Tag Archives: rants

UPS Invoices are annoying.

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I get one every Monday morning, and each Monday morning I rant about this, out loud, to whomever will listen.

UPS sends me an invoice for our pick-up and shipping services every Monday. Except that they don’t send me an invoice. They send me through 7 rings of Hell.

You see, they send me an email with a link. The link goes to a website with another link. This link leads to a Zip file that contains a PDF document. The PDF document is my invoice.

Why in hell does UPS do this? Why can’t they simply send me the invoice formatted as an email that I can simply print? Seems easy to me – get email, print email, give to accounting. No, they make me go through 4 extra steps and the associated waiting to get my invoice. It’s not like it’s more secure, because they don’t make me log in or anything- it’s there to anyone who receives the email. Just put the contents of the freaking invoice into the email and be done with it!

I am amazed and dumbfounded that a company with the logistical efficiency of UPS cannot figure out how to email me an invoice without it taking 3 minutes to get to it.

Dumping MySQL and Moving It

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So, does anyone out there who follows my blog know how to take the ENITRE OPERATIONAL STATE, including GRANTS (or permissions, or whatever you call them), usernames and associated passwords and all the table/db data and move it from one MySQL server to another and get it to work?

I am trying to move Inanis.net to a new platform and I can’t seem to get the MySQL permissions to work correctly. I use the command mysqldump -u root --all-databases  > filename.sql to dump the data from the old box and something similar to pop it into the new box. I then copy my entire web directory (all the php apps like wordpress and mediawiki sit there) into the same location on the new box. I navigate to any of the web apps and get complaints about the webapps’ permission being denied because my damn SQL username/password combos are invalid.

So, isn’t this -all-databases trick supposed to dump the entire frigging system state, or does it do everything but users and permissions? If the case is the latter, that is the most asinine, inane thing I have seen in a while.

Or maybe I’m just dumb, tired, old, inexperienced or a mix of them all. Maybe I just forgot to do a FLUSH PRIVILEGES after my import- I dunno.

Leave ideas in the comments. Right now, I must go to sleep and dream about another day sitting behind a desk making money, all the while desiring just to get home to the SO and watch Jeopardy.

USB Flash Drive Woes

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I want three things in my flash drive:

  1. The ability to attach it to my key-clip (I hate around-the-neck lanyards)
  2. Unsurpassed read AND write speed
  3. relative indestructibility.

My two previous drives had only some of these characteristics. The first one, a Swissbit 1GB w/ tools was really handy, but it was not fast. It lasted quite a while but eventually gave in to what I call Port Flexing. I’ll go into that below.

My second drive, a Corsair Flash Voyager GT 2GB was superb. I use the word “was” because it is now also broken, succumb to the Port Flexing issue. It scored 2.5 out of the three: like the Swissbit, it could attach to my key-clip, and unlike the Swissbit, it is quite possibly in the top 5 of the fastest USB flash drives out there. It has a nice rubber housing and a USB Cap to protect the port, which was great for a while. I soon lost the cap, because Corsair didn’t engineer a way to keep the cap from being lost. The Port Flexing issue was not a problem while in use, like with the Swissbit, but was an issue when I sat down with my keyclip attached to my hip. Under certain circumstances, the drive could become lodged between me, the seat and my keys and would bend the USB jack. Another one bites the dust.

I just did some research, and purchased a step up from the Flash Voyager GT, the Flash Survivor GT. It is housed in an annodized aluminum pipe while not in use, and the design of the drive itself looks to help prevent Port Flexing while in use. Plus it is as fast as the Flash Voyager GT, double the size and half the price of the Voyager when I purchased it.

* Port Flexing is a phenomenon where the USB Jack is poorly engineered and is susceptible to being bent, snapped off, or likewise from relatively little force. When the jack only is held in place by the 4 USB data/power lines and two small nubs at either side of the ground shroud, you can see how they would snap off easily (well, in my case anyway). They really should engineer these better, perhaps with some sort of molded plastic dealie, or like the drive one of my employees has, where the outer shell of the drive is exposed metal and wraps around the entire ground shroud of the USB jack. Too bad that drive is slow as molasses, or I would have gotten one.

Only In America…

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… will you see two fat friends go to a donut shop, have several treats and cups of coffee, then when done, get up, egress the building, enter their seperate cars, and drive both to the same destination … the drive thru of the fish ‘n’ chips joint next door.

We have some fat and stupid people in this country. No wonder everyone hates America.

PS: Yeah, I used egress as a verb. Wanna fight about it?