Paul Mischler

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:27:53 GMT

Yesterday afternoon I finally had a chance to start catching up on podcasts that I had not had a chance to listen to in a while.

I listened to This American Life episode #396, "Party School" about the party atmosphere at Penn State.

I would like to thank This American Life for getting "Party In The USA" stuck in my head. Bastards.

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:24:53 GMT

Dear Courier Post Online,

Thanks for the note letting me know that my newspaper subscription was about to expire and that I could pay for it online. Thanks for directing me to your website and providing me a nice form to put my credit card number and expiration date into.

I have to admit that I was rather surprised about the lack of a submit button on the page. I mean, you do want to be able to charge me money

I thought it might just be a Firefox rendering thing.

So I tried it in Chrome. Same result.

Putting the health of my computer at risk, I loaded Internet Explorer just to make sure you really weren't trying to pull a fast one on us. But guess what? Same thing.

Maybe you don't want my money?

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:18:21 GMT

Okay, it appears that getting contacts from a Palm TX to an iPod Touch is pretty impossible without Outlook or a Mac.

Hmmm... Might it be possible that I could take the palm, a sync cable, the iPod touch to an Apple Store and ask the geniuses there if I could use a fresh mac to copy all the contacts into iSync, sync my iPod to it, then wipe the mac clean of my contacts information?

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:07:54 GMT

It's a new year miracle!

Boston, MA weather:
Midnight-7AM - Chance of Snow
7PM - Midnight - Chance of Snow

10 AM - 4 PM, Overcast/Mostly Cloudy

Go... ~~Flyers!~~ ~~Bruins!~~ HOCKEY!

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:15:24 GMT

Fark Headlines of the year... Business tab. Go vote. You know you want to.

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:23:19 GMT

As promised: Fark headline of the year contests:
Sports
Showbiz

And in case you somehow missed it, headline of the year!

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:56:46 GMT

It's time to vote for Fark.com headline of the year!

There will be upcoming contests for the subtabs (Sports, Geek, Showbiz, Politics, Business), puns/wordplay, parents of the year, and dumbass of the year.

No, none of mine made the finals. But vote anyway, damnit!

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 05:38:28 GMT

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Fark Headline of the Year voting!

Round 1 (January-March)
Round 2 (April-June)

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:19:10 GMT

RIT gets a mention in Tuesday Morning Quarterback this week.

Posted using TxtLJ

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:03:38 GMT

Catch Greg Klyma on the folk show with Gene Shay on xpn.org tonight!

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:39:06 GMT

Pro tip:

I wrote on Thursday about the Inkstop liquidation. Unlike other liquidation sales that I've seen (CompUSA, Circuit City), products at Inkstop were not marked the hell up then "discounted." Prices at the liquidation sales are actually based off the last tagged price the store had on the shelf. I picked up a shiny laptop bag for $21.99, one that retails at Amazon.com for $50.

These are the locations that are open for the liquidation sale.

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:02:59 GMT

Congratulations to the latest company I have done business with to have their customer information hacked/stolen/given away... J&R Electronics!

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:14:37 GMT

Carl Kasell is retiring... from Morning Edition. He is still going to be on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:47:09 GMT

Windows 7 running tally of issues and fixes:

Juice Receiver (podcast downloader):

Getting Juice to work in Windows 7 Wasn't the complete answer, I had to change download_dir to:
C:\\Users\username\\Documents\\My Received Podcasts

Vim:

Context menu for "Edit with Vim" for Windows 7.

Palm

I'm not even going to go into the hoops I had to jump through to get the Palm HotSynch to work with Windows 7. I'll just say that it involved a bluetooth dongle, seven or eight different screens of data, the sacrifice of a peep bunny, and other unmentionables.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:54:06 GMT

Follow-up from Comcast regarding my problem with Ecobill

Hi Paul,

I have confirmed you will need to login with your Comcast.net email
address to access ecobill. If you wish to receive at another email
address, email forwarding, will need to be turned on. We are working to
add this feature at a later date.

Thank you,

George [Redacted]
Comcast Corporate Office

(Obviously, edited to remove the last name of the representative)

Thanks for the quick reply.

Didn't help me much, this was a service you used to offer.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:38:03 GMT

Many thanks to horvendile for pointing me to this evening's minor rant.

The scene: Acme Markets in Medford, NJ.

A tired misch is getting groceries on Tuesday night. He needs milk. Fark. It's $3.79 a gallon. But misch is tired, and the thought of going to another store after his workout makes him all stabby.

misch sees the Lehigh Valley Dairy Fat Free milk on the shelf. In big letters, it reads "Lehigh Valley Fat Free Skim Milk" Right next to it on the shelf is the Acme brand milk, with a "Hey, this price is cheaper!" tag. It's also got a light blue label.

So, misch grabbed the Acme brand milk with the blue label.

When misch got home, misch noticed he bought 2% milk. misch was a little bit annoyed.

