Motivation

As you might guess from my profile picture, I have cats. I tend to be comparatively lax in the rules I expect them to adhere to, and, generally, we coexist nicely... and if there are temptations that I think are too great for them, I find ways to work around them. One such is scavenging from the kitchen trash.

Back when they were much younger, they took an interest in the trash, and, in the dark of night, would take to tipping the can over and sorting through the contents for tasty treats... a problem that I fixed by using a piece of twine to harness the trashcan to some drawers in my kitchen. Everything was golden for years thereafter... but last night I tossed something apparently irresistible to them, two slices of old pizza.

Yes, they got the lid off the trash, got the pizza out, and ate all the cheese and pepperoni off of the slices... but the impressive thing to me is that they managed to do this without waking me up, which is no mean feat. Sure, I sleep soundly, but I usually trigger awake off of "unusual" sounds, which I would think that whole sequence qualifies. Makes me wonder how much coordination between the two of them was involved, and how much pre-planning there might have been... I know, I know, it was probably a spur-of-the-moment decision on one of their parts, but there's always that nagging doubt... :)

Cell Phone Adventure: Surrender

For all that I'm stubborn, sometimes I can recognize when something just isn't worth the effort. I finally remembered to give Virgin a call this afternoon, dug through the phone tree and got a human, explained the situation, and listened while she tried her best to help. She went looking for my old account, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't find it. From some other cues I picked up from what she said, it looks like somebody 'overwrote' my old account info with the new account info, and somehow managed to lose my balance in the process. I was willing to let her keep trying, but I briefly heard a fire alarm go off on the other end of the phone before I was automatically disconnected.

Am I going to call back and go through all that again, over $20 or so? Not hardly... it just means that my first month of working with this provider will be *almost* as expensive as my prior months with my old provider, after all. This adventure is over.

Cell Phone Adventure: Almost there...

Well, my phone came alive on Friday night... everything works, but they seem to have neglected to bring across my cash balance from my previous number. Oh well, I'll wait until I'm at work tomorrow, and see if that can be rectified.

Cell Phone Adventure: Glutton for Punishment

It was late last night when my new phone finished its initial charge... so I went ahead and activated it. Surprisingly, it was straightforward, simple... and left me with a new phone number.

Now, for the number of people that know my phone number, I could easily have left it at that, passed out my new number, and contacted AT&T directly to get the old phone dropped... but I pushed things, and decided that I wanted to keep the old number (and honestly, I do have at least one half-assed reason... it happens, by sheer luck of the draw, to be one digit off of my sister's cell phone number... :)). I should have known better when the means to do so is listed deep in the service agreement, and requires a phone call to Virgin.

After working my way down the automated menu to find the necessary section, and letting it know that it's a non-Virgin number I wanted to work with, I get sent to wait for a "customer associate", I believe the term was... and get put on hold with, frankly, crappy music, and constant reminders that "I'm on the other line, it'll be just a sec". I'm not sure if it's an improvement over "Your call is important to us", but if anything drives me from Virgin Mobile, it will be the peppy, "hey, we're youth oriented" tone everything there seems to take.

No gory details beyond that point... except that I'd forgotten, many years ago, that AT&T asked for my SSN as part of the signup process (credit check, I'm sure), so that was a bit of a surprise. Other than that, lots of reading info off of my AT&T bill, multiple times on hold, and... my phone should be back on the network in 3-5 days. Of course, AT&T dropped my old phone like a hot rock once the news hit them that I was leaving... but they did warn me about that. Here's hoping nobody *really* needs to get hold of me remotely for a few days.

Cell Phone Adventure Time!

So yeah, I started out my cell-phone-using life something over 4 years ago... I know this because I've had two 2-year contracts, first through AT&T, then through Cingular (which split off from AT&T, and is now returning). The first trip with AT&T started a little bit rough (I basically had to threaten to reject the phone when it arrived to get it shipped... strange, but true), but was smooth sailing from there on out. When AT&T begat Cingular, I bought a new phone and a new contract... and had nothing but trouble getting billed in a timely manner... to the point where I actually received one bill after the due date.

Now that Cingular's being re-absorbed by AT&T, I had some hope that billing might get straightened out. I received my first AT&T bill on Monday, with a due date of Thursday.

Now, it should be well known to just about everybody here that, to the greatest extent possible, I Don't Do Phones... my cell phone exists almost entirely to catch "help me" calls from work, with family coordination and pizza being close runners up. I've got several thousand "rollover minutes" on my current phone that I can't ever foresee using. So... I'm going to experiment with a prepaid phone from Virgin Mobile. It's charging as I, er, speak... let's see how much fun we get to have on this one!

