I received a postcard.

( Fucking scammers )

( Background info & facts )

So, O Internets, I humbly request an answer to these questions:

1. Can I deposit the check WITHOUT waiving my rights to sue them for the $743.17 they owe me? (I need the cash.)

Suppose for example I write on the check:

"This check is deposited under protest, without prejudice, and with reservation of all rights of the payee against the drawer of this check pursuant to UCC § 1-207 for an unpaid remaining debt of $743.17, and explicitly denies any accord or satisfaction to waive this remaining debt."

... and then deposit it WITHOUT endorsing it, either at my own bank or at theirs (Citibank).

1b. Can I write that, and deposit it WITH an endorsement, and preserve my rights to sue?

2. Can they conditionally refund my deposit in the first place? IIRC there are laws requiring that deposit be fully returned within a certain period of time; that I dispute the amount they have given me should not waive this requirement.

3. Can they legally countersue me for the ENTIRE amount of carpet installation that they admit had only 25% life expectancy remaining, despite a) not having given me receipts, and b) having not listed the full amount on the itemized deposit deduction statement? According to http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/sec-deposit.shtml citing Civil Code Sections 1950.5(e), "normal wear and tear" cannot be charged; this includes specifically a "useful life remaining" rule.

4. According to http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/sec-deposit.shtml citing Civil Code Section 1950.5(g)(2), they are required to have given me copies of all receipts unless I explicitly waive that right, which I did not do. I did not receive any even when I explicitly asked for them. Does this increase their liability to me?

5. According to http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/sec-deposit.shtml citing Civil Code Section 1950.5(b)(3) and 1950.5(e), it is illegal to routinely charge each tenant for cleaning carpets (among other things). However, my lease contains a clause EXPLICITLY requiring this as a nonnegotiable deduction from the deposit. I believe this also falls under 1950.5(m). Does this create an additional liability, openness to injunction to cease, or liability for punitive damages?

6. According to http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/sec-deposit.shtml citing Civil Code Section 1950.5(l), if they act in "bad faith", then the court can order payment of the full amount of the deposit plus double that amount as a "bad faith" penalty. (This would total 3463.17 in my case, still under the $7500 limit of small claims court.) Do the events described here constitute "bad faith"?

7. Their letter to me a) does not include the receipts I requested; b) claims that they could countersue me for the entire amount of the carpet installation [contrary to #3 above]; and c) is obviously intended to initmidate me against suing them for the amount I believe I am owed. Is this illegal, and if so, does it create a liability?

8. They are located in a different county than I. Can I sue them from a local small claims court, and/or can I do so entirely by written declaration?

9. Is it worth taking them to small claims court over this, all told? How likely am I to collect the amount I believe they owe me; collect more for damages, interest, punitive damages, etc; or to contrariwise be ordered to pay THEM additional money for what they claim? (Which, AFAICT, is exclusively the full amount of the carpet.)

10. Anything else I should take into consideration?

Thanks in advance,
Sai

P.S. On the moral question: they've been total assholes to me and others throughout my tenancy. The only qualms I might have had about suing would be about the two former managers who were total sweethearts, and who were forced to resign recently by the aforementioned assholes. So I have no qualms whatsoever about this; my question is exclusively one of whether it would backfire on me.

( CA Civil Code 1950.5 )

So rmpalpha offered me his ex's Sidekick 2... and I tried to see if I could get an unlock code for it.

The short answer: no.

The long answer: we don't want to 'cause it's tmobile exclusive and you can't make us so nyah.
( Conversation via IP Relay (with a friendly RO, omg) )

*stops banging head against desk in favor of dinner and sewing*


In other news, my apartment manager gave me a letter saying that to get my parking restored, I would have to submit an inspection report from an official Acura dealer oil change to prove that my car is drivable.

This is several MONTHS into things. Last time I talked to her she said nothing about it. And after I drove my car off the lot. And submitted requests 2-3 times 'cause she "lost" them.

What started it? I had to replace my battery. I fixed it by buying a battery at the local shop, and replacing it myself. And gave her a written notice that yes I had fixed it. She did not find this to be adequate proof that I had done so, nor was the fact that I could drive the car off the lot. (Which I did when they threatened to have it towed... for not being drivable.)

At this point I think she's just being intentionally obstructive.

At least I'm leaving soon.

Went to the fabric store today to get some stuff for the kilt. Fusible interfacing for the waistband & beltloops, linen to act as structural interfacing, cotton for pocketses.

