zen.org Communal Weblog

Just three days until the Huygens probe lands on Titan.

For ages, I’ve only been able to use billpay.ie with an old copy of the Opera browser (or, alternately, Internet Explorer in my VMware-resident copy of Win98). But today I tried using it to set up payment of our phone bill, and at the Confirm button, the JavaScript code didn’t fail!

Either they finally fixed the bug referring to an undeclared variable, or firefox is more lenient than previous Mozilla browsers—but I doubt firefox is letting people get away with bad code all the time. 🙂

Tsunami simulation an inexact science / Even knowing undersea floor, it’s tough developing wave-effect maps for S.F. Bay

Dad’s quoted in this article…pretty neat.

And for other zen bloggers, I used the bookmarklet function that’s on the bottom of the create post page. Quite nice and easy to use….

We’ve been trying to get a replacement right hinge for a Dell Inspiron 7500. Asking Dell in Ireland, they referred us to a company called Upgrade Options in the UK. After a week and a half of trying to get a straight answer out of them, we finally said screw it and just ordered one from a company in America, paying $21 in shipping to get it here.

After an initial call where I needed to find out if it’s 15″ or 15.4″ (it’s 15″); he said they have right hinges for the 15.4″, but they were out of stock of those for the 15″ screen version of the Inspiron. But, he told me (and I noted), if I needed those they’d “be in soon.”

All further attempts to get the same person named Daniel failed. Three messages were left on his voice mail, and one call also had someone claiming to take notes to give to the right guy. Never got a call back. So today I tried again and another person took the information and said he’d look into it—only to have the call disconnected.

I called right back, and asked again for Daniel. Finally got him, said he recognized my name but wasn’t sure what I was calling about. Gahhhhhhhhh. I explained about my attempts to reach him, and he said he’d have to see what was going on with his sales team. He asked for the details again, and then I waited on hold for a moment. He came back to say he doesn’t know when they might get them in (when I pointed out the “be in soon” line, and asked if that would be within the next six weeks, his response seemed to suggest that he had no idea).

He told me that he knew of two companies in the US who had them now, and he could give me their number. I asked where they get their own parts (“the biggest collection of Dell spare parts in the UK”) since it’d help to know where they’d be getting them. Maybe something could be accelerated?

He started to respond, then click, the call was disconnected. Again. I’m not ready to theorize that their phone connection is faulty.

Thus we ordered one from a US company online, and will make sure to let Dell know that our experience with their support company in the UK was awful. If this is the only resource for people in the UK and Ireland for the care of their Dell equipment, it sure feels like we should go out of our way to use someone else’s product.

So fabulous is this WordPress thing that we are going to use it in school for collaborations between European schools on a thingy called the Comenius Comet ( Sample Here ) which is written and designed by 15 yr olds around Europe. Its kinda cool!

Correction on the URL:
The Comet…it’s a PDF.

I just spent all day trying to get my Linux software RAID devices to work on Debian Sarge. Then I noticed, there hidden in the middle of a bunch of X upgrades was a mdadm upgrade. Debian mdadm version 1.7.0-2 worked fine, but 1.8.1-1 did not. I downgraded and pined the lower version. I dislike software RAID in the first place.

It took all day to figure out. Much check/file bug report tomorrow.

A straw poll of sorts today, first day back in school, suggested that about 60% of the kiddies got a pink or silver mini i-pod for Christmas. A number of them could not send an email before the Christmas break but they are now all about the torrents and the folders and the iTunes and differences between MP3s and AAC and the best firewall software. Scary stuff. To be encouraged.

I remember way back to one of Brendan’s first ponstings about the OED word of the day. The article “Many English words have fascinating histories” reviews a book called Word Histories and Mysteries put out by American Heritage Dictionaries that Brendan might also enjoy.

…of Graham Norton, may I present: You are what you eat – ebaumsworld.com. My job takes me to the most interesting places!

The suffering of “filthy, faggot Swedes” in the South East Asia disaster was punishment from God for Sweden’s tolerant attitude toward homosexuality. This is how a website owned by an influential Christian extremist movement in Kansas has reported Swedes’ suffering in the tsunami disaster.

So says Swedish pastor disowns US hate site.