Take this weekend, for instance. I’m minding my own on a Friday evening, trying to invent the best and least hair-pulling way to introduce updates by email–and comments, by the way, not just replies–to the blog, when the desktop decides to throw not one, or two, or three, but nearly a dozen warning and critical error messages at my face. Everything from hard drive failures to RAM usage being critically high, to flat out memory failures. Now, keep in mind, this machine’s nearly 4 years old and just had its wireless card replaced–twice, mind you, so one or two failures of that nature wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility. So I’m going through the usual diagnostic steps, doing what you do when you’re under the distinct impression your primary machine’s about 30 seconds from going flatline and you’ve got absolutely no spare parts kicking around, when this innocent enough looking “Windows XP Recovery” window crops up. It helpfully informs me that Windows is suffering damage possibly related to bad sectors on the drive. This along side yet another of those dialogue boxes cropping up informing me one or more IDE/SATA drives are about ready to self-shoot.

By this point, I’m more than a little WTF-ing. I *just* meaning less than a week ago, had a Dell tech out this way to replace the network card. Was I *really* going to have to have another one out to replace at least one failing drive and lord only knows what else? Not to mention the roommate just 48 hours prior to that got the pleasure of dealing with his very own failing hard drive and the replacement of same–in fact for much of Friday evening, while I was diagnosing, the running joke was that apparently hard drive failures had now become as airborn as your common virus. But I got curious. The only Windows XP recovery utilities, particularly utilities that bare that name, are usually found on the XP CD–and certainly don’t randomly show up when Windows is loaded, though sometimes I think that might be helpful. Enter that tiny little alarm going quietly off in the back of my head while I go hunting for my usual fix me tools.

I keep 3 tools one hand for incidents kinda like this one–one spyware scanner, one virus scanner, one nuke ‘em all tool. Because I was testing a theory, and if I was right it would at least manage to nail most of it, I loaded–and fired–the nuke ‘em all tool first. Sure enough, within about 2 minutes of the utility running, Windows XP Recovery took a hike. And so did its small army of warnings and alerts and whatever else managed to show up. Yay! I’m free! Except not quite. I nuked the majority of the infection, and probably caught the source, but there was still damage. Have my desktop was toast, and I’m pretty sure I was missing things out of my start menu on top of that. Nice. Wonderful. Nifty. Easily fixed.

I ran my other two tools, which took a little longer than I’d of liked to finish–but they finished and nothing broke, so I’m happy, and removed what I think might have been the last remains of the thing. Easily delt with by a simple reboot. Now, there was just the issue of half my desktop and probably some of my start menu going completely snap all over the floor. Because I was sick and tired of fighting with it, a system restore took care of that–and then some. Yay, again. I took care of what I thought needed taking care of manually, then went on the hunt for info.

Apparently, the infection I just went around with is new. Extremely new. As in I’ve seen postings as early as May 13th, but no older so far. To the tune of every forum, blog, website etc I know to check has something on it. And still, it managed to sneak by my usually pretty solid defenses.

All told, I’d way rather have just had an actual hardware failure. Or several, to be completely honest. The fake ones were a bitch to knock out. Now, to find where I hid my emergency back-up material–just in case.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Will the real fake Borat please stand up?

It made troubleshooting this issue even harder still, as the desktop I primarily use for 90% of my online work when I’m at home has been experiencing its own good attempts at dialup performance on the network. I was initially blaming the router, but during testing I was getting much better performance from the laptop than the desktop, both of which I was testing wirelessly. Yes, the laptop’s definitely a more powerful machine, but that has no baring on internet speeds these days–a dual core processor should be running just as or nearly as fast on a network set up by an OCD geek as a machine running a core i5 or i7. Well, you’d think, anyway. Testing disproved that. So now, I have a theory. A dangerous thing in my hands, but you’ll have that. The mystery of the dying router was partially hidden, or at least masked, by the compounding suspected issue of the desktop’s card tanking in 18 different directions. Nifty, with the tiny exception of not entirely. Fortunately, or not depending on your perspective, that’s the easiest thing to replace–and the cheapest. It was also the first thing I got things moving in the direction of replacing–hi, Dell technical support. Time for you to actually work for me. Considering you’re working because I’m not, and all. So one phone call later, and yes it took giving out my former Dell employee ID, troubleshooting was bypassed and hello, replacement card under warranty.

So now, we have replaced the router. I am replacing the network card in the initial problem machine. The rest of the wireless equipment? Wayyy too new to be causing problems–unless someone really wants me questioning their compitence. The only questionable piece of hardware that has yet to be gone over with a fine-toothed “don’t you dare fall over” comb is the modem. And honestly, it’s only a gigantic questionmark over here because, er, one of those already blew up in my face. The unstable network should now, barring unforseen small technological implosions, only be a myth in the house of geekery. And if it’s not, I know one ISP who’s going to get really, really tired of hearing from me. Mostly because I’m not looking forward to the next installment of “When is a router no longer a router?”.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• When is a router no longer a router?
• The slow, painful death of a router.

