GordyBlog

Just posted a brief article on my current tagging guidelines here.

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I got a call today on my mobile phone. As I fumbled to pull the phone out of my computer bag, I accidentally hung it up instead of answering it. Not wanting to be rude, I pulled up the call history, noticed that the phone number was 623-492-6031 and the caller ID was Arizona, and dialed the number back.

I was greeting with an automated voice system that said it was American Express. It instructed me to enter my account number.

Obviously, I had no way of knowing if this really was American Express or not, so I just pushed the # button. Eventually a person (Ms. Davis) came on the line. She could not tell me why they had called, but if I would give her my account and social security number, she would look up my information. I politely declined, partly because I still had no idea if this was really American Express and partly because Ms. Davis had a very poor command of the English language and it seemed unlikely that a large and prestigious company like American Express would hire someone like that to interface with customers.

Then I called the customer service number for American Express and spoke with Ms. Jones. She was not able to tell me anything and instead tried to ask me all kinds of personal questions about my employment and salary. Very strange! Oh, Ms. Jones didn’t sound much more literate than Ms. Davis.

So I still do not know if the first call was a legitimate American Express call. And I’m not at all impressed with the representatives of the company that I spoke with today.

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Me and my family all have mobile phones from Sprint and I am billed electronically via my Bank of America account.

This morning (4/5/2008) I received an electronic bill from Sprint that is due on 3/28/2008.

I called Sprint and spoke to some guy named Dana. He had no explanation.

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I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 today. The upgrade when very smoothly. But when it had finished I could no longer connect to the wireless network at work or at home. From another computer I did some searching on the Ubuntu forums and found a post where the author un-installed the following packages:

• network-manager
• network-manager-gnome
• ubuntu-desktop
• dhcdbd

I did the same thing and then went to System / Administration / Network and re-enabled my wireless connection and re-entered the authentication info.

It fixed the problem immediately.

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When I tried to install Komodo 4 from ActiveState on my 64-bit Ubuntu 6.10 system, I received this error:


./INSTALLDIR/lib/python/bin/python: 4: ./INSTALLDIR/lib/python/bin/python2.4: not found


With help from the nice support folks at ActiveState, we found this resolution:


sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk


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…is going on now.

Here is a link to the info page.

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Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution. I have installed it now on two computers, a 32-bit AMD and a 64-bit AMD system. I used the default installations which came bundled with the Gnome window manager instead of KDE.

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