The Comms Room

@MarkHenderson put it in the quote and bill them accordingly

@Andrew They rejected my amendment

It's OK - now it's done as Do and Charge

But it's my pride that gets hurt

@MarkHenderson I know the feeling :(

I had things like that happen... 3 times in a week

Some of them are really obvious. This one is about lag before sending SMS alerts. I suggested that they might want to wait until a bill is actually overdue before sending an SMS alert. "No no, we'll just alert them once they have an outstanding bill" - and guess what. now customers are getting SMS alerts about their bills before the have even received their bills. And SMS alerts are usually reseved for overdue notices anyway, not just outstanding

So now we retrofit for overdue only. It's like a 5 minute job, but it's annoying that they don't acknowledge that I was right

Why do you think they aren't?

12:07 AM

I'm just a dumb contractor, who happens to know their workflow better than they do

@MichaelHampton Because in their change, not once did they say "You were right"

@MichaelHampton because they haven't said "you were right, we were wrong, we need to change", they've "just decided" to change how to do it

They said "Hi Mark, we need the following change:

- SMSes should only send for overdue bills, or some sort of lag functionality."

@MarkHenderson Sorry, I mean what do you think their motivation is for not acknowledging you were right?

@MichaelHampton it's cultural.

@MichaelHampton Ohh. Saving face is my guess.

12:08 AM

@MarkHenderson pfffft.

An Aussie thing?

I spoke to project manager with my suggestion, and now he comes back with the change, but I notice on the email that the director is in on this email

So he doesn't want to be found out that he pooh-poohed my change

@MarkHenderson Ah, there's your mistake. You should email these suggestions.

Yeah, we expect you to take responsibility for your mistakes. It's not like the US where a mistake is a Personal Failure and You Suck.

@MichaelHampton I did, but they were only between the project manager and me

I could easily dig it up and CC it to the director, but i'm not here to get anyone in trouble

12:09 AM

Just... acknowledge it and move it, but damn well acknowledge it.

@MarkHenderson curious if this is also a generational thing...

@Andrew I own my fuckups all the time. It's one of the reasons people like dealing with us - we don't shift blame. If it falls on me, it falls on me.

If they come looking for heads (which has happened before. Not with this company but with another one where a similar thing happened) I have plenty of evidence. Plus we record all calls at the trunk so I just have to re-listen to 13 hours of phone calls to find the part that I need. Which I have also done before to avoid a lawsuit about breach of contract.

No more he-said, she-said when we have call recordings

@MarkHenderson I wish I had a recorder in my office :(

@Andrew Our system supports it natively, but I saw one nifty solution at one place - a mirror port on the internet connected to a system that just listened for SIP and RTP sessions. It recorded the RTP stream and used the corresponding SIP data as metadata for the call

Also: are the people who reject your changes consistently older than you?

They recorded hundreds of hours a day that way

12:14 AM

@MarkHenderson oh, I meant room mic. Never mind voice calls.

@Andrew oohh

Old iPhone/iPod Touch that has the memo app?

@Andrew And not consistantly. I'm 28 so most people are older than me by default, but I do work with a lot of people in their early 30's so I'd file them as equivalent in age

@MarkHenderson hmmm

I'd kinda assumed it was a reverse agism thing, "stupid kid what would you know"

Joel E Salas

I'm getting a raise wooo

fwiw our company is made up of a 43 year old owner, two 28 year olds, and a 27 year old as its primary staff

We had a 30 year old as our sales lead until last year, so he was still a child of the 80's

hmmm.

grrr, Windows Updates...

12:26 AM

@MarkHenderson Nothing terribly interesting, only $200 value. I think it got targeted because I offered free overnight shipping to the US, so they thought it would be out the door before anyone noticed the scam. Unfortunately for him, I wasn't born yesterday. I already opened a case with PayPal, I'm not shipping until they tell me I have to.

pfSense question for @ChrisS @MarkHenderson - does 1:1 NAT preserve or bypass the usual firewall functionality?

