| Tuesday,
December 26, 2000
The perils of ecommerce...
Dr. Pournelle, I'm on day two of trying to buy an audio receiver from
buy.com. The first problem was that they ship only via UPS. No USPS
option. I live in an area where UPS doesn't deliver -- in fact I'm not
even certain that there is a street address here. Usually I have items
shipped to my PO Box and pick them up on my next trip into town. Since UPS
won't or can't deliver to PO Boxes I have to give them my undeliverable
address (really a description of where I live) then wait for UPS to call
me to tell me they can't deliver to me, then I have to go to the UPS
office at the airport to pick up my package. Since I live in Hawaii UPS
only ships here by air so I end up paying extra for this
"service". I decided to buy the receiver anyway so I went
through the process of making a buy.com account &; ran across some
problems: The CC is billed to my PO Box. It has to go there since I don't
have a street address. This is different from the semi-fictional shipping
address so I was warned that this would further delay shipping if buy.com
had to verify it. The server kicked back my order because I had spelled my
town "Kailua-Kona" instead of "Kailua Kona". The order
description defaulted to a quantity of 2 &; standard (ground) shipping.
I changed the quantity to 1 and the shipping to 2nd day air and hit the
update button. This time it kicked back because they didn't offer standard
shipping to Hawaii. Surprise! When I had hit the update button it
automatically figured the shipping fee with one item at the ground rate
and ignored the fact that I had just changed the shipping method to 2nd
day air. I persevered and changed the shipping method and resubmitted, and
got kicked back again, this time because "You are trying to add or
change to an email address that already exists. Please try another email
address or check your spelling." I logged out, quit netscape, started
netscape up, went to buy.com, logged in to my new account and went through
the same rigamarole I went through earlier -- find the item, click on
"buy", reduce the quantity from 2 to 1, select 2nd day air. And
again I got the error: "You are trying to add or change to an email
address that already exists. Please try another email address or check
your spelling." And the secure servers are s-l-o-w. I give up. I'm
going to second hand store to see if I can buy an old 8 track tape player
instead.
-tgs
Sorry about the lack of
paragraphing, but I have grown weary of hand inserting paragraphs. Please
double space between paragraphs and make life easier on me. I
long ago gave up ecommerce if I can get it at Frys, Good Guys, Electronic
City, Circuit City, or someone in an alley down in Studio City. My
exception is Amazon which makes it easy to do business with them. The rest
make it an endurance contest and they can provide me an 800 phone number
or do without my business.
CONSIDERABLE mail on restoring
settings after a server crash (see column for December 25, 2000 at
www.byte.com):
I had a very similar problem to what you found. And I was able to
restore my settings. Here is how.
1) Logon to the machine as the local administrator. 2) Right click on
the start button and explore. This will place you in the correct branch of
the directory tree probably c:\documents and settings\adminstrator\start
menu 3) under c:\documents and setting you should see jerryp and probably
jerryp.chaosmanor or something similar. 4) the jerryp folder is likely all
of you old settings.
at this point you could delete the second folder and rename the old on
to the new name. I chose an alternative. I made a copy of my old settings.
Went to user admin, and deleted all of the usernames. I then recreated the
one I wanted. After that, I copied my old settings to the new
"documents and settings" folder. I have my disk partitioned into
multiple drives and had to reauthorize my account to use it and remove
access by a lot of funny names.
That did it.
Gregory W. Brewer Flow-Cal, Inc. Energy Software Solutions (281)
282-0865 mailto:gregb@flowcal.com http://www.flowcal.com
Hi Jerry,
Just read your article on losing your settings. They're still there
under C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\JERRYP. Your new profile will become
something like C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\JERRYP.001 or other. Just log on
as administrator or some other admin user and copy the Desktop, etc, from
JERRYP to the relevant JERRYP.001 sub-directories and viola, everything
should be back in place!
Merry Christmas! Tony Wong
Of course I have reset all of them
by hand by now, but this is what I needed to know. And thanks.
Dear Mr. Pournelle:
The only thing possibly less reliable than a Western Digital HDD is any
modern cartridge tape backup system. I have almost never seen these things
work. When you really need them, that is. Like a few other peripherals
(almost anything USB running under Win32 comes to mind), they always seem
to follow an inverse proportion of reliability::necessity.
Just my opinion, of course. I enjoy your column immensely and I always
have.
Lawrence Rhodes
That do seem to be the case. Better
to mirror the disks. And build a box of drives as a backup server...
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