eBay is one of those institutions that tries both to stream-line and to impair the complaint process by requiring that complainants use forms. In spite of eBay's efforts at impairment, I managed to use one of their forms to clearly report a pattern of shill feed-back, with demonstrating evidence. Thwarted, they fell-back to asking me for details in e.mail that were already provided in my initial report, as if they were lacking. At such point, many people of course give up, and others write an outraged response that eBay can then dismiss as the work of someone irrational. I instead took advantage of the fact that I was no longer confined to the earlier format, restated the case more as I would originally have stated it (if not confined by the form), adding new information that had arisen. And I concluded by making reference to the civil liability that eBay would develop by failing to act.

As I left David's Coffee Place to-night, there was a group of men out front, hugging and talking. Across the street, a drunk yelled impotently at them that they were disrespecting the male gender. At the time, I was amused enough that I laughed aloud for a while.

But it does irk me that many people think that they are entitled to invoke respect as a justification for oppression.

I went downtown for jury duty to-day.

I took the bus, in order to save on the expense of parking. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about having various knives and multi-tools on my person. There were no lockers at the court-house or otherwise nearby, and my car was back in Hillcrest. So I decided to ship my things at the nearby UPS Store. I didn't want to have to wait until to-morrow to retake possession, so I asked if I could ship them for pick-up at that very same store, and found that I could. That cost me a total of US$6.60, including the envelope.

I got to the juror waiting rooms in time to see the final seconds of the orientation film. I'd seen it once before to-day, and once is one time too many; I was glad to have missed it.

I parked in the reading room, and watched Dark City (1998), to indeed see whether there were any SC 1243 subscriber sets in it. I didn't spot any. (I did spot a Model 500, most of which were made by Western Electric, and sets or bits of sets that I couldn't identify without checking references. Also, I am no longer quite as certain that the set at 4:40 is a WECo Model 302, though there's a Model 302 at about 55:55.) Actually, as I noted to the Woman of Interest, it was probably wise not to include a SC 1243 subscriber set. The design of the 1243 was clearly influenced by the 302, and the sets are normally black like a 302; but their appearance is less utilitarian and more overtly art deco. Dark City is thus a bit more dark for their absence.

Shortly after I finished this peculiar cataloguing of Dark City, the Woman of Interest called. We chatted until about 14:00, at which point she went out with a friend for dinner. In all this time, no one in the jury pool was actually summoned to be seat as a juror. In fact, by the end of the lunch period, the jury services office announced that only one remaining court might need a jury. So, by the time that the Woman of Interest got off the phone, I was expecting to be dismissed soon.

At about 14:15, announcement was made that there was going to be an evacuation drill at 14:30, that we would be directed out of the building and to a public assembly place by sheriff's deputies, and that afterwards, those who were not present as alternates (selected on a previous day) would be free to leave. This announcement offended most of the jury pool. It is one thing to serve on a jury or to stand-and-wait for such service, another to be convenient subjects to teach deputies and others herding techniques. (After all, almost none of us would expect to be back in the court-house for at least another year, by which time the protocol would probably have changed anyway.) Most jurors simply left. I decided to go through with the drill, as perhaps something interesting might happen.

However, once we were directed out of the building, deputies did not direct us on to the alleged place of public assembly. So we milled-about in front of the building until, after some time, a deputy told us that the place of assembly was at the intersection of Union Street and B Street, and we headed thence. But at C Street, a block south of B Street, we were rerouted eastward by a deputy. No indication was given as to just where were were actually going; I had 15-to-20 pounds of computer on my back and large book and what-not under my arm; and the UPS Store was in the opposite direction. After a bit more than another block, we hit my Fuck you too! point, and I left the herd.

Shipping my knives and tools 0 feet did not work as well as might have been expected. There was different staff at the UPS Store. They struggled with the concept of my having shipped from the store to itself, and kept telling me that the delivery truck had not yet arrived. Apparently, I was the first to use this trick. (Too clever by half, perhaps.) When one of them finally understood that the package should be there without having arrived on a delivery truck, they still couldn't find the thing. The fellow who had taken the package in the first place was out on an errand, and I had to wait for his return before I could recover my things.

In the context of some construction work, I had trouble locating the bus stop for my return trip home, and ended-up carrying the d_mn'd computer and what-not for an extra four-to-six blocks, in the course of which I got jostled by a hulk who had a commitment to walking slowly and otherwise in such manner as to block everyone behind him. It was apparently during this brief incident that one of the two bus passes that I (qua juror) had been given fell, unnoticed, from my pocket. Although I might never have used it, I regret the loss.

It seems that the LJ RSS feed for this 'blog is or was broken beginning with my entry Another 'Bot-'Blog (posted 26 Feb 2008 at 17:24:32). I'm not sure what the problem is-or-was, but I do note that it uses brackets as text and WordPress makes peculiar use of brackets. I have attempted a work-around by replacing the raw brackets with HTML ampersand escape sequences, though I am doubtful that this response will fix the problem, because WordPress has otherwise demonstrated an obnoxious propensity to replace escape sequences with raw characters.

Addendum (05 March): Using escape sequences for the brackets seems to have fixed the problem.

Sprint has changed the web interface for their mobile phone service customers. Some of the changes increase functionality for the user. Others appear designed to increase security, for which increase I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of convenience.

But they got my back up by refusing to accept my last name as, well, a last name. When I removed its blank space, the name was deemed acceptable. But my last name is two words. A lot of people have multi-word last names.

It's trivial to write computer code that will tolerate spaces in last names, and we are long past the day when computing power was so dear that the cost of running such code was prohibitive. In some cases, an issue can arise because some members of a family spell the name with a space but others do not; however, it is also trivial to write code that, for various purposes, treats names as equivalent if they only vary in terms of blank spaces. (This will also creäte some problems, but these problems are a proper subset of those that would exist if people were simply forced to report their names as if they had no blank spaces.)

The Woman of Interest heard Richard Simmons for Richardson this morning.

Some years ago, I gave three macaroons to Felix. To-day, he made a present to me of those same macaroons. He boxed them, and gift-wrapped them, and presented them to me.

I don't know why he didn't eat them when they were edible. Instead, he let them do, well, whatever, exactly, macaroons do at room temperature over the course of something like five years.

The fix for the Windows Bluetooth set-up problem was to select Cancel during the portion of the installation that was failing. The set-up routine would then ask for permission to reboot the system. After the system were rebooted, any attempt to use the applications from that package would cause the set-up routine to resume, and it would be able to complete successfully.

So the program was trying to do something that it couldn't do without the computer first being rebooted. It plainly should have at least suggested that much, instead of plaguing me with requests to activate the Bluetooth unit.

Anyway, I will now be more concerned to get Linux to interact usefully with the phone set by way of Bluetooth.

The 'Net is awash with pages that claim to be about how to do this-or-that in Linux, but are really only about how to do it with some peculiar flavor of Linux.

This morning, I smell of garlic. Last night, I ate a considerable amount of the stuff: three bulbs of baked garlic, perhaps a quarter cup of pesto, three little garlic buns, and fettuccine Alfredo made with garlic.

I am to meet my friend Felix early this after-noon at Lestat's Coffee Shop, to return his copies of those movies that he loaned to me so long ago.