Got up later than anticipated. Failed to send something I needed to before leaving for work. Failed to bring parking permit to work. Got far less done than I hoped to. Got a crash dump I've been trying to get to send to Sun for a while... and managed to erase it. Will be out later than I hoped for dinner, because lunch was late. Need to do laundry when I get home.

Calgon, take me away!

My day didn't start out well either. Got a call on the Unix consulting line from an internal tech helping his customer. He wanted a graphical partitioning utility in Red Hat 9, so his customer "didn't have to deal with that command line crap in fdisk". After finding no way to reinvoke DiskDruid once the install is complete, I left him woth no solid answer for the rather rude way he was asking for help beyond "There are some third party ones out there". This guy wanted me to call Red Hat for him, since he didn't believe my answer of "No, it dosen't include one".

Day got better though as the local Windows admin idiot who took over for someone who did a decent job had a rough day. The machine that he runs to connect our test network to the corporate one died (Hung at "Starting Windows" on boot). He got it back up after pulling a CPU and replacing a NIC, plus a W2K repair. But, the networks still wern't linked. As far as I know, he still didn't get it fixed, for who knows what reason. I got some good Linux jabs in on him today, and still find it humerous that it takes me one iptables command to do what he couldn't do with his "much easier to administer" OS.

cfdisk

Don't worry - I won't tell.

He wanted a graphical partitioning utility in Red Hat 9, so his customer "didn't have to deal with that command line crap in fdisk". After finding no way to reinvoke DiskDruid once the install is complete, I left him woth no solid answer for the rather rude way he was asking for help beyond "There are some third party ones out there".

Amusingly we recently discovered that the rh9 installer has been "fixed" in such a way that fdisk can no longer be run, and you *must* use DiskDruid.

I hate DiskDruid.

My Monday involved calling a collection agency to sort out a $1400 debt to Cedars-Sinai, who, after being given my insurance (covered 100%) info, made no effort at submitting a claim, but just let it go to a collection agency -- despite my insurance company calling them 6 times in two and a half months.

Grrr....

Anyone here know what sort of legal options I have against Cedars-Sinai?

I had that happen with an auto glass claim. The idiots at the auto glass place sent me a bill about 6 months after the work was done. Then I would call the insurance company they would tell me they would take care of it. A few months later I would get a bill again. This repeated 3 times. I think it's been paid now.

I hate DiskDruid.

All praise fmthard and his minion prtvtoc!

Does DiskDruid (which I also hate based on the approximately three times I've used it) at least show a to-scale representation of partitions. I've always found Window's Disk Management control panel/snapin's partition graph size randomness to be particularly inexplicable.

Yup, that's the same story. They've sent me about three bills. Normally I'm a "mistakes happen, don't sweat it" type of guy, but they had two and a half months, and Cedars has been totally incompetent with the whole deal -- they couldn't get the proper form to print, then they gave the old "the claim is in the mail" line, then "it's been updated in one of our computer systems, but not the other, and I have to get the supervisor to update that system." Supervisor obviously didn't, and Cedars is, apparantly, no longer taking calls from my insurance company.

I wonder if there's a class action suit in here somewhere...

On a converse note, I worked two at least twelve-hour days last week, worked on Independence Day, and about six hours all told over the weekend in order to get a pair of servers installed and documented for Monday. I fully expected to be snowed under with support calls all day.

I finally had to call them to make sure that they were working on it. No calls at all.

And I got a piece of software (SAPGUI for Solaris) from another team that I'd asked for about five weeks ago. (This required that they take the time to pick it up off their desk and hand it to a courier. But that, in itself, requires that at least one of them remove his thumb from his ass.) And I got it working with almost no documentation.

And a binary distribution of Mozilla worked for me on my Solaris workstation for the first time in about 5 official releases.

Of course, my boss didn't show up until about 4:30PM, so I didn't get my timesheet signed until late and I probably won't get paid this week.

cfdisk

Ahh, good to know. Noone in internal IRC knew this one either. Of course, we don't officially support 9.0 anyhow, and I was checking a 7.3 box.

Of course, we don't officially support 9.0 anyhow, and I was checking a 7.3 box.

I regret to inform you that your excuse of checking an older version of Red Hat is insufficient, since cfdisk has been around since at least Red Hat 1.2.13, as evidenced by this email from 1997.



(Although, to be fair, it was removed from Red Hat at some point prior to 7.2 -- Aug. 27, 2001 if I'm reading the util-linux RPM changelog right. I don't know if it was ever re-included in the RH distro.)

I wonder if there's a class action suit in here somewhere...


Probably not. But there IS pretty effective action you can take.

Write a letter to one of the administrators of the hospital. The letter would be something like this:


"I have an outstanding bill with your hospital that has not been paid because of incompetence by your accounts receivable department.

"It has come to my attention that this bill has now been turned over to a collection agency.

"Please be aware that if my excellent credit standing is damaged in any way as a result of your ill advised and precipitous action, I will hold Cedars Hospital civilly liable.

"I would appreciate it if you or one of your staff could call me at (213) 555-1234 within the next 48 hours to resolve this matter, after that it will be in the hands of my attorney.

Sincerely,

Mr. Canuck

cc: Fuku Sumi, Attorney at Law"


Then, go to your bank and try to take out a mortgage loan or business loan or other large amount, making sure that the loan is denied because of the bad credit report caused by the collection agency.

How far you want to take things after that (whether to just resolve the bill, or go ahead and sue for damages) is up to you.

tanstaafl.

Hey, that's a good idea. I'll hang onto that thought. I have been thinking about re-financing my truck...

Thanks.