This morning I have an Oracle show in Rochester at the Hyatt to attend so I had to get up early and drive up to the city. For a change, this show actually had a full breakfast included (a nice buffet at the hotel, eggs, breads, meats, juice, coffee, tea, etc.) I got there just in time, got breakfast and went into the show. The show only ended up lasting about an hour and a half. It was supposed to be a bit longer than that. But they show didn’t end up being super applicable to me so I wasn’t disappointed. They did a good job, it just wasn’t really geared towards me all that much.
After the show I headed on over to the hospital to catch Eric at work. We took off and went over to Bruegger’s for some coffee (anything is better than Starbucks!) We ended up getting bagels and eating there. I worked out of the hospital for the rest of the day and didn’t get home until almost 4:00.
Eric came over after work for a little while because we have a project that we need to get some work done on and we had to make some phone calls that are much easier to make from the house than to make from the office. So he hung out for about an hour.
Andy’s order of Visual Studio .Net 2003 arrived today… sort of. It turns out that the place that he ordered from, Softwaremedia.com, isn’t a real company and in fact is a racket that takes garbage, throughs it in a box and charges $600 for it. What Andy received was mismatched bits of different products that are neither what he ordered nor legal. He received some CDs that he was able to install the product from but did not receive a certificate of authenticity nor a license. That means that the CDs are worth exactly the amount you can get for the plastic once you melt them down. The media set from Microsoft costs only about $10 but has a certificate of authenticity to make them legal. You still can’t install them legally but at least then you could go get a license for them. But these discs were totally worthless. And it was obvious that the thing was a scam. The discs were not legal to begin with (by the way, this is called software piracy and the amount that was stolen from Microsoft was about $2500 which is way into the grand theft range) but they also just came as discs, not box or books or anything which you get quite a bit of with that product. It was a total scam. If he had wanted to steal the product he could have easily used a peer to peer network to steal it or at least spend $10 (1/60th what they charged him) and get the discs from Microsoft. At least for $10 the discs themselves would have been legal even if the install wasn’t. Then just as a kick when he was down, the jerks charged him extra to guarantee morning delivery but only had regular delivery put on the package so he had to wait all day after paying extra for it. And it wasn’t FedEx’s fault because it was standard delivery that was marked by the company on the package. What a problem. So now Andy has to figure out how to deal with being robbed of $600 and what to do with a company that is a blatant piracy operation preying on people who are not familiar with how the licenses and certificates work.
Min cooked dinner tonight. Shepherd’s Pie and bread pudding for dessert. I know, you all wish you were me!