Archive for the ‘ Personal Life ’ Category

In Which Everyone Loses…

Author: JoshMiller

Feb 15

So, back in December, on December 9th, to be exact, because I have an email notice, I decided to order business cards through Vistaprint.  They offer free (for the price of shipping) business cards.  You can upgrade various things about them for very little fee but I went with the basic freebie cards.  I get an email stating they had shipped and would arrive on December 16th (or so).

Around this time, I was in the middle of moving into a new house.  This is notable due to the change of address but also notable because, as far as I know, I have been getting all of my mail forwarded.  I also have ordered a crapload of packages of things and furniture and Christmas gifts in this time period.  It may be useful to note that I STILL OWN the other house.  Mail going there addressed to me will get to me anyway eventually…

Come December 31st, I realized that I had never gotten my business cards.  The tracking information says they were sent via UPS but delivered to the local post office for the final leg of the journey.  The tracking information says they were sent tot he old address and then listed it as being forwarded to the new address.

I went to the post office to look into it one morning.  The mail people were less than helpful and basically said “we don’t have it here”.

Fine, fuck, whatever.  I go to Vistaprint’s website, I use their support to tell them I never got my package.  I get a second shipping notice in the mail.  Hey, cool, they resent my order, no harm done.  Hopefully this time the idiots at the Post Office can handle delivering this package, you know, because that is pretty much the only thing the Post Office does.

Package shipped out on 1/10/2012.

Groveport, OH, United States | 01/10/2012
Package received for processing by UPS Mail Innovations

01/10/2012
Shipment information received by UPS Mail Innovations

01/11/2012
Package processed by UPS Mail Innovations origin facility

Groveport, OH, United States | 01/11/2012
Package transferred to destination UPS Mail Innovations facility

01/12/2012
Package received for sort by destination UPS Mail Innovations facility

Kansas City, MO, United States | 01/12/2012
Postage Paid/Ready for destination post office entry

ST LOUIS, MO, United States | 01/13/2012
Package transferred to local post office

HAZELWOOD, MO, United States | 01/12/2012 | 9:12 A.M.
Electronic Shipment Information Received for Package by Post Office

01/13/2012 | 10:27 A.M.
Shipment Acceptance at Post Office

01/13/2012 | 12:45 P.M.
Package processed by local post office

HAZELWOOD, MO, United States | 01/13/2012 | 1:13 P.M.
Package processed by local post office

01/14/2012 | 7:40 A.M.
Received by the local post office

01/14/2012 | 8:57 A.M. |
Package sorted by local post office

01/14/2012 | 9:06 A.M. |
Local post office attempted delivery, package is undeliverable as addressed. Contact sender for further assistance.

01/14/2012 | 9:07 A.M.
Package out for local post office delivery

PANA, IL, United States | 01/14/2012 | 11:48 A.M.
Package was forwarded to the receiver’s address that is on file with the local post office.

The 14th comes around, and I still do not have my package.  It was originally scheduled to be delivered by the 16th, I wait until sometime in the 20s to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Surely my package did not get lost… AGAIN.

Irritated, I print both sets of tracking information and go tot he post office.  They claim they can use one of the numbers to look it up but when the person comes back, I get nothing useful.  Basically, they claim that there “must have been some sort of deliver conformation preventing delivery”.

This may be true, but I have doubts.

First, it says it was undeliverable as addressed, then it says “package out for delivery”.  Then it says “Package forwarded to receivers address on file”.  Why would it say it was forwarded to the on file address if the package couldn’t be forwarded?  Why not put “returned to sender”.

Secondly, this was a free set of business cards, so I doubt Vistaprint added any sort of delivery conformation.  i can tell you for sure I did not.  I pretty much always pick the cheapest shipping option because I don’t give a shit how long it takes to send my packages.  Also, I feel like add-ons like that are mostly scams to make money.  Delivery conformation is served by the tracking information and it’s something I should have to pay extra to confirm that the fucking post office is doing their ONE FUCKING JOB.

So in the end, everyone loses. 

I lose because I don’t get my business cards.  I’m also out like $5 shipping, which I don’t care about anymore.

Vistaprint loses because, while I really don’t hold them at fault since they were quick to replace my lost order which was free to begin with, I have the stigma now in my head of not getting my stuff.

UPS loses because why the hell are they pissing around with the post office instead of just delivering my package themselves? 

The biggest loser here is the USPS.  They were pretty apathetic when I told them they had lost my packages both times I went in.  Plus, they lost TWO packages (and god knows what else I don’t even know about).

