mounty’s corner would like to officially welcome Sam “My Life is an Open Book” Sutter, PA brother, and all around good guy, to the blogroll. Visit his site at http://fiveamuel.blogspot.com. Both the site and the RSS feed have been added at http://bjbloggers.mountyscorner.com.

Props to Jared Sutton for getting this out to the masses tonight. I installed the newest browser from Microsoft, Internet Explorer 7 beta 1, on my Windoze install this evening. I write this with mixed feelings, and I think to clear up those feelings I’m going to have to use it for a little while longer. But tonight I bring you the first look.

The install was clean and straightforward - the usual Microsoft install. I have to say that MS does most installs pretty well, and this is no different. It didn’t even hijack my settings of Firefox as default browser. And, compared to previous versions of IE, which took forever upon startup to finish installing, this version was fast on the restart.

The first thing I noticed was the interface. It’s pretty klunky, at least for me coming from Firefox where the tab is the bottom object. For some reason, this strikes me as a window in a window. I played around with the settings for a few minutes, but I didn’t hit on a way to put the File menu and all that stuff above the tab bar.

The next thing I saw as I was hunting through the toolbar was the “Phishing Filter.” This looks promising, and I’m tempted to open one of those “Your eBay account has been suspended” emails just to see what it’ll do.

Next I was eager to see what kind of RSS support they built in. It’s pretty bare, to be honest.

So what better way to test out this new feed thing than to go to my site and see what happens? But wait…mounty’s corner could be trying to phish you…

Sure enough, the feed discovery worked…sorta. I actually have three feeds - RSS 0.92, RSS 2, and Atom. Sadly only the RSS 2 feed came through here.

I think IE’s feed engine is also a little less forgiving that most. I’ve never had problems with my feed, but IE won’t render it.

So what happens when I hit a site that has a well-formed feed?

RSS feed support was one of the big selling points of IE 7. Tabbed browsing was another one. You’ll notice that in some of the shots I’m working with two tabs. I hit the idea - what about opening a link in a new tab? Just right-click…

Finally, since MS is a big security stickler, they got a little more noticable about bad site certificates:

So what’s the first impression? Well, truth be told, it’s okay. It’s a start, at least. There are things I still want to play around with - could it be that IE 7 supports 3rd-party plugins? - and there are plenty of hard sites to throw at it and see what it does or doesn’t do. But they’ve gotten themselves off to a good start. I just hope that further changes and updates include some cosmetic and usability issues, because right now it just looks plain yuck. Installer available upon request.

I was reading an earlier post this evening (actually, I think it’s morning now…gotta get to bed…) that made me smile. I was back home, working with my dad in Philly when I wrote this. A few things came to mind:

I still like that jacket.
I need to write a new list of “must-have” extensions for Firefox.
I can’t really remember what it feels like when it’s 8 degrees outside…because it’s been 98 degrees for the last two or three days.

It’s July…but February’s a-coming…

IE running on Linux??? Click to see the whole thing.

While I’m waiting for a Linux game (!) to finish downloading, I thought I’d spin some thoughts on the importance of a good definition. Today I was reading an article written by a self-proclaimed Microsoft Evangelist (actually, it was someone interviewing him). He claimed that there was no innovation in Linux that Microsoft couldn’t do. That’s fine, I thought, but define “innovation.” Better yet, define “that we [Microsoft] couldn’t do.” Tabbed browsing? Popup blocking? Only one default user that has access rights to completely hose his computer? Sure, we can do that…but we won’t. Bottom line - if our users wanted those features, they would have asked for them. Never mind that M$ tech support brings to mind images of people sitting around with their fingers in their ears saying, “La de da…can’t hear you!!!!”

Again in the tech world, we see the ever-annoying phrase, “It doesn’t work.” Readers, do your favorite geek a favor next time your computer breaks - don’t say “It doesn’t work.” The most comprehensive yet brief system I’ve seen resides on Red Hat’s Bugzilla software. It asks three questions: What did you do to get the error? What did you expect to happen? What actually did happen? When you click your macro button, what should happen, and what actually did happen? Nothing? Error message? Computer exploded? Tell me what you thought was going to happen and what did or didn’t happen, and I’ll be more than happy to assist.

