Tag: complaint

Nano Update – Day 12

Whew, am I behind.  I got a little behind on Thursday because we had a friend come into town.  Then I got a little more behind on Friday.  Then on Saturday I woke up at 4:30AM puking, I have no idea why, and didn’t stop until around noon.  After that, it was all I could do to just stay awake, much less write.  Then the wife of the friend joined him (she’s a friend, too, but it’s easier to say it this way), and we hung out on Sunday, so as of this morning, I was nearly 5,000 words behind the pace.  I’ve never been that far behind, unless you count 2004 when I only wrote 448 words on day one.

On the bright side, I’ve written 3,058 words today, and am only about to break for dinner.  The Monday Night Football game is going to be disgracefully bad, so I should be able to write through that.  And I’m only 1,741 words behind schedule now.  I can make that up this week.

This is why were killing the planet

I work on computers all day.  So do my coworkers.  This morning, I came into work and found someone had left some papers on my chair, which seems to be universal for “You should look at these”.  I, naturally, assumed it was something reasonably important.  Perhaps some security form I needed to fill out.

It turns out it was a printout of a sixteen page SQL stored procedure which my coworker printed just so he could highlight the 8th and 9th lines of the first page and write a little note informing me of something I did not ask to know, need to know, or want to know.

He had a bunch of options here.  The first one, and my preference, would have been to just not tell me at all.  The world would have continued to turn.

Second, he could have emailed me the stored procedure with a note in the email.  That would have been fine.  He could have come by my desk this morning and said, “Hey, open up that stored procedure.  See this line?  I changed it.  It works better now.”  I would have even been sort of okay if he’d printed out the first page only and made his notes there.  An unnecessary use of paper, but not egregious.

Anyway, now I have to recycle this stack of papers.  All so he could notify me of something I never needed to know.

I cant show you what we did this weekend

Stupid Comcast. They fixed part of our cable and internet problems. They’re claiming we have a weak signal. But our HD channels are coming in just fine. But we don’t get Comedy Central and the stations that rerun Law and Order: SVU all day, which makes the wife a little salty. And our internet doesn’t work at all. Which means I can’t post the pictures of our progress this weekend to Flickr. So, let me just say that our hallway/art gallery is looking fantastic. And it only took four drill bits and countless trips to Home Depot. We melted a titanium drill bit. I don’t know the chemical properties physical properties (Thanks, non-blogging-scientist-brother-in-law) of titanium, but you get the impression that it’s pretty tough, right? And you figure that melting it would be hard? Turns out it’s not as hard as you might think.

But it’s all finished now. The wife was putting a final coat of paint on this morning, and we’ll hang pictures tonight. Comcast is due back between 5-8PM to give it one more shot, so maybe I’ll even be able to upload pictures. If I do, you’ll get a sneak preview of the color we’re going to paint our bedroom next time we get a weekend with a little free time. I really like the color.

Joo-dish-oo-what?

Is this a DC thing?  Every time I hear someone on a Metro loudspeaker mention the Judiciary Square Metro stop, they pronounce it “joo-DISH-oo-wary”.

I don’t often take the Red Line out that way, so I don’t hear it very often.  But today something was going on there, and they made an announcement at Pentagon City while I was waiting for my train.

I’m home early, by the way, because Satan’s Cable Company, Comcast, is supposed to come out again to fix our tv and internet.  I was told the other day that they had to do some work outside, and no one needed to be home.  Apparently that was a lie.

I really hate Comcast.  The service is bad.  I hear they’re much better in Maryland, but in DC the service is not good.  The guy who came to look at our connections the other day was very pleasant, but he couldn’t fix the problem.

Anyway, if there was any real competition in the cable and internet market here, I would switch.  But there currently isn’t.  A neighbor is trying out the DirecTV and Verizon DSL route.  I’m going to have to see how he likes it.  I’ve had bad experiences with satellite tv, and I’m sure Verizon is going to complain if I ask for DSL without a Verizon phone line (Although I think they have to provide it).

So, I’m at home, using my wireless internet card from work.  It’s AT&T, and it works occasionally.  Actually, the card says Cingular on it, but Cingular doesn’t exist anymore.

And now I’m just rambling, which usually means I should just stop and hit “Publish”.  So I think I’ll do that.

Net neutrality is not net neutrality

Obama pledges Net neutrality laws if elected president | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone via Boing Boing

Net neutrality, of course, is the idea that broadband operators shouldn’t be allowed to block or degrade Internet content and services–or charge content providers an extra fee for speedier delivery or more favorable placement.

Actually, net neutrality is a problem that would just go away if we had real broadband competition in the United States. Techdirt repeats this ad nauseum. Broadband operator_ should_ be able to offer different levels of service for different prices. In fact, they do now. No one seems to think that Verizon offering a cheap DSL connection, then a more expensive fiber optic connection, is a horrific affront to the fundamentals of the internet. And broadband operators should be able to prioritize content.

If people really had choices in the broadband market, this would cease to be an issue. Provider A could degrade whatever they wanted, and Provider B would step in and take all their customers. Look what’s happened in Japan, when they forced sharing of infrastructure. OMG, fast cheap internet! And competition! Without net neutrality laws!

