pelandrone/rant

my son hand painted this for me. He picked this mug due to the fact that it has a monkey's ass on it, and I would effectively be mooning anyone that is nearby while I am having my coffee. :-D

Hell yeah.

Mmmmmmmmm

We're in the process of moving our Maryland facilities from one space to another. The phones are moving today, so I'm in Maryland supervising that, and the installation of the Internet connection.

I just watched it take 3 engineers, and 4 others 15 minutes to move an oversized desk through a too small door. Very, very entertaining.

Now, as soon as the Phone Company gets all the lines moved properly, I can start wiring that.

Boffo.

I'm a consumer. I like to buy stuff. Sometimes, I consume more than I need (okay, I do that a lot). As a consumer, I'm more excited about getting treated well as a customer, than I am on getting that "killer deal".

I ordered three items today from two different merchants, neither of which I had done business with previously. My dad's 79th birthday is Saturday, and a few weeks ago, he mentioned that he has been searching for a while for a long-sleeved guayabera shirt. My dad has been a fan of the guayabera since he first visited the Philippines, and saw them worn at formal events. I gotta say, I'm a big fan of being able to dress comfortably and formally; that's seldom possible in Western culture. So when he mentioned this, I pulled out my laptop, did a google search for "long sleeve guayabera" and immediately found a long-sleeved, linen, guayabera at CubanFoodMarket.com. He was of course very upset that it took me so little time to find it, but then conceded that I do, in fact, have mad google-fu skillz (my words, not his). I placed an order this morning around 0700 EDT for that, and a sweet "leisure" shirt for myself.

You're thinking... slacker! This isn't interesting! When are you going to tell us about the good customer service?! Don't worry, I'm getting to that.

I then realized that I was going to need a good hat for the summer. I have plenty of hats, as my wife will attest to. I may possibly have too many hats, but I don't really think such a thing is possible.

I've always liked flatcaps but there is always the problem of how to search for them, since they go by 30 different names. This took my google-fu to the limit, but I finally found the Cavanaugh/Stetson Plaid Linen Ivy Cap that both my wife and I agreed was a good one. So I placed an order for that.

When I checked my email after lunch, I had received one from Falkoffs.com, from the VP of Internet Sales, no less (I know, it sounds lame, but an actual human wrote to inform me that my order was on it's way, and gave me the tracking number)

How often do you get an email like that when you order online? So that brightened me up a bit. Then, since I'm a slacker, and waited too long to order my Dad's birthday present (his birthday is Saturday), I had the guayabera and leisure shirt shipped overnight. I sent an email to cubanfoodmarket.com asking if it would ship today, and within 30 minutes got a phone call from Maria letting me know that my shirt out of the order was out of stock in my size. She cheerfully offered another shirt to me (which I think will be a great party shirt) and said the Dad's shirt will ship today and be here tomorrow, my shirt will ship tomorrow (I opted for ground shipping on that, and she threw that in for free) and I'm apparently getting a little something else with my shirt that she assures me I'll like.

THAT is what I'm talking about. The first thing I did after talking to Maria was to tell a co-worker what happened. He's the VP of Sales for my company, and his first comment was, "That's what will make you come back. They treated you right, and the first thing you did was tell someone about it." And now I'm telling the Internet.

Bravo to CubanFoodMarket.com and Falkoffs.com for reinforcing my faith in online retailers!

I think I tried to hard on that subject line.

Anyone who uses twitter knows that they've had technical difficulties lately. This is fine with me, since I don't pay for the service, and I can't even begin to fathom how large their database infrastructure must be to handle the traffic they handle. Anyway, the XMPP/IM service into twitter has been down for a few days, and that was my primary way of using twitter, since I can't keep up on my phone, and don't have the patience for reloading the webpage constantly.

@zen_jewitch recommended that I try twhirl. Officially, Adobe AIR, doesn't have Linux support, but they DO have an alpha release, and it seems to work just fine.

The AIR installation went smoothly on both Fedora 5 and Fedora 8. The thwirl installation was even easier, since AIR handled it, and it also put everything neatly into /opt, which pleases me.

So, what do I think of twhirl? I like it. It's not taking up too many cycles on my old hardware (2x 800Mhz Coppermines on my Fedora 5 workstation), and it's pretty handy as far as organizing twitter information goes. The only g-glitch that I've noticed, is that it picks up my keyboard shortcuts I use to switch from desktop-to-desktop in Gnome. I use C-M-left and C-M-right a lot to get around, and C-left and C-right affect which pane is active in thwirl. If there's a way to disable or configure this, I'd love to know it. ;-)

I have nothing really bad to say about it. I do miss my XMPP connectivity, though.