To break out or the Computer World, we find the phrase, “Can I borrow a tissue?” Sure, just give it back when you’re done. Then there’s, “We’re almost there!” I mean, sure, compared to how long it would take to walk to Seattle, we’re almost there. Right along the same lines, there’s the little word “soon.” Oh, does this one ever have multiple definitions. Don’t worry, we’ll get you back up and running soon. Students, how about this one? “Summer break’s coming soon!” Yeah, right. Those two weeks of “soon” are the longest on record.

Then there’s a friend’s comment today when we walked out into the 90-degree heat…at nine in the morning. “It’s a little hot out here.” “Little”? Yes, little, as in, “The Atlantic Ocean consists of a little water,” or “French horns only mess up a little in concerts.” (Sorry…couldn’t help myself.)

Well, the downloads are complete, and since I have no good way to end this article, I’m just going to stop typing.

After a brief scare involving the complete erasure of bjbloggers.mountyscorner.com, I have recreated the file and the page is back up; apologies for anyone who tried to access it during the last hour or so. I made so many changes, additions, and a few subtractions, that I have no idea who was updated. Suffice to say, I think my list of 81 BJ bloggers is now the most complete list of folks in the blogosphere who either are or have been at some point in the past students, faculty, and/or staff at Bob Jones University in hot-as-all-get-out Greenville, SC that exists anywhere on the Internet. This list includes RSS feeds for every one of those sites (that has an available feed) for the benefit of you folks in Readerland who digest your news thataway. Finally, for you folks “in the bubble” for whom many of these sites are blocked by Bess (you know who I’m talking about), I am loosely involved (in name only; perhaps soon in deed) with a sister project: BJU Bloggers, a site that picks up the most recent posts from this massive list and displays them, in their entirety, on one central page. Call it a gigantic blogroll project, if you will. Megaprops to Null Variable and Jared Sutton (who really needs a more transparent internet handle) for doing the bulk of the work in designing and arguing about which engine should power that site. I hope to come on board eventually (since it was my list that was harvested, though I have to say I picked up a few from them, too) to help with the CSS design of the site…except that with my astounding lack of creativity, I’ll be limited to only designing what I’m told to design. Which is why I haven’t started yet - they haven’t come to an agreement on what the site should look like. I’ll be here, boyz.

Now, for the next part of this post. Some of you who aren’t blessed with such an astounding lack of creativity (and here I speak to Austin, Doug, Nick, and the other people who may have at one point emailed me with suggestions) please give me suggestions for that site. I have a few in mind already (changing the text link for RSS feeds to one of those ubiquitous orange “RSS” stickers; adding a list of the five most recent entries, which involves an automatic time/date stamp on all edits; etc.) but I’d like to hear feedback. Nothing fancy, nothing that would make the page load ten times slower or look like one of those cheesy “do-it-yourself” home pages, but just some clean design tweaks to move the site to the next level. You want specifics? How should I integrate a permanent link to bjbloggers.mountyscorner.com on the front page? Many have asked, and I just haven’t come up with a clean way of doing it. I could create a “sticky” post, I suppose, but that’s so unoriginal. Any ideas would be appreciated. After all, mountyscorner.com is here for you.

Google has entirely too much time on their hands. Their map engine is cool enough (see here for a cool use), but the Lunar version is just useless. (BTW, try zooming in all the way.) Then someone took the time to draw up this little gem of a job opportunity. Read very carefully, because you might miss some of the humor if you simply skim it.

All in all, I think the programmers at Google are really bored. I wonder if I could get a job there…

UPDATE: apparently FF1.0.5 broke a number of extensions and was rather quickly replaced by 1.0.6. RPMs for both Firefox and Tbird 1.0.6 are available at all finer RPM distro sites. Humble apologies to Mozilla and the general world of Linux…

So a few days ago Firefox 1.0.5 comes out in all flavors. Now Firefox 1.0.6 is out. That’s a pretty fast release (less time between releases than M$ ever had for two fixes for the same product), but that’s not what I have a problem with.

I’m a Linux user (Fedora Core 4 with Gnome, thank you very much). I’m a user to the point that I can even compile a program from source (even on fast systems, K3b takes absolutely forever to compile!); but I much prefer installing through RPMs or (better yet) Apt. Why? Because when I do that, I don’t have to worry about tracking and manually updating every piece of software I install. Normal source compilations do not index themselves with apt or rpm, meaning uninstalling or upgrading those programs involves quite a few extra steps. If they’re installed through either apt or rpm, they’re registered with the system; and apt-get upgrade will automatically upgrade those packages when new ones come out.

