Joe's Random Ramblings

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but grinding they do...

Background: Back in late Sept. 2013, somebody drove into my car in the parking lot of the building where I live. My rear bumper was damaged and ultimately had to be replaced.
I thought, not a big deal, that's what insurance companies are for. As it turned out, the car's owner, the driver's mother (the driver was a minor) didn't pay the car insurance bills, so the insurance company had canceled the coverage. Talking with the car's owner proved to be useless, she was just screaming at me over the phone, and said, there are no witnesses, and it was my fault, anyway, etc.
So, I ended up filing a lawsuit against the car's owner, in small claims court. I won that case easily, on Jan. 29. The driver admitted to driving about 25 mph, and that in a parking lot. Way too fast, of course. And she contradicted herself several times, etc. It was obvious that the mother attempted to speak for her daughter (because she's a minor), but the judge shut her off pretty quickly (it would have been hearsay, and there probably had been some coaching, anyway.)

Of course, winning a lawsuit is just half the battle. Collecting the money is the second half...
The car's owner said she doesn't have the money, and even when I said, "installments are fine", she said she wouldn't be able to pay $250 a month, she could only pay $50. At that rate, it would take 1 1/2 years to pay it off, which I couldn't accept. So this went back and forth, with her screaming at me, throwing insults at me, and me staying cool
At some point, out of the blue, she proposed two installments, each being more than the $250 she earlier had said she couldn't afford... She had just gotten a nice Mercedes, so she must have realized that neither I nor a judge would take her claim of "not being able to pay" seriously.
So, we sign a contract stipulating the two installments, one in mid-April, one in mid-May.
Come mid-April, she doesn't pay. I was out of town the weekend when the payment was due, I contacted her when I came back, and she promised to pay the following Friday. And she actually did, to my surprise.
Come mid-May, she again doesn't pay. I contact her via SMS, she insults me, and says "it's only 2 days late." As if that was an excuse for her insults. The following day, she sends me an SMS saying she'll pay the following Friday. Of course, she didn't. She ended up being two weeks late on that payment.

I had some additional costs, e.g., for the process server, that I had intended to pay out of pocket, in the interest of a speedy resolution of the case. But with her paying me late, and insulting me when I inquired, I was not inclined to let go of these costs.
So, I filed additional paperwork with the court, claiming these costs, as well as interest. As was to be expected, getting her to pay these costs didn't come easy, either. It took another one and a half months for her to pay that.
But finally, all got paid today, and the case is finally, after 10 months, closed.
Whew.

This probably has happened to a lot of people:
You think you have backed up your files with tar, but when disaster strikes, and you need to restore the files, you find that your tar archive is corrupted...
This happened to me this weekend, and seeing the dreaded "bzip2: Data integrity error when decompressing" error (the tar file was compressed with bzip2,) I had pretty much resigned myself to an hour or two of hex editing to skip the damages files and stitch the tar file back together...

But the Internet to the rescue
It turns out somebody already did the hard work, and has a handy Perl script on his website to find the next file header in the tar archive.
So, all that needed to be done was to run the Perl script and then tail to skip the broken parts. The details are on the aforementioned website.
I had the good files out of the tarfile in a few minutes. This is why I love Open Source

Update: the author of the Perl script I used now has made available an even easier tool: repair corrupt tar archives ? the better way.

I have had AT&T's U-Verse service for a couple of years, and before that, the older-style DSL service.
While back in 2009, I had some problems setting up IPv6 tunneling due to crippled DSL modems, it has been working fine since then.

Fast forward to October 2013. AT&T rolls out a firmware update to their U-Verse routers.
And immediately, there are reports of this firmware update breaking IPv6 tunneling.
I had an online chat with AT&T support shortly after my router got the broken firmware, and they claimed that they are aware of the issue and "the technical team is developing a patch, which may remove the restriction."
Well, it is three months later, and still no patch forthcoming.
I called them again today, and in the 2 hours or so, nothing of substance was achieved. The AT&T support guys seems to know less about IPv6 now than back in October, much less about tunneling.
Like back in 2009, I may have to look for other, non-AT&T routers that actually work.
Not surprising, yet another AT&T Fail. These guys can only stay in business because they have a monopoly in their market.

And that in 2013. Maybe they should get an education, best at some other university...
http://guru.psu.edu/policies/AD52.html#pq=zjyLoP

Unless authorized by the Vice President for University Relations (who will consult with the University Licensing Committee on trademark issues when necessary), no company or organization may place a link on its site to any Penn State web page.

Facepalm.

Update: They have since changed their policy. I guess they got an education...

I just installed Android 4.4 on my 2012 Nexus 7.
I am disappointed that there is no option to select the ART runtime. Big fail.

Guess I am reverting to CyanogenMod and wait for their CM11 build, which will be based on Android 4.4.

And of course, the CM11 builds for the 2012 Nexus 7 include the ART runtime. Works great!