@Andrew Preserve

@Andrew The NAT in pfSense is part of the firewall.

i.e. could you set up 1:1 NAT for stuff to get ASA-like protection?

@Andrew Yeah, pf is actually modeled quite a bit on the ASA..

12:30 AM

@ChrisS ah excellent.

Now where did @Jacob go?

@MichaelHampton errr... we ate him?

You leave this room for 5 minutes and it turns into Lord of the Flies...

@MichaelHampton I think he was up all night fixing OpenVPN and RADIUS issues

12:46 AM

Damn, just when I was about to sign up for his VPN service too.

Oh well.

@MichaelHampton It works with TCP but apperently OpenVPN UDP sessions are not authenticating

I don't know about L2TP or PPTP

@MarkHenderson I don't care about L2TP or PPTP

@MichaelHampton Well OpenVPN TCP is fine. I was using it all night.

@MarkHenderson Works for me.

1:11 AM

Eating dinner

What's up

up

@MichaelHampton Hey what's up? I was helping my dad with stuff.

@Jacob Oh, I was going to ask you if I should put in anything for a pormo code when I signed up for the VPN.

Other than BRAZZERS. That didn't work.

@MichaelHampton Umm, sure just use XNSTG

that's 33%

@MichaelHampton I can make that work :)

@Jacob It doesn't do anything with BTC pricing?

Of course you're also missing a significant digit on the BTC prices anyway...

@MichaelHampton It's the billing panel, I have to adjust it. By default it only supports 2 places.

@Jacob Ah. Should have used mBTC :)

1:21 AM

@MichaelHampton We're switching a ton of stuff out. Actually that's a good point

@MichaelHampton have you heard of PettyCoin?

When work on this first started bitcoins were traded in multiples of 1

@Jacob That's... quite a while ago.

@Andrew Damn, how many *coins are there?

@MichaelHampton it's a subnet of bitcoin.

Anonymous

Heartbleed disclosure timeline: who knew what and when

Anonymous

1:23 AM

world's so small

slideshare.net/RustyQRussell/…

designed to solve the "bitcoin blockchain is too big" problem, sort of. and also the "bitcoins are too valuable to trade whole parts of" problem.

"an adjunct not an altcoin"

@MichaelHampton Let me see if I can adjust that on the fly

@MichaelHampton I'll just activate your account; you can pay later.

@Jacob Haha, I guess I'd better create an account first :)

Oh, there's a discount if I bump it up to annual pricing.

So I guess that's good enough.

@MichaelHampton The math on that uh looks wrong.

.03BTC ?

@Jacob Yeah, that's why you need more significant digits.

1:32 AM

@MichaelHampton Uh, yeah, if the prices for BTC I just saw were correct, you got a steal.

@Jacob :)

Now I guess I'd better install OpenVPN...

@MichaelHampton Unless you happen to be on windows...

Which I doubt.

Yeah, I doubt it too.

@MichaelHampton You really should have paid ~.05 -.07BTC :(

I'll get it fixed, but you got a steal.

@Jacob You got some free security research. Let's call it even. :)

1:37 AM

@MichaelHampton research? I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I'll take your word for it.

Well, I did have to "research" the rounding error... it was easy though :)

@MichaelHampton Though I must say that it seems useless to signup privately if your going to use an email that links back to you...

@Jacob You assume it's the only account I'll sign up for. And anyway it's tied to my home IP address, so there's little point to obscuring the user.

@MichaelHampton I like the first idea....

Do that :)

Don't worry, it'll be after you've had plenty of time to implement fixes. :)

1:42 AM

Lordy... Just got this in my email... from a fax... of a printout...

3

Anonymous

you just dissolved my eyes

@ewwhite Was the printout take with a cell camera?

looks it

and what editor is that?

they want me to help them make their printer behave

@ewwhite google says emacs

ugly

1:45 AM

@ewwhite NO! SEND IT BACK TO THE DEPTHS OF HELL WHENCE IT CAME!

@ewwhite Sorry, I didn't quite catch that?

@ewwhite oh, put it on a wooden table and take a photo of it.

