Somehow it is another Sunday but the story seems the same—I'm back for the weekend to begin another day at my hopeless job. I haven't had 10 minutes to live for myself, but life doesn't give a fuck what I want to live for, so I guess it doesn't matter. *grits hits teeth and sets his alarm clock*
That check from Courtesy Ford came in the mail with the reimbursement I requested for their shit job with my fuel filter. For their idiocy, I should have demanded more but that is what I get for being a reasonable guy. With this in mind, I took the ride in to have them address the reason my fucking engine light was on again. They didn't find anything wrong and suggested the other Ford place just didn't clear my computer last time. Whatever. They didn't charge me anything to simply clear it so from this point I'm just going to watch it and see what happens.
I have changed the format of the permalinks used here at LAB-Y. They now reference each entry by title. If you notice any broken permalinks, please post a comment about it or drop me a line so I can fix it. The old format still works but the new URL's are a bit more descriptive.
This past Saturday, I had that IAC valve installed in my car at a Ford place in another city, no worries there. The mechanic also addressed the starting problem and that smell of petroleum in the cabin of the car.
Turns out that Courtesy Ford didn't install my fuel filter properly when they did the 60K mile scheduled maintenance, leaving a dangerous fuel leak in my car. This was the cause of the smell inside my car. So here's a bit of advice, if your fuel efficiency drops about 10-15 mpg and you smell gas inside your car, take it in immediately.
The mechanic at this Ford place was quite courteous (no pun intended) and charged me only a half-hour of maintenance labor to fix the problem. However, Courtesy Ford still left my vehicle and my life in grave danger with their bumbling.
Below is a copy of the letter I faxed them.
September 13, 2003
Courtesy Ford
XXXX XXXXXXXXX St.
XXXXXXXX, XX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXX XXXXXX Ave.
XXXXXX XXXXX, XX XXXXXDear Service Manager:
On September 6th, 2003, I brought my 1999 Ford Escort LX to Courtesy Ford for a scheduled 60,000-mile maintenance and to address a problem with my idle air control valve. As a part of the scheduled maintenance, your mechanics replaced my fuel filter. However, they were unable to replace the idle air control valve because the part was unavailable.
Unfortunately, the fuel filter was installed incorrectly. When I drove the vehicle off of the lot, the cabin smelled of petroleum and the car had difficulty starting. I assumed this was due to some problem related to the IAC valve that was not replaced.
On September 13th, 2003, I brought my Escort to Ford-Lincoln-Mercury to have the IAC valve replaced. At that time, William Wilson, the Service Advisor of XXXXXXX Ford noticed that the fuel filter was incorrectly installed, causing a leak of gasoline. This left my car in a dangerous state, according to Mr. Wilson, that could have resulted a fire causing in "total loss of the vehicle."
With this fax, please find included a copy of the invoice I received from XXXXXX Ford-Lincoln Mercury. They removed and reinstalled the fuel filter of my Escort. I request that Courtesy Ford reimburse me for this cost in the amount of $24.50. This covers one half-hour of maintenance labor—a small sum, considering the danger to my vehicle and my person resulting from the negligence by your mechanic.
If you have any questions or concerns about this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. You can reach me on my cellular phone at (XXX) XXX-XXXX. Please leave a voice-mail message and I will return your call. You can reach Mr. Wilson at XXXXXXX Ford-Lincoln-Mercury at (XXX) XXX-XXXX. He will be happy to explain any of the details that may be unclear.
Sincerely,
Freeshell.org member homepages were having issues but they seem to be back up. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I forgot to add: I spent $65 this weekend to have the IAC valve installed and the fuel filter reinstalled.
Current total: $1285
Courtesy Ford told me over the phone today that they would be happy to reimburse me for the amount I requested. Fucking super.
Something you never want to hear your boss say. But since the company I work for apparently thinks software is free and it takes zero time to write, I didn't get 5 minutes to myself today. But oh well, I don't have to work weekends yet. [Bitch mode off.] I'm glad I have a job.
As you can probably see if you have javascript turned on, I've added support for the free blog comment service from Squawkbox.tv. I know, I know, this is a fucking lame way to provide facilities to comment on blog entries but until I get my own coded up, this will have to suffice.
Since nobody reads this blog, hey, what the hell? Eventually this Squawkbox shit will be removed from my site when I host my own comments. At that point losing only piddly a comment or two isn't a big deal.
I also put up a calendar index into my blog entries. Credits to zend.com for their fantastic article on building a calendar blog index with PHP. The code was simple, elegant, understandable, and easily adaptable to LAB-Y. If you notice any problems with it, please drop a note my way as it is still experimental.
Cause I can do it, in the mix / Not a problem that I can't fix
Every day it seems like SCO does something else to shoot themselves in the foot with regards to their case against IBM and the Free Software Community. This time, they've sent out a ridiculous "Open Letter to the Open Source Community". It's chock full of all kinds of logical flaws, not the least of which are blatant misquotes of Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens. The flood of bullshit from them is hard to believe at times.
