Here's something I saw on a bulletin board. Customer posts that he had a bad experience with customer service of the company and because he will never order from them. Various people post saying that they've never had problems with the company's service and believe that their service is one of the best in the industry. Guy replies that he's not enough of a fanboy to ignore his bad customer experience. Owner of the company chimes in that customer was rude to his wife (who was handling the order at the time), noting that it takes quite a bit to make her angry. Guy replies that owner is can't be objective and that he (the guy) was quite reasonable on the phone.

This is a relative typical complaint thread. The problem with the guy is his protestations that he was being reasonable and polite, when he hasn't been while posting replies to the thread. You post enough and people can tell when your standards of civility are not enough for the common man. It's just funny to me that someone who is rude in a simple thread can claim they weren't rude in some other situation...

Wow, it actually got hot enough in my apartment to shut down my PowerBook server. When I came home it was frozen and of course really hot because it was still on. I cooled it down a bit (not having ice, I used some frozen cans of fruit juice) and restarted. But after a half hour it heated up again and froze. Of course it was decidedly over 95 degrees F in my apartment, even that late at night.

Although the recent PowerBooks are quiet because of their convection cooling (i.e. no fans). It breaks down when the ambient temperature is too hot to let convection cooling work. A fan would help, and there's a handy fan right there working all of the time -- Dave's Sun Enterprise Server. So I set up the PowerBook behind and up a bit, letting the exhaust from the Enterprise Server wash over and under the PowerBook. The exhaust is not noticeably warmer than ambient air and it does double duty now...

There is one suggestion -- and I forget who made it, some sort of science or engineering group -- that reducing the power line voltage by 2.5 volts will result in 5% energy savings. From 120 volts to 117.5 volts. Almost all, if not all, electronic appliances can easily withstand that since they have tolerances built in. And it would make have duty appliances more efficient (though I don't know how). The biggest noticeably change is that lights would be slightly dimmer.

It's definitely a novel approach to help our energy woes. Don't know how expensive it would be to implement. Even though the news channel says that 5% is only about one power plant's worth of electricity, But we hit a stage one alert at 7% reserves, stage two at 5% and stage three at 1.5% reserves, so 5% more power would make a lot of difference.

There are also the occasional suggestions to take over PG&E and make it a state-owned utility. Much opposition to that plan -- government shouldn't get into the energy business. Personally my feeling is that PG&E and Con Edison (in the LA area) have failed in their business so it's not going to get all that much worse if the state ran them. I can point to SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District) and a couple of other small power providers, run by city/county government, that have done quite well. Then again, it's a huge scale up from Sacramento to the whole state...

Occasionally I send out emails saying "Happy Independence Day" or "Happy Thanksgiving" or whatever. And I send them to lists that I know have international members who of course don't attach special significance to July 4th or the third Thursday in November. So is the proper etiquette to ignore them and act like talking to a US-only audience, or do I mention that this is for US members or that I'm referring to a US holiday?

In general I do end up ignoring the international issues. I've found that at least for Europeans and Canadians, they know our major holidays and other major US customs and can at least understand the sentiment even if they don't share it to the same degree. It's strange how insular we tend to be in the US, that we don't know these facts about other countries. Of course, we are the biggest gorilla on the block so it makes sense that other peoples would study us more than we study them.