A Day Late

I think I’ve come to that big crossroads in life. I’m still looking for a new job. I’ve only been looking locally but the lack of success has motivated me to start thinking about else where. I’ve also thought about trying to do a small business but with that comes a lot of risk and uncertainty. Some people handle that well, I just don’t happen to be one of them. Likewise some people thrive on change, I tend to struggle with it and avoid it if I can. It’d be nice if these decisions didn’t have such a large impact on the rest of my life, but what can ya do? It’d also be nice if I could see the end result of each choice before I made it. I have a feeling the next year of my life could be interesting. By the way, if I’m still writing entries about what job to take or where to go in a year, someone yell at me and just tell me to make a decision.

After quite a bit of work my digital camera is finally here. I decided to go with the Canon PowerShot S400. I’ve had my eye on this camera for a few months now. Ever since a friend picked up the 230 model I’ve been thinking about getting one. This is my first digital camera and I really haven’t felt the need to get one, but I wanted to take some pictures when I go back east at the end of the summer and I figured why not take them in style?

I noticed Jeremy Zawodny bought one a couple weeks ago and from the sound of things had a similar online purchasing nightmare. Here’s what happened. First I went to Amazon and ordered it but it was out of stock. Being the impatient person I am I kept looking and found that Dell had it for about $20.00 cheaper than Amazon, so I cancelled my Amazon order and ordered it from Dell. Shortly after I received an email saying it was back ordered and wouldn’t be shipped until July 21st. Since I leave for DC on the 23rd I thought that was cutting it a little too close so I kept looking. Here’s where I start to make mistakes.

Against my better judgement I cancelled my Dell order and order it from some site I’ve never heard of but they said they had it in stock and listed the price about $30.00 cheaper than Dell. Well, after ordering I don’t even get an email response or anything. After a few days I decide to call and check on the order. It took almost an hour to get a person on the phone. I had to call 3 seperate times and sit on hold because it would automatically disconnect me after 20 minutes of being on hold. So they guy says…”uhh we don’t have any. They were supposed to be in yesterday. By the way, may I ask why you didn’t purchase any of our great accessories with your camera?” I dodged that sales ploy and immediately decided his “they were supposed to be here yesterday” line was a bunch of crap. So I started doing a little background checking on them (WHY didn’t I do this before I purchased? It’s a good question, all I can say is I’m often stupid when I’m impatient). All I could find was this site with miserable ratings and feedback for the company. I quickly realized I wouldn’t be receiving my camera unless I ordered a bunch of over priced accessories so I cancelled that order. Fortunately they didn’t charge my credit card before hand (their policy is not to charge until it ships), but I’m still gonna keep an eye on my account for a while.

So…now I’m back in the same place I started a week before. No camera and no camera on order (or so I thought). I found the camera again at another site selling for about the same price as Dell. This time I did a little research to verify that the company had at least a decent amount of positive feedback. I ordered it and kept my fingers crossed. I did get an email confirmation, so I considered that a good sign. About 2 or 3 days later I got an email indicating it had shipped and a fedex tracking number. I finally breathed a sigh of relief.

Here’s where the story really gets funny. I walk into work the next morning and the receptionist hands me a package that was delivered the day before. You can probably guess the look on my face when I see the Dell return label on the outside of the package. Sure enough, it was the Camera I had ordered a few days before. Did they send me a tracking number or indicate in anyway that the package had shipped? Nope. I got a cancellation number when I called but that obviously didn’t mean much when they saw it had already shipped. In the end I was still glad to finally have the camera.

The other one I ordered should be delivered today by Fedex. Lucky for me I was showing mine to my brother and he decided to buy the other one from me so I won’t have to pay any restocking fees or anything like that.

So what’s the lesson? Online purchasing can really suck. Don’t get me wrong, I love Amazon, and I really can’t fault them in anyway. It wasn’t in stock, had I been patient enough I’m sure it would’ve been here in a week or two. I’ve also been very pleased with past purchases from Dell, but I am a little miffed I didn’t get any notification the package had shipped. All it said under my order up until the time it arrived was “Expected ship date: 07/21/03″. Anyway, the camera is here and I was able to unload the second one, so in the end it’s all turned out ok. At least…hopefully this is the end.