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Filed under: 2012, Personal Life | Tagged as: , , , , ,

Step One with Stepmania

Author: JoshMiller

Feb 14

I managed to motivate myself into actually playing Stepmania this morning, after all of the work I put into fixing my DDR Pad.

It felt good. 

I didn’t do anything higher than a 5/10 difficulty but my feet were achy a bit when I finished the six songs I played.  Mostly Light Mode songs but I did do Jet World and Butterfly from 8th Mix on Heavy.  I need new shoes anyway, and the ones I was wearing are NOT ideal DDR shoes by any stretch.  I’m not blaming my shoes for poor performance, more for the ache in my feet. 

There is a new version of Stepmania available but I think I’m going to just stick with my old copy of 3.1.  I see no compelling reason to upgrade and I have my old copy all tricked out to look and sound like DDR Extreme.  I am not a real big fan of the default Stepmania look.  I am sure I could reskin 5.X but I don’t see the need for that effort.

The secondary reason for keeping the old version, I know how the score file formats itself.  I am hoping to find an old program I wrote that would automatically translate the score ini file into a formatted HTML table.  This will allow me to automate the process of daily conversion and upload of my scores to the web.  The hardest part of this task is finding the score conversion program I write ages ago.  The rest is a scheduled run of the conversion, writing a quick ftp script and scheduling the script to run. 

Simple.

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Filed under: 2012, Fitness | Tagged as: , , ,

Using Evernote (Part Deux)

Author: JoshMiller

Jan 13

evernote Last post I made was about my plan to use Evernote as an organizational tool.  It has been a roaring success, so far.  Granted, it’s only been a few days.  If this continues, I’ll probably go ahead and chock up support for them by getting a subscription.

I’ve managed to replace several alternative solutions into one solution, these being, so far:

Remember The Milk – Ok, I do like RTM, but there are a lot of features that are near but not real useful.  Like being able to tweet tasks to it.  Technically, I’ve replaced RtM with Atrid Task Manager, but at this point, I’m just using some sorted notes in Evernote with task lists written out on them arbitrarily.  I used to use RTM for things like “songs to Download” or “Blog Topic Ideas”, now I just use evernote notes for this.

My Private Idea blog – I set up a non indexed private WordPress instance that I could update with the WordPress app with various ideas I come up with sometimes.  These would be things like website ideas I’ll never get around to making, or Video game concepts, or even as simple as build ideas for Team Fortress 2 or Second Life.  I’ve portal all of that into a Notebook on my Evernote and delete the WordPress instance.  i only get so many SQL databases with my hosting anyway.  Plus, this way, I KNOW it’s not being indexed by rogue search engines.

Instapaper – Instapaper is great for saving news articles.  Why save the news?  Going through and porting my archives has shown a lot of the original stories are gone.  Evernote has a new feature called Clearly, which shows an add free, navigation free version of articles, which can be clipped to Evernote.  Evernote is also more searchable than Instapaper.  I’m slowly importing all of my old Instapaper stuff to Evernote.

Print to PDF – I used to also print News articles to PDFs for archival.  More commonly, I printed receipts for purchases.  Using Clearly and Evernote, I can now clip these in and sort and search them.

Now, there is the angle of “all your eggs in one basket” but, I’m tired of having multiple baskets, and if it works out, I’ll be paying for the service by February which will allow me to make offline backups.  All of my home files get pushed to a Carbonite Backup as well so I’m fairly confident most of my information will survive.

Other things I may push into Evernote?

Dream Logs – i often jot down notes on interesting dreams.  They make decent fodder for stories sometimes.  One of my favorite characters I’ve created for fiction was born out of a dream I had once.

Zine Organization – I’m considering bringing back the Lameazine again.  An Evernote Notebook would be a good place to store the files and articles collectively until I pull them into MS Publisher.

Twitter Archiving – I’m currently working on a round about system involving WordPress syndication to RSS to Evernote Email to put daily archives of Tweets into Evernote.

Anyway, the point is, it’s going really well.  Better than expected even!

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Filed under: 2012, Personal Life, Technology | Tagged as: , , , ,

USB Dongles and DDR Pads

Author: JoshMiller

Jan 10

If I say it, and make it an official thing, I won’t do it, so I’m not going to say it.  Though this has not been true of my “thing” related to reading.

Anyway, in a situation entire not related to anything New Years of Resolving, I’m trying to get the Dance Dance Revolution/Stepmania thing going again.  In preperation I pulled my Stepmania archive onto my new PC and played a few rounds on the keyboard.  Boy is it enjoyable and relaxing. 

