Jason Crowther’s Blog

…to the tune of $7.5 million dollars. Guess that explains why I had a ginormous charge (~$158) from Dreamhost on my credit card statement this month. (mental note, guess I need to get some more referrals!) Being the software business I frequently have nightmares about fat fingered moments like the one that cause the snafu. Ouch.

They quickly sent out an email explaining the situation and saying it would be a day or two before erroneous charges would be cleaned up. How you be mad when they use Homer Simpson in their apology?

So, I’ve been trying to log into my sprint customer account for a few days to update my billing address after my recent change of address. So, I fire up my password key ring and dig out my login credentials. I copy and paste them over and click the login button. Sorry, bad username or password. Ah, ok. Lemme make sure I copy and pasted that right (still absent mindly swap control for command on the Mac every now and again.) Ok, that looks right. Sorry, bad username or password.

Ok, maybe I forgot to update my key ring the last time they forced me change my password (or maybe it was username, since I remember being able to log in with my phone number as my username.) Lemme try the forgot password feature. Bzzt, we’re sorry, but we can’t let you change your password online at the moment. Please call Sprint customer care for more assistance. Funk that, I’ll try again later.

I took few days off and tried it again. Same deal, can’t log in, password reset features says currently not available.

I tried it again this morning. Got in the on the first try with the username and password that I had on file. Way to run a website, Sprint. It ain’t rocket science, ya know?

Another annoyance is my paper bill. Recently, they helpfully reformatted the bill, switching it from the smaller sized paper to full 8 1/2×11″. In the process they dropped useful details like how many minutes each of the lines in my family plan used (ed.- take that back, its just on a different page; in really small type. ugh.) and replaced them with useless boilerplate and full page ads for services that I don’t care about.

I’m pretty sure that all wireless providers suck these days, but do any suck even a little bit less? What do you use, do you like them?

Testing posting via Gnome Blog Poster (via). An easy click and go install for Ubuntu. Makes blog posts about as fast as twitter. Maybe it’ll encourage me to post more. Probably not.

On one of my favorite TV shows, Mythbusters, they have what are known as Mythbuster’s Moments. Every once in a while, Adam stops and reflects on what he’s doing, like blowing something up or putting himself on the line in some crazy experiment, and realizes just how crazy things have gotten.

Not nearly as exciting, I’ve been having similar moments of wonder in my running. Marathon training and actual running of the race where numerous times I my sanity, let alone my motivation.

Lately, I’ve been running more or less for the fun of it without any specific training goals. But, I’m still have moments that give me pause.

2 weeks ago, I was doing a long run with Larry at Green Lakes when its 44 degrees out and raining cats and dogs, easily the wettest run this year.  By the end of the run, it felt like my windbreaker weighed 10 pounds on its own.

Last Saturday, I was out for another long run at Green Lakes; this time it wasn’t raining, thankfully, but it was a balmy 25 degrees out. It was a new experience to see frost accumulating on my shoes through out the run. I layered a running shirt, a long sleeve cotton shirt, and my windbreaker and think I was just about right. Larry chose just a short sleeve running shirt. Just looking at him almost made me go into a bout of hypothermia.

I snapped awake at about 3 this morning. I’ve been a nervous wreck lately about buying a house, and today was the closing (that all went fine, of course), so I was laying around staring at the ceiling and listening to the wind howling and rain. I thought, man, if that rain kept up, it’ll be a pretty icky run. But, an icky run is better than no run.

What a second. What the hell was that? I’m leaving a perfectly nice warm bed to go out into 35 degree pitch black night with a pretty good chance of rain. I think I may have blown a microchip.

It seems to be getting harder and harder to stay motivated as it gets cooler and the weather gets wetter. It takes all my will to get out the door, but once I’m going, each step gets a little easier and I’m always glad that I made it out when I’m done.

Tomorrow should be pretty exciting. Weather.com says 30 degrees and light snow at 5am. Not looking forward to it, but can’t wait to be done, if that makes any sense.

Made that realization as I was driving down to Carousel to wait an hour in line to buy a copy of the new Mac OSX, dubbed Leopard. I never thought I’d do something like that.

I was just gonna blow off the big kick off at 6, but I had a friend who was going was looking forward to having a chat whiling away the hour. When I made the scene about 5:10 there were already about 40 people in line. Hmm, guess the stake out was a good idea. After I made to the end of the line, an Apple Creative wheeled a cart with coffee (Starbucks, none-the-less) and bottled water, thanked me for coming out and offered me a beverage. These Apples guys are alright.

The balance of the hour was split between diehards waxing on their various macs and iPhones and the uninitiated asking again and again just what Apple was releasing this time around. Of course, just saying Leopard got some strange looks. The other semi-amusing part was folks who wanted to get in the closed Apple store (or right after the reopening) to do their non-os related shopping.

Soon enough, at 6:02, the gate on the storefront went up to a semi-enthusiastic cheer. Thankfully (probably from iPhone experience), they controlled access to the store with some ropes and a few security guards. About 10 minutes later, I stepped in a got my free t-shirt and headed back to the check out to grab my Leopard copy. In normal fashion the line was moving fairly quickly with other staff pulling out the credit card purchasers and ringing them out on their handheld terminals. A few minutes later I was heading back out with my Leopard family pack in hand.

Later in the evening, I ran a Super Duper backup (not that I was really worried) and started the Leopard installer. The install process was fairly uneventful and took about an hour including a media check on the DVD before the actual install began. Everything came up nicely on the final restart.

For the most part, things are working out fine. I’m enjoying a lot of the new visual tweaks like the update doc and system menus. I’m trying to whittle down my downloads directory so the cool stacks feature on the doc will show the fan from all the Leopard screen captures I’ve seen lately.

Like I said, most things are working fine. But there are a few sticky wickets. The official Last.fm player and Mozilla Songbird go down in flames when you try to start them up. I’m not too worried about them, I’m sure there’ll be updates for those soon enough. The other slightly strange item I noticed was that when I go to the Network in Finder, I don’t see any other computers in my (otherwise Windows) network. I’m guessing its more of a configuration item than a bug. Gotta look into that further.

I’ll try to file further Leopard briefs as I find more cool (or busted) stuff… stay tuned.