Now, it’s off to a valentine’s get together with a few friends, one of the 80 million things I love about Rochester. Mockery? Snarkery? General geekery? Yeah that’s still coming. As for now? I see food in my near to immediate future. Catch you on the flip.

According to ConfigServer’s software, which I have taken to not trusting after our most recent discovery, inbound trafic on all the ports we needed to be open was possible. As was outbound. Except for that tiny little part wherein it sort of wasn’t. That lead to some pretty interesting problems in the neighbourhood of him actually being able to receive trackbacks/pingbacks. Since blogging in general, and WordPress in particular, is primarily focused on the whole community/conversation element of it all, that posed a very small problem. We fiddled off and on with it for a few weeks, and eventually for reasons of trying to scrape together a few dollars, we decided to start the process of migrating him away from that server and to my arangement over here. After breaking things in that department in all kinds of new and interesting–not to mention very very creative–ways, we thought we’d play with seeing if that fixes the outstanding issue of tracking back. Hence, if you hadn’t figured it out, the test post from earlier. And wouldn’t you know, the damn thing up and proved us both idiots. First try, it did exactly what it was supposed to. The only *really* major difference? The server the problem blog’s on isn’t running ConfigServer’s firewall–and won’t be, if I can possibly get away with it. Aside from that? Same server configuration, more or less, with a few extra mostly irrelevant bells and whistles I don’t actually use but hey, they’re cool.

The moral of the storry: If you’re running ConfigServer’s firewall, look for alternatives. If you’re not, keep it that way. It’s bad for you. Stay very, very far away from that program–particularly if you, or anyone you’re hosting/maintaining the server for, plans on running a WordPress blog. They just do not like each other and I think the relationship’s pretty irreparable. Now, the search begins for alternatives.

John Mackle, education director at the Peterborough Victoria Northumberland and Clarington Catholic District School Board, said the Grade 8 pupil at St. Anne’s School in Peterborough’s north end found his way — via his laptop, a piece of downloaded software and the board’s internal network — into a board file server containing provincewide test results.

“To be honest, I don’t know that he would have understood what he was seeing,” Mackle said.

“The information that he was able to see wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to him.”

Mackle said the incident occurred when the server in question, which isn’t located at the school, was turned back on after undergoing a service upgrade.

“We normally have two levels of security,” Mackle said. “In this case, level 1 was turned back on, but level 2 was not. This allowed the boy to gain access.”

Security for all servers has been upgraded in the wake of the incident, he added.

By “upgraded”, does he mean “reenabled”? And, really, just what kind of security do they over at the Peterborough school board consider to be level 1? Inquiring minds want to know. If the system was secured, the kid shouldn’t have been able to access it. On second thought, I’ve come to understand the school board’s definition of secured and the rest of the world’s definition are usually two pretty different things. If given enough time to work at it, most school board security systems–at least up here–could probably be compromised with a minimal amount of effort, if someone with a problem with that school or the board really wanted to.

Let this be a lesson for aspiring IT people. Secure your shit. Twice. And for the love of chese, if you’ve got a system installed, tripple check that it comes up when the server you’re trying to protect does. I should not have to point that out.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• That didn’t take long. School kills wi-fi because kids are acting out during the week.
• And back to school I go. Or, rather, I try to.
• I don’t remember school being such a bitch…
• I knew I shoulda stayed in school.

No love,
The geek

PS: Hey, Primus? Not cool with the blocking of port 25. Seriously. Let’s try not doing that, shall we? You’re breaking things more than they need to be at the moment. And some of these things don’t take much as it is. Also no love from the geek.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Small note to federal conservatives.
• A small note to Emoze.
• A note to email spammers everywhere.
• A small note to Clive Doucet: No one likes opt-out mailing lists.
• Small note to @twitter.

The actual instalation process, for the most part, wasn’t a whole lot different from the steps I followed to install it on the laptop. But there were a few subtle differences in what was required. And naturally, they were just tricky enough that the easiest way to implement those differences was to blow the instalation away and start over. So we did, probably two or three times. On the third try, we managed to actually get the thing mostly up and running. By this point, we were very nearly on easy street. So I decided to do the exact same thing locally.

My install required a little bit more creativity, mostly because I was also using it as an excuse at guessing which VM settings would play a little bit nicer with our instalations. I got mine up and running on the fourth try, or thereabouts, and threw the modified settings at the first attempt at a Gentoo install. Now, with both machines up and running and not threatening to explode, we could play.

