jcm's blog

Bah. I’m ill. I’ve had a headache for the past day or so (no, I’ve not had much coffee – I’ve been keeping it to a couple of cups per day so far this year) and a slightly runny nose. So meh.

Let’s see, try to keep this up to date with small installments. Today I spent some time at home sleeping, made a few config changes at work from my armchair, and played with the beta of VMware to get a devel FC3 environment having given up on waiting for it to install under bochs (RedHat: please please please offer a “minimal install” option in a future release. I guess a bug report is necessary, I just want a couple of hundred megs of environment). I need to play with rawhide stuff and have a box that I can do kernel debugging on – a virtual machine seems to be the best option for FC until either this old devbox can be made to take SDRAM (enough to actually run an FC) or I get around to buying an Apple MiniMac (which hopefully will happen) so I can use this desktop for development stuff. I am willing to consider using VMware as an option – after all, I use closed source proprietary hardware so using their software is only an equivalent. The kernel sources are open.

Air Canada cancelled my booking, because I booked tickets on the 31st of December (New Year’s Eve) and elected to collect from a travel agent (as opposed to on the day at the airport or whatever the other entailed) but was given until the very next day to collect. It just so happens that New Year’s Day is a public holiday in both Canada and the UK (no, we don’t have the exact same public holidays btw – I’ve looked them up, they do have federal holidays for things like Thanksgiving, but earlier than the USians) so, Air Canada, this would be an obvious glaring bug in your website software. Please fix it. Alternatively, you could elect to respond to my customer service email rather than giving me a coronary when I called to confirm the weirdness with the booking status on the website (it was showing up, but nothing was showing for ticket status and the site generated an error code to accompany it) only to be told the booking had been “auto-cancelled”. Could you please not go cancelling my bookings without telling me you’ve done that? Thanks. I’ve now paid them again and been told I was never actually charged the first time – but I’ve checked with Barclays and will also have any double payments immediately cancelled from the account. Despite the obviously British sounding phone system at Air Canada UK, I’m not entirely convinced I wasn’t ultimately speaking to someone in a call centre in India – not that it bothered me too much since they did work with me on both occasions that I called them (the second time to reconfirm the confirmation and to get another copy of the second confirmation mailed out to me just to be certain). Note that, despite this, I am generally happy with the airline and their prices seem quite reasonable – just under 250GBP for a return flight is not bad at all.

I’m reading Designing Embedded Hardware. Specifically, brushing up on electronics – it’s the interactions of passive components and so on that I need to improve upon; For example being able to put precise values on rather fuzzy descriptions of “that probably wants a pullup resistor there or something”.

Jon.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2005 at 8:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.