Jason Copenhaver

I needed to send a package via FedEx the other day so I did a quick Google search for their number to schedule a pickup. It landed me on this wonderful page. Which, as of this posting, lists the number 1-800-22-6161 as the number to call to schedule a pickup. The astute reader will notice that it is missing a digit. (Note the missing digit isn’t a ‘2′, that is JCPenny’s number) I found another phone number for FedEx and was able to get my packaged delivered anyways. I also had the urge to be a good Netizen so I wrote them a short email letting them know there was a slight error on their website. This is the email I got back.

Dear Mr. Jason,

Thank you for writing to FedEx.

With reference to your mail, we kindly request you Contact us in Customer
Service Number on 1800226161, Mumbai 25708888, Bangalore 9880170000, Chennai
9840570000, Delhi 9818170000, you may also visit our website at
www.fedex.com or you may email us at inmaster@fedex.com.

Sincerely,
<name removed>
FedEx Customer Service,
Mumbai, India.

<name removed>
FedEx Customer Service Associate
Mumbai, India

Phone number : 91 22 25708888
Toll free number : 1800 22 6161
Fax number : 91 22 25700836

The important thing to notice is that they would like me to call them on the
same 1-800-22-6161 number. ohh well.. I tried..

Update: 04/16/2007
A reader pointed out that the FedEx page I linked to is most likely the FedEx India contact page. And the phone number has been changed to be a 1600 number rather than a 1800 number. My bad for not looking more closely. I’m a little surprised that it is the first page returned for “FedEx Pickup” via Google though. Maybe more people in India use FedEx than in the US?

I spend a lot of time on Linux and Windows and I enjoyed my first 20-20-20-Rule so much I wrote another one that works on windows. 

You can download the full installer here.  It is written in C# so if you don’t have .NET 2.0 installed the install will be a little longer.  There is also one glitch in the installer, sometimes when it goes to download the .NET framework it doesn’t work, just cancel the install and try again.  I’m not sure if the error is with NSIS or one of Microsoft’s mirrors.  I tried getting some of the NotifyIcon stuff working on Mono but NotifyIcon just plain didn’t work on my amd64, gnome 2.16, and mono 1.2.3.  I’ll have to give it another try after my next upgrades.  Enjoy.

I’ve read about the 20-20-20 rule at a number of websites now. For those that don’t know the 20-20-20 rule says that “Every 20 minutes you should look at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds”. This gives your eyes a chance to relax and if you actually get up to do this, blood flow might even return to your legs. I tend to spend too much time staring at my monitors so I thought I would implement something to help me practice the 20-20-20 rule.

I created the 20-20-20-Rule.py python script to display a small pop-up for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. If you click on the tray icon that is displays you have two options, “Quit”, obvious, and “Restart”, which is useful if you’ve been away from the computer for awhile and want to restart your 20 minutes.

You’ll need the notifiaction-daemon, libnotify, and notify-python packages for this script to work. All of those can be found at the Galago project page if your distribution doesn’t currently have them installed.