Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Link: http://www.nmdp.org/

I am once again a registered Bone Marrow Donor.

Many years ago, I joined the Canadian one....but, then I moved to the US and the information doesn't transfer between countries. Finding a session somewhere in the US where I could get into the US program (for free) was difficult.

However, now that I work at K-State...it has become easier. I found out that they had held a few now and then, but they were mainly advertised to students...so I didn't know they were taking place. Until I read about one in the newspaper....after it had happened and on a Saturday.

Then one day, I saw it written on a sidewalk. So, I walked in and registered.

Meanwhile, something tells me that there should be a blood drive at the University soon, but I can't find any to register for at the givelife.org site.....

Well, there were 3 boxes from Amazon.com.

I started out thinking there were things I needed, or wanted to stock up on, or have in preparation for other acquisitions. But, then I trimmed it back to keep under budget...and I'm not sure I ended up with stuff I really needed.

First, the mouse on this computer is not moving around as well as it could. Not sure if the mousepad is getting gummed up (its a 3M Precise Mousing Surface pad, so maybe....) or the mouse bottom is getting gummed up, especially since the teflon pads have migrated around the bottom...so maybe that adhesive is what is gumming things up. So, I bought a new mouse and a new 3M Precise Mousing Surface pad.

Next, I was thinking of getting the Netflix Roku player. I doesn't come with an HDMI to DVI cable....and I would need one to connect it to my system. So, I got out of these. Of course, now I don't think I'll get the Netflix Roku. Because based on reviews...its not quite DVD quality, which since I do DVDs in an upconversion player...would likely be quite a step back. It also doesn't do 5.1, which I figured I could live with since my initial interest is watching old TV shows (namely old Doctor Who shows). So, there's probably no immersive sound field to get into....though I'm the guy that watches all his DVDs with subtitles, because I don't hear dialog all that well.

But, a review I watched recently, says the Netflix Roku player doesn't do subtitles either. So, that has pretty much shelved my interest to get one for the time being.

Third, or rather, in the box with the mouse and in the box that had the HDMI cable (the 3M mousing surface came in a 2nd day air envelope)....was a roll of duct tape. The one roll of duct tape that I could find the last time I needed to do a patch....disappeared. The building people had been in doing some other work, and I suspect they packed it off along with theirs when they left. But, I wasn't home when they came to do the work, etc. So, I don't know what really happened to it...except that it was on my dryer, which they moved and rearranged stuff around to do their work....and now I can't find it anywhere. One is regular duct tape of the same kind that had gone missing. And, another roll was acquired only because it said it was purple. Of course, its not the purple I was thinking it would be. Oh well.

The other two boxes from UPS?

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At first, I was getting UPS deliveries around 9:30...I could stretch my trip to work and get packages. So, I signed up for Amazon Prime and started getting more and more stuff delivered to home.

Then suddenly...UPS wasn't showing up until around 10:30....I could still manage it once in a while.

And, a few times a delivery person had commented that my Amazon Prime shipment had been sent with instructions to deliver by 10:30 (though maybe those were the times they didn't ship by UPS). Apparently that doesn't apply to next day or second day air service by UPS anymore. Though maybe Amazon Prime isn't shipping by second day service for Prime service anymore.

Now I have no idea when they'll show up....even though they more often than not, check the 10:30-2 box now....since they don't seem to come around 10:30 anymore.

Now that they seem to arrive after noon....wonder if I want to make that assumption and take super long lunches...or go back to try to make them deliver on a specific day and take that day off from work.

The latter might work, given that I have an overabundance of vacation time. Or maybe I could combine with something where I make UPS make extra trips (delivery attempts)....

I wish UPS would go back to the old way of around 9:30 though.

Right at noon, as I was trying to head out to my Tuesday lunch meeting. Hot topic, the recently released results from the IT Open Forum on Upgrade Needs....

But, the call was in response to my blog posting. At first I tried to brush it off, because I was hungry and rushed...but he suggested calling me back at 4pm his time, so 3pm my time...IDM is around 3pm. chance to get away from my desk and blow off some steam

Talked a little bit though...about how I did eventually get a helpful response, and that there seemed to be progress now. He also confirmed that there were problems with the website and that I wasn't the only person affected. And, that the specific part of the site that I was having trouble may not have gotten the attention it needed, but that it would get it. There were also other changes planned for the site, he mentioned the cart function....didn't occur to me, at the time, to ask if the checkout option of ship items along with next club shipment would come back.

I just popped over the site and, my 'calendar' settings have been adjusted to what I had requested through the support messaging system (move my next delivery up 2 weeks and reduce my interval by 1 week)...should put me back to just-in-time fresh roasted/ground coffee delivery. Didn't play with the calendar, but it seemed that it should be working now.

Guess we'll see how things go around August 1st, when I either I make last minute changes my selections...depends on what new and/or special coffees are available then...or if I need to fine tune my schedule (or adjust around business trips).

Yay, I finally heard that I'm going get it ... eventually....

Apparently, only people they already owed money to get it quickly

It says:

If you received a refund on your 2007 federal income tax return and had it directly deposited into a bank account, we will directly deposit your stimulus payment into the same bank account. If not, your stimulus payment check will be mailed to you.

Well, I owed $45 to my federal income tax (because I sold all my ESPP shares of my previous employer, to help with the purchase of my condo), and had it directly debited from my bank account.

Several years ago, I tried out Boca Java for regular coffee deliveries. I think I've tried just about every coffee they offer, and I have a few that I like.... Though they didn't offer Jamaican Blue Mountain as a regular option, and I missed it the most recent time. (which I think is when this all started) Though they do have Hawaiian Kona.

