Thursday, January 8, 2004

Joel got his new Apple earphones and iPod dock today. Lunch with Joel, Ena, and Melissa at Yummy Yummy. Patrick went to Kabuki Springs for his massage and spa treatment today. Here's what he says: "The Abhyanga Massage lasts just about 2 hours, so if you have to go to the bathroom, do it before you lay on the table. The massage was done in a private room, tastefully decorated with candles, Buddhas, and Japanese art work. When my masseur, Denny, first introduced himself, he also had me smell three different oil bottles with my eyes closed, and then I told him which smell I preferred. I still have no idea what a dosha is, or even what oil I picked, but I really didn't care after he started pouring warm oil all over my body and rubbing it in with a vigorous (though not too deep) massage. Perfect. Head to toe. After the massage I had a Shirodara treatment, which is when warm oil is trickled over your third eye for about half an hour. An actual contraption is used to do this, positioned right over my forehead, as my head was tilted back. At the conclusion of the Shirodara (about 20 minutes), was a scalp massage, and then finally a twenty-minute soak in a private bath, with various flowers floating across the surface, candles here and there, and a plate of sliced orange. Mmmm mmm..." At work today: a milestone with the student directory on the web project: all the photos are in and working! It's the first strong sign of light at the end of the tunnel on this project. Cable management for Debrah since her keyboard tray was moved to the corner of her desk. Showed James how to install Eudora 6.0 and use its anti-spam filter features. Link checking: fixed some links for Mark Pregenzer, resolved a problem with the backup tape drive—it had been failing to do backups the past few days, so I opened up the server, wiggled some wires around, and it was working again. I felt like Anakin Skywalker in his pod race. Dinner at home by myself: leftover Ha's. I was unable to come to an agreeable solution with ZipZoomFly today, so I had my order cancelled and am planning to not order from them again for at least a year. The person I spoke with on the phone didn't have an explanation for the delay in notifying me except to say that it was their policy that processing an order could take up to 2 business days. I didn't bother to point out that in this case it took them more than 2.5 business days; I just let it go. I had been planning to work on the computers this weekend, but now the whole project is pushed back at least another week. ZipZoomFly could improve by reconfiguring their databases to alert buyers more accurately when stocks are running low so that expectations are set accordingly. If they claim to be doing this already, they need to run updates more frequently. Also, their customer support wasn't empathetic at all with the inconvenience I suffered—not one person apologized for the delay, and I got the impression that business is going so well for them that they don't need mine. Did more shopping online to replace the botched zipzoomfly order. Ran across this policy statement on newegg.com: "What happens if something is backordered? If an item is found to be out of stock after the order is placed, then item will be removed from the order and the remaining items shipped. We do not hold up the order because an item is backordered." Voila!