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Leonids eve, so to speak...
Nov. 17th, 2003 11:07 pmAll of my grandiose plans to get my old Speed Graphic camera up to snuff for tomorrow night's annual Leonid meteor shower went down the tubes with the passage of time. If I am lucky, I will remember to buy some high-speed black-and-white film that I can develop myself, or I may get another roll of the 1600 color film and make sure I get it push-processed by an outfit that specializes in such things.
The work stream seems to be gathering steam; I got a 9-page item to do for tomorrow morning, and a 64-page item to review and on which to get back to the project manager tomorrow as well. I notice that some of the pages done yesterday and tonight are in the 64-pager, so I'll doubtless feel honor bound to inform the project manager of the fact and make sure I know what she wants me to do.
It's always good to get things clear up front, but even so, there are limits as to what one can do after the fact. We had a customer in the store last Wednesday who brought in a package enclosed in a box that was once used to ship oven cleaner. The box was in fine shape, but it had an ORM-D label on it, indicating the box contained a certain type of hazardous material (originally, the oven cleaner).
The problem with using such boxes (or boxes from, say, liquor stores) is that carriers such as UPS and the Post Office are bound to take what the carton says at face value, regardless of other indications, such as weight. After removing the ORM-D label, Drew informed the customer that said operation might not be enough for UPS purposes, at which point the customer said he understood and still wanted to send the package via two-day air to California.
As you might have guessed by now, the package never made it to its destination because UPS classified it as a hazardous item. In Albuquerque. According to the rules, the box was to be returned to us via ground transportation, but for some reason, the UPS tracking data shows that it was flown to Phoenix, and onward to California, after which it was flown back to Denver on its way back to us. (Go figure.)
The client was not pleased, and Drew took the brunt of his remarks today when the package arrived back at the store. None of what the client had to say hinted at the client's willingness to go ahead with the shipment, despite what Drew had said at the time.
In retrospect, it's easy to think that, say, getting the customer to sign a waiver of some kind is a solution. Not so. Primo, life is too short to get everything in writing, and segundo, proving a customer wrong is not generally considered a good tactic in the business world, as it tends to discourage return visits.
* * * I am in the final stages of downloading the Red Hat 9 images, the better to update evdokia with. I had wanted to update the 7.2 version of Red Hat running on onegin, but it appears that there might be something wrong with the hardware, as the floppy disk is no longer recognized by Linux and the machine refuses to boot the RH 9.0 from the CD-ROM drive, ostensibly because ver. 9.0 (as opposed to its 7.2 ancestor) cannot grok the hardware. (The reason I am downloading the images onto evdokia is because it has no CD-ROM, and all attempts last night to get NFS to work were in vain.)
If I do this right, evdokia will become my new mail and local web server (it already performs the latter function). I am seriously thinking of abandoning mutt as my mail reader, primarily because I feel the struggle to get my correspondents to use ordinary text in their mail messages (instead of the cursed HTML) is a losing proposition. I hear that Ximian Evolution is a nice GUI mail reader; hopefully, they allow some modicum of control over how mail is displayed. (Basically, I wouldn't mind if HTML were to be shown as intended, as long as no requests for graphics, etc. are sent out into the world when doing so.)
The download finished as I wrote the last paragraph. I will start the upgrade now, before retiring; said update is likely to take an unconscionably long time, if past experience is any guide, so maybe evdokia will be serviceable tomorrow, noonish.
Cheers...
The work stream seems to be gathering steam; I got a 9-page item to do for tomorrow morning, and a 64-page item to review and on which to get back to the project manager tomorrow as well. I notice that some of the pages done yesterday and tonight are in the 64-pager, so I'll doubtless feel honor bound to inform the project manager of the fact and make sure I know what she wants me to do.
It's always good to get things clear up front, but even so, there are limits as to what one can do after the fact. We had a customer in the store last Wednesday who brought in a package enclosed in a box that was once used to ship oven cleaner. The box was in fine shape, but it had an ORM-D label on it, indicating the box contained a certain type of hazardous material (originally, the oven cleaner).
The problem with using such boxes (or boxes from, say, liquor stores) is that carriers such as UPS and the Post Office are bound to take what the carton says at face value, regardless of other indications, such as weight. After removing the ORM-D label, Drew informed the customer that said operation might not be enough for UPS purposes, at which point the customer said he understood and still wanted to send the package via two-day air to California.
As you might have guessed by now, the package never made it to its destination because UPS classified it as a hazardous item. In Albuquerque. According to the rules, the box was to be returned to us via ground transportation, but for some reason, the UPS tracking data shows that it was flown to Phoenix, and onward to California, after which it was flown back to Denver on its way back to us. (Go figure.)
The client was not pleased, and Drew took the brunt of his remarks today when the package arrived back at the store. None of what the client had to say hinted at the client's willingness to go ahead with the shipment, despite what Drew had said at the time.
In retrospect, it's easy to think that, say, getting the customer to sign a waiver of some kind is a solution. Not so. Primo, life is too short to get everything in writing, and segundo, proving a customer wrong is not generally considered a good tactic in the business world, as it tends to discourage return visits.
If I do this right, evdokia will become my new mail and local web server (it already performs the latter function). I am seriously thinking of abandoning mutt as my mail reader, primarily because I feel the struggle to get my correspondents to use ordinary text in their mail messages (instead of the cursed HTML) is a losing proposition. I hear that Ximian Evolution is a nice GUI mail reader; hopefully, they allow some modicum of control over how mail is displayed. (Basically, I wouldn't mind if HTML were to be shown as intended, as long as no requests for graphics, etc. are sent out into the world when doing so.)
The download finished as I wrote the last paragraph. I will start the upgrade now, before retiring; said update is likely to take an unconscionably long time, if past experience is any guide, so maybe evdokia will be serviceable tomorrow, noonish.
Cheers...
