Good to have friends, part 2

This morning I was finishing my tea and getting ready to head to work when the phone rang. It was Larry Mueller, who will be in Seattle for his grandmother’s 100th birthday and wanted to catch up with us? Maybe we could do lunch? Or maybe dinner and we could put him up?

Yeah, I think we could manage that. We haven’t seen Larry in a few years–since I went to b-school at MIT instead of Virginia, where Larry is director of financial aid at Darden–and I was beginning to despair of catching up with him again. Besides, we owe him. Shortly after he moved into his new home, he did us the favor of letting us stay with him before he had curtains. Well, Larry, most of our windows don’t have curtains yet either, but you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like.
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Good to have friends, part 1

It’s been a day of remembering why friends are important. We were unable to go rafting with Michele this weekend, much to our chagrin, and I was feeling bad that we were letting the friendship down. After all, we haven’t been able to hang with Shel for a few years while on different coasts, and now we can’t make it work on the same coast.

But when I got home last night there was a package from Amazon. Was it the new AV cable I ordered? No, it was addressed to Tim and Lisa. Inside was a pasta roller attachment for our Kitchenaid mixer. The note said something about “in case we ran out of the dried stuff,” and was signed by our friends Charlie and Carie Page.

Of course this is the point. Friendships that are built through a long period of relationships aren’t destroyed by one missed weekend. But it’s a good idea not to take them for granted anyway.
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BlogCritics of the world unite

Eric Olsen and company have launched BlogCritics, an online communal blog about music, books, and popular culture with a traditional critics’ bent. This is the sort of site that Greg and I used to idly dream of starting one day, before we went on, him to get 1200 hits from InstaPundit and me to get continuous hits from Google wanting to know about Wil Wheaton naked.

Anyway, BlogCritics is still looking for authors, so sign up…
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Craig pfesses up: pranks with dot.tk

Couldn’t figure out yesterday why I was getting referrals from www.imabigsexybeast.tk. Went to the page and it was my weblog plus a popup for dot.tk. Now Craig Pfeifer confesses he did it while playing around with dot.tk’s new free domain registration service. You don’t have to have a primary or secondary DNS server either, just a valid URL.

So now my site can be reached at www.imabigsexybeast.tk. Thanks, Craig. I’ll return the favor once their registration engine is working again.
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On the value of wasting your friends’ time

I’m so proud of George. I felt bad when we were working together on a technology strategy project on the videogame console industry, and I got him hooked on MAME and vintage arcade games. Now at least he’s moved on to more productive obsessions: weblogging and home network administration. Don’t forget to keep up with the OpenSSH patches, George! It’s a brave new world full of new and exciting dangers…
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Amazon situation resolved…

…sort of. To recap, suddenly one day my massive Amazon history of purchases, product votes, wish list, etc. disappeared, leaving only my most recent transaction. Freaked, I dropped customer support an email. They reported that I had two accounts with the same email address! I was a little dumbfounded—after all, email address is basically the user ID for Amazon, as far as the end user is concerned. But I could verify what the support person said—I could search for my old wish list and see its contents. What happened? And how could I fix it?

I finally realized today that I just had to log into my new empty account and change the email address, log out, then log back in with the old email address. Worked like a charm—all my wish list and averything were still there.

I’m guessing two things about Amazon’s back-end system:

  1. Amazon’s system has an internal user ID that’s separate from the user’s email address. Very sensible—as long as it makes sure that more than one account isn’t created with the same email address.
  2. Amazon must have suffered some sort of catastrophic systems failure around the time I was trying to place my last order that temporarily rendered my account unavailable. Evidence? A new account was seamlessly created with the same email and password through the process of placing the order, although there was an error when I tried to submit the order. Also, my shopping cart in the original account still contained the items that I bought in my recent order on the “new” account when I finally logged back in today.

Weird, but strangely reassuring. Even through a major system crack-up, I was still able to place an order.

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Just when you thought the contractors were gone…

I’m waiting this morning for the carpenter and the electrician to do some elective work in our dining room. We have an awful little wood-paneled closet in the “solarium” portion of our dining room that we’d like to make usable. The carpenter is coming to rip out the paneling and install drywall if necessary so we can install shelving to hold—well, probably excess glassware, as we probably have enough to stock a small Beacon Hill pub. The electrician is just being asked to install a couple of sconce lights in the dining room.

I thought I was done with contractors in the house, but now that I’m waiting for them again the thought isn’t so bad. Nice to have professionals come in before you screw everything up.