I’m complaining because Firefox 1.0.5 was never released as an RPM file. Now 1.0.6 is out, and who knows how long it’ll be before the RPM comes out for the new version? There’s always the chance that no one released the RPM for 1.0.5 because someone high up knew 1.0.6 was on its way, and the RPM for the new version will be out in the next day or two. But that’s a stretch. Not making any bets on it, but I really gotta wonder.

Not that it’s a major change, but it is cool. I recently updated the master list. For those very few who may have bookmarked it (using http://bjbloggers.mountyscorner.com/index.html), I have changed the home page to index.php to facilitate some database stuff. Used to be I’d have to go in there and add each new site manually or (worse) hunt down one site by its name so I could edit it if the site changed. Now it’s all in a MySQL database, mostly for ease of maintenance. This also allows me to dynamically specify RSS feeds where available. So you’ll notice that I and zacfoo have a little “(rss)” tag next to our sites. Look for that in the future to open up a preview window. For now it’s just plain cool. I’ll be combing through feeds and adding them as I get them.

A (somewhat) comprehensive list of BJ Bloggers has been released on this site. The list has been on Erin’s site for a few days now, but I cleaned up a few link and XHTML problems. The list can be found at http://bjbloggers.mountyscorner.com. Click on over and check it out! Be sure to read the hated disclaimer before you click anything there, lest you somehow think I run all these sites and are responsible for all their content. :cough: Yes, that has happened before. Most recent entry in bold. And, for those of you who missed the latest updates, I figured three months’ news is not news at all, so I’m doing a little house cleaning. I’ll keep one month prior to any new updates; everything else can be found at the BJBloggers site.

UPDATE (6/13/05, 21:20): Three new bloggers have been added to the list. First, we have capadaze. Otherwise known as Capabayan, this Bostonite is sorta in IT; her brother is IT. Then there’s Normal’s Abnormalities - I think the title says it all, especially considering the author. Last but not least, we have Ne Zniayu News. You send a guy to Little Odessa for a summer and he comes back fluent in Russian. Go figure. I’ve known John (Ivan) for three (3) years (лет) now. Imagine…from the hills of NC to the peaks of the Internet. Proud of you, bro (брат).
UPDATE (7/19/05, 22:34): A few changes and updates. Jon and Jen Taylor are now on their own site at jon.biblicalrepertory.com. There’s a staff member abroad in a Communist country that several have told me I’m missing. For his safety I’m not going to link to him here; anyone who knows the family knows the site anyway. Finally, props to RebelIris for catching another one that I missed - Butterfly Music, a choirmate of mine (who, I just found out from the profile page, is four days younger than I) from a few years back. And yes, that was the correct usage of an eliptical pronoun in the parenthetical statement, even if “younger than me” sounds more right.

[Listening to: Rising Early in the Morning - King’s Singers - Here’s a Howdy Do: A Gilbert & Sullivan Festival (04:20)]

I got an email from Greg Linscott a while back asking how my traffic had been since I was linked on Sharper Iron’s blogroll. Well, the traffic spiked, at least from SI, beating out my launchpad for number of referrals to my blog. That’s surprising. Also in the “cool facts” category is the one that says the number of referrals from my launchpad stayed the same. That’s somewhat frightening, because that means that I’m getting a good number of new visitors, and they’re mostly coming from SI. And all I’ve been prattling about lately has been computers.

So, with this whole thing about Joel Osteen now being the fashionable thing to rant about, I decided to join the ranks of religious blogging once again by asking a few questions that meet the following criteria: 1.) I’ve never heard them asked before.

Question number one: if I have an electronic copy of the Bible on my Palm Pilot (which I do - several copies, in fact), is that “The Bible”? Further, if I have a copy of someone reading the Bible back on CD, is that “The Bible”? I might get away from scenario number one by saying that my Palm contains the Bible, among other things. But what about the second one? Or is “The Bible” simply a bound paper book with only the words of Scripture? After all, the Greek word from which we get “Bible” from means “book.” If it’s not a book, is it a Bible?

Question number two: some have said that the performance of Christian music must be an act of worship, and that (by extension) the act of listening to it is also an act of worship. So is it wrong to have Christian music as background music, where you’re not actually paying attention to the message?

