I don't recall 28bytes mentioning the PhoneLabs Dock-N-Talk: This device intermediates between a subscriber set designed for use with a land-line and a cell-phone,
so that the land-line set can be used to place and receive calls by way of the mobile phone. (The land-line set can remain connected to the land-line, and even put a cellular call on-hold while taking a land-line call. To connect the Dock-N-Talk to a cell-phone hand-set, one needs either an adapter cable (which will vary based upon the hand-set) or the Bluetooth module.)

Now, many people might ask

Uhm, why?

The answer that has potential relevance for me is that I have a collection of vintage phones that I would like to have in service in some future home (and the Woman of Interest has a red WECo Model 500 that she probably won't want to retire to the attic), but I'm not entirely sure that I will have a land-line. It would seem less frivolous to buy an adapter than to lease a land-line connection just to be able to put the vintage phones to use.

Now, the product page and the FAQ make no mention of pulse dialing, and my presumption is that the Dock-N-Talk requires tone dialing from the land-line set. But there are commercially available devices that can be placed in-line with a pulse-dialing phone to convert the pulses to tones; and there are other devices, which can be held to the microphone to produce the sounds for tone-dialing.

Haha!

I attempted to log out of a web-site, and was logged-out of my local Linux session! This logging-out baffled me, because there shouldn't have been any way for a log-out command to have been passed to the local shell, and none of the associated strings from the site were valid log-out commands for that shell.

Well, the joint logging-out was basically chance coïncidental. An inspection of a log file suggested that, in the wake of the most recent up-dates to the Red Hat software, I needed to get a new driver for my graphics adapter. I should have reälized this sooner, as various processes had become far less responsive, and all of these involved display.

Last Tuesday evening marked the return of the Game Weasels to David's Coffee Place, but I must admit that this time they were reasonably well behaved, and certainly not so terribly noisy. Perhaps one reason for this was that only one male weasel was in attendance, at least while I observed them. (At some point, the Game Weasels moved outdoors to the front patio.)

Those of you who followed my LJ might remember that a few years ago I took care of a neighbor's Yorkie for a while.

My neighbor had a partner who had (and has) AIDS. His health had notably worsened, and so he had left, to be with family. (He later seemed to bounce-back, and when last I knew he was doing alright.)

Anyway, the two of them had jointly shared responsibilities for the Yorkie, and I picked-up some of the slack for a bit. During part of that time, the dog simply stayed with me. At other times, I was just getting him from my neighbor's apartment, taking him for a walk and returning him, once or twice a day.

I really like that little dog. I would have been quite willing to just take ownership of him, but I didn't want my neighbor to lose his dog to me in a moment of weakness, so I never suggested such a thing.

A few weeks ago, my neighbor moved from our complex to another part of the city. I regretted the fact that I would probably never see the dog again. I do, however, see my former neighbor occasionally, as he has come to David's Coffee Place.

On Tuesday, I asked him how the dog was doing, and learned that the dog had been given away. My neighbor had felt that he couldn't handle the dog's needs.

Apparently, the dog has been placed with an affluent family, and now has a privileged existence. I'm very glad of that. But part of me wishes that he'd been offered to me.

(I would in any event of course have had to clear acceptance with the Woman of Interest. Anything that cannot be kept in something like a medium-sized terrarium, aquarium, or bird cage should get her okay.)

Many people at David's Coffee Place play games — there are a fair number of chess players, and I think that there is usually a card game going on the patio. A number of people take advantage of the WLAN to play WoW.

Unfortunately, there is also a weekly meet-up of the SDBG, AKA the Game Weasels. The Game Weasels crowd those around them, physically pressing up against strangers, obliviously bumping into tables, unplugging power cords, and so forth. They somehow associate having a good time with being loud, such that their noisiness feeds on itself. And they love to play games that are tests of knowledge, but they don't seem to be very knowledgeable; their noisiness makes their ignorance hard to ignore.

Other regulars, patrons and baristi, are starting to complain amongst themselves. Some of us need to figure-out how to address this problem. Some of the Game Weasels seem like the sort who would respond well to an individual, but others seem to have an exaggerated sense of entitlement, so they are best approached by a group, or by a representative of the firm (one of the owners, or a barista).

At 12:58, Rod Pereira, owner of Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) called my cell phone and left a message on my voice mail, saying that he'd been unable to reach me by e.mail and asking me to call him or to send my e.mail address to his e.mail address.

