EEYORE is NOT cute and I wasn't posting to blogger at 5:48PM PST

So, imagine this. It's a Friday night at 6:40PM and I'm at my daughter's Girl Scouts Court of Awards ceremony taking pictures. All of a sudden, Chris calls me, sends me an email, and IM's me within 30 seconds.

Chris: Hey - what happened to the blog?

Me: ? I haven't touched it since 2am. What happened?

Chris: Basically the post you wrote last night is gone and in its place the blog says "Eeyore is cute!"

Me: I'm at my daughter's girl scout meeting. I don't think my google password was comprimised, but I'll change it as soon as I can

Chris: The post is still in blogger so I am going to republish after saving this off

For those who saw the blog during the half hour when, you would have seen the following

What was it?

Well, it turns out that somehow somebody put a post into blogger that was sent to a bunch of blogs today. Some people seem to think that this is an accident. Personally, I think it's much more dubious than that. Either way, I hope that the folks at Google fix the loophole that lets people post (either accidentally or on purpose) to other peoples' blogs. For us, our blog is one of our most important marketing tools. Having random things show up in it from other people is not something that helps our brand!

Is it Yahoo, or is it Blogger?

Is it Yahoo, or is it Blogger?

Why oh why is it not possible to make it so that blogs and web hosting services work well together? Today we've run across the problem that blogger is unable to upload our blog to our website hosted on Yahoo. The issue, Yahoo no longer allows files with spaces in the name. Blogger is creating index files for the labels on the post as is (including any spaces between words).

What makes a file with a space in its name so offensive that Yahoo doesn't allow us to FTP it up to the website? Are they trying to force us to use their tools? Is Blogger just being lazy about file naming?

If anyone has answers to these questions, please let me know.

Weird stuff in a BART station

For my son's 2nd birthday, we took the kids on BART out to San Francisco. You can get off at Powell St. station, head upstairs and jump right on the cable car that will take you up to Ghiradelli Square. As you can imagine, going for a train ride, then a cable car ride to someplace where you can have an ice cream sundae and watch chocolate being made is pretty exciting when you're two :-)

But that's not what brought on the blog post.

When we were back in the Powell St. BART station heading home with two very tired kids (we also walked over to Pier 39 to check out the seals, who actually have their own webcam) we saw some guy in his mid-to-late 20's looking vaguely REI-ish (backpack, sandals, etc.) stumbling down the escalator and then slumping up against one the pillars in the station. Pretty drunk.

Then a BART train rolls up heading out towards Pleasanton. It's only a 4 car train (they vary the number of cars used on each train depending on expected demand) so the train rolls past us and stops about 150 feet down (at commute time there would typically be 10 car trains in service so there is a lot of extra space when a small number of cars are being used).

The drunk guy doesn't move until the train is about to leave and the announcement is made over the loud speakers. Suddenly he realizes that this is the train he wants and gets up and starts running/stumbling towards the train. As he zigzags away my wife gasps because he came so close to the edge so I start paying closer attention. Then BOOM, over the edge he goes.

Luckily for him (and all of us that still wanted to ride BART that evening), he didn't actually hit the 3rd rail. I ran over and helped pull him up out and he staggered away.

What was really strange was that he had a rolled up copy of the Economist in his pocket that fell out when I was helping him up. It was the copy with the person looking over the edge of the cliff. Maybe that's a metaphor for our current economic situation; stumbling around drunk, falling onto train tracks, but being lucky enough to get pulled out before something really serious happened.

2008 Elections

Bizzare Sh!t

<soapbox>
I am f**king tired of the bullshit that is being spewed in this election (2008 for those of you who read this after Obama has given us the BALLS to be great again). In California, Proposition 8 is being shoved down people's throats as a blockade against gays taking over. WTF!! The bill does NOTHING but TAKE AWAY RIGHTS from PEOPLE. Stop taking things away from people and give everyone a little respect and dignity again.

The machine that steals elections is out there and the only solution is for everyone to VOTE. If you have to take the day off and wait in line all f**king day, DO IT! So you get docked a day's pay, it's not like you're getting paid to do a full days work now. In this financial market that may be a good thing (the dollar is worth spit anyway). In your favoe, you get time off, meet with your neighbors, tick off your good-for-nothing boss, and FINALLY get a say.

I am not saying that either presidential candidate is the best, they are politicians after all, but a man who gives hope is worth a billion of those who give hatred.

</soapbox>

GET OUT AND VOTE.

My Ugly Betty Connection...

I learned an interesting piece of trivia today. I sometimes have coffee with Henry Grubstick's daughter at Has Beans

I'm sure I'll get comments from fellow Ugly Betty fans saying

"First of all, Henry doesn't have a daughter, but he has a son named Nathan!. Second of all, he's just a baby and you can't be having coffee with him!"

