Guardian of the Non Sequitur

Center Point Energy’s web site is stupid for not providing me the ability to schedule a payment. They send me the bill two weeks in advance and I can either “pay now” or try to remember to pay closer to the date, forget about it, pay late, get reported for late payments, get dinged on my credit score …

One thing they do have is this nifty histogram of my natural gas usage. I lost my water heater in June, and that was the only thing using gas. I didn’t much notice it at the time, but I was paying something for a small leak that bloomed into a massive leak one friday night in August.

My very leaky house peaks at heater usage in December and January obviously.

And if you’d like to see what that costs me, here in Houston, here’s that data… Continue reading

In December I got an email that said my “Flickr Pro Account is about to expire”. It has been a while since I paid to upgrade my account, so I wasn’t surprised. Then it told me “Beginning January 2009, AT&T Internet members will no longer receive free Flickr Pro.”

Um, I was getting free Flickr Pro from AT&T? When did that happen?

Anyway, it will be expiring on November 8, 2009. I guess we’re redefining “about to”. I also guess that right after I paid for the Pro account I somehow got a free pro account?

Anyway, I fully expect to get another email 10 months from now reminding me that it’s actually about to expire.

Which is to say, here goes quite a bit.

I’m about to try to update my WordPress 2.5 to 2.7. I just did that over on colonelpod.com with the click of a button, because I had that boy on SimpleScripts. And that’s nice.  But I haven’t converted this one, yet.  The one thing SimpleScripts doesn’t do is convert an existing installation.  So,…  I’m going to have to fiddle around with lots of things, and let’s hope not too much breaks.  Backing up things now.

What I should do:

• manually upgrade to 2.7 (many steps in itself)
• backup the database
• move the installation out of the way
• reinstall a 2.7 with simple scripts
• restore the database
• copy in the local files that have been added from the old copy

The new backend of WordPress is worth the pain I’m about to suffer.

The markets are in a free fall. Friday the Dow swung 1000 points. (18% down for the week) At the end of the day, it rallied to only be 150 down. Hoping positive thoughts for the G7 Financial Ministers meeting this weekend.

They think they’re going to get seven pre-eminent economists to agree on a future course of action and all act on it. I think there’s a very small chance of that so more Down on Monday.

I was also humored that there was no talk of the “G8″ since we’re talking about actual economics and Russia’s economy is a rounding error compared to the other seven. They are only ever included for political reasons.

This is the most important point in the last eight years for this country to have a Leader, easily more important than 9/11. So much of the market is reacting emotionally, and without any leadership there have been dozens of voices for the fearful and angry to listen to, only magnifying their negative emotions.

And, oh, by the way, we’re four weeks away from a presidential election.

18 days after the storm and I get the runaround or the cover-my-ass questions from the AT&T reps.

“you only contacted us this morning for the first time?”

Since I’ve been without power for 14 days and couldn’t confirm their outage, they will want me to pay.

And on top of that they have NO IDEA what the status of the network is. Wendy, a very cordial girl who asked about the weather “there aren’t any hurricanes around are there?”, told me to call back in another four hours. It’s the standard response. “Call back at 3:15am”, she actually said to me!

There’s no f-ing way it’s going to be fixed at that time or that anyone will know what’s going on at that time. If I happen to wake in the middle of the night, I may call them out of hatred. And in honor of squeeky wheels.

There have been several stories in the news about companies “listening in” on the Twitter feed for people struggling with their products, and providing personal support.

A reactive Squeaky Wheel policy that can preempt possible public bad mouthing before it happens. (Or truncate it soon after it begins.)

Since those examples, I’ve made a point of mentioning the products and services i’ve had issues with. On Wednesday I got a hit.

In the morning I whined about a Web 2.0 word that annoys me:

“webinar” – i wish I knew who coined that term, so I could make them my arch enemy, and dedicate my existence to their desctruction *pow* 10 am

About an hour later I mentioned the Internet broadcast lecture I was about to start watching.

attending a webinar by MyEclipse on Maven – i.e. i’m sitting at my desk 11 am

In the afternoon, just after 2pm, I received notice that myeclipseide had begun to follow me, in apparent response to my explicit “MyEclipse” reference.

The notice was shunted to my not-so-important folder, and I didn’t see it until later that evening. In the mean time, I had complained about one issue, without mentioning MyEclipse explicitly though.

does the Eclipse java debugger have a data watch/breakpoint? or are you going to make me revert to 1970s techniques to find this bug? 3pm

There was no response from the twitter account (which would of course only confirm the limitation of the debugger).

As an explanation to the unaware who have made it this far, Eclipse is an open source IDE that is practically infinitely extensible. MyEclipse is a configured, supported version of the IDE provided for sale by a company. (IDE is an acronym for Integrated Development Environment)

Another thing of interest is that the MyEclipseIDE account is only two weeks old, with 8 of their 9 posts coming in the last 3 days. Currently they have 15 followers and 36 followees.

The Maven presentation was informative, but I suspect they don’t have the development moxie to be modifying the java debugger to support data watch points. Thus the non-response, if they even noticed it.