The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

I have returned from Pittsburgh, having stayed an extra day to celebrate my mom’s birthday with her. I return with whatever bug my grandma has… I feel like I’ve got ebola. But I am eating soup and relaxing on the couch with my favorite person this evening, so I expect to feel a little better in the morning.

Speaking of Tom, and holidays, every year his mom sends out Advent messages via email. Due to a death in the family, Tom is sending them out for her this week, but you can view them online/add them to your RSS reader here.

BTW- if anyone was wondering about the PPG Christmas tree I referred to the other day, the top image in this article is a drawing of it.

Okay! Offline time is NOW. And not later.

After work today, I’m taking off for a holiday weekend with the family in Pittsburgh. Expect blogging to be light-to-nonexistent until Saturday, when I will return to broadband.

I’m unusually excited about going home for the holiday this year- the last holiday season was my first one so far from home, and I skipped out on Thanksgiving to go to London, and I only got to be home for less than 24 hours for Christmas due to my stingy employer. Scrooges. So this will be the first time I’ve been able to relax and enjoy the holiday traditions in 2 years.

My extended family is still pretty nuclear. With the exception of a couple of aberrations, myself included, everyone lives within easy driving distance of where they grew up. My grandparents went to high school in Clairton, PA and lived there until just a couple of years ago, when they moved a mile or two away into another town. My parents got married in Tennessee where they went to college, but settled in Clairton, and until I was 20 we lived next door to or across the street from my grandparents. My father’s sister and youngest brother each live in neighboring towns with their families. My father’s other brother lives in Tennessee with his wife and family, but he still manages to make it back once or twice a year. We all have Thanksgiving together. My grandparents, my parents, my aunts, uncles, and cousins. My grandparents’ siblings and their kids and grandkids often come too. And it’s not just holidays- sometimes there are spontaneous gatherings- cookouts on Labor Day, dinner when our cousins from New Jersey come to visit. Excuses to get together and harrass each other and eat food (this is the Italian side of the family, after all).

That stuff often drove me nuts when I was a teenager and in college and thought I was too cool for my relatives. Sometimes, they still drive me nuts. But I love ‘em. And they love me. And that’s what I’m going home for. And that’s why I just can’t wait to get on the road.

We’re a living, breathing Olive Garden commercial, my family is. When you’re here, you’re family.

So, Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Have a blessed holiday. Eat until you are sated. Fall asleep watching football. Forgive the things about your family that drive you nuts and enjoy them because they’re yours. Because like Stacey says, that’s all there is to it. The rest is drama we create.

I was mentally pondering the stuff I had to do before taking off for Pittsburgh tomorrow- charge and sync the iPod, charge the phone, pack the camera charger, make a playlist long enough that I won’t have to change it before getting home, etc…

You know, in the scheme of things, it wasn’t ALL that long ago that when people planned to go on a trip, they would sit on a horse or in a buggy for hours or days with no music other than what they could sing. Or maybe they’d pack a trunk and get on a train, with no entertainment other than a book and whatever they could see out the train window. Certainly no way to contact anyone unless they planned to pass by a telegraph station.

But no, not me. I am truly a child of my era- cell phone, digital camera, portable music player. For a three day trip, half a day’s drive away.

Of course, in the old days, people often carried guns with which to fight off marauders on long trips. I don’t have one of those- trusting instead in a cell phone and the locks on the 2-ton steel box I drive- but I imagine my dad wouldn’t mind me adding one to my collection of things to take on trips.

But I hope to get some photos of the PPG Christmas Tree while I am home.

Just in time for the holidays, Slate gives us… Amazon’s Customer Service Number!!

An interesting article on a study showing discrimination against people based on their names.

So, my company uses Salesforce.com to manage leads, sales, customers, and the help desk. We run most of the company on it. I liked it because it’s an ASP, and is therefore more or less cross-platform, which meant I could use my PowerBook.

Until today. Salesforce released an update over the weekend, and it broke lots of stuff. We can’t export large reports, etc. And the mail merge functionality, which I used nearly every day, was broken, but just on the Mac. Why? It’s only supported on Windows 2K and XP.

So I call them. The developers say it was never supposed to work on Macs and it was a fluke that it ever had. Basically, their solution is for me to buy a whole new computer and use an entirely different OS just so I can use THEIR product, which is supposed to be cross-platform.

But, I protest, it worked just fine before the new release. It wasn’t supposed to, it’s a Windows-only feature. Never mind that it’s a core functionality. Never mind that a feature that worked last week is broken this week and they’re calling it an “upgrade.”

But the thing is, there’s no reason the mail merge function can’t work on OSX. After all, it had been working just fine. This is just developer laziness- they don’t want to take the little bit of extra time to support a non-Windows platform. And while Mac users make up maybe 4% of computer users, we’re spread out across a lot of companies. Salesforce tracks marketing efforts- it doesn’t occur to them that there might be a Mac-using designer in there somewhere?

Idiots.

And in case anyone is wondering, yes, I did try spoofing my Mozilla user agent to look like Windows/IE. It didn’t fool Salesforce. Going to try spoofing Safari’s agent next.

UPDATE: I managed to get the first step of the merge working in both Camino (Mozilla) and Safari by user-agent spoofing. I can get it to let me choose a document to merge, but it won’t actually load the document after that. I’ve tried it with and without having Word open at the same time. It’s not that the data merge fields are incompatible, at least at the time I uploaded the templates, because they were all done on the Mac.

Julia has been to London and Rome and has now returned. I sigh in exquisite jealousy.

Jury recommends death for John Muhammad. Tiffany is inclined to agree. Joseph is inclined to rant about legalized state murder, but we love him anyway.

It’s Number Portability Day! Yay! Don’t forget to wait until the end of your current contract.

Bill Gates on spam. Hah. Hey Bill, how about making the spam filters in Entourage NOT suck?

A hilarious deconstruction of the “Happy Jack” Hummer ad.

Dear US Corporations: Far be it from me, a raging capitalist pig, to tell you not to outsource jobs to India and other nations where the costs of doing business are lower. I’m a fan of globalisation and labor market competition. However, think long and hard before you take these outsourcing steps, because the first rule of being a capitalist pig is this: You get what you pay for. Love, Tiff

Presented without commentary.

Mmm, whale.

Hooray for the Second Amendment.

Yes, I just gave you four links that appeared on Fark. Sue me.

Finally some more attention on just how badly retailers use their fitting rooms.

I hate fitting rooms.

Note to retail-chain operators: A good start would be to think about how you’re lighting your fitting rooms- not using the least flattering lighting possible would likely result in increased sales.

Tom and I threw what has become our annual Early Thanksgiving Dinner. We did turkey, dressing, and mashed potatoes in Tom’s kitchen, and asked people to bring things that they enjoyed making or that were traditional for their families.

We had three different kinds of sweet potatoes. Not to mention a number of other fascinating things people brought.

The party was an unqualified success. Now we have to fight off the triptophan coma to go do the dishes.