See WikiPedia entry for the full scoop.

Actually, the characther is named after a real person (one of the writer's, David Grubstick's, grandfather). So, yes, today I had coffee with David's mom, Sandra. She brought in a special edition Mode Magazine that she received (with interviews with characters, etc). Very cool!.

And, no, David, your mom didn't give away anything about season 3 (although I was interested... thank goodnes for Wikipedia to get that fix).

Blackberry Connection Specific Error

Well, I just encountered yet another issue with my blackberry that lost me several hours and data related to synching between my Blackberry and my PC. Over the past week, I kept getting a "Connection Specific Error" when synching with the Blackberry Desktop Manager (which means that my calendar entries were not being synched between outlook and my device). I looked at the log, which just gave me an "Internal Error #4238" message just before cancelling the transaction at the bottom of the log (not very useful)

So, I went to google to find out what the problem might be and how to work around it. Although much of what was out there was close to being right (there seems to be data in one of the calendars that is causing it to crash), much of the focus was on how to delete calendar items in outlook. Unfortunately, my issue happened to be with one of the calendar entries on my device (and not on my PC). I finally figured that out by trial and error (but I could have seen in the progress of the synch that the crash was occuring when reading the device calendar and not the outlook calendar).

So, I ended up deleting all of my future entries in outlook after printing them out to manually enter later (which didn't fix the issue and ended up adding a lot of work).

So, how did you fix it

Well, I ended up having to figure out how to delete everything from my device calendar (which is fine, because I can just re-synch it from outlook). To do this, you will need to go to Desktop Manger on your PC (yes, you have to use your PC to clear your device's calendar!). From there, you double click on Backup and Restore (yes, not where you would expect it to be). Click on the advanced button to see the list of databases on the device. Scroll down to Calenar (in the right hand list) and select it. The clear button will ungray and you can clear the database by clicking on that. You can then re-synch if the problem is the same as mine.

Arrgh

The folks at RIM could have saved me a lot of time by any of the following:

1. Putting more information in the log about what stage of the synch it was on (device), and even what calendar entry that was causing the error.
2. Providing an option to turn on detailed logging from desktop manager
3. Making it easier to clear the database on the device (such as providing the option inside the calendar)
4. Providing better information on the web (most of the links in posts related to my issue had been removed from the RIM support site

Lotus Notes Haters Day

Looks like yesterday was the "First International Lotus Notes Hater Day". I didn't really hate Lotus Notes, but I definitely don't miss it :-)

Oracle still has to have a few instances of Lotus Notes floating around because PeopleSoft had soooo much stuff in Lotus Notes. You just know that they're not too happy about that.

Separate, but related : I was looking for a link to best describe PeopleSoft dependency on Lotus Notes and found this old press release about the release of PeopleTools 5 with workflow integration with Lotus Notes. Hee hee. That brings back some old memories...

Things to watch out for with HP All-inOne printers

I lost half of the day today, dealing with my HP C6150 all-in-one printer. I purchased a computer running Vista (and this is yet another thing that worked great on XP, but doesn't work well on Vista).

Networked Printer Uninstalling itself on Vista

Every once in a while, the printer just disappeared on the machine. You can see this both by going to the HP Solutions Center software (where it throws a dialog saying "No HP devices detected" and closes), or by going to the list of printers in control panel, and finding it missing. I searched all over, not finding any information to help me on this, so I ended up giving up and contacting HP technical support. I literally described the problem as my having to re-install the printer periodically.

Before I describe the wild-goose chase I was sent down (which by following them, caused my scanner not to work), let me send you the link to the critical update that fixes it. If you're running the C6150 All-in-One and accessing it through the network from a vista machine, download and run the patch linked to this page.

Here is what I was told to do:

• Perform a level-3 uninstall (which didn't follow the standard windows uninstall from control panel)
• Re-install the HP Software, but connecting using the USB port
• Finally, connect to the network and add a device using their software to do the network configuration

This required a at least one re-boot at each step.

Although I was finally able to print, I couldn't scan from the device (and the HP Software said that there was no network printer).

Second Issue that prevented scanning

So, the step of instlling the printer first as USB and then as network was the root of my next set of issues. I'm not sure why they had me do it (must be some other bug). However, the fact that there was both a USB and an ethernet print connection for the same printer and that the first connection was USB was causing the scanning software to not even try using the ethernet one. After much wrangling, I ended up going to the printers in Control Panel. THere I discovered the two entries: "HP Photosmart 6100 series" and "HP Photosmart 6100 series (copy 1)". By deleting the "HP Photosmart 6100 series" printer, and renaming the "HP Photosmart series (copy 1)" to "HP Photosmart series", I was able to scan from my machine.

All I can say is I sincerely hope this posting helps somebody doing a google search on this issue.