I recently moved to Philadelphia to start graduate school. I think it’s a pretty nice location. I knew I didn’t want to live in Center City or University City like the other students tend to. I don’t like the idea of living on the 14th floor of some high-rise apartment, or having to parallel park my car five blocks away because that’s as close as I can find a parking place. So, I’m on the outskirts of Philadelphia, away from the crowded urban districts. I’m near the airport.
Of course, when I tell people I’m near the airport, they seem to think I mean a rough proximity. So, in order to explain better how close I am to the landing planes, I’ve taken a quick video on my camera and posted it in the downloads section. For convenience, it’s also linked here.
Imagine you pay for an expensive car because you saw a commercial that said it has a 100,000 mile powertrain warranty. After only 30,000 miles, the transmission goes out, so you have the car towed to a garage to have it replaced under the warranty. You go to pick up the vehicle and have a huge invoice that needs to be paid for. You say, “no, it has the 100,000 mile warranty, this should be free under the guarantee!” The mechanic looks at you and says, “yes, but after 30,000 miles the guarantee has been met.” Bet you’d be pissed, wouldn’t you?
The United States Postal Service has an offer where for a mere $16, you can send a letter and have it delivered before noon the next day. It’s guaranteed overnight by the time indicated on the receipt at the time the express mail is dropped off. Imagine my surprise when the USPS managed to not get the letter to me by noon. I found on their site where it says there will be a refund if the commitment is not met. Their commitment to me was noon by today, August 26. I called and asked how my mom goes about getting her money back, because $16 is a lot to spend on a letter when normal postage is what, $.42? I kid you not, the USPS customer service agent on the phone said, “No refund will be issued until the mail is over 48 hours late.”
So just remember, next time you have something that really, really, REALLY needs to be somewhere the next day, and are considering USPS Guaranteed Express Mail, you might be paying 3809.5% more than a stamp for something that’s still allowed to take 3 days to get to the destination. Seeing as how I’ve found no fine print ANYWHERE saying the guarantee is for 3 days or less, any other business/private person would get the snot sued out of them for false advertising or breach of contract, but something tells me the postal service is immune.
Gallery2 is a photo hosting PHP package. You can use it to do such things as run your own version of photobucket or flickr. Unfortunately, all I could figure out to do with it is get frustrated and say bad things.
Since I like to isolate myself from quarrels with some big internet site over what’s good and what’s bad to post, and don’t want my own content mixed in with stuff I consider wrong and they don’t, hosting my own personal page led me to find a way to host my own photo management. I tried coppermine and Gallery2, and while Gallery2 is nicer on the surface, and loaded with options, most of the options are “don’t go there” options. Those are the options that sure, they allow you to edit them, but doing so results in catastrophic failure, and a need to reupload the package. ~40MB, not counting the time taken to pull down the pictures and put them back again. Furthermore, it spontaneously quits allowing the uploading of new files, and is not stable in what actions cause errors and what don’t.
So, Coppermine now gets another chance, and Gallery2 gets sacked.
