Matt, M.S.

I had two roundtrip tickets to Myrtle Beach, SC for noon today. We were just going for a few days to blow off some steam, and bought the tickets a week ago on a whim. In blows this gigantic record setting snowstorm and 2’ of snow. The normal snowfall around these parts is around 3” per storm.

I spent most of the day yesterday shoveling the driveway in anticipation of flying out this morning. This morning comes and I look out the window and see that our road is still not plowed. I head out in a feeble attempt to shovel into the road!

If this wasn’t enough our kitchen sink starts leaking all over the floor and we’re out of kitty litter. We have two cats and the idea of them without clean litter for a few days makes my head swim of ruined carpets.

We realized that everything was seemed to be conspiring against our trip. Not one to tempt fate (and hey, I doubt we’d get out of the driveway), so we decided to eat the tickets.

I wish tickets were refundable when these types of circumstances occur. It’s no one’s fault, but I still lose $500.

30 minutes into a call to Travelocity… I hope something can be worked out!

Ah, Ohio.

UPDATE: 50 minutes into the call I’m told that I cannot cancel the reservation as the flight is on time and I also cannot move the reservation as I’d already checked-in online (when I thought I might be able to make it, hours ago). So I’m out $500. What a fucking racket. I wish I could get away with keeping money for non-rendered service. I was so frustrated that I did the retarded guy thing and slammed my fist down on my desk. I broke the center drawer whilst doing so.

I’m going to bed.

This was taken just a few minutes ago in Columbus, Ohio. It was sunny and clear about ten minutes before. Joy!

Scratched my head for a tick when I noticed that Ruby’s Date::strftime doesn’t include a ordinal formatting option (eg. “January 1st, 2008”). To get the “st/nd/th/rd” in the formatted output, do this:

date.strftime("%B #{date.day.ordinalize}, %Y")

Hope this helps someone out there!

Just a quick note to say that RESTful_ACL has been updated. This latest version supports securing non-CRUD actions. It’s a slight cop out of sorts; essentially if the user in question can read an object, they will also be able to do the non-CRUD action. It’s not the best solution to the problem, but it will work for the moment. Maybe there is a slick way to pass in a function name as a hash/block thing that I’m not sure of. Hrm.