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Jan. 8th, 2002
hosed by Bill
Jan. 8th, 2002 04:00 pmBill is your friend. Trust Bill. Are you happy, citizen? (I'm sorry; it's been too long and I can't remember the whole thing now.)
So, more about my long sad tale of hardware woe some other time, maybe, but at the end of the day yesterday I had a fresh drive with a fresh OS and my old drive as a secondary drive, and I began the process of getting all the applications I care about loaded and configured. Ned (the system guy) had already installed Outlook for me, and he said my saved mail folders had been restored. (I specifically asked about precautions here before they touched my machine, and between a full backup and keeping the old drive this should have been safe.) Well, the file he had copied wasn't the right one; it was an old backup and I was only seeing the (unpopulated) default Outlook folders. Fine; we'd just copy the file again. Except neither of us knew where Outlook keeps that file. So after being told by Jack (the senior system guy) that it would be something.pst, we searched the drive for *.pst, using Windows search. (I didn't yet have Cygwin, and thus grep, installed.)
Nothing. So we manually browsed the disk looking for hints, and found nothing relevant. We told Jack there was a problem and he would have to restore from backup.
This afternoon, before doing that restoration, he came by. He searched, using Windows search, and using the exact same query. (In fact, search remembers your previous N queries and it was sitting there for him, as proof that we weren't making this up.) And bing, it found the file down under "documents and settings" somewhere. We copied the file, and all was fine with the world.
Except that Ned and I wanted to know why the f--- the search had worked for Jack today when it didn't work for us yesterday. We speculated about the backup having been run, but Jack had said he had not restored anything yet.
So we explored the land of "documents and settings" some more. (The target is d&s/user-name/local settings/application data/blah blah blah.) We noted that none of what we were looking at had been there yesterday. Eventually, I asked Ned "what does it mean that some of the directory icons are grayed out?". (Really "yellowed out"; the yellow folder icons were just a bit paler. Didn't even notice it at first.) It suddenly occurred to me that those might be "hidden files"; this morning, when restoring stuff to my machine, I had changed the Windows default of "do not show hidden files" to "show everything" for Windows Exlorer. We set it back to the default, and everything we were looking at disappeared. Repeated the search, and got yesterday's results.
In other words, Windows has a notion of "hidden files" (turned on by default) that even hides those files from search, and nothing in the search dialogue gives you any freakin' hint that this is happening. And Outlook data is deemed to be "hidden". I would have forgotten about the hidden-files setting entirely, except that the jikes (or maybe CVS) installation required me to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and I wasn't finding it. That led me to inspect the options in Windows Explorer more carefully.
Bah. Nailed by a cryptic interface yet again!
Whoever did the mood icons for the set I'm using sure got "frustrated" right. :-)
So, more about my long sad tale of hardware woe some other time, maybe, but at the end of the day yesterday I had a fresh drive with a fresh OS and my old drive as a secondary drive, and I began the process of getting all the applications I care about loaded and configured. Ned (the system guy) had already installed Outlook for me, and he said my saved mail folders had been restored. (I specifically asked about precautions here before they touched my machine, and between a full backup and keeping the old drive this should have been safe.) Well, the file he had copied wasn't the right one; it was an old backup and I was only seeing the (unpopulated) default Outlook folders. Fine; we'd just copy the file again. Except neither of us knew where Outlook keeps that file. So after being told by Jack (the senior system guy) that it would be something.pst, we searched the drive for *.pst, using Windows search. (I didn't yet have Cygwin, and thus grep, installed.)
Nothing. So we manually browsed the disk looking for hints, and found nothing relevant. We told Jack there was a problem and he would have to restore from backup.
This afternoon, before doing that restoration, he came by. He searched, using Windows search, and using the exact same query. (In fact, search remembers your previous N queries and it was sitting there for him, as proof that we weren't making this up.) And bing, it found the file down under "documents and settings" somewhere. We copied the file, and all was fine with the world.
