Archive for October, 2007
I really hate Comcast
October 30th, 2007 • 2 comments chatter
Our internet has been up and down — mostly down — since Saturday and we’ve probably called half a dozen times to be told it’s a problem on their end and that a technician has to come out. Last time this happened, they (well, Adelphia right before the 1-2 switch to Comcast) somehow had my MAC address of my modem in their lease database incorrectly even though it’d been working without issue, and no new DHCP leases, for nearly a year. That took a week to get resolved and the technician that was supposed to come out never came out, shocker I know. Now we’re told our modem is getting a weak signal from their HE and someone needs to come to our apartment to fix it. Why not fix it at the HE, or head end, since the problem lies there? Friday’s the best they can do on getting someone out here and we work from home, that isn’t going to cut it.
So we spent today doing a bunch of nothing but watching movies on TV and trying to figure out why ICMP/DNS/FTP work but HTTP/SMTP/POP do not. Then we go out to waste time and see if our Best Buy has one of the rumoured Rock Band demos up but they didn’t so I just played Guitar Hero 3 instead. Then we headed to Borders which was a waste since they’re so poorly organized I couldn’t even find a person to talk to. 20 minutes later we’re at Barnes & Noble and I’m picking up All The Rage by Aaron McGruder, mastermind behind the comic strip The Boondocks (and writer of the award-winning TV show). I also picked up the first mass compilation of Boondocks strips so I could catch up on what the TV show and the new book would leave out. Good stuff. After a blatantly wasted half hour or so at Circuit City and dinner from Whole Foods, we arrive home to magically working Comcast High Speed Internet, sans a technician.
Wonder what the issue was? No clue and I’ll be the tech that might show up on Friday won’t know either. I was also greeted with another email from my boss telling me how to do my job although, he’s not even sure what I really do but he’s got to tell me how to do it and how I was wrong to potentially cause bad PR from a guy who called my entire department “stupid” and “unprofessional” amongst other slanderous things while we all maintained polite composure and tried to be diplomatic. It’s always about the bad PR and potential loss of income, not how your employees feel after being verbally demeaned or how well they do their job 99 times out of 100. No, we’re just worried about the (already) bad PR and (pre-existing huge) loss of income (which would amount to $25/mo. It’s really a huge loss, I know).
I gotta find that new job already. My resume needs a little updating.
day 2 with the new sidekick lx
October 26th, 2007 • chatter
So this is my 2nd real day with my new Sidekick and I’m loving it as much as I did my old sk2. This is what the sk3 should have been, not that plastic piece of crap it is. Everything’s been improved to the benefit of the users, except I do miss having the ssh application but i guess that there was no real demand for it.
I’m posting from my sidekick instead of making a tweet since most of the WP interface actually works in this ultra slimmed down version of Firefox. I would’ve never tried this on my sk2 since its browser was terribly slow and rendered javascript horribly. Not to mention loading the admin panel over GPRS would’ve taken at least 5 minutes then it’d just error out anyway.
Now only if they’d really open up the SDK for users to develop apps that might be useful instead of pushing a handful of crappy apps down our throats for a few dollars. Why is the Myspace application a $3/mo recurring charge? That’s just beyond me. I want something useful like the ssh application was but I know that’s not the crowd that Tmo markets to. Unfortunately to get the dev kit, you have to fill out silly paperwork and get approved instead of just being able to make apps people will probably want…like a streamlined blogging interface that hooks into your popular script’s XMLRPC API.
Now that’d be popular with the demographic of this thing.
I missed you, Sidekick
October 24th, 2007 • 1 comment chatter
Today I was finally able to pick up the new Sidekick LX which I’d been waiting for since my Sidekick II died months ago. As politely put by a T-Mo rep who’s a friend of my girlfriend “it was a Fisher Price toy phone” in reference to the piece of junk Sidekick 3. Well put, I admit. But today was the day I finally got my hands on the shiny new LX and I’ve remembered all day how much I loved this phone.
This phone is what the SK3 should’ve been: sleek, updated with what the customers actually wanted (MMS messaging after 3 years!), much improved screen, I could go on. I’m so happy it’s out, Jess is too since I surprised her with a new phone today as well (she bought my original SK2 so many moons ago). Now I’m getting rid of my Dash since it only a replacement until the new Sidekick came out.
Now as soon as my Gmail accounts get IMAP, everything will be splendid.
The ‘buzz is in
October 23rd, 2007 • chatter, hookah
I just received a shipment of new hookah supplies:
This Starbuzz shisa is already smelling up the entire office and it’s still wrapped wholly in plastic and in the tub. I can’t wait to smoke this later.