I won’t blame Obama for this – I imagine he has good intentions, but isn’t getting the whole story. The rest of the Democrats are right in line with him on this, too, so it’s not just his mistake. It’s just funny how people want to promote the freedom of the internet by adding regulation to it.  And, frankly, I think the Republicans are mostly against it as a knee-jerk “no regulation is good regulation” sort of thing.  I doubt they actually took any more time to understand the issue than the Democrats did.

Whats with the spam?

My Akismet spam filter on the comments here at Complaint Hub has been letting me down lately. In general, it has been fantastic. It’s caught about 8,000 spam comments since I started the site, and only caught maybe three or four real posts. But lately it has been holding more and more spam comments in moderation, emailing me and making me tell it that the comment is spam.

Some of what it’s been letting through are quite obviously spam. The latest was a brief message and then forty links to hardcore porn.

I hope this means that Akismet is just nearing the next step in their release cycle, and the spammers are getting better at fooling the filter, but all will be back to normal soon. I hate captchas, and don’t ever want to use one here, so a filter like Akismet is a necessity.

If Dante were writing The Inferno today, what circle of Hell do you think he’d put the spammers into? I’d throw them into the Eighth circle with the panderers (a person who serves or caters to the vulgar passions or plans of others (especially in order to make money [source]). There they would walk in a line, being whipped by demons. That seems appropriate.

Curse you, rain

Well, not really.  We need the rain.  But it’s messing up my weekend.  We have flag football on Saturday morning, and my mother-in-law will be in town from far away, and wanted to see the game.  My mom was going to come from less far away, and everyone was going to watch.  But since it’s been raining for two days now, and isn’t expected to stop until Saturday afternoon, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll be able to play.

This probably also doesn’t help the wife’s plans to take her mom around the city tomorrow.

On the bright side, it’s been so long since I’ve actually seen rain that it was really kind of nice.  It wasn’t raining that hard when I was outside, and it’s still warm enough to be pleasant.  As I was waiting to cross 16th Street yesterday, I watched the rain run down the windshield of a Ford Explorer that was blocking the crosswalk as the light was changing.

As I stood there watching, I wondered if anyone had ever uttered the phrase, “The warm rain running down the windshield of your 1993 Ford Explorer is hauntingly beautiful.”

Then I wondered if I had accidentally ingested some drugs without knowing it.

But then I decided that it’s just my subconscious getting ready for Nanowrimo.

Anyway, we need the rain.  But it sure would be nice if the fields were dry enough to play on this Saturday morning.

Seriously, Ubuntu

_I’m sort of live-blogging my Ubuntu install.  The following would probably be more interesting if it actually, you know, worked. _

So, we just finished some delicious Saag Aloo, and now I’m going to install Gutsy while the wife watches Law and Order: SVU.

I’ve got a black screen so far. That’s not good. BTW, I’m writing here on my old laptop while I install on the new one. Just FYI.

I just got a warning, telling me that Ubuntu is running in low graphics mode. That’s not cool. I chose 1440X900 from the “generic” monitor resolution list. Now it’s running local boot scripts. This doesn’t seem good. I was kind of hoping it would just boot up without my input. I’m staying postive, though.

I just ctrl-alt-deleted. It wasn’t doing anything.

I tried the default 800X600 resolution this time. Now it’s running local boot scripts again. I’m not optimistic.

This Live CD stuff just isn’t working. I’m downloading the alternate install cd now. I’ll be back in an hour or so.

Gutsy or Bust

So, I’m going to install Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon. It’s going to be awesome. You may have already seen my guide to getting 7.04 onto a Lenovo Thinkpad T61. Well, this time I’m doing things a little differently. First, I’m going to try the Live CD install rather than the alternate install, because I just have faith that it’s going to work. Then, I’m completely blowing away Windows. Vista is stupid, and I haven’t missed it since I got the Thinkpad. Which is good, because I broke it installing 7.04.

Anyway, I’m going to install a second partition for my /home folder, which lots of people say you should do. And everything is going to be awesome. I just know it.

First of all, though, let me complain about downloading the stupid ISO. I tried it yesterday, release day. After two hours, I was at 2%. I killed it, and tried again later. No dice. I even tried wget from the command line, thinking that maybe without whatever overhead Firefox introduces to the process, it might be better. No dice. So I tried again today. My ever-helpful brother-in-law (I should probably write down the euphemisms I use for my various brothers-in-law so I can keep them straight, but whatever) suggested that I might have better luck with BitTorrent. That seemed like a good idea, since a huge number of users slows a download but speeds up a torrent.

No dice again. Why? Because Satan’s ISP (Comcast) has decided that P2P=BAD for all values of P2P. Never mind that what I’m doing is downloading totally free software and saving them bandwidth at the same time. I mean, I won’t get into illegal downloading and all that. But what I’m trying to do is TOTALLY LEGAL and encouraged by the creator of the intellectual property or whatever we call software these days. But Comcast can’t allow it, because some people use P2P for illegal things. Up yours, Comcast. If it wasn’t for your dirty monopoly on cable internet here, I would have cancelled your service today.

Anyway, my laptop is currently sitting two feet from the router, plugged in by wire, because my wireless is being finicky and I don’t have any long ethernet cables anymore. It’s maybe 1/3 done with the download.

If all goes well from here on out, I’ll have this working tonight. If all goes as expected, I’ll polish off this bottle of scotch trying to get it to work.