Caturday 090523

This should help de-stress your life, a little... :-)

Heh... got THAT right...

While I'm a big fan of Linux, and am willing to help others learn the benefits it offers, I'm not a hard-core FanBoi that Bill Gates is the AntiChrist.

That's not to say that I don't find these examples of what would happen if Microsoft made everything highly entertaining. Like THIS one:



Go ahead, see for yourself.

Intertoobz -- I gotz 'em

The local cable company (Bresnan) turned up yesterday (at the beginning of the two-hour window they gave me) to get me connected to their systems.

It didn't take long for the installation guy to get me hooked up with cable TV (more on that in a moment), Internet, and digital telephone (technically, 'Voice over IP', or VOIP). I've got more bandwidth than I had with DSL (though it IS somewhat clogged with a bunch of Windows systems spewing crap), and the couple of calls that I've made with my phone indicate that everything phone-wise is working well, too.

When I signed up with Bresnan, I agreed to their $100/month TV-Internet-Phone package; compared to their regular prices listed in all the paperwork they issued me, it is something of a deal. The thing is, I'm really not all that interested in the TV side of it -- I simply don't watch it that much. There are a couple of movie channels that I'll likely use a little, and a couple more specialty channels (I watched programs on the M1A1 Abrams tank and the F-117 stealth fighter on the Military Channel last night, for example), but that's about it. I simply have no interest in the myriad of food/living channels, the sports channels, the reruns of OLD programs (I Love Lucy? yeesh!), and so on. So when the trial period expires, so will the cable service, methinks. The remote they issued me for my cable box has enough buttons on it that it looks like something NASA came up with, too.

Anyway, I have a shiny new phone number (I could have kept the old Qwest number, if I hadn't told them to buzz off before the installation guy turned up), a bigger pipe for my Intertoobz, and a shitload of TV channels not to watch.

Stepping in it

Apparently, Qwest and I didn't reach any kind of agreement: at no point in time yesterday did any kind of delivery service turn up to hand me my replacement DSL modem.

I have to admit that I'm more than a little surprised by that -- the last person I spoke with at Qwest assured me that it would go out Monday because my name was second on the list at just after 9:00 in the morning.

I don't know what happened, who's responsible, or why. The Qwest support person that I dealt with last expressed their understanding of the consequences if I didn't get my modem, yet it didn't arrive as promised.

So, at 3:05 (I waited until 3PM, Just In Case) yesterday, I called Bresnan (the local Cable company) and signed up for one of their specials: Internet, digital telephone (aka Voice over IP, or VOIP), and basic cable. I expect that when the intro deal period passes, I'll drop the cable TV. Installation is supposed to happen between 10AM and Noon this coming Monday, the 18th.

Qwest, you've got to learn to quit stepping on your own weenies...

Blitzkrieg

As promised/threatened, this morning I made my call to Qwest to address the "issues" that came up over the weekend.

It took nearly 45 minutes and 3 phone calls, but Qwest and I have reached an understanding: Qwest will give me proper technical support; in return, I won't leave any more of their employees walking around with only 1 ass cheek and feeling like they could pass a watermelon without noticing.

I remained calm, polite, and courteous. I also remained obstinate, insistent, and adamant. Along the way, I gave a couple of Authority Figures the trouble ticket numbers that I'd been issued, so that they could see what all had transpired. I also offered a couple of genuinely helpful suggestions -- one of them being that if a caller says they're running Linux or MacOS, immediately bump them to level 2 tech support so that they aren't jerked around by the front-line script-reading dolts.

I just mentioned that I had to make three phone calls. The first got me some tech support weasel that was as willfully ignorant and unhelpful as the bundle of boobs I had to deal with this past weekend. The second phone finally got me someone with the willingness to actually address the underlying problem of Qwest's lack of support for Linux (and Macs, I expect) -- and resulted in me being forwarded to someone with the horsepower to actually issue me a replacement modem. Sadly, that person didn't quite grasp the concept that because I initially called the problem in on Saturday, I considered that to be the start of the promised 3rd day arrival of the modem. Since that person's supervisor hadn't arrived at work yet, I ended the conversation and made my third, and final, call. I was able to get the person on the other end to understand that I was not merely unhappy, but thoroughly disgusted with Qwest. I suspect that my comment that I was blogging about the process and perfectly willing to terminate any services through Qwest in favor of digital telephone and Internet with the local cable company (Bresnan) may have influenced them.

The bottom line is that I will (theoretically, anyway) have a replacement modem in hand tomorrow (it's supposed to be shipped Overnight), at no cost to me.

Why, yes, I can be an asshole -- but only for the forces of Good, I assure you.

Blech Support

Much to my dismay, my official Qwest DSL modem went off into the weeds this morning: it shows that I have a DSL connection, but nothing is getting through; nor can I get into it from my network to configure it. After troubleshooting the situation, and determining that it was the modem and not something else, I was obliged to call Qwest DSL tech support.