Movies and books
October 22nd, 2007 • 2 comments chatter
This weekend turned out to be rather fruitful in that we actually got out of the house to do something other than buy cleaning supplies or similar! We saw 30 Days of Night yesterday, after waiting months for it to come out. It was gory and gruesome, I loved that aspect of the movie. I also liked the way it was directed in ways similar to how the graphic novel has its art direction going (long ground-sky pans, lots of overhead action). I really liked the movie and thought it was an above average role for Josh Hartnett. However, I do have one big problem: why were all of the Vampires Eurotrash birds? And by birds, I don’t mean women but their thoughtless gazes and movements mirrored that of a bird or a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. Not to mention they all looked like Bat Boy from the gossip rags (giant black eyes, piranha-esque teeth). I think that’s my only issue with the movie. These vampires were supposedly from a long line of vampires that have roamed the planet, brutally murdering entire towns at a time (that seems kind of silly in the vampire ethos, I know guess they’re gypsies), and apparently only spoke some language that sounds like Jewish Klingon with some Russian here and there. They weren’t this dumbed down in the novel, at least from what I remember. I still give it 8/10.
I also bought two books: The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs and The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. I’ve heard good things about both and I can attest to Jacobs’ book being quite hilarious. I’ve only gotten two chapters into it but it’s written, at least from the start, by an agnostic Jew so that can only mean laughs abound.
This was a great weekend since it was both Gaby’s birthday and the BR561 meeting. Both Stankdawg *and* Dr^ZigMan showed up! At the same time! Needless to say, it was a very long night at Holloways/ZaZen. Fun none the less though.
Yay we’re home
October 15th, 2007 • chatter
Just got back about 15 minutes ago from Orlando. We went to Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights. To say the least, I was utterly let down by the “scariness” of these haunted houses. I’ve got horror movies scarier than anything I saw tonight (besides some of the atrocious fashion!) and it was more funny than anything else. We actually got to Universal shortly after the park opened for HHN but it took us another 90 minutes (!!!) just to get parked and in line for our first haunted house, I couldn’t believe it took so long just to park and walk what amounts to about a mile and a half. Hell, paying for parking took 30 minutes alone. Unless something incredibly awesome comes along next year, I doubt we’ll be going back. Not only is it expensive, it’s nearly 7 hours in the car!
Jess didn’t find anything really scary either and she was pretty primed to scream like a baby. It was surprising since she doesn’t like to be scared by things that jump out at you but she hardly flinched at this kid stuff. Massive places like this should learn that shuffling thousands of people through a haunted house, per hour, won’t make much of anyone scared. You get pushed through these places like cattle so they can get more people in and out instead of going through it in small groups of <5 in order to heighten the fear factor. That's how places like Sloss Furnace in Birmingham, AL do it and they do it right. Plus having a haunted house in an actual abandoned factory-cum-asylum helps a lot.
Oh well, time for bed and nightmares of how cheesy this trip was.
OK nevermind….
October 12th, 2007 • blog, tweets
Last weekend, I sent a few tweets while we were at the Sonata Arctica show but I just realized that none of them actually showed up here, like they should. The error_log provided by Cpanel does little to actually offer helpful information, I’ve dealt with the problem at work quite a bit but never got a real definitive answer as to “why” the error occurs aside from some lame local resolver issue.
Now they’re showing up. This is why I hate my server company and their crappy backbone.
Hm, my server doesn’t look lik…
October 12th, 2007 • tweets
Hm, my server doesn’t look like it wants to get my tweets 
Shisha flavour updates, pt. 2
October 12th, 2007 • 3 comments chatter, hookah
I finally got some quick lites and decided to give the Tangiers another shot. This time I used some cheap Chinese finger coals that Berge gave me to try, they didn’t look like much but burned very hot (no idea what brand they were, the logo was in an “Arabic” dialect that neither Berge nor his wife could read although both can speak Arabic). He was told they last for a long time which if you consider 50 minutes a long time then they live up to the claim. The coal was a regular square shaped silver-coated finger coal, scored into thirds (most are scored into quarters) and broke easily.
I packed up my Tangiers Small Funnel but I over zealously packed it and ended up wasting a little shisha after the coals were done. This time I got billowing smoke plumes for at least 35-40 minutes, even when the coals were nearly the size of a dime. That’s the greatest asset of this bowl: it gets extremely hot (hotter than my glazed and unglazed ceramic ones) so the shisha stays very warm the entire time you’re smoking. But like last time, the smoke was harsh but had a thicker tea flavour. Soon I’ll try using some halved Three Kings 33mm discs to see if I can get the heat just right. This was a more “productive” outing than the last time I smoked the Tangiers but I still got harsh smoke.
I did manage to figure out that all those times I was busy poking a hole in the middle of my foil for air to flow down the funnel was a waste of time. I believe the mixture of the heated air through the central air hole I made and the outer air rings I’d put in the foil were just counter-acting each other by mixing flavourful shisha smoke with hot air straight off the coals (and it got more charcoal in my stem than I wanted!). I’ll be nixing that extra hole from now on and figuring out a different foil pattern for Three Kings.
