I was worried that the package coming today was marked “signature required” by the sender. I put a note on the door, and made a point of sitting in first-floor space near the front door, so I could hear anybody (usually I can hear car doors closing out on the street; though delivery trucks often don’t ever close the doors so that doesn’t always make noise).
I was right to be worried. I discovered, when the tracking site updated, that they had been here in stealth mode. To add insult to injury they put the “door tag” under my note. At least I’m not in doubt as to whether they saw the note!
No risk they missed my note!
Guy on the phone says there’s nothing he can do (was very apologetic, but completely useless). Using the website I redirected delivery to one of their in-store sites, where they probably can’t make excuses for not delivering. The guy, and the website, couldn’t tell me anything about how to enter a complaint about this situation, so I’m going to be spending some energy today and probably tomorrow on finding ways to do that; way more energy than I wanted to expend on getting a package delivered, but Fedex has gone above and beyond here so I need to also.
Naomi just before we took her to the vet; she didn’t make it, she died on the way.
Naomi, last photo
She would have been 18 next month.
Her kidney number were looking good, and we were doing decently at getting her thyroid meds into her. She was eating less and less the last few days (we’ve been tempting her with special foods and home-made chicken broth for two years), but we didn’t expect things to wind down nearly this fast.
As you may have heard, Kidde has recalled some appallingly huge number of fire extinguishers, whose plastic parts may not hold up to actual use. If you have one, you can still get it replaced, details here.
I had three. Mine were very old (I really should have replaced them, or at least had them tested and refilled, a decade ago), but the model numbers were listed in the recall. I entered a claim on the website (with serial numbers as well), and they accepted it.
Well, late last week, the three replacements came. They’re physically smaller it seems to me (definitely shorter), have metal parts everywhere at the top (except the hose), have a metal rather than plastic mounting bracket, and have a higher rating than my old ones (3A rather than 2A, the new are 40BC, old might have been just 20).
They do want me to ship back the old ones. The same packaging works, and they provide pre-paid shipping labels. I have no idea if they’re asking for all of them back, or if mine are so old they’re suspicious whether I really have them, or whether I happen to be one of the people randomly chosen to send them back so they can be examined. Whichever, they make it very easy, just re-use the same packing and stick on the label and call FedEx. And I’m getting more than $100 worth of new fire extinguishers for free that I should have bought myself some time ago.
I did have some idea of maybe discharging one of the old ones for training (read play) purposes, but since I’m shipping them back I didn’t.
I’m not really clear how they can survive this scale of recall financially. They seem to be covering even very old models that have the problem.
Oh, and the CPSC page linked above says one death reported. While one preventable death is bad of course, that’s not very many to base a decision to categorize a very widely-deployed piece of safety equipment, manufactured for decades, as severely defective to the point of needing recall. I suspect these defective extinguishers have saved hundreds or thousands of lives. I don’t know the numbers on either side of this or any other recall, I don’t really have any definite opinion whether it’s clearly right, clearly wrong, or somewhere in the debatable area. I’m just glad to have gotten my fire extinguishers updated for free.
Old (recalled) and new fire extinguishers. The new one is considerably shorter, and rated higher (3A rather than 2A, and 40BC).
Old — all-plastic top, levers, pin, etc.
New — metal fittings, pin, and levers.
Old hose retaining clip is just barely retaining, as you can see.
The code from the main project I worked on out in Marlboro (for Digital Equipment Corporation Large Computer Software Engineering) is up on the web!
This proves that I really have been using source control systems since the 1980s (I think this was DEC CMS), and that I wrote BLISS code, and that I wrote many metric fuck-tons of comments.
Possibly the weirdest bit is this floating-point number conversion code. It handles pdp-11/vax 32 and 64 bit floating point, and PDP-10 36 and 72 bit floating point, and can convert anything to anything (within format limitations). It’s at http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/bb-r775d-bm_tops20_ks_upd_4/01/sources/dixfp.bli.html
Although the declaration of the character tables for various character sets might be a runner-up. (Bliss had far and away the most powerful macro facilities of any language I’ve ever used.)
