Taste of New York

Today, a couple co-workers and I went to Taste of New York (TNY) for lunch. Its a new pizza joint in down-town Sioux Falls. Ordinarily, such trips as this are not worthy of writing about, however today it was.

In an effort to avoid the painfully unnecessary details that preceded the events that ultimately transpired, I'll give you two key pieces of detail that are relevant: Brian's cheese pizza was burnt, and I was in the restroom when the first offensive was launched.

Picking-up with me returning from the bathroom, the mood at the table had clearly changed since I had left. I asked what was up, and Gochal said that he'd explain later, that he just wanted to leave. SO, we all got up, and started to the door.

As I approached the counter to settle our tab, the manager called out to Brian, who was leaving the building peacefully at this point, and said, "The next time you want a free lunch, go to the food pantry!"

I was stunned. Totally didn't see any of this coming.

Brian, understandably upset, shot back, "are you f'ing kidding me?" Which was all the manager needed to launch into another salvo of back-and-forth with Brian. Ultimately, Brian left saying, "good luck with your next job, 'cause you won't be here long."

Having not yet paid, I was waiting awkwardly with Brock while the manager fumbled with my card. This was the point at which things got VERY uncomfortable for me.

Brock asked if she had any tooth-picks, she did not, and was very quick (and rude) to tell him. At this point, Brock says nothing.

As she continued to ring-up our bill, and riff against Brian to Brock and I.

"Your friend has a problem," she said at one point.

After several of her salvos, Brock finally pipes-up and says, "I think two people may have acted inappropriately today." He said this in a very non-confrontational tone, the kind of tone you use when you're trying to correct your grandmother about how old you are.

She proceeded to riff against Brian and Brock, at which point Brock and I simultaneously turned to each other and said, "maybe only one person."

She finished taking our money and promptly asked both Brock and I to leave.

I have never, in all my life, witnessed customer service like this. Not only did she alienate a customer who had a legitimate grievance, but proceeded to alienate two paying customers who had DONE NOTHING WHATSOEVER.

I will never be back there again.

Notify ODS command-line utility

Linux has this nifty little notification system that is grossly under utilized. According the the folks over at Canonical, they're working to make most applications support this handy little interface called Notify OSD. I wanted to leverage this facility to notify me when snort had triggered on something, so I wrote a pynotify -- small python script to allow me to interface with Notify OSD, from the command-line and/or scripts.

The potential here is enormous. If you have scripts that run in the background, but that you need to know when they're done, you can just call this little puppy and get notified in an ultra cool way. Feel free to mangle this into other things. It should be pretty straight-forward.

wajig

I recently came-across wajig while looking for a way to show the suggested packages for an installed package. The short story on wajig is that it is basically an abstraction layer for various apt and dpkg utilities... and its works very similar to apt-get except has additional directives that allow you to do things like install the suggested packages for a package, or install the recommended packages, or install both the recommended and suggested packages, or find out what package a file belongs to, etc. Its very slick, check it out!

TrueCrypt -- OpenSource File Encryption Goodness

I've been working with a number of customers on data security needs lately, and it occurred to me that I haven't been practicing what I preach about data encryption. SO, today I jumped in with both feet and installed TrueCrypt, an open-source file cryptography utility that will help me keep my data safe should my laptop be lost or stolen.

D-Day & Patriotism

You may have noticed on Saturday that there were a lot of flags being flown. You may have even known why they were out. In case you didn't, Saturday was the 65th anniversary of D-Day -- the day that Allied forces landed on the European main land to re-take the continent from Germany. Today I saw an interview with Arthur Seltzer, who was one of the thousands of brave men who landed at Normandy. Arthur's story is compelling beyond words. No words I could write-here would do it justice. Please watch the Interview with Mr. Seltzer here.

When you're done watching, have your kids watch it. Have your parents watch it. Have all your friends watch it. Show it to complete strangers.

We - as a nation - fail, too often, to appreciate the profundity of the sacrifices made for our Freedom. And while I'm seldom the gushing patriotic type I'm damn proud to be an American. For all our cultural foibles and political faults, this is still the greatest nation on the planet. God Bless America!