I’ve been awaiting a package I ordered from Dell. It was supposedly picked up by “DHL”:http://www.dhl-usa.com/home/home.asp from a distribution in Fontana, California on Tuesday the 27th in the early afternoon. The estimated delivery date was supposed to be today. The tracking information hasn’t changed since Tuesday, it’s still showing an estimated delivery date of today even though there isn’t any indication that it has even arrived in Seattle.

I realize that their front end might be lagging their logistics system, but it is now 5pm. I’ll be very suprised if it arrives before next Monday or Tuesday, at this point. I wonder when they’ll finally get around to updating their delivery estimate.

My theory, it fell of a truck and they still haven’t realized its gone.

Update (1/2/06):Three days later, they’ve finally updated the shipping info. My package is in f’ing Chehalis (half way to Portland). Estimated delivery date? Still 12/30/2005.

Another Update: A few months later, I order something else from Dell. It also ships via DHL. It also ends up being very late. I called Dell days after the package was due, which was also days after DHLs tracking system said it had arrived in Seattle. The Dell rep tells me that DHL has determined the package was lost and that a new one will be shipped out. A few days later, the package arrives, same tracking number and info as the original package.

I’m starting to suspect that Dell gets DHL to fudge the tracking information so that Dell can actually ship products days after they say they do.

Note: My wife uses DHL for pretty much all our personal packages and has been very happy with them.

I just counted, I have 4 computers in my house running at all times, each probably sucking as much power as a couple of light bulbs. Two are the desktop machines used by the humans in the household at random times during the day. One is a low-power mini-ITX machine working as a file-server and the other is hooked to the TV in the livingroom where it is occasionally used to watch downloaded video.

I’d shut the desktops down at night, but they backup to one another. The fileserver has software mirrored drives, but I like having multiple copies of things on multiple machines. The TV computer could probably be replaced with some sort of networked video player with faster startup and lower power consumption, but my encryped 802.11g network may be a little too flakey to be used to reliably play back high-quality video stored on another system.

I think I need to rethink my approach to backup and storage first, and then go from there. I want to be turning at least two of these things off every night.

I’ve just learned about an exciting new business and I have to say: Superstraunt is going to be huge. It’s in stealth-mode now, but within two years, all the kids will be talking about it.

That’s right, you read it here first.

I can’t say more, yet.

Tookie Williams has, hopefully, made his last stop before execution.

Under other circumstances an amoral sociopath with leadership skills like Williams could become Vice President, Speaker of the House or even Commander in Chief. It’s a shame, of course, that Cheney, De Lay, and Bush may never pay the ultimate price for their crimes, but that’s no reason to spare Tookie Williams for the murders he committed, and all the more blood that will be spilled as part of his legacy as founder of the Crips.

No hollow deathbed confession can wash the blood from his hands or the evil from his stained soul. Good riddance, asshole.

“WinDirStat is a open source disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows”:http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/.

It scans your disk and then shows you what folders and files are taking up the most space on your hard disk, producing both an expandable list of the directories on your hard disk, sorted by size, and a visualization, color-coded according to file type.

It takes a few minutes to gather all the information, but once its done, you can see at a glance what’s using the most space on your hard disk.