Question number three: paradigms change in the practice of the church. Not too long ago, the piano was considered a bar room instrument and would not be used by any sane Fundamentalist (anachronistic, yes, but you know what I mean). Enter camp meetings, where it becomes impractical to drag an organ out into the woods, and suddenly the next generation of pastors use pianos in their services, understanding that there is no inherent evil in the instrument. Same thing with guitars, more recently - after the renewed interest in classical guitar, people are realizing that the guitar is not an evil instrument in itself and are incorporating it (slowly) into their services. Now the big thing is PowerPoint, and it seems to be something of a dividing line between supposed Fundies and supposed Newies. But someone put it this way: If we can speak it, we can show it on a screen for all to read, right? And if we can show it on a screen with static text, we could probably show it with pictures. And if with pictures, than probably with moving pictures. So is the multimedia age of preaching really that wrong?

Question number four: while I’m talking about paradigms, what was first century preaching like? Did John the Baptist, or Christ, or Peter, or Paul, really stand up for hours on end and just lecture? Were all the questions recorded in their sermons rhetorical, like they seem to be today? Or was there interaction? And regardless, is interaction a kosher thing to do? Consider: if the preacher simply has to memorize a homily and deliver it, then retreat to his office for the rest of the week, he doesn’t have the opportunity to show the real depth of his knowledge of a passage. But if he stops and asks for questions from the audience, he can’t possibly be prepared with pre-packaged answers for all the possiblities; he has to know his stuff solid, deeper than he’s actually been preaching on. But, on the other hand, does that lend itself to mere sensationalism and the possibility that people will merely come to see the interaction between pastor and people?

I’m not really expecting answers on this, though thoughts from readers here and abroad would be welcomed. I know, it’s just like me to challenge the traditions…and if there’s a reason for them, then I’m all for keeping the traditions. And, before you start speculating, it was a man in his 50s that asked me the last two questions, so this isn’t, as I like to call it, “pooled ignorance,” the meeting of two uninformed minds. One uninformed mind, sure. But not two.

Just a quick note that my launchpad has and will continue to undergo changes throughout the week…hopefully. At the moment I’ve just tinkered with the comments on the right sidebar - you’ll notice that now the format is “[author] on [post title]: [comment]” with the comment now 3 times as long as it was. Also the last 10 comments are listed, rather than the last 5. That should help people trying to browse and size up the discussion. (This is on the heels of my new interesting in PHP/SQL programming.) I hope to have an RSS parser up for the fun of it by week’s end, but we’ll see if that actually happens or not.

Firefox 1.0.5 has been released. Get it here.

This morning I was listening to one of my favorite conservative talk shows during my morning rounds (Russ & Lisa on AM 1330, website here; note that Dr. Sobel looks exactly like I thought he would), and I heard something vaguely surprising. According to one site, Russ Cassell is a “former disc jockey turned immigrant-bashing xenophobe” and, given some of his comments, I’m inclined to believe there’s a little grain of truth in that assessment, overbearing though it may be. Generally, talk radio down here scares up the most interesting crowd - usually ultra-conservative rednecks (I mean that in every possible kind sense of the word) who have opinions, not necessarily intelligent, and who want everyone in a fifty-mile radius to hear them. (In case it’s not blindingly obvious at the moment, I’m not a big fan of talk radio, but there’s nothing else on the airwaves down here worth listening to.) This morning was just too much.

I don’t know what the argument was at the beginning - I was fixing a laptop across campus when the hour started - but as I was driving back the topic drifted to what the United States’ repose should be to terrorism. Out of morbid curiousity I kept listening. Sure enough, Redneck A calls in and floats the idea that, for every terrorist attack anywhere in the world, the US should bomb a major city in either Iran or Syria, our choice. Any thinking human being (here I am not referring to Redneck A) would dismiss this as overly reactionary and absolutely the wrong thing to do. I suppose the thought process is that, with enough leveled cities, the terrorists would return home to rebuild…or something. To my absolute surprise, Russ agreed that perhaps this was the way to go. He was a little vague, which made me think he was just trying to dismiss Redneck A without flat out telling him his idea should have landed him a place in an asylum. But then Redneck B gets on the line and suggests bombing the tar out of Iraq for the fun of it. Okay, so he didn’t say “for the fun of it,” but here was his reasoning: the terrorists are from Iraq; therefore, all Iraqis are terrorists and should be killed. He actually claimed on radio that he thought all the Iraqis should be killed off. Even more surprising was that Russ actually agreed to this madness.

