I love this neighborhood but holy cow do I hate this particular building sometimes.
Make sure your answer is private, memorable and does not change over time.And yet, none of the questions allow that!
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.
Sure, out of context I guess my second tweet could have been seen as a complaint about FedEx, but why would two separate CSRs decide that they need to immediately make sure that I'm happy with FedEx service when clearly I know how to track a package and am just being impatient? Maybe they have real customers who demand to know where their package is down to the street level, or don't understand that delivery takes several hours. But I was just joking at my own expense, which anyone who knows me (from actually being a legitimate follower on Twitter — meaning, someone who saw something I had to say and decided I was worth reading for some strange reason) would have understood.
Twitter is a communication tool, which I happen to use to keep in touch with friends and random Internet acquaintances. To me, it is not a B2B marketing tool or a customer service tool or a way to generate revenue or eyeballs or whatever, and every time some business decides they need to monetize the community assets in order to generate customer-facing goodwill or whatever other bullshit leads to these ridiculous decisions, they only serve to ruin yet another thing that people just do for fun.
Bill Hicks had the right idea.
While you think you may be speaking in your own interest, anyone who has wanted to download pirated versions of the Beatles catalog has likely already done so, as there are many avenues by which to do that which don't involve an official EMI release. All you are doing by insisting that EMI recompense you for any pirated "leaks" of an official EMI downloadable version is preventing the people who want to buy them legally from doing so.
Love,
A fan
So, it's pretty unlikely I'll ever get the item. I guess I could try calling the apartment building and see if the package was left with the front desk or something. (Of course it's possible whoever is at that apartment now may have just opened the package instead, but being a Beatmania import I doubt they'd have any use for it.)
Still, screw you, eBay.
However, there is still one issue with it which has been bothering me since version 7 at least (and maybe even earlier): it would be really nice if it were smarter about prefetching upcoming audio files, so that if I've, say, had a project open and idle for a few hours, it doesn't give me an "audio engine overload" error every single time the playhead touches a new uncached file for the first time.
The easy workaround is to just do an offline bounce but that's silly, and only partially solves it for extremely complex projects. Most of the time Logic is sitting there with an empty HD load indicator, so I know it could be better about actively prefetching assets. It's not like playhead motion is a Turing-complete problem or whatever (it only moves in one direction and usually doesn't even change speed that much).
Obviously, freeze tracks aren't the answer, since it just replaces a bunch of small un-cached files with a bunch of large uncached files.
Maybe there's a buried setting. It's not like Logic is short on obscure preference panes after 20 years of accretion...
There is absolutely no reason to use base-2 file sizes. Yes, computers deal with things in terms of base 2, but nobody else does. When you look at a file that is 104768926 bytes big, you think, "oh, 105 megabytes," not "100 megabytes." As files get bigger and bigger, the disparity between MB and MiB gets worse and worse.
People have long accused hard drive manufacturers of "inflating" drive sizes by using base-10 instead of base-2, but really it's been the fault of OS makers for deflating it, based on some really ridiculous legacy which dates back to the 70s, namely that it was a lot easier for OSes to just say how many 1K clusters were available, or divide the bytes available by >>10 instead of /1024, or whatever.
The practice of 1024-as-K has also led to all sorts of weirdness, like 1.44MB disks (which were 1440KiB, i.e. 1474560 bytes - neither 1.44MB nor 1.44MiB).
"But computer parts are sold in terms of 1024 units!" is also crap. The only part that has ever been sold on that basis is RAM, which actually makes sense for various technological reasons not worth getting into. CPU speed is base-10. Network adapters are base-10. Bus speed is base-10. And hard drives are sold based on base-10, but reported based on base-2.
Okay, so RAM sizes will be somewhat disparate from hard disk sizes, but really, why does that matter? RAM sizes only matter to programmers, and as a ballpark figure for users for having "enough" memory. Just because a file on disk takes 1200KB doesn't mean it will take 1200KB of RAM; chances are it will take much more. (Granted, there are a lot of spots where it makes sense for code to use power-of-2 sizes, for things like memory allocation and caches and the like, but that doesn't need to be reported to the user.)
The only place where hard disk size really has any base-2 issue is because file systems tend to allocate things in base-2-sized chunks (usually 512 or 1024 bytes), but that's not counting overhead of the filesystem itself, and anyway the vast majority of files (the ones which take enough space for hard drive availability to be an issue) are so large that the cluster size essentially just amounts to rounding error anyway. Okay, so the "real" storage space taken by a 123456789-byte file is actually 123457536 bytes, but that's still a lot closer to 123.4MB than it is to 117.7MB!
In short: Apple is doing a good thing by finally freeing us of some ridiculous legacy which has no bearing on reality.
Okay, so it does mean there will be a mismatch between file sizes reported on OSX 10.6 vs. any other OS, but when does that actually matter?
So iTunes tried installing OS 3.0, and before it even completed and tried to activate for reals, it complained that "an unknown error occurred (1611)" and had to restore from the backup. Which also failed with the same error. So I tried 'restore iPhone' which apparently could ONLY restore to the latest (3.0) software, which of course continues to fail, and so basically my iPhone is now a brick.
At the very least I should put up a sign in my space, like, "Please call [my phone number] for permission to park here; violators may be towed." I'd put up a fare collection box but that's a bit intrusive and is just another thing for people to scoff at, and it would also give the parkers a justifiable reason to stick around.
What I have to wonder is how these people are even getting into the garage to begin with. I have a feeling that one of my neighbors is letting them in and saying, "Oh, just park in #7, that spot's never in use." I guess it's time to send another bitchy message to the other HOA members.
So yesterday I took it to Performance, and the tech found the shard of glass in the tire that was causing the flat, and he removed it, replaced the tube, and charged $15. And then I got the same goddamn flat.