Illinois Got it Right

I gotta hand it to the Illinois Department of Revenue … they got the online tax filing system right.

The system to file your taxes online is simple, straight forward, and fast. Although I did use TurboTax to calculate the taxes, I entered the information directly into the states web site and was done in about 10 minutes. At the end I was able to download and/or print a PDF of my completed tax form with the confirmation number noted at the bottom.

There were no convenience fees (which I think are bogus anyways, why should I pay to save YOU money), and the refund (all $182 of it) will be deposited into our checking account.

The ONLY thing I would say they could do to improve it would be to make the form jump to the correct position when you ask it to do a calculation. Perhaps some AJAX technology would help in that respect.

Early Tech Support

Someone on one of my mailing lists posted this … it is hilarious!

Note: It’s safe for work … it even has subtitles, so you don’t need sound.

[tags]funny, support[/tags]

Common Courtesy

0223708.jpgIs it too much to ask that service providers CALL if they are going to be late for a scheduled appointment?

I’ve been waiting at home for a HVAC repair person to come out to fix our humidifer. He was supposed to be here between 9am and 2pm. It’s now 10 minutes after 2pm.

I called the main office and was informed that they were running behind schedule. They had some No Heat emergency calls that had priority.

Obviously I don’t mind if they have emergency calls that have to be taken care of first … but, in my opinion, it should be standard operating procedure that they call me to say they are running behind schedule. Maybe even give me the option to reschedule (although I wouldn’t have opted for that this time).

When my Covad DSL went out, they the repair tech called to tell me that he was 10 minutes behind schedule … and he called more than an hour before he was due.

I’ve also had service techs from other companies arrive BEFORE they were scheduled … stick around a few minutes, leave a note that they were here and I wasn’t, then leave. I, of course, arrived at home right on time to find their note.

Of course, the worst was ADT … when we had our windows replaced they were supposed to come out and remove all the sensors from the existing windows. They never showed up and never called. And I took time off of work to be here when they were scheduled to arrive.

Maybe I should start sending invoices to service providers that don’t meet their promised time window and don’t even try to notify. What do you think? $25 / hour? Maybe $50 / hour on weekdays where I have to take time off of work.

[tags]service, repair, appointments, schedule[/tags]

Thunderbird message list out of sync

Sometimes I find that the message list in Thunderbird gets out of sync with the message bodies. When this happens, if I click on a message in the list, the message body that is brought up doesn’t match the subject.

I found a easy solution … just shut down Thunderbird, delete the corresponding .msf file from the accounts data directory, and start Thunderbird back up. Thunderbird will rebuild the .msf file and everything should be fine again.

To find accounts data directory, click on the “Server Settings” category of the effected account and look at the “Local directory” field.

[tags]thunderbird, mozilla, email[/tags]

Obama for President?

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has announced that he has filed papers to create a presidential exploratory committee. The announcement, which was made on his Web site, is a first step in the senator’s potential 2008 run for president.

– NPR: Obama Pursues Presidential Candidacy

Although I’m sure Obama would make a fine president … and I would / will probably vote for him … I’m not sure he’s quite ready for the presidency (he’s only been a senator for 2 years) and I’m SURE that the country isn’t ready (there are far too many bigoted people out there).

I worry that, if he runs, the democratic voters will be polarized … and that will cause us to loose the Whitehouse again.

[tags]president, obama, whitehouse, politics[/tags]

Working Out

workout1.jpgThe biggest impediment to me starting a workout program is the fact that, after my first workout, I am in a lot of pain.

Oh, the pain goes away after a few days … but it’s kind of hard to get into the habit of working out initially.

I had a good workout on Monday … and was going to workout again on Wednesday … but I was in such pain I had to skip.

I was going to workout again today … but I couldn’t find my padlock. Yeah, I know it sounds like an excuse … but I really couldn’t find it. I bought a new duffel bag and didn’t move my lock from the old bag to the new one. Darn annoying.

I am absolutely, positively, going to workout tomorrow … even if I have to buy a new lock.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

(with apologies to Lemony Snicket)

Last week was not all that great for me computer wise.

I had three events that pretty much threw me for a loop. If it hadn’t been for Ginny, I would have probably been a drooling, babbling, idiot.

Where should I start? Hmmm, the beginning, maybe?

