19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England’s Unbeatable Patriots
A few of you may have been watching TV yesterday and may know otherwise.
AT&T Fuckers
Yes, you should not let those with sensitive ears read this blog.
Once again my phone is not working. The DSL’s been sucking for hours - about 5pm on Saturday evening. I finally tried the phone and it’s dead. So, I go outside and unplug the house, and plug an analog phone into the line. It still doesn’t work. The line is totally dead. That the DSL will load a web page in 10-20 minutes is a technological miracle.
Of course, I call them, press a hundred buttons answering a hundred automated questions, before the test the line, leave out the information that “yes our line is fucked up”, and say, i kid you not, “your line will be fixed on Monday, between 8am and 7pm”.
My favorite combo:
“If the reason you’re calling is that you have no dial tone, press 1.”
1
“Are you currently calling from the effected number? If yes, press 1, if no press 2.”
2
“Is this effecting all of your hand sets? If yes, press 1,…”
1
Thank you for assuming I’m a dumb ass AT&T, because I certainly assumed the same of you.
So, no paying my bills this weekend. No doing my taxes this weekend. At least I got in most of the blog updating I was doing today.
This is the third time my phone and/or DSL has gone down in the last two months. Once out four days BECAUSE THEY DISCONNECTED IT!
Homicide is in my heart.
Microsoft overtake of Yahoo?
This is not a good sign for my DSL service, which was set up by Southwestern Bell, which was overtaken by AT&T, which partnered with Yahoo, crufting up the place entirely. Now Microsoft wants in on the mess. Eep!
Paul and Kucinich
If neither Dennis Kucinich nor Ron Paul is your first choice in this year’s civic decision that you should be making, I suggest that one of them should be.
There is no doubt that democracy has been diminished for their exclusion from multiple debates. The reasoned arguments from the edges are what sometimes steers a ship of state in the right direction.
If you won’t support either of them, you owe your country at least to listen to them. You don’t have to agree with them. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are voices we need.
And maybe when you listen, you’ll remember how media is supposed to work. An airing of ideas, not a lashing of tongues. It’s hard not to interpret the exclusion of candidates by large corporate “sponsors” of debates to be anything but silencing of voices of dissent.
This country was built on dissent.
I’ve put Bill Moyer’s Journal in my RSS aggregator, and the audio podcast in my iTunes. If you still prefer the cathode ray, they do allow him on the air waves, but only on a station funded by the public.
There are several other ways to expose yourself to real discourse,… if you choose civic responsibility.
The Inflated Worth of MySpace
Why doesn’t myspace want me to block spammers?
- I get an email from a new “friend” and have to click the link.
I have to log in manually, because myspace is too stupid to provide me with a link in the email that will log me in and/or keep me logged in from last time. The link already has “id=901C2C3E- C4C7- 4B01- 8C3A- B8E67467D47F” in it, and it still couldn’t log me on.- I’m shown the invitation and have to click through to the profile.
- I click “block user”.
- Java script pops up a confirmation panel and I have to click “OK”. Yes I really want to block this user. If I did it accidentally, I could always go unblock them.
- Another page reloads to re-confirm that yes, I really want to block this user. I click “block this user”.
- Back on the invite page, I take one more click to “mark as spam”.
There could easily have been a “mark as spam and block user” button there, and with auto-login, it could have taken me two steps. Why doesn’t myspace do this? Because they’re stupid? Yes, that’s true. But I think the reason they don’t is they like spam users. It drives up their “usage” stats, and makes them look somehow still relevant.It’s January 1 - and I have one spam friend invite. Come December 31 2007, I’d wager I’ve had 200 more. And hopefully, the slow to the party print media will have pronounced “MySpace is Dead”!
Cha Ching
So, a few years ago I refinanced my mortgage and Ameriquest gave me a god awful rate (others wouldn’t loan to me). Because of their predatory lending practices (which I’m sure did others in) they settled a large class action suit.
I just got settlement money in the bank. Yay, now I can afford to pay the mortgage on January 1.
Of course, all those bad mortgages are still going to kerplunk the credit market, and aid an economic slowdown if not a mild recession.
