Smalltalk with James Robertson

Back in April, I forgot to put a few of the relevant federal forms into the mail for the state of Maryland (I had to mail because TurboTax told me that my forms couldn't be e-filed - go figure). I got a penalty notice a month later, which was not a huge surprise. I called, was told to send the forms in, and did so.

Wait one month, another notice arrives. I call again - this time, I'm told that if I mailed the forms, they would get lost. This was, shall we say, a surprise - I asked whether a check would get lost if I had sent one (that yielded an awkward silence). Fine, fine - what's the right procedure? I'm supposed to fax the documents.

Hmmm - fortunately, I have an ancient (20 years old!) fax/printer sitting in the corner. I get the phone line plugged into it, have the half remembered arguments with it over paper jams, and proceed to fax the 20+ pages. Then I call back, and ask whether they got the fax - "who knows", is the response.

And people wonder why I'm cynical over any plan that involves a bigger role for government....

Technorati Tags: government, taxes

Seriously? Bacon Sundaes?

As we shop carefully for a new car (my old one finally died completely), we had a bit of inconvenient excitement with the one we still have - the electric window on one side is stuck - open. So much for parking it and leaving for the day :) Easy enough to get repaired, but not this late in the day on a weekend....

We got my wife a new Mac Mini - the old PC died, and she's about had it with Windows. Setting it up we discovered a few things:

• The old LCD monitor she had is shot
• The Mini has no DVD/CD drive ( I knew this, but forgot about it)
• We forgot to get a USB keyboard (her PC had an old style connector)

So... off to my boneyard. We grabbed an old CRT, a USB keyboard I had lying around, and a really old external CD/DVD drive - and it all worked fine. Good thing I didn't throw my "junk" away :)

Technorati Tags: mac

My wife's old XP box developed a bad sector problem on its hard drive, and it's old enough that it just wasn't worth it to fix - we dumped the data to a USB drive, and ordered a Mac Mini. She'll still need Windows access for some old apps, but that's what Parallels is for :)

The last non-VM Windows box in the house exists for only one reason now - to provide wired internet access to my XBox when I use the XBox in the exercise room :)

Technorati Tags: mac, windows

Yesterday I noticed that my music was just cutting out every few minutes (I run a USB cable to my stereo, which lets me use iTunes and a decent sound system). I could "fix" it my unplugging and replugging the cable. So I did the obvious thing - ordered a new cable.

Then this morning the Mac wanted to reboot, so I actually looked at the back. Seems the USB cable to the stereo was hanging a bit out of the socket (meaning, whenever there was a bit of bass, it went loose. Doh. Switched the cables around, and it all works fine - the one coming from my time machine drive into the same socket doesn't look loose.

So I have another USB cable lying around now :)

Last summer I changed the credit card I use to pay my Verizon (FIOS) bill - my old card expired, I called them updated the information, and moved along. Well, not so much. As I was looking into a work issue, my network dropped. I rebooted the router (that's usually what it is), and instead found a "service suspended notice".

Four different Verizon people (across 3 phone numbers) later, I discovered:

• They had no card on file for me
• The last payment was in August, when I changed the card
• No, they hadn't thought to contact me
• No, I couldn't pay the bill with the billing department, I had to use an automated phone system
• Sadly, I didn't know the account number (they don't send me a bill, and I have no idea what it is)
• My account is not tied to a phone number

Now, I understand why they won't hand out the account number when I called; I could have been spear fishing. Still, this left me with a problem: how to pay the bill? Finally, one of the people I got said she could call the automated system, punch in my account number, and then get off the line, leaving me to pay it.

Then, to add some more misery, my work computer is refusing to get a new IP address. It insists on trying to grab one the router has already handed out. Awesome.

It seems that in a very real way, many architects see the world differently than the rest of us do:

There are many such confirming studies. For example, Gifford et al. (2002) surveyed other research and noted that “architects did not merely disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings, they were unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so.” The researchers traced this disagreement to well-known cognitive differences in the two populations: “Evidence that certain cognitive properties are related to building preference [was] found.”

I wonder if this has now reached the self selection stage where the problem is reinforcing itself....

Technorati Tags: architecture

It's Labor Day here in the US, so no screencast today. Check back tomorrow, when we get back to our normal schedule.