So last Friday was just one of those days. You know the ones…it’s the end of the week, the sun is shining, and every minute that ticks by at work seems to take a little piece of your soul. It was a slow day so I decided to take off a few hours early and go fishing up in Heber. A couple friends and I found a nice little fishing hole up there. Everything was just perfect till I reached the fishing hole and realized the water was about a foot higher and the water was as muddy as it could get. Since I’ve just been fishing with nymphs and scuds I was pretty disappointed, unless the thing hit the fish on the nose there was no way they were going to see it. I thought about driving back down the canyon and try fishing the lower Provo, but it looked pretty crowded as I drove up. I thought about it a little and decided I wasn’t exactly fishing to catch fish. What I mean is, it was basically just an excuse to get out and get away for a while. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time it’s both…get away AND catch some fish, but not Friday. So I decided to try my luck at smacking a fish on the nose through all the mud for a couple hours. I didn’t catch anything but it was still a beautiful day and a great day to be on the river, even if it was too muddy.

Oh, by the way I think the mud was caused by a water reclamation project going on just below Jordanelle dam. I’ve heard some stuff about it but haven’t given it much thought since the waters been clear up until recently. Anyway, I may just have to stick to the lower Provo from now on.

I noticed a slashdot article for a Gentoo “live” cd to run linux on Mac’s, the other day. It took me a few days, but I finally got around to trying it out. I downloaded the Gentoo Gnome CD image last night on my cable modem at home and it downloaded pretty quick, around 2 or 2 1/2 hours I’d guess.

The CD is bootable so once I burned the image to a disc I rebooted my powerbook, held down the “c” key and Gentoo started booting right up. I really haven’t had enough time to play around with it much. I just ran through it fairly quickly trying to see what’s available and how it looked. From what I’ve seen I’m impressed. Gentoo also has a screenshot from the KDE version that’s also running mac-on-linux which looks pretty slick. This allows you to run OS X inside linux. I’m interested to see how it performs or if there’s any limitations. I also noticed Gentoo had a posting on their homepage about releasing a full version of Gentoo for the PowerPC platform. Looks like linux on a Mac is already here. I honestly thought it would take a lot longer than this. By the way, I REALLY dislike websites that don’t make permanent links to posts on their homepage obvious. I spent a while trying to figure out how to link to both posts but couldn’t find much, so you’ll just have to be satisfied with the link to the home page. Maybe in the next few weeks when the posts drop from the homepage and become archived I’ll come back and update this.

CORRECTION: After looking at Gentoo’s site a little more I realized they already have a distribution for PowerPC. The post I was looking at was for a distribution that would run under OS X. That’s even better than before. According to the post it should be “released soon” (I wish someone would define soon).

AH HA! I remembered what it was I was going to write about. I’m getting a digital camera in the near future and I started thinking about posting the pictures on the weblog. I decided it would be much nicer to have a web based photo album instead. That way I can keep the photos fairly organized, at least more so then if I had them scattered throughout my weblog entries.

With that in mind I decided to look around SourceForge for some web photo gallery projects. I enjoy using PHP so I decided to just search for php photo galleries. I ended up with about 15 different projects. This is one of the things that irritates me about sourceforge and open source. 15 different projects that are essentially trying to do the same thing. Wouldn’t it be better if we could consolidate down to 4 or 5 projects? Anyway, I found quite a few projects that looked good. Now I have to decide what features I want. Initially I was thinking of just something simple. A basic photo album with thumbnails and such but then I saw some other projects that allowed publicly viewable albums as well as albums that require a username and password. That might be nice, cause I’m not exactly sure I want the entire world to view pictures of my friends, family, etc (and I’m not sure they’d want their picture publicly available either). So, I might try and go with that option. I haven’t really decided, if anyone has suggestions I’m open to them.

I’ve also considered writing my own PHP photo gallery. Then I could add the features I want and add more later if I wanted. Not to mention I really like playing around with PHP and this would give me an excuse to do so. Hmmm…fortunately I have some time to think it over.

Does anyone else have this problem? You start thinking about something that would make a really good weblog entry and decide to write about it the next day. The next day comes, and you don’t have any idea what it was you were going to write about. Then it eats at you until you remember, that is if you remember.