Shane’s heavily into the whole beta testing thing, so we went on a dependancy hunt to trick out his install with the requirements for at least one game he’s been testing. Then, we threw Gnome at it, and while that took its time installing, we threw a small party. The new and exciting part of all this was over by now–virtual Gentoo plays just as nicely as nonvirtual Gentoo, post-install. So now comes breakage.

I had no idea exactly how hard Gentoo, even in a VM, was to break. Or how easy it was to fix when it did. We’d try this or that nifty little trick, compile something, and watch it fall over. And in about 10 minutes at best, we had the why, the when, the how, and a fix was on its way down. The two things we didn’t intentionally break are apparently fairly common, or at least, simplistic issues–apparently, kernel 2.6.36 is still way, way too knew. As in things that depend on the kernel sources being installed–hello, NVidia drivers–fail quite fantastically at the compile stage. Same with the latest current stable version of Speakup, which escentially meant if we wanted the instalation to talk at us, we weren’t about to be using that kernel version. There’s apparently such thing as *too* bleeding edge. Who knew?

Another potentially kernel-related almost failure isn’t actually what I’d call breakage, but it is kind of annoying–and equally not either of our falt, lucky for us. This is the more common/known/widely experienced issue–when you run certain commands from the console or a remote session, it throws an “Unknown HZ Value!” error. It doesn’t actually break, and I’m assuming the results you get from that command are what you’d expect to get, but the error, or notice if you’d rather, regularly makes an appearance. We traced the problem to Procps, a utility package that contains several system monitoring programs among other things. I was about ready to report it, then saw it was already taken care of–hence the more widely experienced/common-ness of this annoyance. This is not something I’ll be fixing any time soon, but the activity so far as this bug report shows indicates people far more experienced than me with Gentoo, kernel tweeking and all the fun crap that goes with have it well in hand. Or at least are faking it very well. So now, we just sit back and see what else decides to implode.

The install actually went a little easier than I was hoping, if only because hey, I needed an excuse to break things on a more permanent basis. But, oh well. The OS works, on both machines, and any lingering loose ends we can safely reject any and all responsibility for. For my next trick, I’d like to see if I can install MacOS on the VM. I’d be interested in seeing how badly that breaks. In the meantime, time to go play fix the video card. Thank god for caffeine.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Precisely why I’m a linux user, and a Gentoo user specificly.
• I’ll stick with Linux, thanks.
• Why linux is for the epic motherfucking win.

I started out helping Shane throw together some kind of a fix for a problem he was having with his WordPress installs. Or rather, several small problems that, when lumped together, became one very hugely gigantic ball of oh my god what the hell am I doing. That was well over 3 hours ago. From there, we ended up blowing away the WordPress install, trying our damnedest to get it to reinstall, banging our heads against Apache and Suexec, and generally coming this close to screaming. My poking at Suexec config files, at least those I could find in that not so cleverly disorganized mess CPanel calls a directory structure, told me it should be working the way it’s supposed to. But when WordPress went to do something as simple as generate a config file, it crapped out with permission errors. Okay, this wasn’t how I invisioned spending an evening, but hey, what the hell else was I gonna do?

So I poked around some more, and discovered when CPanel installs Apache by default, it compiles things in a not very Suexec-friendly way. And convincing it to recompile, as I learned tonight, in such a way that it would actually do what we want without puking all over the place first, well, it wasn’t about to happen instantly. Apparently, something within CPanel tells it it’s alright to slap a random file in /etc to prevent Apache from actually being shut down, even in situations wherein it needs to be shut down–such as, for instance, to be recompiled. Finding that file, then finding out what it’s doing there, then finding out if just plain ripping it out would break anything, took a bit of digging. Then, after much hair pulling with both the web and command line interfaces to CPanel, we eventually, finally, managed somehow to explain what it is we were trying to do. Getting to that point, of course, just had to involve a tech support person from the hosting company who wasn’t a whole lot more clued in than we were–par for the course when you’re us. So we decided to take a random shot in the dark and rip out that file, then try desperately to convince CPanel that yes, it was perfectly alright to do what we’re asking it to do.

After about 2.5 hours of screwing with it, we finally have CPanel singing the right tune. It does its thing, eventually recompiling both apache and PHP to build in support for what we want to do–PHP as CGI through Suexec. Great, so now we just pray to god it works. By this time, my brain is pretty much sawdust, and we still have the initial issue I was trying to fix before all this to work out. Craptacular. So we get to doing that, and thank the freaking gods that goes through without a problem–now that we managed to exhaust just about everything we had access to to get to that point.

At the end of all this, I’ve come to a very important–well, to me, anyway–decision. If ever I find myself in a situation where I’m forced to use CPanel, I will not walk, but run terrifiedly screaming in the exact opposite direction as though this guy was after me. Faster, even, as I swear that thing is the software reincarnation of Satan. If you’re even remotely technical, at all, stay the hell away from CPanel. You *will* lose years off your life. And develop a strange craving for alcohol. Speaking of, where’d I put mine?

