Category — Rant

Still hate AT&T for those of you who were wondering.

Yup, hate them with a passion.  Too bad UVerse is better than that piece of shit TWCable.

Still, I think I’m going to dump them in favor of a good book.  Bastards.

Just when you thought it was OK to like the French again, they go and screw it up with this crap.

If passed into law, the legislation would deal very harshly with any form of file sharing, be it video or audio. Alleged offenders will first receive an e-mailed warning, followed by a registered letter, and lastly with a 3-12 month suspension of internet service. The law will also prevent users from switching ISP’s to avoid punishment, and even public hotspots will contain filters. Additionally, home users will be required to lock down home networks, and will be legally responsible for its security.

In return the French will start receiving DVD’s in a more timely fashion, and music DRM will be drastically scaled back.

Now, I haven’t downloaded copywrited stuff in quite some time – not since I had a DVR installed, found Hulu and got a Live account with my new XBOX.  But, in the past, I did a fair amount of downloading of “catch up” episodes for TV shows that I missed – something that I still consider a “gray” area of use.  Of course, by the book, it isn’t “gray” at all – its illegal.  In fact, I’m actually glad I don’t have to do it anymore.  Truthfully, for a show that I really enjoy, I’d much rather pay $2 an episode than wait 3 days for a crappy quality download only to find out that it is dubbed in German.

Still, this bill scares the crap out of me.  I can’t believe people would be willing to give up their freedom for early access to entertainment.  Still, in socialist France, maybe the people actually aren’t, but the politicians are… One of the few things that I like about Obama is how tech savvy he seems to be.  You almost have to have personally bought content and been frustrated with trying to actually use it where you want to really understand this stuff.  Out of Obama, Biden, McCain and Palin, I would have definitely picked the O-Man as the one most likely to have done so.  Still, given his politics, I’m not sure that this will help us any.

One day, people will have the ability to have their own networks and crap like this won’t happen.  You already see it in big companies – very large WAN infrastructure that never actually touches the internet.  Some day that will spread to people, and you’ll have co-op networks that are completely private.  Its the only answer to crap like this and only technology keeps it from happening today.  I’ve personally knows folks who all live in the same apartment building that have wired their apartments together – not for the purpose of circumventing copyright law, but simply for the ability to share information and infrastructure more easily.  Why have four home servers when one shared one does the job for 1/4 the price?

Of course, in the current State-of-the-Tech-Union, you could only do that with people you implicitly trust.  One day technology will make that unnecessary – just as our current internet security technologies make it relatively safe to surf the net.  I think even the telecom companies would like that, as it removes them from having any liability whatsoever.  You’d still pay a monthly fee for your “line” – but it would likely be a simple direct link to the next person up the line, or something similar.  You may have private line aggregators that take a monthly fee from a number of people to allow for more bandwidth, etc.   Don’t get me wrong – this would likely be in addition to an Internet connection, but I think there is a pretty good chance of it happening at some point in the future.  It would take a ton of cash, a lot of technology and a critical mass of people, but its is indeed possible.  I’d call it a Private Public Network or PPN.

For those of you saying “impossible” – just remember that one dude, Linus Torvalds, started the unstoppable wave that became Linux.  Its amazing what can happen when fed-up people buck the status quo and go off and do something on their own.  Linus didn’t try to start a revolution, but his idea was so good that it happened anyway.  It may take years or even a decade or two (work on what became the Linux began in 1991), but it CAN happen.

Mark my words.

Well, AT&T and I have made up.

Not willingly mind you, but I’m bound to them through the shackles of a corporate contract that is completely out of my control, so what can I do?

Surprisingly enough, even though my email to AT&T bounced back to me, apparently someone was listening.  I was contacted via email by a Premiere Customer Support agent who apologized profusely for my inconvenience and mentioned that they would forward my complaint on to their management (who, I’m sure, will take it very seriously… yeah, right!).

Anyway, glad that someone had heard my whining, I happily replied thanking them for contacting me, explained to them about the email bounce and then asked if they could contact me to help me upgrade my phone to the BlackBerry Bold.  I figured they had kept me on hold so long, someone could call me this time.

Well, wishful thinking.  They said “No, you have to call us…”

OK, fine… Remembering my golden handcuffs, I tried again.

This time, calling the service number put me immediately in touch with a representative who, while not very chipper, ended up actually being helpful.  They quickly understood my problem, explained it to me and then tried to get me off the phone.  When I protested and asked if they could simply take the order over the phone, they offered to walk me through the ordering process online.  I figured that was fine – I just wanted to order the darn thing.  Well, the Fates of Online Apps had something else in mind.  When trying to log in to the Premiere Site, it just wasn’t responding.

A loud sigh later, the agent offered to take my order over the phone.  Hmm – isn’t that what I asked for in the first place?  Oh well, as least they were going to do it!  After about 15 minutes of listening to the person mutter and yawn (yes YAWN), my order was placed.

When will it show up?  I have no idea.  She / he (I couldn’t tell, and they had an androdgenous name) didn’t know either, so I guess I wait.  They gave me an order number and the charge showed up right away on my card, so it should be official.

Yay.  I’m so happy.

Its official.  I hate AT&T.

I received an email from AT&T Premier services today (the branch of AT&T that handles corporate accounts) with an advertisement pimping a new sale on the Blackberry Bold.

“Great!” I thought, as I’ve been wanting one of them for quite some time, but have been put off by the $399 price tag they slapped down on us corporate types.  The new price?  $199 – exactly what I expected it to be when it launched back in October.

