Companies Finally Charging Extra for Paper Billing

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Our cell phone company has just started adding a $2 charge for any customer that still receives a mailed bill. They’re promising to donate an additional $2 to a charity for any customer that goes paperless, too.

I expected this sort of thing to happen years ago. Companies have been touting paperless billing for more than a decade, because it saves them a ton of cash. How do I know? Simple — they aren’t trying to charge you extra for it, and you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they would if it was even the same cost to them as paper billing (“for the convenience,” no doubt). They’ll never admit to you that it saves them money though, because then you’d want them to pass the savings along, and they’d far rather keep it themselves.

I prefer having something to put in my filing cabinet, so I can go back and research things. Most companies won’t hold your billing information forever. This one preserves the last eighteen months; some go back only six, or in one extreme case that I saw, only three. The paper bill also acts as a reminder, so I don’t have to remember to check for each bill myself each month.

Will I go paperless? Probably, eventually. I think I’ll wait until they iron out any bugs in the system though — and it’s a safe bet that there will be some, once people start moving over to it en masse, as they will now that it’s costing them money. Maybe another six months or so. We’ll see.

Upgrades Gone Bad

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I’ve mentioned my love/hate relationship with upgrades before. Yesterday I had another check-mark for the “hate” column.

I’d run into a minor compiler bug in my Ubuntu version of GCC. Since a new version of the OS had just been released the day before, promising even faster bootups and other improvements, I thought I’d upgrade the entire distribution instead of trying to jury-rig an updated compiler into the existing one. Unfortunately, for the first time in a long time, the upgrade (as our British cousins put it) went all pear-shaped.

The OS itself upgraded with no problems, but since it installed a new kernel, I lost my VMware Fusion shared folders. No problem, that’s expected, just reinstall VMware Tools to fix it. That’s where the trouble started.

VMware Tools wouldn’t reinstall properly. Two of the modules wouldn’t compile at all (including the one needed for shared folders), and it claimed that there were no drivers for the X-windows subsystem. I tried rebooting it, but that made things a lot worse because the screen came up as a completely unreadable jumble of horizontal lines as soon as I logged in (the log-in screen itself was fine).

I finally found a way around that (by logging into the recovery terminal and playing with vaguely useful-sounding commands that I no longer recall until I’d set the default log-in resolution to the only one that worked), but it was obvious that something had gone horribly wrong. Several VMware Tools reinstallation attempts gave the same problems, though none of them resulted in the video problems again. The open-vm-tools project (an open-source version of VMware Tools) gave the same results as well.

For a very popular combination like Ubuntu on VMware Fusion, I would expect that such a problem would be widely reported and discussed (as such things always have been in the past), but Google failed to turn up anything remotely similar, no matter how I phrased the search or how far into the results I delved. In fact, I’d found several places on the ‘net that implied that there weren’t any problems.

I figured I just needed an updated version of VMware Tools, since I’ve seen things similar to this before. But I couldn’t find one on the VMware site, or anywhere else trustworthy. One of my searches turned up a page saying explicitly that VMware Player (the free version of the virtualization system) would automatically download an updated version of them when you created a virtual machine with the new Ubuntu, so I spent more than an hour downloading it and the new Ubuntu install disk and installing both onto my wife’s Windows machine so I could extract them. The installation into the virtual machine crashed for reasons unknown, but I was able to extract the new VMware Tools ISO file anyway, and extract the files I needed. To my dismay, they turned out to have the exact same problems that I was already encountering.

To make a long story a little shorter, I eventually created a new virtual machine and installed the new version of Ubuntu from scratch, which worked with no problem. I encountered what seems to be a new bug in the AutoFS system (which cost me several hours of attempted fixes before I gave up and used a less-convenient work-around), grabbed about four hours of sleep, then copied my data to the new virtual machine. I’m about 95% up and running now, and should be up to 99% before the end of the day.

It’s a major consolation that, if I’d still been running Windows instead, it would have taken twice as long to recover from a major problem like this. I had to do it often enough that I had the timing down to a science.

Winston, our Mighty Hunter

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As mentioned before (in posts such as this one), we share our house with three feline companions. Winston has always been our problem child, usually by his attitude that litter boxes are optional equipment. He’s also the original scaredy-cat, almost always looking around wide-eyed and running away from everything, including us.

Last night GoddessJ, who seldom gets to bed before 4am and often later, woke me around 4:30. (Of course, she got my evil twin Skippy — he usually comes out when I’m awakened from a sound sleep — but she managed to get past him.) It seems that Winston had managed to catch himself a mouse, and she wanted me to dispose of it.

