Yesterday, when I was about to pay for groceries, the cashier asked to see my ID. This puzzled me, so I asked why, as I wasn't buying alcohol or anything unusual. Turned out that the signature strip on the back of my credit card had been worn down so much that my signature was illegible. Of course, this had to be one of the occasions when I didn't have any ID on me. Fortunately, she accepted the signature off of one of my other cards.

Today I decided I'd rather not have to do this again, so I called up customer service to order a replacement card. "Enter your account number" *beep beep beep...* "enter your zip code" *beep beep beep* "This account is closed".

w.t.f.

I waited a short time to get through to a human, and explained what had happened. Turns out that a few days ago, "fraud activity" was spotted on my account, and they blocked the card. Apparently there's a new one in the mail to me already.

I asked for more information on what exactly had happened, but they weren't very forthcoming with details. From the way she described it, they don't have a lot of details themselves. Putting the scant details together, it appears that what happened was something along the lines of a store got broken into which had my details, the perpetrators were caught, and law enforcement told the credit card company the list of potential card numbers that could be compromised. Turns out mine was one of those that was. Something like $2000 of bogus charges were run up before it was blocked, which were refunded before I'd even realized there was a problem.

Sucky, But at least it's all sorted.

From the allergy medicine I've been taking..

"Side effects include: somnolence, headache, nausea, insomnia, malaise, fatigue."

This last week, I've gone through the above checklist. I think the only side-effect listed I didn't have yet is "abdominal pain".
(The irony of somnolence and insomnia both being side-effects, and having them both is not lost on me).

"Patients studied exhibited greater irritability/fussiness than patients on placebo"

Great. That explains why I've been a miserable bastard all week.

Looks like I'm back to suffering from allergies next week unless I find alternative chemicals which agree with me.

We know know that you expect on-time departures and arrivals and there is no question
that flight delays are disruptive and frustrating. We are sorry for the interruption
of your travel plans on February 4.

Although we cannot guarantee our schedules because of the many variables associated
with airline operations, we would like to offer a goodwill gesture as an apology and
to encourage you to fly with us again. I have added 3,000 miles to your AAdvantage®
account. You will shortly see the miles posted to your account at www.AA.com/AAdvantage.

What I liked about this was that I didn't even have to ask.
Whilst it sucked ass having to spend even longer hanging around LAX, and I didn't get back into Boston until after the public transport had closed down, it was a pleasant surprise to receive this.

Though by 'many variables associated with airline operations' I wonder if they're factoring in "Our planes are ancient. Little wonder they're falling apart."

In case it wasn't obvious from my previous post (which judging from some email I got, it wasn't), I won't be working for a week or two due to me messing up my elbow pretty badly in a fall. Whilst I can type with one hand (slowly), a) it gets annoying really quickly. After n years of typing with two hands, my body intuitively wants to reach to the keys on the left hand side. Kinda awkward in a sling. b) See 'slowly'. It took me about 30 minutes to write this post after fixing all the typos (somehow I make more typos with one hand than I do with two). c) The drugs I have for the pain mess me up to such extent I don't feel comfortable doing much of anything.

Which leads me onto my next bit. I'm not sure just how 'extreme' percocet is in the family of narcotic painkillers (yes, I could look it up on the internets, but I'm really not that curious), but holy crap. Firstly, this stuff is something my body really isn't used to. I rarely even take advil or like these days when I'm in pain for whatever reason.

The good:
Whilst this stuff is in my system. I have no pain at all in my arm. I can even move it. I have 90% of my mobility back.

The bad:
Whilst this stuff is in my system, my head is in pieces. Dizzyness. Uncontrolled body temperature (though this could also be because I'm coming down with a cold at the same time, yay for hanging out at hospitals for a day). And a general feeling of... disconnection.

I'm typing this during one of my 'between doses'. An hour ago, this would have looked a lot more incoherent. Probably akin to something I'd have written after getting drunk. Really drunk.

I just took a walk to the mail box which turned into a real adventure. (There's still ice everywhere, which means walking in the road. The road, which I must share with assholes who expect me to walk on several inches of ice as it turns out. I hate people.)

So anyway, no work. not much of anything really, until Fudcon probably.

Fedora kernel stuff -> fedora-kernel-list@redhat.com, not me. As usual. (Though everyone seems to keep forgetting).
Anything else can wait for a few weeks.

Cellphone providers have one basic function.
Making a phone ring when someone wants to call you. Some offer other services too, but primarily, this is what they are meant to do.
T-mobile have been consistently failing at this for about 4-5 months now. I'm getting more than a little annoyed to be suddenly told I have n voicemails when the phone never rang once. That, and frequently receiving text messages up to 12 hours after they were sent is getting kinda old too.

At first I thought maybe my phone sucked. Switching to an old one got me the same result.
It isn't a signal strength problem, as I'm rarely in weak signal zones according to the bars on the cellphone.

I think it's time for some changes.

In hindsight, the last few days were a mistake.