@MichaelHampton Besides what would you even need 2 accounts for.

Pay for this one

tunnel through a server and buy another. Then your real IP never touched the system.

@Jacob You might as well just use TOR at that point.

We don't store it anyway. We bridged that function.

1:49 AM

can you decipher the programming language?

@Jacob Wouldn't that be a legal requirement?

@ewwhite at a guess COBOL?

@ewwhite At least it doesn't look like MUMPS.

@Bob People want to be anonymous & and secure

@Bob The US/CA have no such data retention requirements ironically enough.

We'd just incorporate elsewhere if they did.

@Jacob That's because the NSA catches it before it reaches your DC ;P

1:51 AM

@Bob Probably, but meh they don't share that much.

Apr 14 21:51:12 saurok nm-openvpn[7720]: TCP: connect to [AF_INET]162.213.37.38:443 failed, will try again in 5 seconds: No route to host

I think this is bad...

@MichaelHampton Which location is that supposed to be?

@Jacob Washington DC

@MichaelHampton Oh, I was actually been meaning bring that back up. 2 minutes :)

12  * be2151.mpd22.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.40.73)  38.811 ms be2148.ccr21.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.31.117)  38.881 ms
13  be2113.ccr41.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.169)  38.950 ms be2176.ccr41.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.41.53)  39.020 ms  46.779 ms
14  38.122.63.210 (38.122.63.210)  62.028 ms  26.527 ms  28.931 ms
15  38.122.63.210 (38.122.63.210)  3020.618 ms !H  3021.521 ms !H  3021.602 ms !H

Of course I'd pick the one location that was down...

1:55 AM

@MichaelHampton It might not be online. Everywhere else works for OpenVPN. PPTP and LT2tp out of the US I get to fix.

and by might be I mean definitely.

Amsterdam seems to work.

@ewwhite soooo.... not BASIC is it?

nope

@MichaelHampton sending contraband through amsterdam? bit cliche...

@MichaelHampton Yeah, PPTP and l2tp don't because all of the packages were updated and I guess the confs we use don't work in the newer versions.

1:59 AM

@MichaelHampton Is that Fedora?

@Jacob Yes, Fedora 20 with KDE

@Jacob I only really want to do OpenVPN

@ewwhite ALGOL? Fortran?

@MichaelHampton I want to switch back to a RHEL clone for my desktop. Windows is just making me mad.

@Andrew NopeNopeNope

2:01 AM

@Jacob Fedora is a pretty good balance between RHEL-like and modern software

@MichaelHampton I wish everyone was as enlightened as you and knew that OpenVPN was really the way to go, but they aren't and want to use silly protocols like PPTP or IPsec secured L2TP.

So I have to fix it.

@Jacob Well, that's because Windows makes those protocols easy (if not secure).

@MichaelHampton And we solved that issue, our Windows client does all the hard stuff for you.

@ewwhite IBM RPG?

@Jacob Yeah, I've heard of some white label OpenVPN clients for Windows.

2:03 AM

@Andrew You won't guess it.

@MichaelHampton This really just controls the OpenVPN program for windows, AFAIK we had it custom dev'ed.

@ewwhite I recall you complaining about something like that awhile ago.

Programming Language for Business

Programming Language for Business or PL/B is a business-oriented programming language originally called DATABUS and designed by Ozlem Datapoint in the early 1970s as an alternative to COBOL because Datapoint's 8-bit computers could not fit COBOL into their limited memory, and because COBOL did not at the time have facilities to deal with Datapoint's built-in keyboard and screen. A version of DATABUS became an ANSI standard, and the name PL/B came about when Datapoint refused to release its trademark on the DATABUS name. Functionality Much like Java and .NET, PL/B programs are compiled i...

@ewwhite ycuk

Datapoint's 8-bit computers could not fit COBOL into their limited memory

so it's the janky COBOL

and you look at why COBOL sucks:

@ewwhite Progressive Management?

2:07 AM

@MikeyB yeah...

not a produce customer...

@ewwhite No, it's even jankier than COBOL.

