Plaidophile

I ordered a bunch of music gear. It came in two shipments, both shipped on the same day, and both actually made it to San Francisco on the same day. The same name was on both of them. The same street address was on both of them. Presumably either the same company name or the same floor number were on both of them. AND YET, UPS knew what to do with one package (that arrived this morning) but the other one (which was as far as I can tell in the same truck with the same driver) was rejected because of an "incorrect suite number."

My office doesn't have a suite number, just a street address and "4th floor." Usually, shippers can figure this out. But every now and then, UPS, in its infinite wisdom, decides they need a suite number to continue. And so my stuff gets delayed.

Unfortunately, a lot of merchants don't seem to realize that both company name AND floor number are necessary for packages to get to me, but in this case UPS should have been able to figure it out anyway, simply because there was another package for me in the same batch of packages which actually made it to me.

And of course, whenever I call UPS under situations like this, they claim that they need to hear from the shipper, not from the recipient, because nothing makes things go faster than extra, unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and buck-passing.

This is cool, a bunch of people at Mobileread have done a pretty thorough job of reverse-engineering the Topaz format, and even have rudimentary tools to convert Topaz into SVG, PDF, and XHTML. I'm a bit dismayed that they don't seem to realize how much work went into "just took the book and scanned it, ran an ocr and some corrections/images and put together a huge slow package and called it a salable ebook," but oh well.

So I got kind of annoyed with how slow my legacy Dreamhost account was getting, so I finally gave in and eschewed a working Bogofilter setup for actually being on a new server which wasn't a horrid NFS-cross-mounted mail-server-on-web-server-storage piece of cruft with constant load levels over 20. Dreamhost was happy enough to oblige, and the server seems to have been migrated just fine. If anyone notices anything wonky, though, let me know, of course.

now is a good time.

I just realized I neglected to post this here: lately I've been experimenting with homemade soda. I had a few really bad results the last time I tried this (a year ago) but I decided to try Alton Brown's ginger ale out. After I assembled it all, I felt like experimenting with my own base as well. I'd been thinking of making root beer, but then had a flash of inspiration and decided to make chocolate mocha soda.

So, I needed some stuff fixed around my home, namely my kitchen light fixture and my furnace's flame sensor. I went to Cole Hardware's referral service, and they referred two very good local businesses for that: Brookline Electric and Peterson Heating.

In both cases, the issues turned out to be minor things which I thought I'd ruled out (a defunct switch and cruft buildup, respectively), and if I hadn't been so overconfident in my diagnostic abilities and just went and did those basic repairs myself, I would have saved a lot of money, but that's my own dumb fault. At least I'm supporting the local economy somewhat.