Useless Conversation

[Merusk]

Sometimes your package tracking on Amazon makes zero sense.

August 9, 2012    07:15:00 AM    Elsmere KY US    Out for delivery
August 9, 2012    03:24:00 AM    Sharonville OH US    Departure Scan
August 8, 2012    11:01:00 PM    Sharonville OH US    Arrival Scan
August 8, 2012    10:35:00 PM    Cincinnati OH US    Departure Scan
August 8, 2012    09:11:00 PM    Cincinnati OH US    Shipment received by carrier
August 8, 2012    11:56:59 AM    Hebron KY US    Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit

Hebron is the Amazon warehouse about 12 miles from my house.  There's a FedEx shipping hub 3 1/2 miles from me, so of course they'd send it north of the city, 36 miles away, and then down to the hub in KY instead. 

[Chimpy]

Is it a FedEx ground or express hub? FedEx operates the two as separate companies with the only place they meet up being at Kinko's where you can drop both off.

[Murgos]

Sometimes your package tracking on Amazon makes zero sense.

Hebron is the Amazon warehouse about 12 miles from my house.  There's a FedEx shipping hub 3 1/2 miles from me, so of course they'd send it north of the city, 36 miles away, and then down to the hub in KY instead. 

Or, you know, it's cheaper to move 100 tons of goods to the sorting & distribution center all at once rather than sending out Jimmy in a van just for you.

[Merusk]

It's a ground hub, Chimpy.  It's where all my deliveries come from and it does all the sorting for N. KY.  

Yes, Murgos, that's what I meant. 


Further research has given me reason to suspect why they did this.  I wasn't charged sales tax, so it had to cross state lines to be a catalog order.  Sneaky.

[Paelos]

He probably lives closer than I do, the white accountants live on the north side.

Well I live in Buckhead, so I'm ITP, but yeah. 

It's still 50 miles, but I go up there on the weekends usually.

[Salamok]

I like it when I order something and they have UPS deliver it to my local post office so that the US Mail can deliver it to me.

[Sky]

Hebron is the Amazon warehouse about 12 miles from my house.  There's a FedEx shipping hub 3 1/2 miles from me, so of course they'd send it north of the city, 36 miles away, and then down to the hub in KY instead. 

They should do like newegg and have an option to pick it up from the warehouse.

[Yegolev]

He probably lives closer than I do, the white accountants live on the north side.

Well I live in Buckhead, so I'm ITP, but yeah. 

It's still 50 miles, but I go up there on the weekends usually.

I'm lined up to handle this one now.  Wife says Gainesville is cute.  Also, they have a Schlotsky's.

[schild]

You're both dreamy. I owe you beers and stories you should never hear about gaming executives should we ever meet up.

(Note: This lousy redneck needs to actually contact me back with a price before I can set any of these square wheels in awkward motion. People in Gainesville like taking their sweet time about shit and apparently don't like money).

[Yegolev]

Call me.

[schild]

I will when it's worth calling.

[Paelos]

Cool, I'm around as a backup if needed. I'm a less functional Tim Tebow!

[Yegolev]

If people in Gainesville liked money, they would be in Atlanta.

[Bunk]

I'm kind of sad to discover that some of you are from Alabama. I'm now reading all your posts in the accent I learned from a Salesperson/Realtor from Atlanta.

I think of everyone here as being some level of nerd. Nerd and an Alabama accent are hard to reconcile.

[Rasix]

Are you mixing up Alabama and Georgia here?

[Paelos]

Are you mixing up Alabama and Georgia here?

Sounds like it. Considering I don't know where half the Canadian provinces actually are, I let it slide.

[Chimpy]

Honestly, isn't like a third of Alabama just an extended suburb of Atlanta anyway?

[Selby]

Honestly, isn't like a third of Alabama just an extended suburb of Atlanta anyway?

Don't let the people from Alabama hear you say that...  My family is from there and it's quite an interesting mixture of people.  Accents and no accents (my family has no Alabama accent).

[Paelos]

Honestly, isn't like a third of Alabama just an extended suburb of Atlanta anyway?

Birmingham seems to be where Atlanta people go to get away from it.

[Yegolev]

I actually am from Alabama, transplanted to the ATL.  Most people don't realize that Georgia and Arizona compete for the worst educational system in the nation, so Alabama's not that bad.  The roads are nicer, too.  Well, the main ones that get paved are.

I don't remember which of the large rectangles are which province, so it's not a big deal if Bunk doesn't get it right.  I'm a fan of just-in-time geography.

[bhodi]

Storing private keys in KeePass and then exporting them to Putty using KeeAgent is single-signon MAGIC. When technology works flawlessly and completely transparently, it makes me really happy. I get this little thrill.