Except that Ned and I wanted to know why the f--- the search had worked for Jack today when it didn't work for us yesterday. We speculated about the backup having been run, but Jack had said he had not restored anything yet.
So we explored the land of "documents and settings" some more. (The target is d&s/user-name/local settings/application data/blah blah blah.) We noted that none of what we were looking at had been there yesterday. Eventually, I asked Ned "what does it mean that some of the directory icons are grayed out?". (Really "yellowed out"; the yellow folder icons were just a bit paler. Didn't even notice it at first.) It suddenly occurred to me that those might be "hidden files"; this morning, when restoring stuff to my machine, I had changed the Windows default of "do not show hidden files" to "show everything" for Windows Exlorer. We set it back to the default, and everything we were looking at disappeared. Repeated the search, and got yesterday's results.
In other words, Windows has a notion of "hidden files" (turned on by default) that even hides those files from search, and nothing in the search dialogue gives you any freakin' hint that this is happening. And Outlook data is deemed to be "hidden". I would have forgotten about the hidden-files setting entirely, except that the jikes (or maybe CVS) installation required me to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and I wasn't finding it. That led me to inspect the options in Windows Explorer more carefully.
Bah. Nailed by a cryptic interface yet again!
Whoever did the mood icons for the set I'm using sure got "frustrated" right. :-)
how to run a business
Jan. 8th, 2002 10:26 pmOffice Depot scored major points with me today.
In October, I bought a new monitor. They had advertised a $100 rebate; when I got home, after shlepping the monitor up the front steps and then down to the basement office, I discovered that the rebate form they had given me was for $50. Hoping that I would not have to return the monitor (it was worth the posted price to me, but not $50 more), I called them the next morning to see about resolving this. They eventually said that they had been in the midst of a price change (well, rebate change) when I came in, but they would honor the posted value. I should send in the $50 rebate, and they refunded me the other $50. So that got them points -- I was in the right, but they didn't make me fight over it. (I did have to spend about an hour explaining it to *four* different people, though.)
Yesterday's mail brought a letter from Phillips: this coupon is for the wrong model, so we're not honoring this. Fix it if you can before the deadline (end of January). Upon closer inspection, I agree that the coupon and the model from the UPC don't match, though the number on the coupon was not listed as a model number and I don't think I can be faulted for not noticing that a stray 107S on the coupon didn't match a 109bc103 (or whatever) on the UPC.
The coupon had a phone number, but it was apparently set to auto-hang-up all day. So this afternoon I called Office Depot and asked if they could do anything to help me out. The reasonable thing for them to do would be to issue a corrected coupon so I could send the thing in again. What they actually did was give me the $50.
Now that's customer service.
In October, I bought a new monitor. They had advertised a $100 rebate; when I got home, after shlepping the monitor up the front steps and then down to the basement office, I discovered that the rebate form they had given me was for $50. Hoping that I would not have to return the monitor (it was worth the posted price to me, but not $50 more), I called them the next morning to see about resolving this. They eventually said that they had been in the midst of a price change (well, rebate change) when I came in, but they would honor the posted value. I should send in the $50 rebate, and they refunded me the other $50. So that got them points -- I was in the right, but they didn't make me fight over it. (I did have to spend about an hour explaining it to *four* different people, though.)
Yesterday's mail brought a letter from Phillips: this coupon is for the wrong model, so we're not honoring this. Fix it if you can before the deadline (end of January). Upon closer inspection, I agree that the coupon and the model from the UPC don't match, though the number on the coupon was not listed as a model number and I don't think I can be faulted for not noticing that a stray 107S on the coupon didn't match a 109bc103 (or whatever) on the UPC.
The coupon had a phone number, but it was apparently set to auto-hang-up all day. So this afternoon I called Office Depot and asked if they could do anything to help me out. The reasonable thing for them to do would be to issue a corrected coupon so I could send the thing in again. What they actually did was give me the $50.
Now that's customer service.