lenovo warranty call
January 26, 2009
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
January 22, 2009
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
September 22, 2008
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
September 18, 2008
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
August 26, 2008
Is it unfair to sneak up on deaf people and hijack their pictures?
weekend
August 25, 2008
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
August 20, 2008
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
August 4, 2008
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.
July 30, 2008
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.