[Minvaren]

So putting radiant barrier in the attic of my townhouse (end unit) seems to have dropped the July light bill by 21% versus last year.  Which is a feat in Texas.

Not bad for $200, only a year-ish payback.

[Ironwood]

Storing private keys in KeePass and then exporting them to Putty using KeeAgent is single-signon MAGIC. When technology works flawlessly and completely transparently, it makes me really happy. I get this little thrill.

?

[Merusk]

So putting radiant barrier in the attic of my townhouse (end unit) seems to have dropped the July light bill by 21% versus last year.  Which is a feat in Texas.

Not bad for $200, only a year-ish payback.

Considering the record heat we had this summer that's an even more impressive savings YOY.

[Bunk]

Wow, ok, I am usually a little better at geography than that.

Yea, to be honest Alabama is one of those states I sort of forget exists and just kind of mentally merge with its neighbours. In general, that's way easier than remembering all of them.

[bhodi]

?

So, you know what keepass is? Password manager, stores & generates passwords under one passphrase? Has auto-type functionality similar to saving passwords for websites, but also works inside games or what have you? You also know about ssh key auth for logins, you stick the public part in your .ssh/authorized_keys2 file?

Well, inside keepass you can attach arbitrary files to entries and if that file happens to be a .ppk (ssh private key), there is a plugin that emulates Pageant, a memory resident key manager, which matches up the server name, scrapes and presents the keys to putty for automatic login as if you had configured putty under connection->ssh->auth and stored a private key .ppk file for each server. The password field is then used for the password for the auth file (if any).

It's really useful if you have a whole bunch of servers that use key exchange rather than password auth. Like Amazon's AWS cloud. It's saving me a lot of typing.

[Ironwood]

Indeed.

[Lantyssa]

Considering the record heat we had this summer that's an even more impressive savings YOY.

We've been very mild compared to last year.  Still, it's a great payoff, and it'll be even more important when we do get a brutal summer here.

[Paelos]

I hear stories about record heat, but Georgia has also been very mild, just like our winter this last year.

Our average high in July was 89 degrees, and that included the beginning of the month when we hit 104 for a brief period. We also got 5 inches of rain.

[Minvaren]

I picked the July bill because it rained most of June (which was when I installed it).  It rained a fair bit in July, but also started getting up to the 95 to 100 degree max temps we usually have.  This month so far has been about normal.

Weird to watch much of the rest of the country deal with our usual Texas summer weather, though...

[Morat20]

Considering the record heat we had this summer that's an even more impressive savings YOY.

We've been very mild compared to last year.  Still, it's a great payoff, and it'll be even more important when we do get a brutal summer here.

Yeah, but humid. Heat index has been brutal.

I've really got to get an efficiency check of my house, but first I want to go ahead and get the door seals redone. (When you can SEE the gaps, you don't need a fancy thermal camera to say "Hey, you're leaking cool air there"). I've done the attic (new insulation paid for itself in less than a year -- which happens when you  have 30 year old insulation in the attic and a wife who wants to live in a frozen house), I'm a bit worried about the wall insulation.

But yeah, Texas makes you really keen on energy efficiency. I'm planning a solar appraisal when I replace the roof.

[Yegolev]

Storing private keys in KeePass and then exporting them to Putty using KeeAgent is single-signon MAGIC. When technology works flawlessly and completely transparently, it makes me really happy. I get this little thrill.

I believe I owe you a beer.

[ghost]

But yeah, Texas makes you really keen on energy efficiency. I'm planning a solar appraisal when I replace the roof.

My in-laws just got an appraisal.  It was really expensive and probably is only worth it if you plan on staying put for a while.  There were some potential issues with placing the panels on an existing roof, as I understood it, i.e. if you needed to replace the shingles first (which is entirely likely) you'd basically have to uninstall the panels and reinstall them after the roofing was done.  That process is very risky for the panels and would potentially be a "hidden cost" that the installer might not bring up.

[Merusk]

This Old House had some panels on recently (like the last year) that got around that.  I can't remember how they did it, though, nor which house it was.  It's not the beach house they're currently doing, but the one 1-2 houses before that IIRC.  (Hell it could have been Ask This Old House, too.)

[bhodi]

I believe I owe you a beer.

If you also want to use keypass as your server list like I do instead of saving sessions in putty, since it's a PITA to keep a detailed and portable saved session list, add username@host in the URL field, and under notes launch putty with a url-override line like so:

Url-Override: cmd://"C:\Program Files (x86)\putty.exe" {URL}

Then just select the entry under keepass, hit ctrl-U and the magic happens. It's almost as seamless as kerberos. You can also bind it to the ssh:// protocol which is a lot more portable between OSes, but it requires a reg add since windows 7 doesn't have ssh:// protocol support by default. Because it's fucking dumb.