Skip to main content

Jers checkin’, chicken

I’m a bit of a pedant about checking things like the actual writing on items like booking slips. It avoids mismatches between transport media (bus, train, ’plane, tram etc) on the day.

This paid off in work terms when I stumbled across an installer treating RAID-1’d partitions inconsistently after I’d read some boring text displays on-screen. It paid off “in real life” when I called up my next air booking... to discover that it wasn’t on Sunday, as I’d supposed (to match up with my next hop), but tomorrow.

Thinking back carefully to the late-night session on Monday when I made the actual booking, I remember being bounced because someone had just taken the last (under $6xx... or, for commercial seats, under $1400) Sunday ticket between me bringing up the timetable & me clicking to book it.

Aaanyway... cheap seats aren’t refundable & are expensive to move (50% in this case) so I’m glad I caught it early.

Oh, look, the 80GB drive in the USB caddy has just filled itself up (dd is my friend) — so it’s time to unplug, wander across & visit Clyde.

Comments

Leon RJ Brooks said…
After all of the jazzing about from earlier in the week, I had a gander, & the ticket prices have held fairly steady (I’d only need to pay about $75 more now for a seat tomorrow than I actually did on Monday) & there’s even a few more reasonably-cheapoh seats open now than there were then.

I wonder what major social event or astrological jiggery-pokery would bring many people to can or move their tickets?
Leon RJ Brooks said…
Oh, also would like to thank Kim & Janet for making the train interface painless & smooth.

It’s the zillion or so “small” items like this which fall together to make a visit (or a conf) thoroughly pleasant & enjoyable, as contrasted with irritating, worried & distracted. Glad to see it working well in both assignments.

Popular posts from this blog

An Open and Shut response to Darl McBride

Hi, Darl. I see you’re being dishonest again . It’d be really nice if you could shoot straight for a change, but I think Kerry’s Dad will be selling snowplows in Hell first. Three years ago, when I first joined The SCO Group, we focused the company on the area that was most profitable and provided the most benefit to customers, investors, resellers, developers and employees: UNIX No, you focused the company on suing people, which was most profitable to lawyers and provided some golden parachutes for your buddies. People thought we were crazy. They were right. But since SCO owns the UNIX operating system The SCO Group does not own UNIX® in any sense of the word. The Open Group owns the UNIX trademark, definition and other rights , The SCO Group does not. The SCO Group doesn’t even own the UnixWare® or OpenServer® code, the rights to those are held by Novell and TSG use them only by permission and under certain conditions — which they have violate...

5x7 text dot-matrix in five minutes...

This is a fairly primitive toy I threw together today for a specific purpose, published in case it’s any use to others... feed it a list of words as command arguments, which it will then display as a 5x7 ASCII dotmatrix with ‘#’ as a dot & ‘_’ as a blank. /* * display text using a 5x7 bitmap font in ASCII letters */ static unsigned char font [] [5] = { { 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00 }, // 0x20 32 { 0x00,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x00 }, // ! 0x21 33 { 0x00,0x07,0x00,0x07,0x00 }, // " 0x22 34 { 0x14,0x7f,0x14,0x7f,0x14 }, // # 0x23 35 { 0x00,0x07,0x04,0x1e,0x00 }, // $ 0x24 36 { 0x23,0x13,0x08,0x64,0x62 }, // % 0x25 37 { 0x36,0x49,0x56,0x20,0x50 }, // & 0x26 38 { 0x00,0x00,0x07,0x00,0x00 }, // ' 0x27 39 { 0x00,0x1c,0x22,0x41,0x00 }, // ( 0x28 40 { 0x00,0x41,0x22,0x1c,0x00 }, // ) 0x29 41 { 0x14,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x14 }, // * 0x2a 42 { 0x08,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x08 }, ...

Citizens Augmenting Government Waste

So here we have Microsoft-funded “ Citizens Against Government Waste ” (CAGW) heavily criticising Massachusetts’s switch to an internationally accepted and open document standard (not open source, open standard — but I seem to remember a large monopolist who frequently confuses the two when it suits them). I remember CAGW, they were the organisation who had dead people writing in to support Microsoft in court a few years ago — thanks to sbergman27 for the link — is this “the dead hand of CAGW” at work again? Let’s follow the money and find out. Who stands to lose the most money and control if Massachusetts switches to an unencumbered document format? Big surprise, it’s CAGW sponsor Microsoft, through their dominant MS-Office suite. Why did CAGW list Microsoft’s suite last, after two other much-less-dominant examples which are waning anyway? If you’re inclined to wallow in additional irony, consider that at leas...