My call was answered by some git in Mumbai or Calcutta or some damn place like that, and the flaming idiot simply couldn't understand that I'd already tried everything that his book of troubleshooting scripts called for. Nor did he grasp the concept that I was running something other than MS Windows. When I finally got fed up with dealing with him (along about the fourth attempt to walk me through the Windows modem setup), I went off on him and demanded a supervisor.

Well, she wasn't any kind of improvement -- she was equally adamant that I simply had to go through the script(s), and kept telling me that I had to do this or that so that we could configure the modem. It didn't take me long to lose patience with her (the third time she asked me what version of Windows I was using, despite me already telling her that I run Linux, and declaring that we needed to get my ISP online so we could input the modem settings). Slowly, carefully, and using a calm voice and small words in the hope that she'd understand, I told her that I was through screwing around with them -- that if she didn't authorize a replacement modem right then, the call was over and that I'd be raising hell with Qwest customer support on Monday (useless bastards are closed nights and weekends, of course). She said that all we had to do was input the modem settings. I asked how we were going to do that when I'd already told them several times that I couldn't get INTO the modem to set it up, and that I wasn't using Windows, which was the only thing they knew how to use to configure it. After several seconds of deafening silence, she tried to tell me (again!) that they could see the modem, so all it needed was to be configured. That was all it took for me to tell her that she was an idiot and hang up.

Come Monday morning, some poor soul at Qwest is going to learn that aggravating me is not a Good Thing To Do. For starters, I'm going to ream that person about the blazing incompetence, idiocy, and ineptitude of their alleged "tech support". Then I'm going to let them know that if they can't/won't get me back online by end-of-business Tuesday (the next day), then my first call Wednesday morning will be to sign up with Bresnan for cable, digital phone, and Internet -- and closing my Qwest account.

Back before they became Qwest, the company was U.S. West -- or as people liked to call them, U.S. Worst. I think an appropriate nickname for them now is Qworst.

Anyway, it looks like I'm going to be offline for the next couple of days, except for the infrequent visit to a local coffee shop...

I've tried to tell people...

While I use Linux, and do what I can to encourage others to get away from Micro$oft, I'm not what I'd consider a "fan-boi" -- one of those hard-core types that thinks Linux is the do-all and end-all of computer operating systems. I readily admit that Windows works just fine for a lot of people; it's just that the very people that "should" be using it aren't taking responsibility for knowing enough about owning and using an Internet-connected computer: the same folks that think nothing of buying a complete system and hanging it off the Internet would be horrified at the idea of an unlicensed and untrained driver being turned loose on the roads.

I've previously written blog entries about the hazards of an unsecured computer being used as part of a "bot net" (network of computers taken over by someone other than their owners): used to send spam, having personal and financial data stolen and misused, and so on.

Well, this Washington Post "Security Fix" article points out an additional hazard: having that remote overlord tell your computer to, essentially, commit suicide...

One of the scarier realities about malicious software is that these programs leave ultimate control over victim machines in the hands of the attacker, who could simply decide to order all of the infected machines to self-destruct. Most security experts will tell you that while this so-called "nuclear option" is an available feature in some malware, it is hardly ever used. Disabling infected systems is counterproductive for attackers, who generally focus on hoovering as much personal and financial data as they can from the PCs they control.

But try telling that to Roman Hüssy, a 21-year-old Swiss information technology expert, who last month witnessed a collection of more than 100,000 hacked Microsoft Windows systems tearing themselves apart at the command of their cyber criminal overlords.

If you'll go read the article (which I would strongly encourage; it's NOT full of computer-ese), you'll find that at least one of those hundred thousand machines belonged to someone in New Jersey, who used it as part of his business.

I will once again reiterate my standing offer to send a FREE (no cost to you at all) "live" (everything runs off the disk, and WILL NOT do anything to what you already have) CD that will let you take Linux for a test-drive so you can see for yourself that Linux is a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows: Linux (and all the software you'd ever need -- MORE than enough to fill a DVD) is free, infinitely more secure than MS' offerings, and runs faster and better on the same hardware. Several of the people that I know that have made the switch are delighted to have done so. Simply send me an email with your snailmail address, and I'll get the disk out to you the same day.

FYI

Fun facts about the human body

• It takes your food seven seconds to get from your mouth to your stomach.
• One human hair can support 3kg (6.6 lb).
• The average man’s penis is three times the length of his thumb.
• Human thighbones are stronger than concrete.
• A woman’s heart beats faster than a man’s.
• There are about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet.
• Women blink twice as often as men.
• The average person’s skin weighs twice as much as the brain.
• Your body uses 300 muscles to balance itself when you are standing still.
• If saliva cannot dissolve something, you cannot taste it.
• Women reading this will be finished now.
• Men are still busy checking their thumbs.

Thanks to LeeAnn, via email...

Start Trek in a nutshell

Caturday 090502

Cattitude -- there is no such thing as "lost cause"...