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Things I will always miss about tech support, number 98562.
• This is why I do tech support in a call center, folks.
• The thing about tech support: you’re never *really* done.
• Why I don’t do email support.

As I make no secret of, I power this site on WordPress plus about 20 wickedly handy plugins to take care of everything from statistics to adjusting things so folks who come across a 4-year-old link that no longer works can still find the entry they’re looking for at its new location. It was that latter redirect plugin that decided at one point to give me issues. For the record and those curious, if you want something similar for your own site the plugin is Smart 404, and it only works–to my knowledge, anyway–on WordPress. Now, before my year or two of experimenting with that other blogging platform, I had this site running under a different piece of software. That piece of software, still in development, took care of my needs back then with the exception of the whole comment spam thing–but the way it handled links in general was just different enough that when I set this up, and included the old entries from my first attempt at a blog, those links promptly broke. Not horribly, just a slight enough change that Apache threw a page not found error.

WordPress in general is very good about redirecting things within its own isolated environment to where you want to go. So, for example, if you were to go to http://www.the-jdh.com/index.php?post=123, it would redirect you to the appropriate post automatically–and to the appropriate, much more readable URL of that post–with no coaxing from me whatsoever. Kind of wicked nifty cool in an “I’m a lazy tech geek” kind of way. The problem is, there’s no native functionality for redirecting other links, not created by WordPress, to their appropriate wordpress equivalent. Enter the redirection plugin, Smart 404.

When I set it up to do what it was intended to do, though, I ran into another, slightly frustrating, problem. If you were to go to http://www.the-jdh.com/year/month/date/some_post.html, which was the old link structure on the blog, even with the plugin in place you’d get a 404 instead of being redirected to http://www.the-jdh.com/year/month/some-post/, which is one of WordPress’s default structures. Now, if we were talking closed source projects here, I’d of just switched to something else that did a similar thing–I’d have a better chance of seeing the problem fixed, and sooner, by doing that. But instead, it started out entirely in public comments on the blog of the developer of the offending plugin.

The actual conversation was, were it to happen over IM instead of blog comments, very short yet still very effective.

I posted a couple comments over there, pretty much explaining what happens when someone references one of the old, non-working links, and what according to the plugin documentation is supposed to happen. After running a real quick test to get access to exactly what it was the plugin was trying to do, the conversation effectively turned very quickly to something like this.
Dev: Okay, try this line of code and let me know if it breaks.
Me: *copy, paste* Okay, looks like it doesn’t explode. And hey, it does what it’s supposed to now. Who knew?
Him: Awesome. *throws it into CVS*
Me: Hey look, new version. And there’s the fix I tested. Awesome squared.

Yeah, it was literally that easy. And a very awesome reason for why sometimes, being able to actually see the program’s inner workings is a very good thing–you get to escentially debug and test a patch for your own problems, rather than waiting on the software’s tech support department–if they have one–to get around to communicating with the developers, who may or may not then get around to actually diagnosing and fixing the problem. The open source community as a whole gets major props for that. And major props to the Smart 404 developer for being nearly as quick to implement solutions to problems as his users are at finding problems to fix. And huge props to WordPress, because–really, do I need a reason? Now excuse me while I go consider for the thousandth time learning PHP or something.

After exiling SP3 from my machine for being pretty much a complete and total failure, I’d also a while later gone ahead and got rid of Eset’s Smart Security product for a whole host of other, unrelated reasons I’ll get around to posting at some point in the maybe not too distant future. That fixed a few dozen other slightly irritating, but not ultimately hindering, problems. After seeing SP3 crop up on some of these machines and ultimately not cause mass amounts of destruction, I decided just before I came down here to install it again on mine. I took that opportunity to test IE 8 out on a non-frankenputer as well, but I’ll save that for when I figure out what about the offending machine is making it break. And, surprise of surprises, it didn’t result in extreme amounts of bloodshed, or physical damage to the computer.

So, after much of the getting pissed with Microsoft for making yet more work for me, and after confirming not once, but five times that SP3 did not, in fact, break me severely on install, I officially withdraw any cursing, swearing, or overall snarkish remarks directed at Microsoft on its behalf. Instead, I shall officially aim those remarks at Eset/Nod32, and add them to the 50 billion others I’ve had plenty of time to prepare and direct at the offending antivirus manufacturer. But don’t worry, Microsoft still has much for me to snark about–I still have to figure out in exactly how many pieces they’ve managed to break .net framework on this machine, which may or may not warrant a separate entry. But SP3, at least so far, is not as evil as it looked a few months ago. Good job, MS. Now fix your framework, goddammit.