So I asked for some help finding the right materials. The lady had some suggestions...

Fusible interfacing? She gave me a light knit white fusible cotton. (I got a black woven midweight fusible cotton.) Also, being told that all interfacing "feels the same" when I ask whether something I'm pointing to is light, mid, or heavyweight? Not helpful.

Linen? She suggested a linen/lycra blend. (WTF? The whole point of the interfacing is to be stiff, not stretchy! I got the stiffest, crease-holding-est stuff I saw that still felt good.)

Cotton? I specifically said "something light and very tightly woven". As she repeated that she gave me a heavy, very coarse weave cotton. Coarse enough that I could see the holes in the weave from a couple feet away. Again, WTF?

I don't know whether the lady I asked for help was incompetent, uber hurried, or misandristic... but the selections she suggested were all significantly wrong, even though I explained pretty clearly what it was for and showed her the kilt-in-progress.

Hmph.

I still like the store - it has a lot of neat things - but the service, for me at least, has always sucked to the point of being useful only for pointing me in the approximate direction of where I might find the right stuff.

I wonder if this is what women get when they try to get anything computer or mechanics related.


On the plus side, I called ilyx while there and got much more cogent & helpful advice. :-) Huzzah.

Also, I now have fabric and can continue kilt-making. Huzzah again.

Now to see if I can st^H^H take inspiration from SeV pocket designs...

Just took it.

Let me say that was probably the single most insulting test I have ever taken. I would be embarassed to give that to 7th graders, let alone grown adults with a college education. Seriously.... *long division*? Asking me what 3/4 equals in decimal notation? WTF? And complete bullshit PC essay questions. Ugh.

I'm tempted to write a nasty letter to the CBEST people demanding my money back and compensation for my wasted time.

Is the state so desperate for teachers that the pass rate on such a test is still on a bell curve? If so, that's pretty damn depressing.

Winamp crashed after trying to play this file (or maybe the one after it, hard to tell). Why? Windows media DRM which I told it to say fuck off to. Evidently it wasn't happy with that.

I thought the number was amusing.

(Side note: I’ve been half-’terping almost everything as I’m listening. Oy my sorry ASL vocabulary. But I’m glad at how much I *do* manage to get.)

Windows has symlinks. It hides them though. Hides them very tricksily it does.

Which is a FUCKING PAIN IN THE ASS behavior when a backup folder is riddle with hidden hardlinks (sorry, 'junctions') to the REAL, CURRENT file structure. NOT APPROPRIATE. Backup folders should be easily and SAFELY deletable.

*finger to whoever decided not to give Windows decent integrated symlink display and editing* (seriously people. 'properties' should NOT lie to me about location or the fact that it's not really a real folder it's actually a hardlink to another one that ISN'T supposed to be deleted)
*cheer to toranin and the people who wrote things to get around it*

I have found one more error that implies it's Apache's fault:

3 pepsi:~/mdtem.com$ ruby current/public/dispatch.fcgi --trace
Status: 500 Internal Server Error
Content-Type: text/html

[error 500 HTML message snipped]

In tail of production log:

undefined method `downcase' for nil:NilClass
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.12.5/lib/action_controller/request.rb:18:in `method'
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.12.5/lib/action_controller/base.rb:933:in `log_processing'
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.12.5/lib/action_controller/base.rb:407:in `process_without_filters'
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.12.5/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:377:in `process_without_session_management_support'
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.12.5/lib/action_controller/session_management.rb:117:in `process'
/home/trevgunn/.gems/gems/rails-1.1.6/lib/dispatcher.rb:38:in `dispatch'
/home/trevgunn/.gems/gems/rails-1.1.6/lib/fcgi_handler.rb:150:in `process_request'
/home/trevgunn/.gems/gems/rails-1.1.6/lib/fcgi_handler.rb:54:in `process!'
/home/trevgunn/.gems/gems/rails-1.1.6/lib/fcgi_handler.rb:53:in `each_cgi'
/home/trevgunn/.gems/gems/rails-1.1.6/lib/fcgi_handler.rb:53:in `process!'
/home/trevgunn/.gems/gems/rails-1.1.6/lib/fcgi_handler.rb:23:in `process!'
current/public/dispatch.fcgi:34


The "undefined method for NilClass" error is here in the Ruby lib:
# Returns the HTTP request method as a lowercase symbol (:get, for example)
def method
@request_method ||= @env['REQUEST_METHOD'].downcase.to_sym
end


Which in turn means that @env['REQUEST_METHOD'] is returning null.