We’re not sure how long he’d had it before she discovered it. It was quite dead by that point, and he was sitting next to it, giving it the occasional nudge with paw or nose as if hoping that it would move again, and looking very pleased with himself. Most cats of my acquaintance would have started eating it, but he’d never seen a mouse before in his entire nine years of life; it didn’t look or smell anything like the cat food he’d always eaten, so the thought apparently never crossed his mind.

After praising the mighty hunter, I examined the diminutive corpse… its skin hadn’t been torn or pierced anywhere that I could see, and there was no blood on it except around the mouth (presumably from internal injuries). He obviously hadn’t wanted to hurt it, just play with it, and he was as careful in doing so as he knew how to be. Unfortunately for the mouse, he’d never had a playmate that much smaller than he, and didn’t realize how fragile they were.

(We’re not sure where he caught it. We found him at the top of the basement stairs with it, just outside the kitchen, but we haven’t seen any evidence of mice anywhere in the house since we moved in a week ago. It was very small, maybe half to two-thirds the size of the full-grown mice that I’ve seen, so we’re wondering if it had just found its way in looking for shelter. I’ve always heard that if you see a mouse, there are probably ten more that you haven’t seen… if so, I feel sorry for them, all three of our guys enjoy play-hunting, and I’m sure they’ll be delighted to turn their skills to the real thing if given the slightest opportunity.)

The most amusing thing about the incident was Winston’s personality change. He wasn’t scared in the least, of anything, even when GoddessJ or I approached him (which is almost unheard-of). And he was all but strutting, as if to say “Look! I managed to catch this! I’m more awesome than you thought!” We’ll have to wait and see whether it lasts. I’m betting it won’t, but I might be surprised. Especially if he finds another. Though in that case, we’ll be calling in the professionals… sorry to deprive you of your fun, Winston, but neither of your humans is willing to tolerate mice, even if you do catch them before they can do any damage.

“Earth’s first all Klingon opera debuts”

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I really don’t know what to make of this, except to bet that there were far more geeks in the audience than opera fans:

Schonfeld said he has invited the people of Klingon to see the show during its three day run in the 100-seat Zeebelt theatre in The Hague or a later run in Frankfurt Germany, but he believes they are unlikely to arrive in time. “The difficulty is that our message will reach Kronos in thirty-six years from now, and it will take them awhile to develop the technology for them to travel back here,” he said. “It’s a long shot but I’m still very hopeful.”

(For those following the moving saga, the technicians that showed up this morning finally got it right. I guess the third time really is charmed. 😉 )

Update on The Big Move

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We’re mostly moved in now. As usual after a move, we can’t find anything… we labeled all the boxes, but we’re not sure where some of the boxes themselves ended up in all the confusion. I insisted on moving all our computer equipment myself, so I knew where all that stuff was, and the office is mostly set up now (we even managed to tuck the printer/fax/copier and our office supplies into the closets, freeing up a large amount of space). GoddessJ and I finished the painting last night; it looks good, we just need to touch it up in some places and we’re done.

I’d already had two of the new Weiser “Smart Key” locks at the previous house. I’d used that feature to set both of them to use the same key, and I’d really liked it. So while we were moving I went and bought three more to replace the front-door, the garage man-sized door, and the garage-to-house door. I was able to set all three to use the same (new) key again, instead of the three different keys that the previous owners had used. And I can change them whenever I decide I need to. Nice.

The new house had had an older wired alarm system in it. It wasn’t a monitored system though, so we wanted to move our existing (monitored and wireless) system to the new place. The technicians came on Tuesday to set that up, and to my surprise, they were able to integrate the existing wired contacts into the new system… it took them nearly eight hours, but we now have a kick-ass security system, much better than I’d expected, and more secure than we’d had at our previous houses because it’s wired.

I love the new garage. It was raining pretty heavily when we came home from grocery shopping one night, but I just pulled the car right into the garage and was able to unload the groceries without getting wet, for the first time ever. 😀 There’s no automatic garage door opener at present, but that’s high on our list of things to do when we’ve got the money. That will make it pretty much perfect.

As you might have noticed, our Internet connection wasn’t fixed yesterday. The technician showed up, spent forty-five minutes looking around (and scaring the cats into hiding), then told me the same thing that the first one said: that it would take two technicians and about five hours to run the new wire required to hook up the cable and Internet. Which is exactly what I’d passed on to the people at the company on Tuesday, but apparently they didn’t listen. This time the technician set up the follow-up appointment himself, while talking to me, so I know it was done properly. The earliest I could get was Friday morning, so with any luck we’ll have an Internet connection by tomorrow evening.

Except for the Internet connection SNAFU, we’re absolutely loving the new place. 😀