Month: August 2005

Camera Saga – Part II (See Argh! for Part I)

Good news.
I am mightily impressed.

My friends at Foto Distributors-Nikon phoned me back and told me to come
and collect a new camera, a model up from what I had broken.

Thank you Lourens, who I spoke with yesterday. Lourens is clearly an
important person in Nikon-land (or at least competent).
I’m yet to see whether the new camera works. I’m waiting for the battery
to cahrge [edit: To the Spelling Nazi! I leave this typo here in impunity!] (the camera doesn’t take the many rechargeable AA’s that I bought for the previous model – grr) The saga may not be over yet, but
I’ll be optimistic.

[edit: Camera is just dandy!]

Argh!

Bloody hell! What an annoying day it’s been today.
I went to collect my camera from Nikon – at long last it had been
repaired. It seemed to be in working order – took a photo at the shop.
All seemed well in photo la-la-land.

I get home and fiddled with some of the non-default settings. Bang!
Horrible glitches appear all over the damned LCD screen. Where there is
meant to be a cross-hair on the screen, there is instead a randomly
arranged assortment of yellow pixels obscuring most of the picture.
AAAAAAAAAuuuuiirhgrgr4frBG!

Goes away when I change back to the normal settings, but this is clearly
unacceptable.
But wait… there’s more!

I phone them back to voice my displeasure and speak to the technician.
He seems puzzled about the problem. He seems even more puzzled when I
mention that I’d claimed from insurance for the repair. ‘What? But it
should’ve been a write-off. You should have told us it was for insurance
purposes,’ he says.

AAAAAUTHRHGHRHAUAAUURHGHEEHERHGH! I DID!!! Why the frigging hell
couldn’t the stupid moron at the counter tell the technicians this is
something I am having trouble figuring out.

AAUAUUGUUUGFGHSEHfuklEFJ;HLORJSWNvgaqeruig;CEJY8cetr!!@@!@#$!
~^(@#!@#$(*O$%@*$%GFHJG

But wait! If you buy now, we’ll give you PC troubles! [Warning: Geek
person content]
After phoning them my joy increased not at all when I couldn’t run
openoffice – it wouldn’t start up at all, or just hung there. Tried a
couple of things, and then finally decided to reinstall it – except my
root partition complained. Device read-only. Huh? Even logined in as
root I couldn’t write any files. Started getting all kind of exciting
ext3 write errors. Yippee yay dandy doodah!

I mean..
AAAAUURGdfjkghdfgiohdsiohsfiughgradUIGH:UIDHF:SUOEHFUI:H!!!!

Reboot into Gentoo LiveCD, run fsck. All happy now. Except I’m really
getting sick of attaching stuff to /lost+found. It’s happened 3 times in
the last month or so.

Dubious Day of Doubtful ‘do

Bean went for a hair-do (read hair-cut, but I needed to tie up the title “‘do” for our slower readers), but there was a misunderstanding over terminology.
I asked for winter-cut, expecting that to mean long hair, but neater, and without the matted bits. Summer-cut is something that I did not want because that would mean short hair, with silly and frankly embarrassing long bits.
Apparently this is long hair. I’m doubtful. If it is long, then it has even longer embarrassing bits. On the positive side, it is without the matted bits.

The sales clerk revealed that I was actually looking for was a polar cut. Right… well as she said ‘unfortunately we can’t put the hair backon.’

Bean as she appears now…

Have you got anything without the spam?

`Egg, bacon, spam and sausage’ hasn’t got as much spam in it as `spam,
egg, sausage and spam.’
But still, you can’t have either without the spam, even if you don’t
like spam.

What I don’t understand is why I’m getting the spam off other peoples’
plates?

Apparently I can `Inc reas e [My] Se xual Des ire and Spe rm vol ume by
500 %’ (grammar verbatim).
Wonderful news! Except, this arousing piece of information was addressed
to masebapale@mydomain-name. Not my username (although it is my domain
name, which makes me suspect bad things about my service provider)
In fact, nowhere in the source code of the message does my email address
appear.

Can someone who knows something about email protocols explain this to me?