(cue fade to memory music)

It all started the week before last … I was figuring out what to do with the week off between Christmas & new years. My linux servers (Gondor and Rivendell) are both running Fedora Core 4, and Core 6 was released a little while ago. I figured it would be a fine time to upgrade both servers.

The original plan was to upgrade the servers xmas eve, while Ginny was at church. That plan got changed, however, because Ginny didn’t want her churches website down over Christmas. Ok, later in the week would be fine.

So on Christmas eve, we went to my brother Mitch’s house for dinner. While there, Mitch showed me his Hauppauge MediaMVP . It’s a pretty slick device that lets you play videos (and music & pictures) on the TV. Since we have a SnapStream Beyond TV software running on a system in the basement, we have a lot of video files that can be played. Currently the only way we can play them is to hook up a laptop to the TV and play the videos that way. I figured it would be a nice addition to our A/V setup.

Christmas comes and goes … everything is nice, had a fun time we the family.

On December 26th, my friend Steve calls and asks if I want to take a trip down to Frys to see if they have any deals or specials going on. Sure I say, that could be fun. I’ve been wanting to get the wire to connect my Dell PE430SC server’s AUX_LED to the PCI IDE controller … just so I can see disk activity.

Since I wanted Steve to be able to help me find this cable, I opened the case to take pictures of the connectors. Got my pictures and proceeded to close the case. This is when the trouble happened. I accidentally bumped the ArcoIDE Duplidisk mirroring adapter. This must have caused a temporary problem because the unit started beeping as if one of the drives had failed. A drive hadn’t failed … but the drives were no longer in sync. Well, this shot the trip to Frys.

I spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out what what happened … and get the drives back in sync. I had to call Arco because there were problems getting the adapter recognized by the management software. I ended up attaching the primary hard drive of the mirrored pair directly to the ide controller. Rebuilding the mirror would have to wait a few days.

I decided to fix the mirror and do the Linux upgrade on Saturday the 30th.

I woke up bright and early on Saturday, fed the cat, fed myself, and went down to start my work.

First thing to do is get the mirror re-established. It took a bit of work, because I still couldn’t get the software to recognize the adapter. I determined that it was because the adapter was attached to a add-on PCI IDE card. When I hooked the adapter up to the motherboard’s IDE (it only has one), it worked fine. This is going to take 3 hours for the mirror to be rebuilt. It has to duplicate all the contents of the primary drive to the mirror drive.

While this is running, I started to do the upgrade on Gondor.

While the servers were down, I had setup a dummy “This site is under construction” page on another machine (shadowfax, for what it’s worth). My plan was to assign all the IP’s I have to that one machine so nobody would think my sites were just gone.

Got it all setup … but I couldn’t hit the dummy page. I figured it was because the DSL router still had the old machine’s mac addresses in memory. This has happened before. No problem, I telnet into the router and select the “Restart device” option. The device restarts … but then the 4 lights that correspond to the ethernet ports on the router start blinking at the same time … and the DSL light is not on. I try telneting to the router again, but get no response. I try using the RS232 connection to log into the router, but get no response. Nothing is working.

I also tried connecting my laptop to one of the ethernet ports on the router and notice that windows alternates between saying that my ethernet is Connected and The cable is unplugged at the same frequency as the blinking lights.

I call Covad and talk to a tech … it’s pretty quickly determined that the router had died. The earliest they can get someone out to replace the router is Monday the 1st.

Well, the midrange.com activity will be light because of the holiday … so I shouldn’t expect too many panic calls because there isn’t any list traffic.

So Sunday I decide to get the MediaMVP unit setup.

I had ordered it from amazon.com earlier in the week, but hadn’t had a chance to set it up. My original plan was to use my D-Link DWL-G730AP Wireless Pocket Router in client mode. In this mode I can connect a wired ethernet device to it and it connects to my wireless router.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the two devices to play together. Well, my boss had given me a $30 gift card for BestBuy, so I figured getting a wireless gaming adapter would be a fine use for it. I went to the Schaumburg BestBuy, but they didn’t have any wireless gaming adapters in stock at all. I then went to the Arlington Heights BestBuy and found they had one. The Linksys WGA54AG Game Adapter 802.11A/G. I didn’t really need the wireless “A”, but it should work.