But in the spirit of fairness, sbuckhopper posted a "remix" of the letter on Slashdot giving SCO the same treatment. Let's see how they like being misquoted and misrepresented—included below is the full text of the comment.
Funny, the way I read the OpenLetter from SCO, Darl seems to be in favor of OpenSource. Now that he's dumping all of his SCO stock maybe he doesn't care anymore. Or maybe he's realized that there is not case...
Here is quotes from the letter that support my statement:
"This ""Open Source software is healthy and beneficial. It offers long-term benefits to the industry by addressing a new business model in advance of wide-scale adoption by customers."
"My company, the SCO Group, became a focus of this controversy when we ""fought ""to ""cast...""a shadow over the ""Open Source movement ""by ""alleging ""that UNIX System V code"" in fact"" proprietary software code""."
"Linux ""is a ""authorized ""work ""not ""derivative ""of ""the ""UNIX System V code""."
"No one can tolerate ""SCO's ""business model that is ""built only on ""a lawsuit against IBM"". ""Finally, it is clear that the ""SCO Group is ""increasingly alienated from anyone associated ""with ""software ""and ""community."
"I will continue to ""sue... ""everyone ""...as... ""CEO""."
Check the letter, every quoted word is in there in some context or another. I see this as just as valid of an interpretation of his letter as he does Bruce Peren's letter and ESR's statements.
I'm back from the weekend and what a weekend it was. Even after wrangling with Ford mechanics, I somehow managed to limp home in my car.
After bitching enough to my apartment manager, he finally got me another fridge. My old fridge froze up too often for me to keep much food in it. When I got home from work for lunch today, I find in its place an old, torn-up unit that barely qualified as an ice-box. But it seems to work, at least for now. So maybe I'll be able to keep milk for more than 5 days.
I've decided to start naming headaches like the National Weather Service names Hurricanes. Today's Tropical Cyclone Headache name is Robert. It is moving quickly to batter the coasts of My Sanity.
On a humorous note, I took the Britishness Test and I found I was more British than Simon Willison.
Here is a quick run down of recent shit that has gone wrong with my car, a used 1999 Ford Escort, which I bought in August of 2002. I'm keeping a running total of how much I spend on maintaining it, minus very small things like oil changes.
Okay, this one isn't Ford's fault but it set me back $200. I busted a flat on the way home and had to replace two of the tires. This is the first major maintenance I had to make.
Current total: $200
On the way back from New Orleans, not too long ago, my car sprung a leak in the EVAP system of the air conditioning—not a horrible problem but it caused the engine light to come on. Set me back over $150 to fix it. This is supposed to be common on Escorts according to the Goodyear mechanic I took it to.
Current total: $350
Shortly after that the engine light comes on to annoy me again. This time it is the idle air control valve that determines the amount of air your car consumes when sitting idle. It stuck, but thankfully not at 0%, which would have caused my car to die every time it idled (think being suffocated under a pillow). The same Goodyear mechanic didn't see much wrong with the solenoid so he cleaned it and reset the computer. That cost me about $100. Then I went ahead and installed two new tires to have 4 new, which cost me another $200.
The fucked up thing is, the idle solenoid problem didn't go away. The engine light came back on not too much later.
Current total: $650
This time, rather than going to the previous mechanic, I went to an official Ford mechanic. Since I bought my car at approximately 40K miles and I was at 63K, I figured it was a good time to get the scheduled 60K mile maintenance. (Very expensive.) I also needed break work, as I was hearing a high-pitched squealing while driving (but not breaking, strangely enough). They looked at the idle solenoid but didn't have one on hand to replace it. All-in-all it cost me right about $500. It did fix the squealing, however.
The only upside of the Ford place is they were open on Saturday. But after going there, my car is now having problems starting! The fun never fucking stops.
Current total: $1150
I called the Ford place in the city where my girlfriend lives and had them order an idle solenoid for about $70. This Saturday I'm going up there to have it installed and have them address the starting problems.
Current total: $1220
Well boys and girls, I've finished reworking most of the code here at LAB-Y, which now amounts to my own, home-grown, content management system. I've cleaned up all of the old bits of code that were hardwired, hackish, and dirty. The result is a much more elegant, maintainable CMS. I love PHP. Easiest language I've ever tried to learn, it is as powerful as you could ask for. It has a wealth of prewritten code like Perl with clean, understandable syntax like C. The content freeze is over.
I finally got my Sanyo SCP-4900 in the mail and got it activated. So far so good. Next step is getting the data cable and testing that out with my workstation.
A word of advice to anyone dealing with Sprint PCS personnel. The representatives that do nothing but activate phones are foul-mannered sacks of shit. Their general customer service reps are more helpful. They will, however, sign you up for things you don't ask for.