I mentioned that my post yesterday was a milestone. It was my first post from my new Powerbook G4. I’ve been hesitating for months and I finally decided to break down and get it last Friday. It’s awesome, what more can I say? I’m still having a good time finding different features, organizing my MP3’s, etc. The things I love about it the most are the things I wanted in the first place (which is good). Mainly, portability and battery life without sacrificing performance. I decided to go with the 15″ model and I love how thin and light it is. I can easily drop it in the document bag I take to work and not even notice it. My Dell C800 on the other hand made me feel like I was carrying around a bag of bricks. The battery life has been great. I burned some DVD’s the other day and the battery lasted about 3 hours, which was better than I expected.

Don’t get me wrong, life is not perfect with the Powerbook but it’s better than I expected. A few things I’ve run into that have irked me. One is Quicken for Mac. I got a good deal on it a few months ago and anticipating getting the powerbook, I purchased it. I loaded it on the other night and was getting ready to transfer my data from my dell laptop when I noticed that the Mac version doesn’t have the 401(k) account type. This wouldn’t be a big deal but tracking my 401(k) is one of the things I REALLY liked about quicken. I’m still trying to decide what to do about it. I hate to keep my other laptop around just to balance my 401(k) but I may.

Another concern I have is my iPaq (something I was already anticipating). I really like my iPaq, esspecially because it allows me to keep my calendar, contacts, etc synchronized between my work computer and my home laptop. Right now I’m just hoping Microsoft is planning on putting out a Mac version of ActiveSync but I haven’t been able to find any information that they’re going to.

“Mac’s never crash.” Umm…yeah, I can’t agree with that. The first day I had it, it crashed a few times. I was trying to copy some files from my dell laptop to the powerbook. Both laptops were using a netgear wireless access point. I’m guessing that the load was just too much on the access point and it would reset because I would lose connection on both machines briefly. The windows machine would readily reset and give an error on the file transfer. The powerbook would lock up completely. I tried “relaunching” the “finder” without success. The system was completely unresponsive and the only thing I could do was hold down the power button and reboot the machine (not a good thing to have to do). I think recovery from a connection loss during a file transfer ought to be recoverable, or I should at least be able to kill the process without having to reboot.

But, overall I have to say I’m really happy with the purchase. I was planning on waiting until the “new” 15″ models came out with the updated hardware. I thought that would be in April but no luck there. I’m guessing it will at least be until September or January. I got a VERY good deal on this powerbook model so I decided the discount was worth it and I don’t regret it (I may if the new models come out next week, but not right now ). Anyway, I’m sure they’ll be more post on my Powerbook in the days/months to come (for better or worse).

My server was down most of Friday. I decided to update my Redhat installation using the Up2date command Friday morning and ran into some problems. One of the packages (a KDE package) was locking up the server when it was trying to update. I had ssh’d in to perform the update and when the server locked up I lost all connection with it, so I had no idea what had happened. I called and had the server put into a hard shutdown and restarted but that didn’t seem to help. I couldn’t exactly sneak away from work for an hour, so I decided to drive over after work and look at it.

When I got there I found the console completely black, not responding to any keystrokes. I shut it off again and started it up and everything loaded fine. I decided to try and run the Up2Date command from the console just so I could see what happened. That’s where I notice it freeze when it reached the KDE package. Unfortunately the system became completely unresponsive when this happened. Once again I had to do a hard reboot. It was on this reboot that I noticed why the initial reboot earlier in the day hadn’t brought the system back up. Apparently since the system was taken down hard the drive wasn’t properly dismounted. This caused a mounting failure on the subsequent reboot but when I came in and rebooted it a second time, it mounted successfully.

I’ve always been a fan of keeping systems updated, but experiences like these make me lean toward the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” theory. I guess the thing that concerns me is the utter lack of remote administration/debugging I was able to do. If I did eventually decide to have the system colocated out of state this could be a real problem. However, I do have to share some of the blame. I have WAY WAY WAY too many packages installed on the system. I shouldn’t have any of the X11 and KDE packages installed, but I do. The idea was to experiment with everything on the system, but I haven’t done that. Basically all I use is apache, mysql, ssh, sendmail, imap, named…and well, that’s about it. So, I’ve decided if I do decide to colocate a system I’m going to have to make it as lean as possible (a good idea, regardless).

P.S. This entry is a somewhat of a milestone. I’ll write more about that tomorrow ;).