Being that I deal with computers, the interwebs, and things that make both tick on a regular basis, you’d think I’d of clued in on this a lot sooner than I did. Turns out–and I should have known this–search engines, other websites, random spambots etc don’t actually stop looking for a page just because said page stopped existing in 2008. Nor, for that matter, does anyone actually correct broken links it would appear. And, since until this morning I didn’t even have a clue how to go about doing that, they just kind of sat there returning the standard 404 request.

Fortunately, because the year I was on LiveJournal meant I wasn’t using this domain for it, there’s that much fewer posts I had to worry about correcting. That just left the 600 and change from the old MT install. Three hours on Google, various message boards, and other asorted sites later, I came across what I think might just be the almost right solution for that particular problem. After testing it on a handful of posts that I’ve been able to confirm were tossing back 404 errors, and finding them no longer doing so, I can safely say the blog now works entirely–or virtually so, if nothing else–the way I originally intended to.

The how and the why is semi-technical, though if anyone’s interested in the boring details I’ll be more than happy to elaborate. But, the short version goes something like this. Movable Type, for all its usefulness, had one huge drawback. It built static HTML files. Which, okay, made serving posts etc pretty much amazing. But once you got up to a certain amount of activity–the publishing of new posts and comments–the rebuilding of those static HTML files took about a hundred years. It also didn’t allow for a whole lot of flexibility in how you linked to those files. If you changed the post title and wanted to update the permalink to account for the change, MT didn’t give you much support for redirection to the new URL. You pretty much had to change it manually, then provide the redirection manually. Adding to the complication that is MT’s way of doing things, the directory structure it came up with was something like: http://www.the-jdh.com/2010/06/05/some_post_title_here.html . WordPress, on the other hand, goes more along the lines of: http://www.the-jdh.com/2010/06/some-post-title-here/ . Ignoring the arguments as to which one’s better than the other–I don’t really care to be honest, it presented a small problem post-migration. Problem solved.

A little addition in plugin form to WordPress, and the URL you request from the server suddenly serves a secondary purpose. It gets handled in this way.

• If the post and/or page requested exists, serve it as per normal.
• Failing that, scan the current list of posts/pages for a post who’s title matches the keywords available in the URL.
• If a matching post is located, redirect the browser to that post and hope that’s the one they were looking for.
• If nothing is found, return the standard 404 page as per usual and get on with the normal routine.
• If more than one option is found, then, optionally–meaning whenever I get around to implementing it–provide a list of suggested entries similar to what was detected in the URL.
• If none of those applies, then we have a bigger problem than I thought and I really should consider not tweeking the site while half a mile from no sleep.

Since nothing’s blown up at me during my testing, it’s a pretty safe bet things are at least 90% not broken. Or they’re clever about hiding their brokenness. Now, about that half a mile of sleep thing. Time to go fix that next.

The router, and my entire small network as a result, took a very unplanned nose dive at some point early Monday morning while I was still contemplating that whole being mobile thing. There were, from what I could tell, no warning signs or signs of sluggishness–just randomly snap, toast. Deader than Elvice. Of course, being the geek that I am, that had to encourage some troubleshooting. So when I got done with my running around for the day, I came back and devoted part of my evening to see if I can’t coax at least another 30 seconds of life out of the thing. At least long enough for me to finish the backing up of my laptop so I could finish dealing with another, unrelated technical issue–February is apparently the month for those. Of course, not happening. It was done, and there wasn’t any amount of poking and prodding short of prying the thing open and fiddling with the inner workings of it that was about to make it do anything other than sit there. Which, I might have been inclined to do, if I wasn’t lacking both the right type of screwdriver and the motivation to actually bother with it.

Now, ordinarily, such a situation–router suddenly goes sideways and absolutely no idea the cause, plus absolutely no money to immediately rectify the said situation–might have made me consider finding both motivation and screwdriver. You tend to do things like that when your geekyness is impeded by brokeness. But I was kind of forced to plan ahead about a year or two ago. Another issue cropped up, one that I’d originally thought might have been my router contemplating giving out right there–it was about 9 years old, so having it crap out on me at that point wouldn’t have surprised me. That time though it’d been the modem, which I’d only bought from my ISP, TekSavvy, about a month or two before that. fortunately, that was easier than at the time replacing the router would have been–one phone call, and done. But, knowing that I very likely wouldn’t have much longer before going completely netless if it did turn out to be my router, I’d managed to get online for the 20 minutes required to fork over the money for a spare–this was back when I actually had money to fork over for such things. Three days later, this showed up at my apartment. And a day after that, so did the new modem.

Swapping out the modem solved one connection issue. As a result, the router spent pretty much the last year or so in a box. This includes the 4 months since I’ve moved into the new place. And, on Monday evening, after some internal skepticism as to whether or not the thing would still work after it not being used save a brief testing period when I got it, it became pretty much the center of an otherwise unchanged network. Now, here’s hoping the month of technical issues doesn’t continue into March, and here’s hoping if by some twist of fate–or by some act of someone’s cruel sense of humour–it does, that it leaves this router the hell alone. I’m fresh out of spares, and money to fork over for spares. Anyone feel like donating to the Save a Geek foundation?