Last week I got sick, and seemed to make a quick recovery in a few days. Then just as Helix arrived for a stay, it came back with a vengeance. Instead of 'just a cold', it quickly turned on my sinuses and ears, and wiped me out for most of the week. I probably spent most the time she was here complaining and suffering. (I'm seriously miserable when I'm sick).

Just when I thought I was over it for a second time, I headed off to Portland,OR for a tech disclosure event.
You can guess what happened next. As soon as I got there I started feeling a bit crappy again. By the end of the event people were even noticing that I was unusually quiet. When it finally came to fly out last night, I could barely see, as my eyes constantly streamed tears and my nose felt like, well, it sucked. After what was possibly the most miserable flight I've endured, I'm finally back home (whilst I've been away someone seems to have turned down the thermostat in Boston. Seriously, it's like 20 degrees colder or something), where I intend to do absolutely nothing for the next few days. If I'm not over this quickly, I'll hit up a doctor and take some time off.

Being sick ftl.

Upon arrival to the UK on my recent travels, I found that the laptop I had taken with me had developed a strange fault. It no longer charges past 10%. This equates to about 15 minutes of battery life. Double plus ungood.

What's _really_ pissed me off however, is that on return to the US, I find that the battery in *another* laptop has also given up the ghost. This one even worse, it refuses to charge at all, and Windows pops up a scary "Your battery is irreparably damaged" dialog.

Both laptops are less than a year old (The latter being < 6 months old).

Hardware hates me.

# mkfs.ext2 -cc /dev/sdk
mke2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
/dev/sdk is entire device, not just one partition!
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
262144 inodes, 524159 blocks
26207 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=536870912
16 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
16384 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912

Testing with pattern 0xaa: done                                
Reading and comparing: done                                
Testing with pattern 0x55: done                                
Reading and comparing: done                                
Testing with pattern 0xff: done                                
Reading and comparing: done                                
Testing with pattern 0x00: done                                
Reading and comparing: done                                
Block 0 in primary superblock/group descriptor area bad.
Blocks 0 through 2 must be good in order to build a filesystem.
Aborting....

Hmm.

(00:03:19:root@gelk:~)# hexdump /dev/sdk | head
0000000 2400 b260 020a ffff 0000 2a00 0200 0000
*
0000040 0000 b260 020a ffff 0000 2a00 0200 0000
*
0000080 2400 b260 020a ffff 0000 2a00 0200 0000
*
00000c0 0000 0060 020a ffff 0000 0000 0200 0000
*
0000180 2400 0060 020a ffff 0000 0000 0200 0000
*
(00:03:41:root@gelk:~)# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdk bs=512
dd: writing `/dev/sdk': No space left on device
4193280+0 records in
4193279+0 records out
2146958848 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 20.656 s, 104 MB/s
(00:04:08:root@gelk:~)# hexdump /dev/sdk | head
0000000 2400 be00 0202 ffff 0000 2a20 0200 0000
*
00000c0 2400 0000 0202 ffff 0000 0020 0200 0000
*
0000140 2400 be00 028e ffff 0008 2e20 0200 0000
*
0000180 2400 be00 028e ffff 0000 2e20 0200 0000
*
00001c0 0000 0000 028e ffff 0000 0020 0200 0000
*

Moral: Don't buy a Gigabyte i-ram.
This device seems to be utterly utterly fucked by design.
(After trying with multiple different types of RAM).

So last night I caught my foot in a bag whilst carrying a bunch of PCI cards and took a tumble.

Results:
* A series of holes in my left thumb from the pins on the back of one of the cards.
* Lots of spurty bloods out of said holes.
* A _really_ sore left bicep which I landed on. (Which seems to be getting worse the more I move it, though oddly isn't bruised). If it's not better in a day or so I'll see a doctor. I can move it to some extent, and the pain isn't agonising, just uncomfortable, so I don't think it's broken.

Sucky way to end a holiday though.

At least I can type as long as my arms don't move.
Though playing PS2 isn't quite as fun.

Suck.

EDAC k8 MC1: general bus error: participating processor(local node origin), time-out(no timeout) memory transaction type(generic read), mem or i/o(mem access), cache level(generic)
EDAC MC1: CE page 0x672a9, offset 0xc10, grain 8, syndrome 0x5781, row 0, channel 1, label "": k8_edac
EDAC k8 MC1: extended error code: ECC chipkill x4 error
EDAC k8 MC1: general bus error: participating processor(local node origin), time-out(no timeout) memory transaction type(generic read), mem or i/o(mem access), cache level(generic)
EDAC MC1: CE page 0x672a9, offset 0xc10, grain 8, syndrome 0x5781, row 0, channel 1, label "": k8_edac
EDAC k8 MC1: extended error code: ECC chipkill x4 error

I'm like a magnet for dying hardware. It homes in on me and explodes horribly.
That came from my AMD64 box. On the plus side, at least I know the EDAC-k8 code works.