So then Lisa Rollins (who looks nothing like what I was thinking) gets on and absolutely lays into this guy. What about the 80% of Iraqis who are thanking US troops? Should we kill them, too? Says Redneck B, yup. She starts putting out real facts to him about what Iraqis are saying, about how many terrorists are actually from Iraq, and (I have to admit to laughing hard at this) the guy starts literally sputtering on the phone. He has no idea what to say, so like so many uninformed (read: stupid) people, he resorts to dogmatism, facts or no facts. Even Russ was sputtering!

Sadly, racism like this dies hard here in the Bible Belt. It never ceases to amaze me the callous racism (whether intentional or otherwise; I can’t judge motives) that I occasionally see down here. Being on the road less travelled a lot, I come across phrases like “the black man,” a phrase that while meaning nothing in itself, hearkens back to a time when that phrase connoted inferiority. Recently I heard someone say, “We send missionsaries to Africa to save the black man, but we don’t talk to the black man next door!” Maybe it’s just where I grew up, but that phrase sounded enormously condescending. Then to hear these two callers suggest that all Iraqis are terrorists just because of the country in which they live…it just steamed me. I suppose some things, like bad habits and racist philosophies, just die hard.

Every now and then I read the spam that hits my gmail account. Lately they’ve consisted of letters from CFOs of British corporations (with email addresses from Hotmail and Yahoo, not the company’s domain name) telling me that someone died and left all this cash just sitting around, and out of the goodness of their hearts they’re going to let me give them my bank account information so they can deposit and withdrawl that money at will, letting me keep a cut. (I briefly considered setting up an account at some bank somewhere, giving them that information, then seeing if they really dropped $25 million in it.)

Today I checked, and there was a message in there - your typical chain letter, you know, send $5 to each of the five people listed here and put your email address on the list and send it along back to them…and in six months I’ll get five to six million dollars every year.

I might take start taking spam seriously if it weren’t riddled with spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. In my “funny searches” style, here are some of the best lines from that email:

• there is no law that prohibits this program of Businesses, since it is a simply way to sell interesting information By the Internet, and of earning a pile of dollars with an investment of USS 25 By a single time. - USS 25? Is that a new battleship? And what’s this “By a single time” business?
• and the money go on coming… - Typical New Jerseyan, huh? “go on coming”? (BTW, j/k about the whole Jersey thing - I’ve got friends from there.)
• Get assured to write your address on the left superior flank of the envelope, like the Sender, in case there is problem with the post. - Gotta love that “left superior flank.” Sounds like a war term to me.
• WHEN YOU ENTER IN THIS BUSINESS GET ASSURED TO BUY THE FIVE REPORTS - OK, I will get assured! LAY OFF ME ALREADY!!!!!
• Advising on the Network is very, but very cheap and there are hundreds of places free where To advertise. - Remember, it’s very. There are places where to advertise. Very advertise.
• I a.m. an accountant with to major U.S. Corporation and I make pretty good money. - No accountant says he’s with to someone. And he a.m.? I’m personally p.m.
• I made merciless fun of to her - Whoever made these testimonials up obviously doesn’t speak English as a first language, because he can’t distinguish prepositions from infinitives, and he slaps “to” in wherever he feels like it.
• But conservative ace I a.m., I decided that the initial investment was under little that there was just not way that I wouldn’t get enough orders to AT least get my money back. - Huh? It was under little?
• There simply isn’t to better investment with to faster return and under big.? They give - from the same testimonial. To better and to faster under big?
• Is deleted it, but to later I wondered if I should have given it to try. Of course, I had idea who to contact to get not to another Copy, under I had to 11 wait until I was e-mailed again by someone else……… months passed then it luckily came again…… I did not delete this one! $490.000 Is made dwell than on my first try and all the money came within 22 weeks.? - To later, to try, to get not to another Copy, to 11 wait. $490k is made dwell, too.
• and within days the money started to eats in. - Yeah, money really eats in a lot. Better than eating out, though - wouldn’t want money to spend itself, right?
• If you are not interested in receiving Our emails, you must respond to the sender indicating “To remove” in the Subject. Know to excuse us by the annoyances that we could Have caused. - Know to excuse me for being so to have annoyed.

Courtesy of PC World’s techlog et al.

