who and write failing

[MR ZenWiz]

Hi, I'm new to xfce and xubuntu, though I've been in ubuntu for more
than a year and a half and I'm a CentOS and Unix veteran for decades.

I moved to Xubuntu because I cannot stand the Unity, GNOME 3 or GNOME
Classis gdms - they have too little flexibility for me and xfce has
exactly what I need with minimal hassle.

When I was using Ubuntu 10.10, I had a shell script to produce a
message of the day for me that I kicked off with my crontab so the
message would be up on my primary terminal window when I got up.  The
script would look in a 'who' output to find the first pts terminal I
was logged in on and send a message there.

Two problems have arisen since I moved to Xubuntu 12.04 (today):

1) 'who' displays nothing at all.  With 'who -a', I get this:

$ who -a
           system boot  2012-06-16 12:57
           run-level 2  2012-06-16 12:57
LOGIN      tty4         2012-06-16 12:57              1081 id=4
LOGIN      tty5         2012-06-16 12:57              1087 id=5
LOGIN      tty2         2012-06-16 12:57              1094 id=2
LOGIN      tty3         2012-06-16 12:57              1095 id=3
LOGIN      tty6         2012-06-16 12:57              1097 id=6
LOGIN      tty1         2012-06-16 12:57              1317 id=1

This is not helpful as you might guess.

2) Worse, write does not seem to work at all.  If I write to myself, I
get a message that I'm not logged in.

What am I missing?

MR ZenWiz

PS: Is there a way to turn the clock sideways so it displays
vertically in a vertical panel?