I’m usually not too excited about programming stuff, but Visual C# Whidbey is just plain cool.

I have one of those apple slicing/coring devices at work. I hate eating apples whole, but love apple slices (odd? maybe).

I just went and sliced an apple and utterly destroyed this thing. The blades all bent and started coming apart…

Maybe I should purchase a higher quality of kitchen gadget. In the meantime, what am I going to do with all these apples?

After getting my wireless networking set up at home, it turns out it didn’t like something or another about how it was configured… I’m not sure exactly what that something might have been, but it was really pretty bitchy with me. I secured it down, set up my laptop, and everything would work great… except it would drop my connection roughly every 10 - 20 minutes, regardless of signal strength.

I have since reset the router (using the hardware button in the back) and reconfigured it to my liking and now I’m testing it. As we speak, I’m writing my blog over the wireless connection (don’t get technical with me about how HTTP is stateless and I’m not actually connected; the point is I’m watching the signal and connection on a status monitor). It’s been connected for 15 minutes or so now and I think it may be solved (knock on wood).

The other weird thing I found was that if I booted the laptop up with the wireless card in it, it wouldn’t connect to the DHCP server on the router to get an IP address. However, if I eject the card and plug it back in, all’s well. Apparently stupid things like that are reasonably common, or so I hear. I dunno. I think ejecting the card and pushing it back in is a pretty trivial thing on the large scale of things.

I went to the post office yesterday to mail off my first eBay sale and was dismayed at the whole experience.

Let me step back a bit, though, and explain some of the lead-up.

I sold one of my shirts on eBay and was trying to figure out the best way to get the item in the mail on time. I got payment through PayPal (which, by the way, turns out to be a total scam if you want to accept credit card payments, but that’s another story), and I told the buyer yesterday morning that I’d get the item in the mail that day.

Facilities at work has a mail scale and postage machine and is nice enough to sometimes let us buy postage from them directly rather than going to the post office. I sent an email to the facilities manager to find out if we could send priority mail with delivery confirmation and insurance from here. He said they could. So I went down to the mail room…

… and no one was there. BAH. The facilities manager has to be there with the key to the postage machine, so no go. I went back to my desk.

I tried about once an hour for a few more hours, but at 2:30p or so, after not finding him there, I sent another email - “When’s the best time to come down and mail this?” The response: “In the morning.” No no no no no! It needs to go out today!

Time to go to the post office.

There are two in the area. One’s a half mile away, one’s five miles away. I went to the one a half mile away…

… to find out that it’s a “detached carrier unit,” which means you can drop your stuff off, but they don’t sell postage. Shit. So I went to the other post office.

Now, you gotta figure - it’s like 3:00p, the lunch rush should be over and I should be able to get through the PO with minimal effort, right? Dude, the line was out the door when I got there. They had three people (out of four possible) working the counters, and it was utter gridlock. It took me, seriously, nearly 45 minutes to get my package mailed. Ridiculous. Why does it take so long?

It occurred to me that going to the Post Office is like going to the DMV. They’re all government workers, which implies they may or may not have incentive to work any faster; there’s no sense of urgency; there’s an underlying level of incompetence that you can’t quite put your finger on; and you don’t have a choice in the matter.

I sat and watched as one of the people working the counter took a package from a person and walked it around for, seriously, like five full minutes trying to figure out which bin it went in. There were only four bins! Pick one!

One customer asked for a particular type of $0.10 stamp. Maybe he’s a collector or something. The clerk didn’t have it. The clerk asked the other clerks; they also didn’t have it. The clerk then went on a ten minute hunt for the stamps, just to find out that they didn’t have any. Come on, people. If you don’t have the stamp, you don’t have stamp. Move on!

And you know what? The whole reason I went there was because the customer I sent the shirt to wanted insurance on a $12 package. Insurance for $12 costs $1.30. Why?! Bah. If she hadn’t wanted insurance, I could have printed my postage off my computer - priority mail with delivery confirmation - and never had to deal with it. Irritating.

Aw, crap. I was going to update my “About” section with my new logo but I forgot I haven’t moved it over to PHP so it’s all erring out. How come you people didn’t tell me about this?! I’ll have to fix that.