I got the unit home and started to configure it … but then found out that it didn’t support WPA encryption, just WEP. That’s stupid. Half the reason to use 802.11G is to have better encryption.

I bit of searching online and I found that CDW had the D-Link DWL-G820 Wireless Gaming Adapter, 802.11g, 108Mbps. Luckily, there is a BestBuy near CDW.

So off I go to Vernon Hills. I return the Linksys device and go to CDW. Unfortunately, although CDW has the DWL-G820 on site, it’s not off the truck yet. So I have to wait … about 2 hours.

I finally get the new gaming adapter and get it home … it works, although I still haven’t gotten the MediaMVP to work correctly yet. I need to futz with it a bit more.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Ok, New Years Eve is over … New Years Day is here. The Covad guy is supposed to be here between 8am and noon. Around 10:45 he calls to say he’s in the city, but on his way out … he should be there a little before noon. That’s refreshing.

He gets here exactly when he said he would … runs a few tests, says “Yeah, the router is fried”. Gets the replacement out and starts to configure it. About 30 minutes later, it’s all configured and we’re back on the air. All I have to do is re-implement my firewall filters. Sure wish I had backed them up a while ago. Oh well, they aren’t that complicated … it’s just a bunch of typing.

It takes me about 2 hours to get the router reconfigured the way it should … then I can get the networking on the linux boxes working again.

All in all, I did a lot of work … but ended up right were I started.

Seems to me that this kind of thing has happened before … a few days off from work, a grand plan to upgrade a system or two, and a bunch of failures that cause nothing but problems.

I’m cursed, I tell you, cursed!

[tags]Linux, MediaMVP, Fedora Core, DLink, Linksys, Covad, DSL, Upgrades, RAID, Wireless[/tags]

Gods Inbox

Ginny forwarded this to me … pretty darn funny.

gods-inbox.gif

(apparently God uses a Mac … I guess nobody is perfect)

[tags]god, funny, email, inbox[/tags]

The Howling

No, not the horror movie … the noise.

Saturday morning we woke up to a very loud howling sound … we thought it might be a snow blower, but it kept going for quite a while.

I went down stairs to see if it was something in the house … as it appeared to be coming from the duct work. In the basement, I still heard it … but it was noticeably quieter. I turned off the furnace and the sound went away.

I thought it might be the blower … which obviously would not be a good thing. As a precaution, I ran a trickle of hot water out of every faucet in the house. We have a space heater in the family room, so I’m hoping Riley would stay there in case the furnace failed entirely.

I started researching furnace repair firms … and asked Ginny to find out if anyone at her church could recommend someone.

The odd thing about it was that the noise wasn’t constant … it would start & stop, sometimes when the fan was going it wouldn’t start at all. Other times it would be always there.

pcaddiy_180.jpgThis morning the noise started early … and I went downstairs to see if I could narrow the location down a bit … when I noticed that it seemed to be coming from the humidifier.

I turned the humidifier off and the noise stopped. When I turned the humidifier back on, the noise came back.

Ok, we can live with a bit dryer air for a little while. So the urgency to get it repaired is no longer there. But obviously it’s a problem that needs to be fixed.

A bit more research in the morning found that the humidifier (Honeywell April Aire) only had a one year warranty. So getting it fixed for free is obviously out. I’m pretty sure the company that installed it is no longer in business.

Hmmm … since the furnace is already modified to hold the humidifier, I wonder if I could install a new one my self?

As it happens, I did replace the plastic tube that fed the water to the top of the filter pad earlier in the year. I wonder if that tube is clogged? I couldn’t find an exact match for the tube at the hardware store, so I got a clear plastic tube that was a close match. It seems to be feeding water to the pad.

Update 5pm — I checked the water tube and it seemed to be ok … but I moved it around a bit and turned the humidifier back on. No noise. Here’s hoping.

Update 2/5 — Well, the noise from humidifier hasn’t gone away. If I turn the humidifier off for a while, then back on, it works without making noise for a bit. But the noise comes back eventually. Sometimes it’s quiet for a few days. Sometimes it’s only quiet for a few minutes. I emailed an HVAC guy to give an estimate on replacing the valve. Initially he was suggesting replacing it the whole humidifier, but when I told him it was only 6 years old, he agreed that it was worth repairing. It’s going to cost about $125. I just need to get it scheduled.
[tags]furnace, noise, humidifier, heating[/tags]