So, I figured that going in to the Premier website to do the upgrade would be easy.  I logged in, saw the upgrade offer – it showed my price at $199 and I was good to go.  Well, adding it to my cart gave a $399 price tag.  WTF?

Well, no big problem – I’ll just call them and talk to someone on the phone about it.  Finding the number to call was pretty easy, but I then sat on hold with them for 59 minutes before I gave up.  The horrible 3 minute muzak loop was boring into my poor abused brain.  The stupid voice over platitudes about how important I am to them was really wearing thin.  It was official, I was pissed of at being kept on hold for just under an hour with no option to leave my name and number, no option to be told how LONG I would be oh hold, etc.

Well, I hung up, and that’s when the real fun began.  On the contact page (that I used to find the phone number) – there was a link for providing feedback on “How they can make Premier better”.  Hmm.  That’s about what I need right now, a little venting on how they can 1) make their website work properly in the first place and 2) not keep me on hold for an hour with 3 minutes of brain numbing acoustic diarrhea.  Here’s my letter to them:

Subject: Phone Support
Comments: Your site asked for feedback on how to make premier better. Well, NOT keeping me on hold for 56 minutes (and counting) listening to the same horrible muzak the entire time would be a good start. Your phone queue also doesn’t say how long I might have to wait until someone can take my call. Knowing that would be very helpful. This treatment from a phone company? Very ironic and quite annoying. Well, 59 minutes into it, I’ve hung up. You’ve lost my $400 upgrade business. I’d much rather keep my old phone that put up with this. Sorry, but you asked. -A

Well, I felt better. For about 5 seconds.

UNTIL, I received the email in my inbox stating that my message to AT&T was bounced back.  WTF?  My Site Experience Feedback is Undeliverable!??

Your message did not reach some or all of
the intended recipients.

Subject: Site Experience Feedback
Sent: 3/2/2009 5:46 PM

The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:
icare@cingular.comon 3/2/2009 5:46 PM

The e-mail account does not exist at the
organization this message was sent to.
Check the e-mail address, or contact
the recipient directly to find out the
correct address.

< bspmx01.cingular.com #5.1.1 SMTP;
550 Invalid recipient <icare@cingular.com> (#5.1.1)>

Does anyone else find it the least bit funny that the email address icare doesn’t exist at AT&T?  I must admit that did make me laugh.  But, my jokularity was soon replaced by a seething anger and a fueled hatred.

• Treat me wrong once (mess up your website).  OK.
• Treat me wrong twice (not answer the darn phone).  SIGH. OK.
• Treat me wrong THREE TIMES IN RAPID SUCCESSION (ignore my feedback!)?  Well, you can just go #$#@ yourself.

Yup.  AT&T is officially on my crap list until further notice.

Yay!  The State budget has been approved!

Disclaimer.  I’m going to swear a few times in this article, so if you don’t want to hear that, ya’ll can SHOO.

Go read this article at the LA Times. Yes, I’m serious.

Ok.  Did you notice how now that we have the budget passed, everyone is talking about how we can stop this from happening again?  There are a lot of ideas out there:  Maybe we can dock lawmaker’s pay, maybe we can change it so that only 55% of lawmakers have to approve a budget, maybe we can lower the amount of votes required for new taxes, etc. just to name a few.

But, what’s the ONE thing they AREN’T talking about doing?

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But, does anyone else remember that Hamas is the one that declared the cease-fire over?

If I hear anything more about “pressure mounting on Israel to halt the offensive,” I’m really going to scream!  How long would you tolerate non-action from our President if Mexico started randomly bombing San Diego, El Paso or Tuscon?

Hamas is like that short annoying guy in High School who talked smack all day long and then acted surprised when someone twice his size kicked his loud-mouth ass.

I mostly feel sorry for the poor civilians in Gaza.   BUT, on the other hand, that’s kinda what you get when you vote for assholes who fire mortars from your child’s preschool.

Its true that many of them are squeezed on both sides and you can’t put it beyond Hamas to bully people into supporting them. I suppose its sort of akin to Democrats and Republicans each having their own set of armed thugs and there being very little to stop them from getting up close and personal with you on the way to the polling station.  Amazing.

Iranians Hate Obama ... Already.

What’s equally amazing is that the World loved us for approximately a month and a half before everything started being Obama’s fault.  The poor guy isn’t even in office yet, and already things are his fault.

There really is no pleasing these bastards. But, damn, that was fast…

And, expected.

Well, it was bound to happen one day – I got a drive-by virus.

A friend of mine was moving an older program from one PC to another and didn’t have the disk any longer and asked me if I still had a copy. No luck there – so, I figured I’d search the net to see if you could buy old copies of the program on the cheap. A few Google searches later had me browsing a couple of link-trawler sites that didn’t provide much useful information.

One site – I believe it was oldapps.com, I really can’t be certain – left me with a little present that I won’t soon forget: a brand spanking new copy of Virtumonde (aka Trojan.Vundo.H).

Unfortunately, that present was left with nary a blip on my screen.  Minding my own business, I suddenly got an authentic Windows message stating that my Windows Firewall was no longer active. You know that sinking feeling you get in your gut when something horrible has just happened and you start to slowly comprehend the far reaching ramifications of what you have just witnessed? Yeah…  I wish I could say that I felt that way and immediately disconnected my PC from the net, but no luck. I was a real Noob, and actually thought, “Dang Microsoft, when are you going to straighten out your crapware once and for all?”.

Seriously, I thought Windows Update had pooped the bed or something…  I simply re-enabled the firewall, and everything was fine. No harm done, right? Ahem…

I kept browsing around, and then got another Windows Security Center message saying that my Virus protection was no longer active…

WTF?

NOW you can queue the sinking feeling…

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