song meme

As requested by our northern friend, Paris.

Total volume of music files on my computer: over 20GB (3000+ songs)

The last CD I bought: Stronghold from :SITD:

Song playing right now: Accessory - "Deadline"

Five songs I listen to a lot, or mean a lot to me:
1. VNV Nation - "Beloved"
2. The Birthday Massacre - "Horror Show"
3. The Azoic - "Lost"
4. Tactical Sekt - "Devils Work"
5. Camouflage - "Me and You"

I'm guessing no one reading this has heard of any of these bands except for VNV Nation.

record setting order

I was looking online for a cheap place to buy a new hard drive and my roommate suggested newegg.com citing their reasonable prices and fast shipping. I normally go with the cheapest source from pricewatch.com who will pick up the phone and confirm they have it in stock. This saves a bundle of money, but often results in delays when small sellers don't ship when they say they will. And often they only offer shipping through UPS, charging $9 for UPS ground. So, I tried newegg. Their prices were surprisingly low; within a few dollars of the cheap shady places. And for only $3.99 newegg offered me Fedex shipping. I placed my order yesterday at 2:37pm. By 2:59pm an email arrived saying that my order had been packed and sealed and my card would be charged. Around 9pm that evening the tracking number was emailed to me. Fedex's page indicated that the package had been picked up at 3:43pm. This morning at 11am a knock on the door turned out to be a friendly Fedex driver with the new hard drive.

Total Time From Order to Delivery: 20 hours, 25 minutes
Package's Condition upon arrival: immaculate
Improvement over a UPS experience: indescribable

Let's compare this to my brother's recent experience ordering from another reasonably respected electronics vendor on the east coast. He put in the order nearly two weeks ago. They emailed him the initial confirmation promising shipping within two days. Four days later he calls them only to get more empty promises. Three days after than the packages is finally shipped, but they accidentally "upgraded" him to United Package Smashers ground shipping. The UPS tracking code wasn't emailed to him for another 24 hours. It has now been nearly a week since UPS acknowledges receiving the package but the tracking page hasn't been updated five days. UPS has no information on where the package has been for the last five days or where it is now. They merely recite hollow assurances that it will arrive eventually. In contrast, you can observe that even the short journey my Fedex package made was peppered with frequent updates. To extrapolate into the future based on every past UPS experience I'd say we can expect the following. The UPS tracking page will not be updated until the day the package is to arrive. UPS will turn up at the very end of that day and drop the package off without bothering to try knocking. (Our doorbell is broken, so only those with at least nominally mediocre intelligence will realize they have to knock) Then if we are lucky, the package will arrive only scuffed and scraped instead of totally crushed. In case I haven't said it enough before, I loathe and despise UPS. So, for future electronic orders I will now place the following two requirements on any choice of electronic retailer:

1. They only offer shipping via Fedex (or optionally, just Fedex and the postal service)
2. They are called newegg.com

After this experience newegg would have to do something pretty awful to lose my patronage.

gmail in translation

I learned today that you can use gmail in multiple languages. Obviously I had to see this in action for myself. Unhesitantly I click on Settings and selected and promptly select Deutsch. Instantly the English page vanishes and the German language page starts loading. For several minutes the novelty is enough to keep my mind off the fact that I don't actually speak German and have no idea how to change it back to English. A brief period of trial and error reveals that the German word for Settings is "Einstellungen". The language menu is easy enough to locate and I move on to what is probably either traditional or simplified Chinese. But, unexpectedly I am confronted by a pop-up warning asking "Möchten Sie Chinesisch auch als Ihre bevorzugte Sprache für andere Google-Sites übernehmen?" I have absolutely no idea what I'm about to commit to so I promptly click "Nein". The Chinese version is somewhat more difficult to navigate.

Apparently ?? means "settings" in Chinese since it lead me back to the necessary page to restore the familiar English. Most basic navigation isn't too hard in other languages since I know where the "Inbox" and "Archive" buttons are. The difficulty comes in picking out which menu option is "delete" or which link is "reply to all". It's an interesting way to spice up the mail checking experience. So, I think I'll spend the rest of the day browsing my mail in Russian. Ah, a new message in my ????????!

answering machine

This message (940k) was left on our answering machine a few weeks ago. I thought it was pretty funny and I finally got around to recording it on my computer. The girl's number has been blocked out by a friendly tone. And, no, we didn't call her back.