since they change settings on my local server which ought never to change on the real world servers.

Checked my Dell order and discovered they had given the shipping company the wrong phone number. They had it right on all my online info, but what the bill of lading had was something with the right area code, but a completely different number. I phoned the shipping company, was on hold for 35 minutes - but they announced every 3 minutes or so how many callers ahead of you, and estimated wait time. It made the hold time easier, and I was able to continue doing work while I held. So the national customer service center answers, apparently Dell does this to them a lot, and he corrected the phone number in their records and then connected me to the SF office (another 10 minutes on hold) and they arranged to deliver between 9 am and 1 pm tomorrow.

So, I took home the Blu-ray player after arranging with my lead engineer to work from home until the TV is delivered.

At the car I looked for the chip again, did not find it.  Went to Fry's and bought two more chips plus a memory stick for my camcorder, thought about getting a flashlight then remembered there was one in the glove compartment. Out at the car, shined the flashlight on the floor of the driver's side, and there it was. With a lot of fumbling got it in there, but with the same results. It said it loaded the POIs, but it was too quick, and nothing showed up on the unit.

Got a call from the gonif at The Car Stereo Company who was supposed to credit my AMEX card for the Alpine unit I returned. He cheefully said they mail out checks on the 15th and 30th, and mine will go out on the next round. He is going to get a nasty voicemail message about how that's not acceptable, and wishing "a merry little christmas" to an atheist is not going to win him points. Steer clear of that place.

I built a new file with different software, and looking at it in a simple text editor I can see all the data. Will try again tomorrow, this time I'm bringing my hemostats with me.

So, plans for tomorrow are:
WFH
Receive the TV (probably park the box in the livingroom)
Work
Home, move the livingroom TV to the bedroom, and set up the new TV in the livingroom. Bedroom TV goes into the closet. It's actually a fairly nice computer monitor as well, but not as nice as the one I'm using.

A Day Which Will Live In Infamy

Or not.

Japan, Germany and Italy are now our allies, China and Russia not so much. 9/11 showed we had not learned our lesson about infamy from the skies, and now we send our troops halfway around the world to be ambushed by our enemies. The US government has learned nothing.