This weekend has mostly been about failures. Originally I had planned a simple shot over the bow at Apple and AT&T for their seeming inability to figure out how to enable 3G connectivity for customers whose primary billing address is a post office box. While not catastrophic in scope, it just seems like the address I use for… ummm… everything else, including paying my AT&T Mobility bill every month, should be acceptable for other billing purposes for the same company. After 48 hours, a few convolutions, and eventually finding a workaround buried in an iPad forum, the issue was resolved without needing to change my billing address. If anyone else is having the same issue, ask me how it worked out and I’ll be happy to pass along the info. It mostly involves telling AT&T a little white lie. No one has any problems with that, right?

The next fail, is more the epic of the weekend. It involved a levee “failure” that ended up flooding the naval base where I work. I use failure in quotations because that’s a cop-out term that means you don’t know what happened to it (i.e. breach, overtop, etc). However, I digress. The result was a reported 4-5 feet of water inside the wire that effectively swamped the entire base and conflicting reports of how much, if any, water actually made it inside the building. Not to make light of the situation, of course, but I do wonder if anyone else has been struck by the irony of a landlocked naval base taking on enough water to basically put it out of commission. I’ve also noticed, without the irony, that the single best source of information about the situation there has been the base’s Facebook page, that has had regular official updates as well as innumerable unofficial observations contributed over the last day and a half, where other official and unofficial sources of information have been almost silent on the situation. I’m suddenly seeing more value added to Facebook than as a wonderfully engineered time waster and advertising venue. That it’s doing a better job of keeping the communication flowing says something less than good about our in-house infrastructure.

And finally, Winston came home from the kennel with a “hot spot” on his neck. Think weeping open sore (and accompanying nasty stench) and you’ll sort of get it. He’s on prescription antibiotics and a cortisone spray, but his neck looks especially nasty. Thankfully he doesn’t seem to be scratching it, so hopefully the meds will do their thing and he’ll be healed up in due course. Just one more of the many joys of pet ownership I suppose.