> The COBOL community has always been isolated from the computer science community. No academic computer scientists participated in the design of COBOL, with all of those on the committee from a commercial background or from government.
> ...
> Later, as COBOL became a mainstream language, COBOL suffered as university professors taught more modern, state-of-the-art languages and techniques instead of COBOL which was said to have a "trade school" nature.

but still uses the same software as my produce firms

soooo it's programming languages designed like most mobile apps: by amateurs

@MarkHenderson Reply (ensure the director is cc:ed) with "Excellent! I'm glad we agree on this." You're not claiming it as your own by any stretch, but it's juuust enough to peak interest.

2:09 AM

@MikeyB hmmm

@Jacob Wow, this is amazingly slow. Are half your customers on Amsterdam?!

@MichaelHampton Define amazingly slow?

21.9KB/s

@MichaelHampton Uh yeah, that's no good.

@MichaelHampton amsterdam.btc-vpn.com:8080

Might be Comcast

2:18 AM

@MichaelHampton That seems wrong...

Is that on the VPN connection?

@Jacob Yes, that's on the VPN

@Andrew Figures.

@MichaelHampton Can you try it disconnected please?

@Jacob In progress

Have you all seen Silicon Valley on HBO?

2:20 AM

@Jacob Hm, looks about the same off the VPN. I'll look for the problem elsewhere.

@MichaelHampton I'll get DC up so you can roll through that.

New York looks good

@MichaelHampton Cool. I assume that should get you around your Akamai issue.

@Jacob Haha. I already threw that in my hosts file...

@MichaelHampton So why use a VPN?

2:25 AM

@Jacob Other reasons.

I don't trust Comcrap any farther than I can throw them.

@MichaelHampton OK then. I won't ask anymore, though know that we have servers in certain locations like Moldova ahem especially for other reasons

@Andrew I've not quite got my head wrapped around that, but there's a number of presumptions in there that are just plain wrong... So I'm getting more skeptical the more I read.

@MichaelHampton I'm going to testout a proxy/"SmartDNS"(dumb industry term) just so that I can watch netflix on my flippin fiber.

@Jacob Speed on NY is close to native. Let me know when DC is up.

It's pretty frustrating to have 150mbps, and can't even stream a single show.

@MichaelHampton ETA 6 to 8 weeks.

2:32 AM

@Jacob Nononono. This is Stack Exchange. You're supposed to estimate 6 to 8 weeks. And be wrong by an order of magnitude.

@MichaelHampton I can arrange that.

@MichaelHampton What is your native?

and what did you get?

@Jacob Supposedly 27/7

Though I don't often see that

@MichaelHampton Cool. We have lzo compression on it may help slighty.

Mother FUCKER… guess we need to clean up our customer webserver.

# find /var/www/customers/ -perm +777 | wc -l
190823

@MichaelHampton You might like what we having down the pipeline then. Still have torchat?

2:37 AM

@Jacob This is what I get at New York

@Jacob Yes, I'm logged in

@MichaelHampton Not on that machine. need your address.

..or maybe I'm not

I think Tor got confused by my changing IP

@MichaelHampton icy7m4korntrjxq4

@Jacob Oh, you changed addresses

@MikeyB Hey that's agood idea!

2:44 AM

@MichaelHampton On my mac.

@ChrisS it was very much a back-of-the-envelope design; there's a video of the talk he gave on it

@Jacob Oh, OK

Can anyone give me a really quick rundown of HMAC? Wikipedia's article on it is a bit dense

@Andrew Because it's confusing

I don't even understand it; only how to implement it using someone elses libraries

82.193.99.33 - - [13/Apr/2014:04:29:12 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 51857 "http://randecan.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Digital AlphaServer 1000A 4/233; Windows NT; Powered By 64-Bit Alpha Processor)"

Looks legit.

2:46 AM

@MikeyB Please be real

@MarkHenderson Did you see my message before that? My find command?

@MarkHenderson but ultimately it's an authentication / verification mechanism, not an encryption mechanism

@MikeyB Oh dear {deity} that's rather fun.

