Plaidophile

A photo journey of the transubstantiation of the useless to the functional:

I'd been leeching bandwidth off of fEk for way too long, but that's come to an end now. I'd like to thank him for putting up with my bandwidth-draining ways for the last 5 years, and for continuing to host my DNS and email for me. :)

trikuare.cx will be kind of broken for a while as I get stuff moved over to the new server (which happens to be my Mac mini), though at least all of the weblog content and forum stuff should be there. beesbuzz.biz has already migrated over entirely, though there wasn't much to migrate. Everything should be live now. So if there's any broken images/mp3s/whatever, please let me know!

Argh, if I'd waited a couple more weeks to order my Mac Mini, I could have gotten it with a DVD-RW drive and more base RAM for the same price.

Not that it matters much, since I don't really have much need for a DVD burner, and the base RAM would still not be enough for me (so I'd still have to replace it with a 1GB DIMM — the mini only has a single RAM slot), but it's the principle of the matter. :P (Or alternatively I could have gotten the same configuration as I ended up with for $100 less.)

Maybe I should have paid more attention to the rumors that the mini was about to get an upgrade. Oh well.

UPDATE: I called Apple Sales Support, and they refunded me the difference. Woo! (The CSR had to fight tooth and nail for it, though; apparently her manager was insistent on giving me the refund based on the normal price, not based on the EPP discount that I originally bought it under. Although it's annoying that the CSR had to fight for it, the fact that she did — without me having to go through a lot of grief — makes me proud to be an Apple customer. I can't imagine anyone at Dell doing that.)

Only four days until the world knows what the buzz is all about...

We had the annual company picnic today. We played Broomball. We actually made it to the semifinals, which was in keeping with our teem name (Statistically Improbable Players). I also got pretty sunburnt.

Our CSRs have way better English skills than this:

Dear amazon.com costumer,

We regret to inform you that your Amazon account could be suspended if you don't resolve your problems.
Due to recent activity, including possible unauthorized l istings, we have temporarily suspended activity on your account in order to allow us to investigate this matter further. If you believe that this action may have been taken in error, or, if you feel that your account may have been tampered with, please contact our Live Help team so that we can provide additional information and work with you to resolve this issue.

You can reach the Account Theft Live Help team by clicking the "Security Center" link located below on this page You will have to complete the form below and you will receive our email in 12 hours after clicking "Sign In" link: http://update.amazon.com/?sahj=wqyyy&sas=w377sahsa&id=34786837dhd Complete the form below , with all your corect information wroted by you las time you changed / updated or maked your acount .!

Please note that this suspension does not relieve you of your agreed-upon obligation to pay any fees you may owe to Amazon.

Regards,

Safeharbor Department
Amazon, Inc.

Verify your identity

All information is required and is kept confidential in accordance with amazon.com Privacy Policy.

Your credit/debit card and checking account information is used to verify your identity.

So, I have the Mac mini now. I was preparing to be all, like, blown away by 10.4 and stuff, but so far it hasn't seemed particularly compelling. Spotlight still doesn't fill any need that I had, iSync has gotten even more weird and inconsistent than it was already, and since the OSX DVD which came with the Mini will only install onto the Mini I have very little incentive to still pay $120ish to upgrade my laptop just yet.

Wait, no, I meant it's driving.

Today, Kevin (my team lead) went to Ikea at lunchtime to pick up some furniture. I wanted to go along with him to have lunch at their cafeteria, but I couldn't since being on-call means needing to always be within 15 minutes of Internet access.

So when Kevin came back, he brought me a present: a big ol' bag of frozen swedish meatballs. :)

So, remember that cable service? Which didn't work, and which the technicians were unwilling to make work? That I cancelled after a week?

Well, I just got a bill for the next month of service. So I called them. They said to disregard the bill, because I'd be getting a refund for $43 soon.

Great, except that what I originally paid them was $91. $10 of that was installation, so that leaves $81 for the part which should be getting refunded. So they're charging me $40 for two weeks of non-functioning cable Internet.

I pointed this out to the CSR, and she said there was nothing she could do because that was what was already put into the billing system. And hung up.

ASS. HOLES.

FUCK.

so let's use my Google pagerank for good: mdm.net aka Millennium Digital Media fucking sucks, as does their crappy CableSpeed aka Cable Speed service. They are ASSRAPING RETARDOES. If you are unlucky enough to be a Seattle-area customer who is stuck with MDM CableSpeed from Millennium Digital Media you should just get DSL instead.

Continued...

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Something new is on its way.

