Needing tires, we stopped at Pep-Boys on Cobb Parkway. We went in through the service entrance, and stood in line for ten minutes. When we finally got to the counter, the desk clerk said, “We can’t do tires here. You have to go into the store and go all the way to the back.” Great.

We went to the back of the store, and waited at the counter for several minutes. An employee saw us and said, “You’re here for tires? You can’t get tires here. You have to go to that counter over there.” So we walked to the next counter. And waited. A few minutes later, a guy who had been chatting with one of one of the employees noticed us standing at the counter, and nudged the employee. The employee, “Jon”, came over to the desk.

“Tires?”
“Yes, for a ‘99 Sentra.”
“What size?”
“We don’t know. Can’t you look that up?”
“No, you’ve gotta have the tire size.”

So we had to go out of the store, back to the car, and then write down all the numbers. After half an hour of hassle, we finally got the key handed over and a price quote.

A few hours later, we went back to pick up the car. Again, the service desk guy couldn’t help us. He could give us the paperwork, but couldn’t complete the transaction. “You have to go to the front desk for that.”

We stood in line for another five minutes or so, and finally paid the bill. When the cashier handed me the key, I asked her where the car was. “If it’s not out front, it may be around by the side.” I’m so glad she could pinpoint that for me.

Once we got to the car, I noticed there were no valve stem covers. We went back in and told the service desk clerk, who grabbed some and put them on for us. I’m very impressed with this overwhelming attention to detail, and this fills me with great hope for the oil change they also performed today.

“Pep-Boys: Bringing Mindless Bureaucracy to Automotive Service, Since 1921.”

Hooray for Horseshoe Crabs!

Gallery is a steaming pile of monkey poop.

A few months back, I found traces of an attempted hack via Gallery. After doing some investigation, I found that my version had some serious gaping security holes.

Today, I happened to notice that within the last week, my entire Gallery installation had deleted itself (in a fit of existentialism, no doubt). Poof. Gone. There was no longer a directory called gallery/ .

Luckily, the pictures and albums are stored in a separate directory, so I was able to salvage most things. It’s a giant pain to have to rebuild the templates and user accounts, though.

I’d use something else, but I’d have to figure out how to import it all. That, and I really enjoy bitching about crappy software.

After a few months of dealing with the enormous suckage that is Outlook Express, I’ve discovered a reason to install Linux: the Ximian Evolution Email client.

The key useful feature, for me, are vFolders (virtual folders), which are customized views of your email based on rulesets. You want a folder that shows you all the email from Jim? Create a vFolder rule based on his address. How about a vFolder that contains all the email from the people in Hosting? Create a vFolder rule that includes all of their addresses. Better yet, emails can exist in multiple folders at once.

And yes, it’s a free download, and it works with Microsoft Exchange Server, if you’re unfortunate enough to have to use one.

Yes, Outlook Express sucks monkey nuts.

Sadly, there’s not a better email client for Windows .. or at least one that will work with my broken work mailserver.

OE has been taking three to four minutes to start up for a while now, and I just discovered why: it’s attempting to load all of my Instant Messaging clients, and is failing because I’ve manually removed Microsoft Messenger.

In some versions of OE, the option for disabling this ‘feature’ is missing. However, you can edit the registry to prevent OE from attempting to start messaging clients.

More info here.

Robert wrote a great response to the previous post about proxies:

Just wanted to remind all you firewall busters out there that this doesn’t actually obscure your traffic at all. All this does is get around corporate firewalls with stupid restrictions. They can still see what you’re doing and you still get fired for looking at porn.

The reason for this is obvious after thinking about how the proxies work. The site mentions that some of these anonymize your traffic and thats true. The remote host may never know where you connected from. But in order to connect TO the proxy you still need to go through the firewall at work. That’s why they can still see what you’re doing.

There are several ways around this too, but the simplest way is to go to a site like www.megaproxy.com (I think I might know the owner of that site, so find another one if you want something unaffiliated).

They make you do something really inconvienent, type the address of your destination in a webpage form and submit. But then it asks you if you’re sure you want to go to a secure site and then redirects you to the supersecret page you were visit. Look at those titties!

BUT (downside #2)

Most corporate firewall people already block sites like megaproxy.com. (Megaproxy.com is one of many sites listed in websense’s “firewall avoidence” ruleset) so oftentimes you have to stay on top of the latest “firewall busting” webpages if you want to use these types of services.

There are other ways of getting around work firewalls, some of them much safer than the above, but all of them harder to setup.

If you’re getting around the work firewall just so you can send AIM messages to your friends, then you should be ok. If you’re looking at porn then remember that other people at work don’t always need a network sniffer to see what you’re doing. You could just as easily be fired from someone looking over you’re shoulder.

Hope you enjoyed the corporate ethics message, as well as the firewall crap.

Thanks,
Robert

Here’s a list of open proxies, for all your firewall-busting needs.