@MikeyB I did now, btu I've no idea what it does

@Andrew Correct

Q: What permissions should my website files/folders have on a Linux webserver?

@MikeyB :/

64

This is a Canonical Question about File Permissions on a Linux web server. I have a Linux web server running Apache2 that hosts several websites. Each website has its own folder in /var/www/. /var/www/contoso.com/ /var/www/contoso.net/ /var/www/fabrikam.com/ The base directory /var/www/ i...

2:50 AM

@MarkHenderson It's a little OH GEE I WONDER WHY OUR CUSTOMER WEB SERVER IS SENDING SPAM

@Andrew Most of what you need to know is that the HMAC ensures the data it applies to hasn't been tampered with, and originated with the party that claims to have sent it.

@MikeyB O I C

@MichaelHampton so using it as a single-sign-on token is... ?

@MikeyB Do you know what the exploit was? Were they using Joomla or something?

@Andrew Um, good question? What's the rest of the design?

2:54 AM

@Jacob Let's just say it's a mishmash of phpmyadmin, wordpress, custom handwritten code…

@MichaelHampton also a good question, it involves a shared secret and a timestamp...

@MikeyB PHPMAHADMIN? WHY in dear {deity} are they running that? It's almost as bad as cPanel.

@Jacob Because NOOB USERS

@Andrew There should also be a challenge and a response in there somewhere.

@Jacob No no no, it's way worse. Cpanel has way fewer exploits because it's supported, paid, expensive software that the owners have an active interest in making sure that people can't bypass it

2:56 AM

@MichaelHampton the timestamp is to prevent replay attacks. it's over SSL (Microsoft, so no openssl?)

PHPMyAdmin is basically a remote shell that also happens to be able to have a MySQL GUI

@MarkHenderson If you only knew how wrong that statement was.

@MarkHenderson That is a true fact however.

@Jacob Yeah so sarcasam doesn't come over on the internet well :P

@MarkHenderson bwa ha ha ha good one

You heard about the incident maybe a year ago where a whole shitload of servers got compromised via cPanel technical support?

2:57 AM

@MikeyB Nerd humour :P

@MichaelHampton I was in the mess of it.

@MichaelHampton Hapless, un-trained employees giving out passwords?

@MarkHenderson I missed that bit

@MarkHenderson No, they kept the passwords of people who called in for support, and someone got hold of them.

@MichaelHampton Why were people giving them passwords?

Wait

2:58 AM

@MarkHenderson "hello this is ~~Microsoft~~ ~~Telstra~~ cPanel we need your password"?

4

Anonymous

@84104 I like hexadecimal BADF00D

Dont answer that

@MarkHenderson The wrong goes deep here.

"Oh, well we can just log into your server and fix it if you want...all we need is your password!"

@Andrew Someone else asked me for that. Trying to think

@MichaelHampton And lazy admins give them the root password

Rather than give them a temporary account

2:59 AM

Precisely

@MichaelHampton You have no idea how many times I was forced to give it to them, because boss didn't want to deal with it.

Web hosting man. It's terrible in terms of security

This is just one example of why I do not ever want to be in the web hosting business.

@MichaelHampton This, and the terrible margins

@Andrew At least it's a relevant problem, though I've seen discussions of the future of Bitcoin largely describing the system as having supernodes that handle all the heavylifting and thinclient ideology in the endpoint design. Still, scale is going to be an issue someday.

Anonymous

there's gonna be a lunar eclipse in america in the next hours

3:03 AM

@ChrisS I think part of the motivation was "it's too hard to get into bitcoin because you have a 13GB+ blockchain"

@PatoSáinz Really? D'aww wrong coast

ECDSA is going to be an issue as well, though not serious and possibly not for a while yet. I've poked at GGH and NTRU signature schemes as possible candidates for replacing ECDSA, but both have been found wanting. I do believe a Lattice based signature scheme is the best candidate.

@Andrew Eh, fire-up the client an let it run for a day (assuming you have a decent connection). Or send me some media and I'll sneakernet it back to you.