I just got another deep-tissue massage with Lily. This was even deeper and more painful. Now my arms are numb and I'm all sore and stuff.

Ow.

Does anyone have any good resources for learning foreign languages? There's an awful lot of Canadians here and I feel like I should learn the language they speak to me so I can understand them better.

As of last night, my sister is married. Yay!

I just got my R520m back.

I'd forgotten how big and heavy it was.

6.0/768 via Speakeasy. Woo.

And now I can finally head to work, now that the Covad guy is done installing.

So, at work we have two systems, a Linux desktop and a Windows laptop. The laptop is for stuff like Office and Outlook (yes, yes, it sucks, but it's also the best groupware app around for any platform, which is more a statement of how horrible the world of groupware is than anything about Outlook's quality).

Right now I'm at home because I'm waiting for the Speakeasy tech to finish my dedicated-line DSL installation. I was going to work from home (since there's a document I'm working on), but thanks to the craptacularity of the Dell laptop, I'm not going to.

That would have to be the most redundant label I've ever seen on a food package, even moreso than "Warning: contains nuts" on a can of peanuts.

I wonder what byzantine FDA regulations led to the creation of that descriptor.

(It was on a bottle of Minute Maid Tropical Citrus fruit punch.)

Thanks to the program guide information the broadcasters are required to include in their signals, it's easy to see that there isn't anything actually worth watching for the next 7 hours.

Last night I made some spiral pasta dressed with olive oil, toasted pine nuts, shiitake mushrooms sautéed in garlic and olive oil, basil, and oregano. I put the leftovers in the fridge, and just now I added a light drizzle of some amazing balsamic vinegar (Napoleon brand, which is definitely the nicest balsamic vinegar I've ever had, though I've never been insane enough to spend more than $15 on a bottle), and it's quite good.

I just thought I'd share.

Today I finally had a carpal tunnel massage for the first time since I left Las Cruces. Lily (the massage therapist, who also works for Amazon) did a really good job, but we ran out of time on my left arm. Both arms are very sore though, but I definitely need another appointment to finish up my left arm. And probably regular visits for a while.

Also, tonight was the Fantastic 4 screening. It was pretty good as far as comic book movies go, not so good as an overall movie experience. So much of the pacing and framing and so on relied on the surprise of what happens to the heroes, which is impossible for anyone who hasn't ever read any of the comics or watched TV in the last, oh, three months.

I cancelled cable, and ordered Speakeasy DSL. 6.0/768. It will also handle my site hosting. It's pricey but I can always tier down if it turns out I don't need that much bandwidth, and the 1.5/384 service is about the same price as MDM's non-functioning 3.0/384.

According to Perry (the concierge), the building is actually in negotiations with Speakeasy for having building-wide wireless Internet service or something, but he was pretty vague about it.

I was trying to find my way to Peter Jackson's gaming party somewhere in the middle of nowhere near El Paso, TX. Because the people I was with were being totally unhelpful, I decided to try to find my own way instead.

I was running through some random corn field when I met Cherry.

My new glass-and-metal L-shaped workstation desk's upper support tubes happen to have the same resonant frequency as my speaking voice, which just also happens to be C#. I discovered this when I was talking to myself out loud (which is normal for me, sadly) and suddenly noticed a pretty big thuddy echo which sounded like it was coming from inside my head. I thought something was going weird with my ears or something.

It's kinda cool, but since this is in my recording space, this might be problematic. Heh.

So, a week ago I bought an HDTV (more as a video monitor than for actually watching television). Today I finally got around to getting an antenna for it, with the idea of canceling cable (since it seems pretty unlikely that my building's cable provider is going to stop sucking any time soon).

So far I can only get one channel (Fox), and although the video quality is way better than broadcast, that's mostly because the analog signals are so weak.

(With apologies to Merlin)

1. A shoe
2. A nearly-empty bottle of cough syrup
3. A plunger's base and handle (separately)
4. A Gladware™ container
5. A cat5 cable

So, I bought a phone from a seller on eBay using the name "consumersolutions" with their website at csmarkets.com. The phone was completely misrepresented; it was sold as being "like new" and having Bluetooth and so on, when it was actually a very-abused demo unit which was far from "like new" and had crippled non-Bluetooth firmware and so on.

I contacted them to ask them about sending it back for a refund, since it wasn't as advertised, and they said they would offer me a $15 "partial refund" for the cosmetic condition.

It all went downhill from there.

Dear MSIE,

You fucking suck. Please stop existing.

Love,
fluffy