November 2005 Archive

Welcome to the Archive for November 2005! What you will find here may be old. It may scare you. It may even scare me! More importantly, you might find links that no longer work, and *gasp* information that is no longer, or possibly never was, accurate in any way. Don't rely on this information to save your life!

November 2005 Archive

Tuesday, November 8, 2005

[Comments: 0] 8:10 AM - yay-forums

Finally, after many complications and slow progress, SC3000.com/SC4EVER.com has returned, giving me back the only forum I can stand to visit regularly. Wren, the sites' webmaster, got all the hardware and software back together in his spare time between his heavy load at Maxis, and the site was done for about 5 months.

The forum itself is SimCity-oriented, but it's a great, friendly place to visit, and there's plenty of general discussion too, so if you don't have a forum community to call home yet, drop by and try this one. Registration is automatic when you visit. If you keep returning from the same computer, the forum will remember who you are, so it's nice and simple.

The reason I love this forum so much, besides the people, which truly make it a "home" for me online, is the user interface that drives it. It's simple and clean. It has a beautiful threading model that connects each reply to the exact post it belongs under, making the conversation much easier to follow.

If you do stop by, definitely click the Options link and try turning on the frames options as well. I find they make the forum even easier to navigate than it is by default, especially if you're familiar with nearly any modern email client.

Sunday, November 6, 2005

[Comments: 1] 1:34 PM - useless-support

I know there are archives that supply the humorous and disturbing stories and urban legends of support technicians with unbelievably stupid customers. Do such things exist for unbelievably stupid support technicians?

Yesterday, our DSL stopped working around 1:00 PM or so. I had planned to play WoW, and I thought it was probably just a regular broken DSL situation, so I ran around checking out typical network problems, the router, the DSL modem, the phone line, etc. The phone line still worked, everything was still connected, and rebooting the modem and router did not help.

After waiting about an hour, I got frustrated and I wanted to have SBC check on the DSL to see if they could tell me why it was down and when it could be back up.

Part I: The Automated Chat Machine

First thing you get to do is talk to a computer when you call SBC Yahoo! DSL support. After a brief "conversation," the system ran a line test, said it was done, and forwarded me to a technician. It never told me the results of the test, and apparently, it didn't bother passing any of the information on to the technician either.

Part II: The Manual Chat Machine

Clearly working from a script, the technician I reached asked me what was wrong, and after I reported that I could not connect, he asked me to do the following:

1) Plug a "Windows XP computer" directly into the modem
2) Attempt to open an "Internet Explorer" to see if I get a "Page cannot be displayed error"
3) Try to go to the modem's configuration page and log in.
4) Attempt to open an "Internet Explorer" again to see if I can reach a web site.
5) Shut down and unplug from power both the modem and my computer.
6) Try to access the modem configuration page again.

The entire conversation I told the guy, I couldn't get an address from the modem. I lied to him that I was using Internet Explorer because he was quite insistent that I be using Windows XP, so I didn't want to upset him further.

He didn't seem to believe me when I told him the modem configuration was not working properly, and when he told me to shut down and unplug my computer, I informed him that I was on a laptop not connected to power. By this he was incredibly confused. After a long pause, he seemed to decide that it was okay to skip that step and continue.

Only after all of this manual testing did he decide to run a line test, which came back with an error message "Invalid circuit ID" which he told me meant that my DSL was among many customers' around the country that were being reconfigured with new circuit IDs and that this scheduled maintenance would last until 5 PM Central Time.

First off, if he had run the line test right off while we were talking, he would have seen this condition and not had to insist that I try powering on and off my computer to fix the problem. Second, why would SBC pick the middle of a Saturday afternoon to schedule 4 hours of maintenance on random DSL customers' lines?

The DSL did return later that evening. I ended up spending the afternoon playing WoW at the datacenter where I knew that we'd actually have a consistent Internet connection... but even there I was having some trouble staying logged into the game. I'm not sure if that was the fault of the switch or my laptop, but it was definitely better than nothing.

Saturday, November 5, 2005

[Comments: 1] 2:17 AM - holiday-recess

I've finalized my schedule for going back home to Long Island for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, finally. My parents have been reminding me regularly, trying to make sure I actually book flights before there are none left.... I'm not usually one to plan more than a week ahead of schedule... :)

Anyway, I'm going to be home for Thanksgiving from Tuesday, November 22nd through Saturday, November 26th, enough time to hopefully avoid the primary mad travel rushes on either side of the holiday, and hopefully enough time to celebrate Thanksgiving and enjoy spending some time with my family. My dad will actually be off on Thanksgiving this year, so it'll be one of those rare times we have the "big dinner" on the specific holiday. If possible, I'll have to see if I can throw in some Christmas shopping on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, because I'm absolutely not shopping on Friday. :)

As for Christmas, I'm headed home on December 17th, through December 27th, which will give me a decent amount of time to visit with my family again, celebrate a reasonably relaxing Christmas day, and get back here to handle major company-related business while Ray and Karl take their holiday vacation and attend a friend's wedding.

It'll definitely be nice to get home for a little while. This is the first year where I've been officially moved away from home, and my vacation windows are a little smaller than I'd get in college. I'm not sure how we're going to handle the putting up of the Christmas tree or making Christmas cookies, but if we manage to squeeze them in while I'm home, those will be nice traditions to keep.

Of course, I'll be online and around the whole time I'm home thanks to my trusty laptop. So no need to worry that I'll be out of reach if you want to bug me! :)

Tuesday, November 1, 2005

[Comments: 1] 5:09 AM - mutable-universe

I told Ray and Karl I was contemplating adding this feature to my site. It represents something that I actually do regularly, so I think it will get far more attention than my "Rants" and "Web Site Critiques." I just decided to kill the site critiques and the rants have been merged into my general posting archive. They'll be a little harder to find, but I'd rather rant on the front page anyway.

Since I still haven't actually explained what "this feature" is, here goes:

Virtually every single day in the midst of a conversation about some random topic, like why we haven't gone to dinner yet or what movie we should watch, someone in the room may define bizarre and possibly unreasonable universal parameters surrounding the answer to the question. If it's not about making a decision, perhaps we were just chatting about nothing in particular and someone's imagination spouted a new creature to walk the earth called a cowch, which is of course an interesting hybrid of a peach and a cow.

Either way, I have now set out to blog these unique streams of incoherence into a form of ChangeLog for the Universe, not unlike the kind of ChangeLog a new version of a program on your computer might include. The purpose? There is none.

So, sit back, relax and watch the ChangeLog grow, and imagine how confusing your life would be if your universe really worked like this. :)