@MarkHenderson App hosting... that's where it is.

@MichaelHampton TBH I'm not the one designing it, and it's to get a login to someone else's system... it's not like it's financial data or anything OH WAIT YES IT IS

@ChrisS if you're really interested watch the video. I'm not particularly interested in bitcoin, but the speaker is a cool guy.

@MichaelHampton I see how it is...

:(

@MichaelHampton new cert,

3:08 AM

@Andrew Calculate a hash of a message (like SHA or whatever), then "encrypt" it with a crypto-key (like using your RSA pubkey). Since you have the privkey you can decrypt the hash, then rehash the message and check it to match. Alternately the sender could use their privkey in the signing, then anyone could verify the hash using the pubkey - thereby the document is checksummed (by the hash), and you know who generated the hash.

@Jacob OK, I'm up on the new cert

@MichaelHampton Can we not get that in the google index please?

@Andrew Ah - I'm somewhat "invested" in Bitcoin, so I'm quite interested in its shortcomings and potential solutions.

@MichaelHampton Oh it's pretty slow right now. No idea why. I'll have to do some complaining.

@ChrisS I know we're using a shared secret so I'll suggest some actual encryption. like bcrypt.

3:10 AM

@MichaelHampton Oh and paygarden.com You'll be able to pay with that too soon.

@Jacob You are? Upload's a bit slow but download seems fine

Not sure if they left you combine gift cards.

@MichaelHampton Must be VZ's full ports. My DL is pretty much 0 off DC.

the theory at the moment is something like : openssl( m, HMAC( k, (m+t) ) )? though surely the timestamp nonce needs to be outside the HMAC as well?

3:12 AM

Eventually I'm going to rent a cage( in a datacenter) to live in for the internet speed.

@Andrew Eh, bcrypt is a function for generating a hashkey from a password... So that probably wouldn't be a significant improvement over what you've got now. Would still be some sort of shared secret. (My apologies if someone has said all this, I didn't read all the backlog)

@ChrisS Pretty solid explanation, and pretty sure we all accidentally ignored him. Sorry @Andrew

@ChrisS sorry, meant mcrypt... blargh.

brain.

I dislike some of the Wikipedia pages for using all the Math technical jargon when the concepts can be fairly simple.

rijandeal or whatever.

au2.php.net/manual/en/function.mcrypt-encrypt.php

3:15 AM

Rijandael == AES

Well, AES-1 as it will likely become known when they think they need an AES-2

Truecrypt is secure (probably)

AES is still a stream cypher... Needs the same key on both ends. You get that by Shared Secret (not a great idea) or using a key agreement scheme like Diffie-Hellman in conjunction with a public key algorithm (like RSA, DSA, ECDSA - there are others, but those are the most popular right now, and with very good reason).

Great, a total lunar eclipse tonight and it's cloudy.

@ChrisS Though in some cases shared secret is a good option.

It's snowing here. I'll trade it for your "cloudy"

@Jacob Sure, if you've got technically clueless people implementing your system it's great - like WPA-Personal/PSK

3:24 AM

@ChrisS Really? It's going to be 25C most of the week.

@Jacob Yeah, we almost hit 20 this weekend. Now there's a 1/2" of snow on my deck.

@ChrisS I was thinking more where the key exchange was protected by physical security.

@Jacob Meh, until Quantum Computers break RSA and ECC I'll stick with public key... But an argument could certainly be made.

@ChrisS Yeah, sometimes the theoretical best stays as such.

@ChrisS Snowing? It was 78 degrees here today!

3:33 AM

Yeah, we started at 65 at midnight last night and dropped to the current 32, mostly in one 30 degree swing around noon.

@ChrisS Serious cold front

It's the Polar Vortex baby!

@MarkHenderson Bing has one particularly good use....

@ChrisS For people who can only get to URLs by typing them into a search engine?

3:42 AM

@ChrisS Ohyes, we're expecting that tomorrow night. No snow though.

Bing seems to be working perfectly for me.

@MarkHenderson reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/…

@ChrisS hah really?!