Which really Should Not Happen.



EDIT: Interesting. Running REQUEST_METHOD=GET HTTP_HOST=mdtem.com REQUEST_URI=/ QUERY_STRING= ./public/dispatch.fcgi does work. It generates the correct HTTP/HTML response (a redirect to login) and hits the production server log like it should.

Whereas running ruby ./public/dispatch.fcgi generates error 500 per above.

Edit 2: Or it might be FCGI's fault. I still don't know.

Some of you unix geeks pls help I am about ready to strangle my server.

I deploy my app using Capistrano. I run the following in after_update to set perms:

run "chgrp -R #{group} #{release_path}" # just to make it pretty
run "chmod -R go-wr #{release_path}"
run "find #{release_path}/ -xdev -type d -exec chmod a+x {} ';'"
run "chmod -R a+r #{release_path}/public"
run "chmod a+x #{release_path}/."

Erratically - I seriously have no idea what it's tied to - after deploying, or after poking at it manually, the app does not work. Nothing in server logs (production.log, fastcgi.error.log), only this in the main apache error log:
[Wed Dec 13 05:12:30 2006] [error] [client 208.106.21.7] FastCGI: comm with (dynamic) server "/home/trevgunn/mdtem.com/current/public/dispatch.fcgi" aborted: (first read) idle timeout (120 sec), referer: http://mdtem.com/user/login
[Wed Dec 13 05:12:30 2006] [error] [client 208.106.21.7] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server "/home/trevgunn/mdtem.com/current/public/dispatch.fcgi", referer: http://mdtem.com/user/login

... which really ain't very helpful beyond saying that apache is trying to run dispatch.fcgi which is good. But it's hanging, timing out, and then generating error 500. Without any log or dump that I can tell of what it's hanging on, and I don't know any way to *make* it give me one. Running strace ruby dispatch.fcgi was not edifying (except to show that it generates MASSIVE amounts of file-not-found errors when trying to find files by trying to open them in each of a bunch of library etc locations before finding the actual file in my app path), and showed no eperm events.

I have tried re-deploying - same exact code mind you, .htaccess included, etc - and manually setting ther perms with the exact same code as above.

I did this about half an hour ago. It still hung. Then, as I was bitching to toranin about that fact - without having changed anything else - bang it starts loading and I see it hit the server log on my tail.

W.T.F.

Any ideas why this would be happening? It seems to be totally random, and I really don't like my server uptime being totally random. And it doesn't always happen either - it was out all yesterday on the same code without magically poofing into workingness.

All the dirs to it are a+x; all dispatch files are a+x; everything server wise (e.g. .htaccess, dispatch.cgi/fcgi/rb, svn, mysql, etc) is set up with the same files that I've been using since a month ago so that can't be it.

I'm really rather frustrated at this point.

Right now it is working fine, and that is good (esp. since the boss is giving a demo of it to one of the big bosses tomorrow morning).

But not knowing why it is working now when it wasn't an hour ago is Not Good.

Help please?

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.mspx?&lang=en&cr=US&guid=&sloc=en-us&dg=microsoft.public.windows.vista.administration_accounts_passwords&p=1&tid=280ea24b-e0f6-4391-a679-6498611eabd9

*very irritated*

And I don't know how to fix it either. GRRR.


EDIT: Some debugging and numerous BSODs later, I've determined that it's coming from my wired internet connection. I disabled it and have had no crashes since. No idea how to fix it though, since it's already on the latest driver revision. :-/

But it's not practically much of a burden, assuming my wireless doesn't start suddenly dropping out. Which it used to do, actually. Sigh.

*reinstall reinstall hack hack*

(Karen = my TA, who graded the term paper. Lakoff = prof. Hinton = department chair.)

to: Karen cc: George Lakoff, Leanne Hinton

Karen -

I've taken a little while to get around to this given other pressures; sorry.

I would like an explanation of why I got a grade of 9/20 on the term
paper. Given that the grade rubric attached to it is completely blank,
and there are ony four lines of commentary, it is rather difficult to
tell what I was marked down for.

I have a copy of the version submitted to the department, btw; I can
easily send you the entire scan of it if you like.

Thanks,
Sai
a.k.a. Ilya Starikov