Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Saturday, 22 February 2003

# 12:55 AM

dmv follies

I got a letter from the DMV yesterday. "Your vehicle registration is incomplete," it said, "you didn't provide proof of insurance." Er, what? I thought. I distinctly remember including that.

So I called them up. After a remarkably short period of phone tree navigation I got through to a human. "It probably fell out of the envelope and got lost," they said. "Can you fax us a copy?" I did that, called them back this afternoon, and they tell me they got it and my new stickers are in the mail.

I tell you all about this mainly because it was a couple orders of magnitude easier to deal with the problem than I was expecting. I thought I'd get to spend an hour or so on hold and then be informed that my alleged insurance carrier was not licensed to do business in California, or some equally catastrophic pronouncement.

superfluous technology

I seem to be sending a fair number of faxes lately, and my friend Vynce mentioned that he had a combination fax machine/ansaphone which was looking for a home. So now I have a fax machine. I used it to send the aforementioned proof of insurance to the DMV, so it works on the sending side, and I think I have properly programmed it so that human callers get the answering machine mode. (I'd like to apologize in advance to any of you who have occasion to call me, and get squawked at.)

However, it smells of ammonia — not enough to be a problem when sitting on the desk, but enough to be unpleasant to use. I can think of plenty of ways to clean it, but they all entail dunking it in liquid, which is not exactly a wise thing to do to an electrical appliance. Suggestions from the floor?

teeth

My dentist tells me I have a choice of getting my wisdom teeth removed, finding an orthodontist who will put braces on them and realign them properly, or continuing to bite holes in the inside of my cheek for the rest of my life. None of these options exactly appeal. Ugh.

absolute power! mwa ha ha ha! ...not really.

The GCC Steering Committee has granted me global write privileges over the GCC source tree.

(Donations to the Weinberg for World Dictator Fund are cheerfully accepted and will be used to buy beer at the upcoming developers summit.)