Daily Archives: February 15, 2019
It’s Like Y2K All Over Again . . .
After talking it over with our mailing company this morning, they were able to push us up a little in the queue so that our mail-out ad cards should be hitting the addresses the week of Feb. 25th, just in time for the beginning of the March sale.
I mentioned a few weeks back about a disappearing package. My client bought an $700 machine on eBay that was shipped and then was out for delivery here in Houston by the Post Office on December 28th. And then . . . POOF!
It just disappeared. Finally after 30 days missing, the PO said the sender should apply to collect the insurance. So I contacted the seller through eBay, (the only way you can contact an eBay seller. You never get an email address) But after resending me the PO tracking info, he took a powder and I never heard from him again.
So I entered a complaint with eBay who said they’d contact the seller and get him to contact me. But that if he didn’t by the 12th of February, to contact them again and they’d get involved.
So when I still didn’t hear anything by then, I contacted eBay on the 13th and the $727.49 was back in our PayPal account on the 14th. Nice work.
I suspect that the seller cheaped out and didn’t buy the insurance on the unit, and then got stuck. But at least we were covered with their purchase guarantee.
It’s Like Y2K All Over Again.
Come April 6th, 2019, be careful where you drive. Or at least be careful where your GPS tells you to drive. Turns out that in a retro-Y2K twist, the date stamp in the GPS will reset, and it suddenly won’t know where it, and you, are. This is because they only programmed a 10bit register to store the week, So every 1024 weeks, or about 20 years, the date rolls back to zero.
This of course, is reminiscent of the whole Y2K fiasco where to save memory space (back in the days when it was really expensive) they stored the year as two digits, i.e., 1980 was ‘80’, 1999 was’99, and of course, 2000 was ‘00’.
WHOOPS!
Newer GPS implementations use a 13bit storage area, which should last until the sun goes red giant and engulfs the planet. Hopefully that’ll be long enough.
You can read more about it here:
Now, units produced since 2010 or so, should be using the new ICD-200/IS-GPS-200 specifications, and should be OK. I say ‘should’, because apparently some manufacturers have been somewhat lax in updating their software.
Saves a few bucks, don’t you know. So be careful out there.
Thought for the Day:
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” – Ray Bradbury
gdgh
