Subway is ending their ‘sub club’ program because of fraud. Apparently, employees were stealing and selling entire 1,000-stamp rolls, like on eBay. Maybe at some point, they’ll have a swipe card. Am I looking forward to this? Not particularly; they’ll probably find a way to require people to submit their name so they can tie it to the swipe card, and allow those people to be tracked in a database.
Archive for May, 2005
Stamping Out Hunger
Wednesday, May 11th, 2005iSightless
Thursday, May 5th, 2005I was having some weird problems yesterday with my EyeTV 200 on the iMac G5. It only recorded the first 7 minutes of a show. The system.log reported that the ‘device has gone away,’ according to the kernel, and gave hex addresses. I’d noticed QuickSilver had found an update, thought maybe that was related (when it displayed the dialog to tell the user, was it inadvertantly ‘blocking’?) So I filed a tenative bug. After a reboot, I could get it to come back.
Then later on, I began having problems with an external firewire drive. It was an enclosure I’d dropped before, and the old mechanism had been toasted — but I’d put a brand new drive into it, and didn’t see any apparent damage to the components in the enclosure itself. Well, it began timing out, freezing up anything trying to access it, etc. I thought, “Oh great, is one of the files corrupted or something?” and tried a bunch of stuff, but it seemed like the problem was at the controller level because of the weird freezes.
This morning the problem still persisted. On a whim, I noticed how hot the iSight/SightLight were (even though the camera was not in use and the SightLight was set to ‘off’… hmm) and as SOON as I pulled these two off the bus, the EyeTV magically began working and the hard drive perked right up and became operational.
In part, whew. But.. grr, also! Not sure whether to blame Griffin or Apple or both here. I suspect Apple because in some conversations I’d had with ElGato, they suggested NOT using their products with an iSight anywhere on the bus. I had thought, “But it’s an Apple product, man! Surely they’d make stuff which didn’t interfere with their own systems…” Guess not.
Glad I figured it out, but wow, what a frustrating time.
The entirely new Lexus 6 speed GS
Wednesday, May 4th, 2005Hah. I was going to write about the new commercials for the Lexus GS, where you see a person doing some sort of ‘extreme’ thing (ice caving, underwater diving, Mission:Impossible-style heist acrobatics on strings, all to push a ‘start’ button (you know, like the Prius already had?) but… someone already said what needed saying.