Wednesday, July 21, 2004
This morning as I'm waking up I have an important revelation about my journal which I think I had realized subconsciously in the past but only very consciously as of this morning, and I think it's because of what Stacey had asked me when she and Tim came to dinner on Sunday. Instead of explaining it, I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure it out, as it's a lot more fun to figure it out than to have had it spoon-fed to you. Today's entry itself is one example of the revelation. 8:30 AM bus shows up on time today! At about 9:15 AM I left another message for Contact Lenses 4 Less aka aaa-contactlensesdiscount.com (210 E. Broadway # H 407, New York N.Y. 100, Telephone: 888-439-1857, Fax: 888-439-1858) using phrases such as "still not received my order" and "report your company to my credit card company" and "fraudulent business." Grrr! The message greeting claims that they are open 11 to 8 Eastern time (8 to 5 Pacific time) but when I called today at 9:15 AM Pacific, no human answered the phone. Whois.sc reports the domain is owned by Patrick Stad (8745 Jacmar Street, Whittier CA 90605, Telephone: 562-698-8201, Fax: 123-123-1234). Searching Google on Patrick Stad's phone number revealed a listing on pe.epubliceye.com—a consumer watchdog site—which shows many other consumer complaints from 1999 and 2000. Fortunately, I have plenty of documentation regarding my purchase. A 10-minute phone call to my credit card company told me they would reverse the charges in 2 business days—whew! So now I'm a little smarter and fortunately no worse off moneywise, but I still need to find contact lenses. I've been using my glasses the past week or so. CD-ROM DemoShield production. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: Your life will be prosperous. When I get back from lunch, there's a message on my voicemail from Larry at Contact Lenses 4 Less. He apologized for the delay in returning my calls and said that my order was sent out today—they didn't have enough boxes of my very high prescription. He said the lenses should show up in 2 days. We'll see about that. (Even if they do show up, they still charged my card over 2 weeks before the lenses shipped.) [The contact lenses story continues on July 27.] Installer wrapping: The ITS installer for Eudora 6.1.1 is built with WinZip Self-Extractor Personal Edition, and it unzips the files into a temp folder but forces the user to go find the folder and open it themselves, so I build a new wrapper installer using the full version of WinZip Self-Extractor. My installer launches setup.exe automatically and deletes the temp files automatically. I create similar wrapper installers for Protein Explorer 1.982 and OpenRasMol 2.7.2.1.1. The 6:30 PM bus didn't show up, just as bus driver James warned me yesterday, so I got some bread at Arizmendi (I forget how much it cost) and 2 doughnuts at Donut World ($1.30). Why do doughnuts cost 65 cents each? Dinner at home with Patrick: rosemary pork chops, heirloom tomato and mozzarella mixed organic greens and basil salad, Italian country rolls with butter. Grocery shopping at Safeway, stocked up on party supplies. Dessert at home with Patrick: pound cake, almond whipped cream, fresh blueberries. Today I happened to recall a beloved motto I once had when I worked in technical support at Aldus/Adobe: A hidden feature is a problem discovered. I had coined this slogan in part because of all the hidden keyboard shortcuts we ended up discovering and documenting in various Aldus and Adobe applications.