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• When is a router no longer a router? The sequel.
• The slow, painful death of a router.

I did manage to get a bit of job searching done, not that I found anything worthy of applying for. And thanks to the fact they charge me way too much for a data plan I absolutely have to have with this phone, I was still able to go through a lot of the things I had to go through. When getting around to posting a couple of the things that got posted on here yesterday, though, I discovered the brokenness.

I don’t use any third party applications for maintaining the blog. Mostly because, especially the past month or so, I never know from where I’m going to be writing. It could be from my place, from this machine, over at Jessica’s place in the event I end up there, or wherever. And I very rarely, meaning all of twice, actually wrote and posted something from my phone so installing an application on there didn’t cross my mind. It probably should have.

Trying to log into the site via the Rogers Wireless cellular network proved to be next to impossible. Of course, it being me and my phone being something of a questionable internet usage tool, I suspected it might have been a thing to be tweaked a little in order to get it to work. So I spent the better part of 45 minutes doing that. And googling for things to try that I hadn’t already thought of. After banging my head against that for a bit, I eventually just said screw it and went back to my email. I’d beat the hell out of it when I got back home and didn’t need it in top working condition.

When I did get back to my parents’ place and their sort of half stuck together, but working, wireless network–hey, I can only do so much with a wireless modem from Bell–I figured I’d try to log in via the wifi connection. And, wouldn’t you know, first try it let me in. I tried from the cell network again, and of course it laughed at me.

What’s interesting about it, though, is it doesn’t throw any kind of error at me. Or rather, it doesn’t throw anything at me–it just returns me to the login screen as though I hadn’t given it any information. The logs don’t show my attempts either, which makes me wonder exactly what funky and messed up thing Rogers is doing to me between phone and blog. Of course, googling further for other people having that issue with websites that aren’t this one didn’t answer my question either. Although, I did find several more examples of severe Rogers and Rogers Wireless related brokenness–their website, which I think has only gotten worse, for one. Not a good thing to be reading about when trying to fix an existing problem, Rogers. You might want to look in to that.

I did manage to learn two very valuable pieces of information, though, when doing this. Pieces of information that may have been helpful 2 days ago.

• The phone isn’t quite as questionable an internet usage tool as I originally thought. The network, however, makes up for that improvement in questionability status.
• And, the most important lesson to take away from this bit of unexpected geekery. From now on, posts while mobile will be emailed. Starting whenever I get around to configuring such things.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Verizon borrows a play from Rogers’s book. Anyone surprised?

ETA: Appropriate tech people have been drop kicked. For the moment, email is again playing nice. God I hope it stays that way…

Wednesday was sort of a personal day of sorts, with us not really doing a whole lot beyond being awake. Mostly because it was just generally all manner of craptastical outside to the point of not really knowing whether or not our rather chaotic weather paterns were coming or going. We did decide, though, that since local weather was being a royal bitch and making it difficult for us to really enjoy ourselves in any kind of relaxing manner outside our own apartment, the first nice day or two we actually came across would be taken full advantage of.

That would be Thursday, and the advantage would be taken with a walk for coffee that couldn’t be obtained the day before, or the night before that. We got ourselves a couple peppermint lattes (she in a moment of insanity got an ice latte, poor girl), and killed pretty close to an hour I’d imagine just sitting outside at the coffee shop talking and the like. We headed it back here, and I made an attempt at getting her computer to play nice with, like, everything while she got herself ready for and wandered on over to class. I eventually managed to convince this thing that yes, in fact, there are other ways of solving problems aside from choking horribly on itself and dying right before my very nonfunctional eyes.

Friday was the sellebration we were planning on having earlier in the week, only we went all out with this one. It started at about 9:00 or so, when we headed to the Cracker Barrel for breakfast. We spent the morning there, stuffed ourselves silly, did a little browsing, then sat outside for about an hour talking while we waited for our lift back home. Once back home, we thought about doing a real quick grocery run seeing as we were running a little low on a few things. And then promptly decided it could bloody well wait, and spent the afternoon fighting with food coma instead. We did manage to recover from that, and both of us were in a mood for Mexican. So, a 25 minute walk later, we were up at the school where Jessica’s taking her massage therapy course (also where she is right now), which has on its downstairs level a quite deliciously awesome mexican place called Selina’s (spelling may be off, but I could care less). An idea roughly of exactly how good the place is: it was packed as hell, to the point where when we did manage to get there (7:30 or so), they were predicting wait times of upwards of an hour and a quarter. We ended up not actually waiting that long, which was good, since we weren’t looking forward to the prospect of it being within eyesight of 11:00 before we found our way back home.