Microsoft has announced plans that it will include RSS (Really Simple Syndication) features in its new OS, dubbed Longhorn. This should come as absolutely no surprise, since Microsoft is generally about five years behind the curve when it comes to internet technologies. I mean, built-in popup blocking has been a staple of every browser except IE until just recently. (I was just installing XP a few days ago and caught one of those flashing news things the installer gives that amounted to “IE has new innovations, like a built-in popup blocker…” New, that is, to Microsoft; such other browsers like Firefox and others have had this built-in and turned on by default for years now. One wonders just how long it will be until Microsoft listens to the rest of the internet community and adds tabbed browsing to IE 7. But I digress.)

So, to recap, Microsoft takes a technology that’s been around for a few years and decides to “adopt” it. What they mean, of course, is that they will take it and pervert it like they have every other standard they get their hands on. Some of my IE visitors may have noticed that the right side of my page is curiously blank until one scrolls all the way down. This is because IE never actually figured out what they were doing with CSS. As a result, CSS programming using IE is spotty, at best. No, I’m not fixing it. Same thing happened with XHTML and other web authoring standards.

As one who seamlessly uses RSS under Thunderbird and Firefox, as well as a convert from Microsoftism, I feel qualified to speak on what will happen when Longhorn busts out RSS support.

1. RSS usage will spike as those poor IE users who don’t know what they’re missing suddenly discover the wonderful world of RSS.
2. The RSS euphoria will continue for a few weeks as all the n003s get it out of their systems. The rest of us who have been subscribing to RSS feeds will simply start bookmarking the new Google News feed (why, oh why have they not put that out yet???).
3. Microsoft will, out of the goodness of their hearts and the short-sightedness of their minds, expand RSS and make their own proprietary RSS standard that is capable of delivering more than just text feeds to your inbox. Think podcasts on steroids - now you can bookmark video clips from your favorite news sources, and the clips are automatically downloaded and played, a la Microsoft’s committment to not only putting food on your plate but also shoving it down your throat.
4. On the heels of this, popular 3rd-party RSS applications like Pluck and the buyware program Newsgator (why pay for something that Thunderbird delivers for free?) will release patches for their programs to adapt them to the new standard.
5. At this point, those who don’t believe all the sugary stuff coming from Redmond know where I’m going. It’s quite true that a very large part of the security of alternative browsers like Firefox rests in the facts that a.) the people who know how they really work love them too much to break them and b.) not enough big fish are using them to make it worth anyone else learning the nuts and bolts of them. Same thing with RSS - the only people that use it are geeks and are pretty well-protected against malicious software. But once the standard changes to allow more than text through, there’s going to be a window where you’ll start seeing RSS viruses and RSS spam. And Microsoft will drag their heels.

See where this is headed? The moment M$ makes its own RSS standard and everyone else adapts to it, people will figure out how to abuse the new freedoms. Now, I’m not against progress. It’s just that, typically, M$ doesn’t bother with contingency plans when they forge ahead where angels fear to tread. I suspect this will be no different.

Of course, if Longhorn comes out anytime soon, a good deal of people will have to either upgrade or replace their computers, since it has a very high set of minimum requirements. IE7, slated to come out last week (kidding), should have this built-in…but then we all know how eager M$ is to support legacy software like, say, Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Short story - nothing M$ has gotten its grubby mits in has improved; usually the opposite is true. Don’t think this new interest in RSS is some sort of turning point where M$ starts making up for lost time. It’ll be just another dot on the map of the disaster that is M$ standards.

Well, it is out of journalistic integrity that I am happy to say I gave the poor folks at 11 Alive (local Atlanta TV news station) something to talk about over the cooler, because no less than four reporters have crossed my path in the last few days. Thankfully, what I and several thousand people saw was not an explosion. I’ll let one of the reporters explain it in his own words:

>>> “Pyburn, Chris” < ———–> 7/6/2005 9:08:48 AM >>>
Hello,

Your email about a plane crash on July 4th was sent to me. There was no plane crash, it was part of the stunt show for the Braves Fireworks… several guys jumping out of the plane during the fireworks show.

Chris Pyburn

—–Original Message—–
From: Thomas Mount [mailto:———-]
Sent: Wed 7/6/2005 9:10 AM
To: Pyburn, Chris
Cc:
Subject: Re: Plane crash

flaming engines and all? Wow…should have been at Turner Field instead. Thanks for the heads-up.