They used to be pretty good. You set up the date and interval for delivery dates, and they shipped your selections by that date (they used to strive to get it so the UPS delivery date was that date).

Now you're lucky if they get around to roasting and grinding your order on the 'delivery' date.

A couple months ago they flashed up their account management section of the site. And, made it broke. I have been unable to change delivery information on my account (that's both address and date/interval, the manage selections barely works...they seem to have taken away the option to order extra items and include it with the club shipment as well).

I had considered having them deliver to the office, though I haven't heard when it'll be my turn to buy coffee for the office again....the last time I did, Amazon.com had just started doing groceries....and I then stopped drinking coffee at work sometime after that. But, I think the cut back on coffee has lead to my developing high blood pressure (or at least contributed).

Anyways, because the repeat interval is still based on delivery dates, but since the delivery is late each time....I have now crossed into the state where the number of days that I'm out of coffee has been steadily increasing. And now that I have the new coffee maker....I've stopped skimping on coffee usage when I near the end of my supply.

My delivery date was June 16th (and I was out the week before, so that should've helped.) But UPS tracking says I'm going to be without coffee until June 26th.

I've been trying to reduce the interval and make my next shipment come earlier...but the stupid site is still broken.

So maybe it is time to find another site....since I'm not sure I remember how to go back to not having coffee delivered to me.

Link: http://plurk.com/redeemByURL?from_uid=10383&check=-1587838045&s=1

Come join me....I feel like nobody is seeing anything I plurk about.

Of course, that's what I felt when I first joined Twitter....to the point there I deleted my Twitter account. But, signed up again so that I could follow other people....and the Mars Phoenix.

I found Plurk through some of the people I follow on Twitter...so that's mainly all I'm following (one of the flaws of Plurk right now, is being able to find people to add to your timeline). IE: MarsPhoenix on Plurk.

Plus I find it more of something to microblog about what I'm doing while sitting at a computer with a browser, while Twitter is something I can do from just about anywhere (except when it is down, which it has been a lot lately).

http://www.plurk.com/user/TheDreamer

Link: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/TestTrack/2008/05/28/testing-60/

This is a test to see if I've fixed the PHP code to do trackbacks works.

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This morning I woke to find my DSL modem reporting a speed of 1984/512. Reran the spectrum analysis tool at DSLreports. I shows a theoretical 35xx/818....wonder if I could've really gotten the 6.0/768 tier to at least get the much higher upsteam speed. It would've only been $5 more per month. (The tiers were 1.5/384, 3.0/512, 6.0/768 and the prices were $25/$30/$35).

I graph the SN margin/Line Attenuation along with up/down speed from the modem in cacti....so I see that my SN margin has dropped quite a bit, and Line Attenuation has gone up a little. So I see it started shifting gears around 5:20am.

Using the speed tool, I still can't get the reported speed. But, there is a proportional improvement. But, latency has dropped quite significantly. Better than cable now. Well under 100ms.

Don't know when the current DHCP leases expire, but I reconfigured DHCP to tell my Broadvoice VoIP service to use DSL as its gateway now. Wonder if there's anything else I want shift around....

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Not sure who did it, but I'm mad

A long time ago, when I owned the REB1200 eBook Reader from Gemstar....I bought stock in this company called Gemstar. Which then merging with TV Guide and among other things came crashing down. They also eventually got out of the eBook Reader business. Probably because they charge the list price of a hardcover book for the electronic version. And, you can't share the electronic version at all, where as the printed version you got something physical that could be (or at least I could show off on my bookshelf [where I never have people over], and then many years later try to donate to my local library.) Worse was the magazine subscriptions on eBook. Even though they had all the same content....you paid full price, as opposed to the substantially lower news stand or print subscription price for these.

And, then the plan that Barnes & Noble would be the online seller of content and the wide selection of titles not happening, just made things worse. There was pretty much very little out there for it, and there was no supported way of adding your own content to it. Plus I could get a laptop for less than what I paid for it now.

Part of them held out though...because I thought the Gemstar eBook Reader and TV Guide combination might be a good thing....though they never offered TV Guide as a publication for the eBook Reader, and even if they did...they would probably have charged some price 100x more than newsstand price or something.

I really haven't looked at e-book devices much since...though the Kindle seems neat, but I'd have to research it more before I decide if I want to use it to launch myself back into reading books again (that is other than technical work-related books, where I want the physical book for reference and office collaboration, etc.) But, being Amazon.com probably gives them the edge over other e-book devices. If it had looked cooler, I'd probably have taken a closer look right away

Anyhoo....along comes Macrovision to acquire Gemstar. It is fast becoming not the company that I had original become a shareholder in. I had hung on this long because my cost basis for the company was about 11.50 a share, and I was in some kind of hope that I could at least get out even.

Well, Macrovision offered to acquire Gemstar stock at either 0.2548 shares of their stock (MVSN) for Gemstar stock (GMST), or $6.35 in cash.

I received a letter from TD Ameritrade saying that (by the time I received it) I needed to call them within the next two days to make my election...for either cash or stock for my 50 shares.

I elected for cash. Which would've meant that I should've received $6.35x50 - $30 (reorg fee) = $287.50 for my stock.

What TD Ameritrade did instead was they converted my 50 shares of GMST to some other less quantity of stock 28.651 shares, and sold that at 6.35. Result $6.35x28.651 - $30 = $151.93

That is $135.57 less than what I had agreed to.

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