It had been raining a fair bit when we walked up, but we were sort of halfway hoping it’d manage to let up when we were looking to come back. So we weren’t overly concerned about the walk back, seeing as even if it hadn’t really let up, it was still fairly nice out there, rain or not. The food there was, of course, holy fucking awesome. We thought about dessert, but only for maybe about 30 seconds. And instead, we asked for the bill.

The walk back was when things started to get really interesting. Instead of letting up as we’d originally thought it would, it was actually raining a little harder, I think. It had gotten a bit cooler as well, but that was both to be expected and nothing we hadn’t prepared for. Problem is, it kept cooling. All told, by the time we got home, not only was Jess freezing, but I think so was the rain. I don’t think I’ve been out in weather like that, particularly in April, in a very long time. And I could probably stand to go another very long time before doing it again. I don’t mind the cold, but I so wasn’t dressed for freezing rain and possibly snow. Which, according to some friends this morning, is precisely what we were getting hammered with when Jess took off at 8:00 for her all-day clinnic. And by the sounds of things right now, the crap factor outside has yet to do any sort of actual improving.

On the bright side, we did get a lot of things accomplished this past week, including my attempt at installing Freedom Scientific‘s JAWS for Windows screenreader, only to discover neither she nor I realized she was running XP pro. I don’t have an authorization key for XP pro. That plan’s been put on hold until such time as we can price out what it would cost, or… um… otherwise obtain a key for JAWS to run on XP pro. Other than that, though, there was a lot accomplished on a personal front as well. We were kind of using this past week or so as a means of getting to know each other even better than we already do. This relationship thing’s still fairly new to me, so I’m still sort of learning my way around as I go. I’m sure she is too, which probably is what makes it easy. I haven’t the slightest idea what if anything we have planned for tonight, or even if we’re going to make an attempt to bother so much as stepping outside in that mess. But I do know there’s still a thing or 6 we both kind of decided we want to do before I go running off to Ottawa again. So if not today, then definitely at some point this coming week, there will be some kind of hell raised. What that actually translates to on a productivity front is anyone’s guess, but… oh well. So I won’t win any awards. I’ll live.

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• And now, an actual update.

him: i got a question about my computer  
me: call the manufacturer.  
him: thanks  
me: np. lol  
him: i would buy a new one but they cost money  
me: heh.  
him: i would get a new one but they cost $$$$  
me: yeah.  
him: do you know how to set it back to factory setting   
him: or wipe it  
me: it depends on the model. i’ve never actually done it myself, since the factory settings are usually what i’m trying to get the hell away from  
him: ok  
him: its running slower then hell and it keeps crashing saying hard were problem   
me: then whiping it probably won’t be a whole lot of help. call the manufacturer.  
him: i’ll go there on monday and see how much $ it will cost  
him: thanks 

Dood. *Not* tech support for $company. Your computer was made by $company. $company knows how to reset the bloody thing. $company has the ability to replace whatever component is fried or frying. And, $company has people who get paid to listen to you whine in that unreadable way you do. Why the hell are you asking me? Thank you for wasting 10 minutes of time I could have been spending doing anything else. No love, your irate older cousin.

PS: You had to know I was going to tell you to call $company anyway. I’ve been saying that since you got the damn machine. You, sir, fail at life.

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• Technical support rules, the dummy’s version.
• Never let it be said I don’t follow through.
• I follow the rules. Really, I do.

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• When is a router no longer a router? The sequel.

This post Puts me in mind of my year and a half working for Dell. I spent most of it working nights, and my manager just so happened to be about as blatantly honest as they come. To agents, to customers, whatever. If you’re a complete fucking moron, he’d call you a complete fucking moron. And if you were a customer, he’d do it in such a way you had absolutely no idea you were just called a complete fucking moron. We had a couple folks on our team with definite middle-eastern accents. One of these guys happened to be Lebonese, I believe. So anyway, enough background.

About 3:30 EST on a Saturday night, when you’d think most people would either be sleeping or getting absolutely smashed rather than trying to fix their computer so they can go back to their porn, we just so happened to be getting completely and totally slammed. There was all of 1 person on average not on a call for probably the better part of 2 hours. At about that time, the Lebonese dood happened to be that guy. He sat like right behind me, so I got pretty much a front row seat to what went on. This New York sounding dood calls up, and for obvious reasons, ends up talking to mister Lebonese. Except he’d really rather not. No sooner does the guy get halfway through “thank you for calling Dell” does the guy hang up. Couple seconds later, he calls back. Gets the same agent. Hangs up again. This time, he at least has the good sense to wait a minute or two. Then again, he calls back. Third time’s a charm. The guy behind me gets the call again, and yet again the caller drops it.