Also I am a bit rusty, though I’m blaming the keyboard.  My old Keyboard had a nice separate arrow set, this one is jumbled up close to the numberpad and the right shift/control keys.  It’s hard to “feel play” it.

But situations not in any way involving resolutions don’t happen with fingers, so that doesn’t matter.  Thankfully, myself, 8 years or so ago, had the foresight to construct a device capable of letting me play Stepmania as it was intended.

That is an old ass picture BTW.  My room nor my office is that cluttery cluster fucked.

I had a few setbacks however.  Back in the day, I used a 32 pin Parallel port to Playstation adapter.  Parallel ports are hard to come by these days so I had to go and buy a cheap USB to Playstation adapter.

I tested it with a Dual Shock 2 controller, all of the buttons and whatnot work as expected, it even rumbles.

So this morning I went to test it with the Dance Pad.  Irritatingly, the game sees the pad’s directional controls the way it does a stick, which means I can’t use it to hit sets of arrows.

This actually would probably be fine if I were some pansy beginner player, but I am more on the level of Advanced leaning Expert.  Well, I was a while ago, I’m probably more of an Intermediate at this point, but whatever.  The point is, the songs I play, require lots of “jumps”.  They also require things to be more responsive than the stick allows.

I do have a solution, which will bring in a project I’ve been planning for a while.  I have a plastic electrical box with buttons attached it.  I’ve been sitting on it for a while, the intention being that I want to use it as a selection box with the pad.  I even have a design to put it on a stick that I can place it in front of the pad.  This will require dismantling the controller I cannibalized to make the pad and soldering some more wires to it. 

I can add this box, and at the same time, remap the DDR Pad controls to some other buttons, say, the L1, L2, R1, R2 buttons.  Yeah, those buttons would be cumbersome to play with on the controller but the pad doesn’t care about that.

Mostly it’s an irritating setback.  That’s part of why this project has nothing to do with New Years or Resolutions or things that I feel I “HAVE” to do.  If that were the case I would feel an overwhelming compulsion to NOT do them.

Instead I feel the need to find my Soldering Iron.  Or maybe just go buy a new one because I have no idea where my soldering iron is.

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Filed under: 2012, Fitness | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

The Easy Part…

Author: JoshMiller

Dec 21

So the new house had a television wall mount already installed in the basement.  Also, someone was smart and made sure to install it into the studs.

My television has been sitting on it’s pedestal stand for too long. so I went and mounted it last night.

BTW, I totally love these little box-less wall plates.  They are much easier to get cables through.  I picked a double wide one because I knew I’d have a bunch of cables to cram through here.  Though in hindsight there weren’t THAT many cables and a single would have worked just fine.

I originally was just going to stick it inside the frame but the box wouldn’t fit.  Putting it below like this means it’s still hidden though so it’s not a huge deal. 

I imagine that if the box were visible then the television would be small enough that the frame itself would end up being visible anyway.  Not to mention too small for the room.

So yeah, it’s hidden.  Also there was an existing box below that had a couple of phone lines and a couple of coax wires in it.  The previous owners had DirectTV so every cable jack has a phone jack with it (Direct TV Boxes require this).  I’m not sure why there were two here.  Our DSL based TV through the phone company works a bit different so one of the coax lines was used to feed the house and the other three cables were extras. 

It also used a closed off sealed box.  Getting two HDMI cables and a VGA Cable and a hand full of composite cables through this box would be a pain so I opted to just put a flat plate over it and put in a new box.  To power the TV I simply dropped the power cable down through the holes and plugged it into the wall.

Selecting cables was a little tricky since I’m not real keen on running extra cables after the TV is up.  The TV has 4 HDMI inputs but at the moment I only need one for the Blu Ray player.  I have 4 cables but often to just drop two.  Sometimes i hook a laptop up to the TV with HDMI.  I also almost forgot to use the VGA cable.  Right now it does nothing but the office is behind this wall.  I plan to put in a VGA jack in the office so i can feed the TV with a PC (for Hulu or other video files, possibly even for Emulator gaming).

And so we have the semi final product.  No wires, nice and clean.  The console is temporary, which is “The hard part”, picking one out.  The wife said she has one picked out at K-Mart so that will look much better.  I also play to buy/build some narrower (probably 6” deep) shelving up both sides for books and movies.  Not too huge but something classy, and black.

The room also has a dimmer on the lights already, it’s a pretty kick butt movie room really, or at least it will be.

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Filed under: 2011, Home Remodeling | Tagged as: , , , , , ,
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