lenovo warranty call

The battery in my much agonied lenovo x61s completely died last week. I’ve had the laptop for about 6-7 months now and the battery is completely dead. Would not charge at all. I tested it out on another laptop to see if it was my charger or the battery interface. No joy. I go to the lenovo website. I check the warranty info – it says warrantied for another 6 months. I give lenovo a call. I’m on hold for about 5-10 minutes. (Granted it was friday morning at 9am but that’s neither here nor there).  I talk to the rep who tells me that my battery warranty expired in July of 2007. Since I’ve only  had the laptop for 6 months I suggest to him that it is unlikely. He agrees and realizes someone mis-typed something. Gets the battery warranty matched up to the laptop warranty and tells me they’re shipping me a new battery to replace the one I have.

I suspected it would take a while and in the meantime I’m tethered to my power cord (no fun at all). I figured for at least half the week.

Fast forward to this morning at about 9:30am. I’m going out the door to go fetch coffee for the household. I turn the corner onto the side porch and what’s sitting there? A big box with a battery from lenovo.

Good show lenovo warranty fulfillment people.

a damn good start

I’m sure this is a common topic today but:

1. transparent gov’t

2. suspension of prosecutions

3. closure of gitmo

a damn good start.

happy equinox everyone

Today is the autumnal equinox. It’s officially Fall. You can break out the hot tea, apple cider and pumpkin pies, now.

Fedora Award – 2007

My Fedora Award – 2007

Originally uploaded by skvidal

So, apparently I got an award from fedora sometime in 2007. Somehow I never received it until yesterday when I had go into the office for this func thing. Anyway – long story short: here’s the fedora award in all its glory.

I’d like to thank the academy and all the producers and directors who made this possible.

Moral dilemma

HIJACKED! (238/365)

Originally uploaded by sleepyneko

Is it unfair to sneak up on deaf people and hijack their pictures?

weekend

I decided to unplug and not be online much this weekend. Friday evening we got some food, nestled back and watched a movie. Then early to bed and up for the farmer’s market. Then I had a huge list of household stuff to do, a number of those things I accomplished. We pulled up most of the finished summer plants, we added compost to the beds and planted fall/winter items (lettuce, kale, collards, arugula, etc). Then we cleaned up the yard and generally tidied everything up. Then I moved on to finish painting a brick wall in the mudroom, which looks pretty good, too.

Woke up bright and early on sunday to meet a friend for a bike ride out to hillsborough. We took the tandem and we traveled about 14-15mph both ways. Had breakfast at weaver st then came on back. Cleaned up, rested, ran a few errands then worked on pickling okra with Eunice. She did most of the work, I just got cranky occasionally. Then I played a couple of video games and now I think I’m going to go read and tuck myself in.

I hope to be back and less burnt out tomorrow.

encryption negotiation like pidgin-otr but for email

Dear LazyWeb,

I’ve recently been using pidgin-otr a lot and I have to say, I love it. The setup is straightforward, I’ve watched the XMPP as it goes and I feel pretty good that google can’t see my stuff. Yay.

However, it makes me want to have a similar feature for evolution or tbird. Something so I can say “send this person an email and confirm encrytped communication between us”

I did some searching and I found nothing.

Any thoughts?

I was in the future this morning

I got a request to talk to someone in google talk (using pidgin) that I didn’t know. Here’s the log:

(10:58:52 AM) soledad: Hola silvia como tai??
(10:59:04 AM) me: I think you have the wrong person
(10:59:07 AM) me: my name is seth vidal
(10:59:18 AM) me: I live in North Carolina in the United States
(10:59:30 AM) me: I’m sorry
(11:00:56 AM) soledad: Silvia????

At this point I went to http://translate.google.com and started typing what I wanted to say and pasting what they said back.

(11:02:33 AM) me: Lo siento, no soy Silvia, mi nombre es Seth Vidal, yo vivo en Carolina del Norte.
(11:03:17 AM) soledad: me equivoque entonces, lo siento..
(11:03:24 AM) me: Lo siento no hablo español, estoy usando translate.google.com para traducir lo que estoy diciendo.
(11:03:43 AM) soledad: ok…lo siento
(11:04:14 AM) me: tener un buen día
(11:04:20 AM) me:
(11:04:29 AM) soledad: gracias..u igual

Not a perfect conversation but the point came across. So, when does the translate pidgin plugin happen? It may not be perfect but imperfect seems a bit better than talking at each other incomprehensibly.

Update: spot was nice enough to point out to me some abandoned plugins: http://code.google.com/p/lingua-franca/

spot, looking suspect.

spot, looking suspect.

Originally uploaded by kernelslacker

This fellow appears to be tampering with something in a subbasement of a large building. If you happen to see him immediately call your local comic bookstore and warn them.

The Thoroughbred of Sin?

Dr. Horrible

Act II – 7:18s

’nuff said.