Weekly Wrap-up 2005_02

It rained heavily early in the week, then settled for being mostly grey, except for Wednesday which was gorgeous. There was frost on the rooftops on Wednesday and blue in the afternoon. On Thursday morning we had heavy fog. Friday and Saturday were just grey.

We went to a talk at SLAC on Monday, then to dinner in Palo Alto. By the time we left dinner (about 7pm) there was less traffic (good) but a lot more rain (nasty). It was a bad drive home made worse because we were in separate cars. I was pretty shaky when I got home. I took a hot neck-sock and went to bed for an hour. Then got up and sat in the hot tub, then went back to bed for the night. I'm glad I don't have a regular commute like that anymore.

Tuesday I stopped off at Sears to return a pair of Lands End Marinac boots (these are great boots but I had ordered the wrong size ;-( I was able to get the right size there at Sears. Hoorah.

We dropped the Camry off at the shop on Wednesday morning for them to look for the oil leak again. Then Rich dropped me off and took the Scion to work. I took the bus home. As the bus doesn't come very near the house, I got some exercise. But by then the sky had cleared and the weather had warmed to 50.

We spent much of the evening fighting computers. Rich tried to install the two new hard drives into Macarena, put in a separate power supply and confused the board. Happily, a friend of ours had a good idea - pull the battery for a few minutes, then try again. It worked. We proceeded much more slowly after that. When we finally went to bed, the backup program was copying the soon-to-be-former boot drive onto one of the new drives.

On Thursday I drove down to another talk, this one on "Organizational Weblogging". We didn't stay down for dinner this time and it wasn't raining (although we were, once again, in two cars).

Rich was unexpectedly late getting home after the talk. He had another flat tire, this one about a mile from the house! Yeegh! These are brand new tires! So he stopped off on Friday morning at the service station where he'd bought them to discover he'd run over something and punctured the tire. To make matters worse, the hole was near (though not in) the sidewall and the service station had not offered road hazard insurance (and Rich had forgotten to ask abut it; I would have forgotten as well. I just sort of expect hazard insurance with new tires!).

The service station people were leery about patching with the hole near the sidewall. Rich suggested patching and then putting that tire in the trunk as a spare. When he got the new tires he kept the best of the old set as a spare, so now the Camry is running on three very new tires and one somewhat older tire with one very new, but patched, spare. Ugh.

I opened my mail on Friday and found a letter from MasterCard announcing that the provisional credit on my dispute with Camera Unlimited is now official (I won :-). So I sent a note to Camera Unlimited and suggested that if they want their merchandise back they send UPS to pick it up asap. It's taking up valuable space in my entry hall.

The Camera Unlimited people are amazing. I placed an order in August and received the (incorrect) merchandise two weeks later. When I tried to simply return it, they promised to make things right by sending the correct items along with a return-mail label for the previous items. I agreed... and waited... and waited. Finally in early October I sent them a fax asking what was going on. They sent new items (different but still, unfortunately, not what I had asked for) by 2nd day UPS... with no return label for the previous stuff. So now I had four inappropriate items, nothing I wanted, and a growing sense of frustration..

After that, things just got weirder, with me asking for a refund (and a return authorization number to send back the incorrect stuff) and them trying to argue that everything they had done was correct. Late in October I sent a well-documented dispute to MasterCard.

I am amazed at the gall and stupidity of some companies. Did they really expect me to lose the dispute? It ultimately cost them more to argue than it would have caused to just take back the stuff and refund my money back in October. They're now out penalty fees from MC and they've lost a customer forever.

This week I read Kris Longknife: Deserter, by Mike Shepherd. Ignore the subtitle again. This was even better than the first Kris Longknife book; I look forward to the next. I also (finally) finished Chindi by Jack McDevitt (and promptly obught everything else he has written). Good science fiction.

I skim-read Fantasy Life by Kristine Katherine Rusch (promising but choppy and the characters should know better!. There is far too much inter-personal angst for the plot). I also mostly skim-read On Basilisk Station by David Weber (the first Honor Harrington novel). This was also promising but contained much too much battle in proportion to anything else (and much too little character development). Booooring.

In between and around the rest, I've had almost enough naps, plenty of snuggles with the cats, and a note or two from my Mom. Rich was out of town for the weekend so the cats and I have had lots of quality time - I read, they sleep.

Onward and Upward.

Weekly Wrap-up 2005_02 ( in category Gemisch/Gallimaufry ) - posted at Mon, 17 Jan, 12:30 Pacific | «e»