No more to say.

US ‘tried to hide’ bomb blunder

This is why I read the BBC to get the straight shit. Or at least more straight than the US newsmedia.

Wow, was this a meeting. Talk about being a messenger of bad news Here is some history. W&M is installing a new Student Information System (SIS) which is the project I am a part of. As part of this project there are a large number of web-based interfaces for students to register for classes and other activityies. W&M purchased a portal package (lets call it WP) from a comapny called CP that would simplify things and also offer features like webmail, online calendaring, and campus announcements among other things.

We also were grandfathered into CP’s new package L. L was released at the end of June 2002, and we wanted to use it. We have been trying to get our hands on it to no luck. CP kept trying to sell us professional services along with the product. So today we had a meeting with our sales rep B. In addition, we had the professional services group representative on the phone with us (lets call him R).

Before we got R on the phone we made it very clear that we were not interested in buying any more services, we just wanted to have them ship us L.

So we got on the phone and R started running through his market-speak speach talking about how we should be implementing this system and all of the services they could offer us. As we started to get through to him that all we wanted was to have them ship us the product (which they are contractually obligated to do for no extra fee), he started telling us how complicated it was and how basically “we couldn’t handle it.”

Finally Will, my coworker who is doing the project management stuff on our side asked:

Will: “So, what you are saying is that you won’t ship us L and let us install it?”

R: ::silence:: “Yes.”

HOLY SHIT! What it basically boils down to is they started shipping L, then got so innundated with calls for help (one would assume because their product is so unreliable) that they are no longer shipping it and are making their customers pay to have a CP technician come to your site to set it up.

Wow. I am just speachless. I actually feel bad for our sales rep B. But I guess she should be thankful we didn’t rip into her.

Naughty vegetable po ::stops::

We have pictures of actual vegetables from our garden! Yeh! Or at least yeh for Elizabeth, since we only have tomatos and I don’t like fresh tomatos. But she loves them and was very happy at our take. I think that fresh tomatos are too mushy as if they are just not quite “done” all the way. But once they are cooked and made into just about anything, I like them lots. Of course given how much Elizabeth, Kris, and Liz like tomatos I don’t know many will make it past the gauntlet.

So far we have been getting orange and gold colored tomatos and I think we will be getting lots more given the quantity of green ones on the vines.

You can see some pictures.

“You have the right to remain silent”

-marine with M-16

Washington Times Article (corrected)

Depending on how you feel on the .Mac issue, there is a petition for you!

.Mac Services Overpriced Concerns

-or-

Mac Users Against .Mac Whiners

Just two links:

I, Cringley on Palladium.

John Gilmore sues to challenge ID requirements for flying.

Happy reading.

From Macminute: A cool story of how Apple employees handled the power loss in the new SoHo store

All in all, it was not the best of keynotes, but it was still fun. I was able to arrange to have the satelite broadcast of the keynote played here on campus. Several members of the IT staff joined Elizabeth, Braz, Matt, Liz, and myself for the festivities.

Plenty of other Mac sites will be covering the events, so I won’t go into those details. The new iMac is cool, but not that big of a deal. The fact that they will be charging for formerly free Mac.com features stinks, but is quite understandable. iTunes 3 is a nice upgrade, but probably not as big a deal as some might like us to think. iSync is cool, and will be nice when it works with the Palm.

So what do I think? Well, Apple did not do anything ground-breaking today. Although I would have liked it if they had, I can understand why it might not be the best thing in today’s economic times. If they had introduced something great and new, I don’t know that people would go out and buy it like crazy, so they seem to be taking the slow and steady approach.

In the end I want Apple to do well, so I can put up with one not so great keynote.

So I am in class today again for this product whose name I shall not name. The topic is the web based portion of the product.

And the instructor is a moron. –

Now I am sure that this guy is quite well versed in his product, but his knowledge of HTML is severely lacking. Apparently the <p> tag is not the ‘paragraph’ tag like we all thought it was, no, it is the ‘print’ tag.

And apparently the and the tags are “Advanced” HTML tags. I don’t know what level that makes my pages. Somewhere around “godlike” I guess.

These are only examples of this class. ::sigh::

I don’t even know what to say about this. I feel like we are entering a new era of McCarthyism, only worse.

The article.

The government website. - Look specifically at the Operation TIPS program.

Send your money to the ACLU now. –

From the article.

Highlighting the scope of the surveillance network, TIPS volunteers are being recruited primarily from among those whose work provides access to homes, businesses or transport systems. Letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors are among those named as targeted recruits.