(Geek Available got my USPS address and cell-phone number at the same as my e.mail address, when I first gave them my computer for repair, so they've had two other ways of reaching me besides e.mail. At that time, I was asked to recite rather than to write my e.mail address, so there may have been a transcription error, but Geek Available should have received a bounce-back from that — it is unlikely that AT&T has a user account with anyone of the more typical misspellings. Certainly AT&T sends a bounce-back when it rejects e.mail as spam.)

I have no desire to communicate with Pereira off-the-record, so I sent my e.mail address to his.

I have received the following from the Better Business Bureau concerning my complaint against GeekAvailable (underscore mine):

The Bureau has decided to close this complaint and consider it unresolved. You have indicated that the company's response to the complaint does not settle the matter, and the BBB has determined that the company's response does not adequately address all the issues or make a good faith effort to resolve the dispute.

When I told Rod Pereira that I would go through the BBB first, rather than court, because it would take more out of your hide, this outcome was what I had in mind. The BBB won't take a case if it has already been taken to court or to a government agency; so Pereira's record with the BBB would have remained as it had been (one resolved complaint). But I can still exercise either one (or both) of those options after an unsatisfactory attempt at resolution through the BBB; and now Pereira's record there reflects his bad faith behavior.

Of course, Pereira could have minimized the loss to his hide by refunding the evalutation fee and offering some compromise on the other costs (enough to satisfy the the BBB, rather than me), but I had a feeling that he'd let adolescent machismo get the better of him.

I am now waiting on billing records from a credit card issuer, then I will take Pereira to court. Pereira will thus be made to bear court costs on top of repaying me.

I can confirm that the Robertson Bad Intentions is the song from WTTS that I wanted to identify. To-day, I received a copy of his Bad Intentions CD that was distributed to radio stations to promote Jimmy Hollywood; I listened to it a few minutes ago.

Yester-day, the Better Business Bureau sent to me a copy of a fax in which Rod Pereira (Geek Available AKA GeekAvailable) asserted

Answering the issue under ID [here omitted], I would like to state that the computer was returned to him as soon as he showed up to pick it up on Tuesday, the 27^th
As seen on the documents provided attached to this, I already sent him an email explaining that we actually dropped the ball on his particular case and saying how sorry I was for that
I absolutely refuse the reimbursement of any computer rental fees he could have had as it wasn't agreed under any circumstances

I informed the BBB that I'd received no such communication from him, that his communications to me since I'd contacted them had consisted largely of various misrepresentations, that vague admission to dropp[ing] the ball was not sufficient, that he'd not returned my computer before extracting an evaluation fee (the diagnosis of which evaluation was incorrect), and that the delay from Saturday until Tuesday didn't result from mere ineptitude and that I was plainly entitled to reïbursement for that.

Pereira can agree to repay me in the process, or we can go to court, in which case he will have to repay me and bear the court costs. I'd say that he should cut his losses.

This morning, I started reading A Drawing Manual by Thomas Eakins. As is my bad habit, I first read the prefacing and introductory pieces by others, one of which was Thomas Eakins: Last of the Art Crusaders by Amy B. Warbel.

It positions Eakins as a creature and champion of the Art Crusade — an attempt to promote American, republican values and virtues by the wide-spread teaching of art (not merely art appreciation), especially drawing. The essay proceeds well enough for most of its length, but, as it approaches its end, rather abruptly seems to argue not merely that Eakins was out-of-step with fashion, but that he was somehow active in a movement that had itself ended. She quotes with apparent approval a passage from another author which asserts that the Art Crusade died with Rembrandt Peale (1860). Eakins was graduated from High School in the next year, and didn't begin teaching until 1870 or '71. This time-frame wouldn't make Eakins the last Art Crusader, but instead a failed revivalist, and certainly not the last such.

In the after-noon, I received a copy of the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. I began reading that in the evening; and, in Max Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities, found this excellent sentence

At the first light of dawn, the battle died away, as though it were spectral, or obscene.

But I'm sorry to report that, in a foot-note concerning The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké, the translator (or some wicked transcriber) has written Chinese for Japanese.

As I waited for a walk light to-night, on the way home from David's Coffee Place, some fellow asked me if I'd like to go somewhere for drinks. The Woman of Interest claims that this is an improvement upon being mistaken for a prostitute, which happened to me a few years ago. I figure that, this time, the poor guy just couldn't control himself because I was wearing my Wellington boots, and have let my sideburns grow for almost three weeks. (Hugh Jackman has nothin' on me.)