Magic Zipcar Bike Guy

On Saturday I took a trip out to Sudbury. I figured I'd get there by Zipcar, so I reserved the car behind the Davis Square Brooks Pharmacy from noon to 4, bussed to Davis, had burrito at Anna's, and found the car. The car opened up fine, but wouldn't start. So I called Zipcar and said, "the car won't start!" The person on the phone ran me through his tech support checklist -- is the wheel locked? can you turn the key? does waving your card at the card reader help any? -- and finally concluded that the car was, in fact, having issues, and that there was someone about ten minutes away that they'd send by.

So I'm sitting in the car, expecting the magic Zipcar tow truck to come by. And since I'm by the end of the bike path, various people are going by, some on bikes. One person rides by on a bike, but pulls up in front of the car instead of behind and gets off; I figure out that this is, in fact, the Zipcar person. He plays with the car, tries to start it, disconnects their boxes and tries again, finds an inside light that got left on (oops) and determines that low battery is the cause of the failure.

The Zipcar guy gets out of the car, goes over to his courier bag, pulls out this smallish battery with jumper clamps and jump-starts the car.

Zoom!

Things I didn't do over break

I was going to update the firewall on my gateway machine at home to use iptables and set the source address on outgoing SMTP packets to come from the tunnel address, rather than the "normal" external address, so those packets don't get dropped by RCN. I was also going to put some energy into Debian things, and totally failed to. (Though it looks like some angry mail started getting exchanged between people not me over my packages, and the right answer might just be "go back to a year ago before everything got messed up". I wonder if it's easy to do that with cvs-buildpackage, and if it's easy to do that with Subversion.)

In positive news, I at least got to getting train stuff, finally, so now I'm exercising my meager woodworking skills. Yay rolling critical failures.