In the last week (from last Sunday the 21st) to this Sunday I worked a total of 89.5 hours. That isn’t including commute or anything. In part so I could help cover the holiday weekend and be a good member for the “team”. While the extra OT is nice, the thanks I got was basically a bunch of attitude today and an attempted, but failed, smack down from Shawn.
So lets see if I get this right. I work 89.5 hours, including Sunday & Memorial Day only because Shawn is absolutely horrible at scheduling and the thanks I get in return is some effort to belittle me in front of all.
Wow… what a guy.
Bon Echo Alpha 3 is a developer preview release of our next generation Firefox browser and it is being made available for testing purposes only. Bon Echo Alpha 3 is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Bon Echo Alpha 3.
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Their motto is “A place for friends”
But it should be….
Late night photoshopping = late night fun.
It isn’t every day where I come across a posting where I think to myself, wow that is nicely written. Recently Alexander Kjerulf of postiviesharing.com wrote about on how not to lead geeks. I have seen articles like this before but what sets this one apart is that it is written clearly and its not a ‘rant’, rather it is an open letter to managers of geeks worldwide. Personally I’d like my “fearless leader” work on #8, #6, & #4 (thats in proper order as #8 is truly bad at times with a #6 trailing in a very close 2nd).
Here is the read up….
http://positivesharing.com/2006/03/how-not-to-lead-geeks/
Well it seems spammers (prodominately spammers advertising credit cards or viagra) have found my blog. Thank god for comment moderation and Akismet, the built in anti spam tool in Wordpress. So far 0 spam comments posted but 1521 deleted.
I wish spam filters were as good as this 
.
About two weeks ago (and two posts below) I reported that my Mac was back. Well that lasted about 2 weeks. On Friday last week it started spontanously freezing up at random times to. It could go hours without freezing up but at other times it would insta-freeze at the moment it was done booting up.
This bothered me greatly. Here was a company I basically represent at my work and my product at home was sucking badly. Hell I even convinced my mom to switch over to Apple (who is still happy to this day). On Monday night I vigorously started a report on bbb.org’s website and sent it off (first doing a triple check for unnecessary attitude as you will get no where with no company if your first, of possibly many, emails is a nasty one). I included all possible details I could such as receipt numbers, repair numbers, times I brought it in, etc. I also mentioned that the last time the technician failed to plugin the CPU fan. For the resolution I wrote that I wanted a refurbished rev C G5 or refurb rev A/D Intel Core Duo as previous companies had offered (such as HP in the past) as I certain that the machine I owned had gremlins and that I still see PowerMac beige G3s perform fine in our datacenter to this day (and they been on non-stop for 6-7 years).
However the bbb.org can sometimes take weeks to contact the company as it has to go through all these official channels. I remember that a year prior I sent an email to sjobs@apple.com asking if the iMac G5 was a good product. Considering I was going through these problems, now would be a great time to tell the team that responds to that email address that it has been far from wonderful. So off went a brief summary that I had contacted the address a year prior and that I basically have been going through hell with it. Attached was the BBB report stating that this is coming down the pipeline as well.
Less then 24 hours later I was contacted by Apple’s Executive Customer Relations team. Someone named Arin contacted me. He left a message on our answering machine at home and Cam relayed the information to me stating that someone from Apple had called. I returned Arin’s call from my desk at work but got his voice mail. We played phone tag throughout Wednesday.
Thursday morning I contacted him early and he picked up directly. This time we talked about the problems I have been experiencing and he was in full agreement that my unit needed to be replaced. At this point he offered me a new unit straight from the factory or store shelf if they had stock. I was surprised, in a very good way. All those bad thoughts I had about Apple the last few days simply were put aside by the fact that they are the extra mile to replace my bad unit. This is unlike HP where I had to convince the lady to possibly be open to providing me a refurbished unit (which I didn’t go for as it was far less superior to the unit I owned).
So summary… tomorrow I am going to the Bellevue Square Apple Store and picking up a new 20″ iMac Intel Core Duo. I am still going to be slightly reserved about the iMac and remain careful to judge it, however Apple Corporate certainly has done their part by providing me a new unit. The only cost for me is the new memory module I will have to buy as it doesn’t take DDR400 but rather DDR2667 SODIMMs.
As the title reads, I made a pretty stupid mistake. It has taken a while for the IRS to issue me a refund. Today I finally checked the website and it showed that they deposited this yesterday. I login to my BoA account and its not there yet. At this point an internal red flag goes off.
So I proceed to review my 1040 and find out that I transposed my account number. Instead of 816498** I put 816489** so you can imagine that the refund is no where near my account.
A quick call to Bank of America and they indeed show a deposit for the refund amount WITH my name on it (literally, the direct deposit actually includes your name) on that bogus bank account. Yes that is after all the problem. The account number that I have given is not a real account. Since this happened on a Friday, it hasn’t been declared wrong and returned to the IRS. If it had been a real account the rep had simply transferred the funds to my account number.
Now I have to call first thing (the customer service rep insisted on calling as early as possible) on Monday at 8am before their ACH department opens up. She said that she can’t guarantee a resolution (which tells me I have about 10% chance of this working) but that the earlier I call the better as they can stop the bounce back to the IRS and still route it to my account. If they can’t help me, I have to contact the IRS and most likely wait an additional 6 weeks (according to their website in situations like this).
The lesson to be learned here? Quadruple check your 1040 if your sending it out especially if your planning to do direct deposit.
