urgl
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The past 3 days have sucked immeasurably. Out of no where customers are coming forth with problems that are either unsolvable, very time intensive to solve, or extremely difficult to solve. And of course, all of them want their problems fixed immediately, with minimum to no cooperation or effort on their part. On top of that they're all complaing to their sales drone about the problem as if support isn't making any effort to help them, so I've got sales drones nagging me too. And for a grand finale Colin is peppering me with random questions. As a result, i ended up working about 15 hours yesterday. Today was a small improvement, as i've started to escalate some of the problems up to engineering for assistance. Just one more day, and then the long 3 day weekend. Hopefully i'll get a chance to relax a bit this weekend.<br />
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In preparation for Denise's trip back to Pennsylvania next month, she wanted to take her laptop with her, so that she could upload pictures from the camera. Unfortunately, our digital camera is a bit on the old side, and uses a serial cable to upload the pictures. Her laptop has no serial port, just USB ports. So i was forced to come up with an alternative solution. First I was thinking about getting a USB to serial cable, however they turned out to be on the expensive side. At that point I turned to a linux mailing list for advice, and a few people suggested that I get a USB smartmedia card reader. I took a quick trip to Fry's and found one onsale for \$9.99. Denise also asked me about how long the battery on her laptop might last if she was watching a DVD while on the flight. I didn't know, but the bigger problem is measuring the battery power. ACPI unfortunately makes that rather difficult on this laptop because its poorly implimented. So, i'm hoping that the ACPI support is better in a 2.6.x kernel, which means that I'm going to upgrade from Redhat9 to Fedora Core 2.