I took the Bing challenge. 4 for Google and 1 Tie.

They wouldn't say it on the Internet if it wasn't true!

NewEgg suck. They say that they start shipping to Australia but every time I add something that has international shipping promotion it deletes it as saying that it's not avaliable for shipping to my country

3:57 AM

NewEgg usually doesn't have the lowest prices anymore. Their sorting/filtering system is top notch, so I research there and buy elsewhere usually. Also the whole "other sellers" thing is super annoying.

@ChrisS Yeah I saw that

Also their prices are no better than going to the local chinese store here and buying it OEM

They used to be, but either their prices have gone up or ours have come down

In the past I b*tched their CSR up and down about having DHL as an option for delivery. I know they're good in other countries but DHL is f*cking horrible in the US. Took two weeks for a package to go from New Jersey to me; 750 miles, that's 2.2mph. Not during a holiday or shopping season either.

UPS has me pissed right now too. Taking 7 days to ship a small box from Oregon to me. The Post Office got me a package from Tokyo to my doorstep in <48 hours (still trying to figure that one out).

I used to live within 500 meters of the main distribution warehouse for Startrak Express here, and I would always be their last delivery of the day. Pissed me off so much, but they wouldn't let me come and pick it up in person

My package is in Illinois... It's been there since Friday and didn't move today. They think they're going to deliver it tomorrow though.. I not using UPS willingly anymore. This sh*t happened to me when I bought some servers last November, sat in a Texas warehouse for over a week that time.

@ChrisS That's pretty poor

I've never had anything sit in a warehouse for longer than 24 hours - but they don't deal with the volume that they do in America I'm guessing

Anyway non-issue, just found the video card I want on eBay. Second hand, 3 months old, local pickup from near me

Half the price of a new one

All those things are a sign that I should buy it

4:15 AM

@MarkHenderson totally go for it

@MikeyB I think so. And if I pay cash it has a WAF of "She'll never know"

4:28 AM

@ChrisS All shipping companies are alternately terrible.

DHL is probably excellent for someone a few streets over from you.

@Bob No, DHL is terrible across the US.... UPS used to be great, but they've had problems for the last year. I'm sure they'll get it together eventually. I've never cared for FedEx, but they seem to be getting the job done lately. The PostOffice has always been great, except in tracking your package. It's all a dark mess between endpoints, though they're trying to improve - I still get packages that appear on my doorstep before their website even shows the package was accepted.

@MarkHenderson Last time I ordered a card on ebay, it came via AusPost express ("Express Post Platinum"). I wasn't home. Instead of leaving it at the post office ~10 mins walk away, they took it back to the St Leonards distribution centre... so, 30+ mins walk + train -____-

@ChrisS I've also seen a lot of complaints about UPS and FedEx from Americans...

@Bob Yeah I used to live in an area where the postie wouldn't even bother trying to deliver the package

He would just put the note in the letterbox and drive away

Saw him do it

@MarkHenderson every other parcel, including international economy airmail, gets left at the door/letterbox or in the post office

Hahahaha I am amused by people doing google searches for 'female coupling' and ending up here

4:33 AM

that was the only one I've ever had go to the distribution centre

@Bob That is weird

@Bob Yeah, most of my complaints with UPS and FedEx are on-again/off-again.. So you're absolutely right on that account.

Thankfully the Baulkham Hills distribution center is literally across the road from my work. I can see it from my desk.

lol

WTF markdown

4:34 AM

@MikeyB Chat markdown.

@Bob The great thing about markdown is everyone has their own implementation with their own quirks.

@MikeyB Double Spud Coupling with Clamps - sounds kinky

@MikeyB Ya. I try to use GHM mostly, though.

@Andrew "Hello, this is the Internet. We need your password."

Chat markdown is some crappy regex or something.

4:37 AM

BTW everyone, for testing markdown: johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2

@MikeyB "My name is John, from MicroWindows8 support. We have detected a virus on your computer."

@Bob Is that shit still going around?

I remember I got that one back in about '06 and then I found it out was still around last year