alexpgp | What a day!

I went in to open the store, as usual, first thing this morning, intending to do the report, get the mail, and then go home and start working on my translations.

I got out of the store at 5:15 pm. When I got home, I didn't much feel like starting to work on anything at all, so I didn't.

All during the day, there were packages to process, for people who decided - I guess - to not even try to buck the Christmas rush. (Either that, or there's a huge population of "closet" Eastern Orthodox believers in Pagosa, for whom Christmas is still nearly 2 weeks away.) At one point, the developing pile threatened to assume pre-Christmas dimensions, but it all got taken care of.

Add to that the fact that we are apparently going to be on the wailing end of everyone whose package didn't make it on time, for one reason or another. (If only half of one percent of packages are mishandled, it's going to mean at least a half-bottle of Tylenol each for me and Galina over the next month or so.)

Today's prize story concerns two packages that were sent from here to a fellow who works at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California. First off, the sender didn't address the packages correctly, so that costs us $10 right there (for having UPS correct the addresses). At this point, we're in the hole for these two boxes.

The boxes were delivered, according to UPS. No, they weren't, according to the intended recipient. We have signatures, says UPS. Those people say they never saw my packages, comes the reply.

We're the shipper, so it's up to us to initiate action on these packages. Galina spends about half an hour talking to the intended recipient's wife, and then to the intended recipient himself, for another half hour. The conversations are... strained.

I get to speak to the guy myself, later, and can understand the strain. At one point in the conversation, I hear "You've never done this before, huh?" in a tone that's not entirely to my liking. I keep my yap shut.

And so it goes... that saga is not finished yet. And there are more such stories to be uncovered, I am sure.

* * *Setting up mail on a Linux box had got to be about twice as hard now as when I did it the first time about two years ago. On the plus side, most of the problems I'm running into (e.g., "unavailability" of procmail) are more-or-less well-documented. On the minus side, lots of the documentation is illiterate or assumes a lot of facts not in evidence (e.g., that one has a domain name).

Chief among the suspects is sendmail. I've got half a mind to replace it with something simpler, but I don't know what. My previous foray with sendmail makes me reluctant to undergo YALC (yet another learning curve), but when I read that sendmail goes out to DNS to find out if it's running on the/a mail server (if I read the docs right), I get the feeling I'm in for YALC anyway.

I'm thinking of maybe going out and snarfing postfix from somewhere and seeing if I can live with that for a while.

On the other tentacle, I just ran the update agent for Red Hat and brought my machine up to currency while I ate dinner (150 MB, if memory serves, streaming in at just over 50 kB/sec, or about 3 megs a minute).

So now, while I have a spiffy machine running the latest, greatest, I nonetheless cannot send or receive mail using that machine. Go figure.

Cheers...