Okay, Acme. Pro tip: Either group your milk by brand, or group your milk by type. Don't group it by color, since your colors do not have the same meaning.

I'm not the only person to notice this. That certainly looks like Lehigh Valley milk on the left, and Acme brand milk in the back.

Lehigh Valley:
Red: Whole milk
Blue: Fat free

Acme Brand:
Red: Whole milk
Blue: 2%

Now, the picture is great, I like how their milk is laid out in the picture. Lehigh Valley is in the left bay, Acme is in the bays to the right. At the Medford Acme, the gallon milk containers are grouped by color. Lehigh Valley light blue next to the Acme brand 2%.

Perhaps they could fix this?

Thanks,
misch

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:38:13 GMT

Dear Comcast:

Thanks for making your "ecobill" systemp pretty useless to me. Up until my move this past September, I was happily using your ecobill to receive electronic notification of my Comcast bill. I was very pleased with the system, I could download my bill on demande, and print it out on my own if I wanted a hard copy.

Then I moved.

I had a new account set up at my new address.

Then I discovered a new annoyance: You cannot set up ecobill to use an e-mail address other than the comcast.net address associated with your account.

Since I never use an ISP provided e-mail address, I find this to be rather annoying. I really don't want to go through the hassle of setting up a new account in my mail reader to get one message a month. I don't want to forward all e-mails from the one account to my personal addresses. comcast.net is too vulnerable to dictionary attacks, and I don't want to deal with the spam.

I wasted an hour waiting for a customer service representative on Tuesday morning trying to figure out what my username and password for comcast.net are. The foreign representative couldn't help me, and I had to be transferred to a stateside supervisor who informed me that they couldn't change the e-mail address that the ecobill notice was sent to.

The last Ecobill e-mail notice I received was dated 9/21/09.

Bad service? That's Comcastic!

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:14:47 GMT

via Ellis Paul's latest e-mail:

For the photo on the inside cover of the album... did Ellis Paul REALLY jump in a lake, with a guitar?

Answer here

There is also a code for a free download of the song "The Day After Everything Changed" included in the video.

also, via FatWallet:$10 gift card by mail when you change $40 in coins into a certificate at coinstar machines. From what I understand, Coinstar does not charge a fee when converting coins into a gift card for a number of different stores, so if you're going to be spending $40 anyway, it's a free $10 gift card for later. Stop by a bank and get $40 in coins.

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:30:59 GMT

Dear CourierPostOnline.com:

I am one of the people who read your RSS feed nearly daily.

For about the past two weeks, your RSS feed has been unusable. For some reason, your RSS feed puts the address "moc.go4f" at the front of the address. The moc.go4f.courierpostonline.com subdomain is not visible to the world.

Even worse, your current RSS Feed Listing returns 404 errors on all the listed RSS feeds. (Like this one)

I've tried to use your contact form for New Media Editor Mark Correa to let him know about the problem.

After clicking on "Send Message" on the form, I get this error message:

Initiating new verification scheme
  Key verification is enabled - initiating
    Validation key found - starting decode
    Validation key life time set to 15 minutes
    Invalid verification key provided!
  Key verification FAILED
Verification FAILED

Luckily a google search turned up a contact point for their New Media editor. Hopefully direct contact will work better.

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:24:24 GMT

We have blinds! We have a bed!

ningeek and I were very hands on DIY today. We put up the blinds, and discovered that we were about an inch too low in installing them. Instead of moving the bracket up, we cut the blinds down. They came out great, and now we have some privacy in the dining room.

It's actually starting to look like a home.

Now to figure out this "how to live together" thing.

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:37:15 GMT

Do you know that we are 8 days away from International Talk Like A Pirate Day?

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:57:19 GMT

Damn Verizon Wireless.

Recently I got a new phone ("new every 2" upgrade.)

I asked for them to transfer my contacts. The guy said he'd do it. He did it. Then he said "I also downloaded Verizon Navigator for you"

He told me it was some amount of money per month, and I can cancel at any time.

I never asked him to download it.

I was charged $9.99 for the data download.

I have a GPS. I don't need another one.

EDIT: Double screw up. The $9.99 data charge for the VZ Navigator was actually refunded. I missed that. The other data charge came from the Verizon Wireless store rep downloading music to my phone. How nice.

That charge has also been refunded, and my bill is back to the amount I expect it to be for my plan.

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:08:17 GMT

RIT isn't all bricks, classes, and hockey games...

There's music too.

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:21:03 GMT

Peter Mulvey on tour, September 9-26 "The Long Haul Tour 2009", Peter will be traveling by bike from show to show, an estimated 1100 miles, starting in Grand Rapids, Michigan and ending in Northampton, MA.

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:16:17 GMT

For ningeek: linky, and this graph jam

And, for everyone else: Ring ring! Bananaphone!

Thanks, StumbleUpon!