=========
Tom Mount
IT Help Desk Technician
(864) 370-1800 x3485

Actually I think it was the guys who jumped out of the plane were on fire, part of the show. But Brenda and Paul who were hosting the show, saw the plane, but park officials were warned that the plane would be coming by during our fireworks.

Part of being funny is the ability to find humor in everything, and most of all to laugh at oneself. In this case I’m not the only laughing at myself, because the entire office here had a good long laugh about this. I mean, what was I supposed to think? Flaming debris and flaming stunt jumpers look about the same from the ground. In any case, just so that there’s no misunderstanding (and to avoid federal agents coming after me) I’ve removed references to the “crash.” Interested parties who want to view the original reports can email me and get them, but if you’ve just picked up, let me summarize:

1. Saw plane fly overhead; looked like it was on fire.
2. Saw chunks of fire falling from the sky; looked like pieces of a plane from a distance.
3. Emailed around, wondering if Big Brother or the Men in Black had taken care of things.
4. Find out that it was a stunt for a Braves game.
5. Laughed at self.

That’s pretty much it. Sorry for the heart attacks, people.

This afternoon I had to do something I absolutely hate doing - call tech support. And this time, it wasn’t just any tech support. It was Microsoft’s tech support.

Few things strike fear into the heart more than the fear one gets when he realizes that he is doomed to spend the next hour or two on the line with a person speaking badly accented English reading from a script containing troubleshooting steps that he’s already tried. It’s even worse the larger the corporation you have to call. Tech support at Bob’s Hardware isn’t that bad…but there are only a few things I would hate more than talking to Microsoft tech support. Well, today, I had to. I was calling about a hotfix that (surprise!) isn’t available for download on their servers. The problem I was having was with Access 2002 SP3 - you can read about it at this KB article. After reading this discussion thread, I decided to brave the waters and call them. Here I sit, an hour and a half later, having been put on hold four times and bounced to as many support people. I even have a Case Number, for all the good it’s done. Allow me to rant about the problems their tech support has:

1. I had to explain the problem, start to finish, to each of the support personnel I talked to. This was apparently not documented as each had to ask me what the problem was.
2. None of the support reps could find the knowledge base article I was referring to, even though I told them the exact number (875252).
3. One guy went so far as to ask me what the hotfix hotfixed. Um…it’s your hotfix - shouldn’t you know what it fixes? Instead I had to educate him about his own product!
4. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could understand the guy I’m talking to without asking him to repeat every other sentence. And I can usually take one heavily Indian accent a day. But when guy A (Indian) sends me to the next level of support to guy B (also Indian), and I can’t understand either of them, I get pretty tired of the whole thing.
5. And, once I finally got to guy B (who was actually more like guy E or so), I had to prove to him that I had the problem, as if the solution were a carefully guarded treasure! Then guy B (E) had to talk to guy C (F), his “tech lead” to get permission to clear me to get the file. THEN, an unknown guy D (G) will email me (get this) a link to the file. Not the file itself, just a link to their server where I can get the file. I should install it, test it, and then email guy B (E) to let him know it worked.

Needless to say, this is pretty bad. I call with a problem, get bounced around to people I can’t understand (with bad overseas connections, I think), have to prove that I even have the problem in the first place (I guess they’ve had problems with people randomly intalling hotfixes - “Hey, Marv, here’s a hotfix for Project XP we haven’t installed yet!” “But we’re running Linux!” “So?!?”), then have to wait and inconvenience my user while I wait for guy D (G) to email me a link. Not to compare the two, but if that had been a call to my school’s IT support line, the conversation would have lasted 45 seconds and ended with a promise to send a technician out right away to look at it.

Well, I feel better now. And, out of the goodness of my heart, I may just post that file on my website in case anyone else needs that particular hotfix.

Not wanting to stay here in Greenville for the holiday, I decided to join zacfoo and go down to the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, home of “The Southeast’s Largest Fireworks Display,” smack dab in the middle of downtown Atlanta. We spent the afternoon wandering around and inculturating ourselves, then enjoyed a fairly impressive display around 9:30, complete with music.

UPDATE: And that would be the end of the story. Really. Nothing happened. Honest.

Adrian Warnock, an Evangelical UK pastor, wrote a rather moving article on the Declaration of Independence from a British point of view - it’s well worth the read.