Milestones

During a conversation out at work today (yes, I was at work on a Saturday, but not in a I'm-stuck-here-for-no-good-reason way, more of a It'll-be-less-painful-to-do-this-with-nobody-else-on-the-computers way), I mentioned (and thereby came to the realization of) that I had lived in my house for more than 9 years (is this sentence confusing enough yet? :)).

Later, I realized that this means that I've been living in this house for longer than my entire time in the Navy (8 years and a few months). All I can say is... it sure doesn't feel like it's been that long. Don't know whether that says more about me as I age or the entire Navy experience, but there you go.

Movie o' the day: Paprika

If you don't care for anime with subtitles or anything... odd... then this isn't the movie for you. On the other hand, if the strange actively attracts you, definitely go see this movie now.

I won't go into great detail (I don't think I could if I tried), but the basic premise begins with a device to let people enter other people's dreams (purely for psychological therapeutic purposes, of course). A few prototypes go missing, a little abuse occurs... and it's not long before things get well and truly out of hand, in a mass-collapse-of-internal-boundaries sort of fashion. Good, clean, wholesome fun!

Consequenses

Well, my tech support fun continues... but a bit of an unexpected twist came about today. You see, the gent I had been communicating with seemed to have it fixated in his head that some other program installed on my server must be the source of the problems with their software... and was getting desperate enough to start tossing Microsoft bulletins at me that had no bearing on the problem at hand, and suggesting that the other, standard Microsoft systems I had in place would prevent them from providing more help. Since I had just recently been given the email address of their sales weasel for other reasons, I included him in a mildly heated reply, expecting maybe to get somebody to look at his work, and... well... correct him.

Boy, did I misjudge. I got a call from the sales weasel in question, letting me know that the gent in question had acted inappropriately and was no longer on my problem, but it had been given to a 'senior' technician, and oh, he hasn't called you yet? Oh, and maybe you would like to talk to this consultant buddy of mine, etc., etc. While I'm impressed by the seriousness with which they're now taking this problem, I have to wonder about their prior tech. I mean, yes, his general knowledge level was below mine, and maybe he wasn't ready for the front lines of tech support... but, from the tone of people involved, it sounds like the guy might have gotten canned outright. If that's the case... well, my feelings are mixed. On the one hand, incompetence shouldn't be tolerated/rewarded... but on the other, it's never a good feeling to have a direct hand in getting someone fired who's doing their best with what they have.

Well, at any rate, here's hoping that the guy's doing okay... and is taking a lesson from this other than "that guy in Spokane was such a dick!"

Frontline Tech Support

Lessee, it's been nearly two weeks since I posted last... but how do I trump wry insight and pictures of Gizmo the Office Wonder Puppy? Answer: I don't even try... so it's time for a mild rant instead!

Out at work we (meaning mainly me) are trying to upgrade some server software before we expand the user base by 4 times its current size. I won't say what software, because it wouldn't mean much to anybody that reads this, but it's one of those "industry standard" sort of things. Out of an abundance of caution, I decide to do a "test" install on an old server over the past weekend. Things go smoothly on the install, reboot everything (like stuff in Windows-land always seems to require), go to administer the server and... get nasty, programmer-level error messages.

In particular, the chain starts off something like "bad image format" and ends up with "memory access" errors... the sort of thing that should NEVER happen in a professionally-coded product (memory access errors mean the program's trying to interfere with memory locations that don't belong to it... and likely belong to somebody else). Anyways, I try a few tricks at my command to make sure that it's not an issue with my configuration or permissions, then give it up and email it in to their support department.

Monday morning rolls around, and... no response. I go check the mail logs (when you run your own mail server, you can see what, in a broad sense, everybody's tried to do with it), and see that their support department tried to email me, but failed... because their mail systems aren't set up properly. I'm already getting a warm fuzzy out of this.

So, I let them know their problem... and they get back to me... by Hotmail. I'm trying to think of an appropriate analog in the real world... maybe if you went and bought a high-end car with a service contract, had a problem, and the mechanic came to you by public transit, because his Escort was giving him problems. Anyways, they try to put off on permissions maybe being the issue, and conveniently describe those memory access errors in terms that make them seem like they might be caused by some other program installed on the server (which doesn't work on so many levels that I won't even try for an analogy).

So, I've politely (much more so than here) called their bluff, given them as much information as I can on the system in question... and we'll see where it goes from here.