Now, by this time I’ve got the customer I’m working with restarting his computer, so I mute the thing, and call over my manager. I give him the 30-second run down on what’s going on, manager dood tells the agent to hand over his headset for a sec. We’re laying bets at this point he’s moronic enough to try it again. And sure enough, no sooner does the manager get the headset on then this guy calls in again. This time, manager dood goes through our thanks for calling opening. Customer then goes into about a 2 or 3 minute “thank God I finally got someone who speaks English” shpeel here. Manager mutes the phone, looks over at me and just sort of giggles a little. If anyone’s worked with this guy for any period of time, you just know he’s mentally taking notes, and as soon as customer dood comes up for air, he’s gonna be nailed to the wall. The manager just so happened to be black, and Louisiana born. So in other words, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone more American sounding in that call center. Customer finally stops yapping long enough for my manager to get a word in, and he ever so politely advises him that he is, in fact, not a tech support person (he’s technical, but they didn’t pay him to fix customers’ shit… that’s what we’re for), he’s a supervisor. Customer’s all “I don’t care, I’m just glad you speak my language.”

Caller then tries to get my manager to fix his problem anyway. Finally, after about another 15 minutes or so of back and forth, this happens. “Okay, sir, I’m gonna stop you, right there. No, just stop talking for a second. Now, here’s what’s happening. We’re incredibly busy tonight. The agent you just hung up on 4 times is the only one we’ve got not on a call right now. So, your choices are this. You can let him fix your problem so you can enjoy the rest of your night, or you can hang up right now and call back in the morning. If you call back tonight, you’re gonna be talking to me again. And if we have to have this conversation a second time, I’ll note in your account that you’ve repeatedly called in to and hung up on our agents, and you won’t be getting support from anyone. The choice is yours, and I’ll even give you a couple seconds to make it.”

The manager didn’t say a thing after that. He just handed it back to my coworker, and his problem was solved like 10 minutes later. And for like the next week, we all took turns immitating this idiot out of extreme boredom (Saturday was apparently fix your computer day that month, it was dead for the rest of the week). Sometimes, the stuff that goes on even manages to surprise me. And that doesn’t happen often.

In completely unrelated news, last weekend was way way awesome. Friday was spent hanging at Trish’s place for the evening, doing absolutely squat. Shooting the shit, and barbecuing burgers, which were rather thoroughly enjoyed. I got back in time to talk for a bit with Jessica (samari76), as per usual, and then promptly fell right the hell into bed. Saturday was rainy, a little chilly, and a lot lazy. Until later that evening, when Trish, her husband and I kicked it to Absolute Comety for what should have been an awesome time. It actually wasn’t all that bad, all told. We ended up seeing Kevin Gasior, Tod Van Allen”> (odd, google didn’t bring this up on the proper spelling of his name… stupid search engine), and Frank Spadone, who were actually pretty good. Though we all kinda decided the first two were better than Frank, who sadly was our headliner. Ah well, whatcha gonna do? We only had maybe two complaints about the whole night, which isn’t really all that bad, considering what could have gone wrong and didn’t. The place was jam packed beyond fucking belief, to the point where you were afraid to sneeze lest you twitch the wrong way and smack the guy behind you in the back of the head. And you didn’t dare have to go to the bathroom, as doing so would have required at least 3 other people needing to get up and out of your way just so you could leave your seat. So the smart majority either tried real hard to go before the show started, or waited until after when they could breathe again. Still, all in all it wasn’t that bad for $12.

Sunday was pretty much a lazy day, spent either relaxing or talking to Jess. The rest of the week was pretty much devoted to job hunting. And coming up empty, I might add. I fired off a few more applications to temp agencies, but so far they haven’t called me back either. Go figure. Yesterday was pretty much written off with large thanks to the headache from hell, which I’ll still trade you your sniffles for, Caroline (kittytech)! And today, well. Unless you count sorting out the biggest tangle of Linux updates *ever*, it was pretty well close to boring as hell. But, y’know. That’s me. Job hunting will continue later on tonight, probably after I get back from Trish’s place (we’re doing that halloween thing tonight, and she’s decided to pick me up in about half an hour or so. So I’d better get me dressed. Cell phone won’t be on my person, as it’s deader than dead and I’m not looking for the charger.

When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers,
bowling trophies and children’s art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.

When an I.T. person says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won’t be there when we need your password. It’s nothing for us to remember
700 screen saver passwords.

When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because
your computer won’t power up at all.

When I.T. support sends you e-mail marked “high priority”, delete it at once. We’re just testing.

When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.

When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s electronics in it.

When you’re getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can fix your telephone line from here.

When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call computer support. We’re collectors.

When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person’s chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a
puzzle.

When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, contradict us. We love a good argument.

When an I.T. person tells you that he’ll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: “And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?” THAT motivates
us.

When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.

Don’t learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by “My thingy blew up”.

Don’t use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have
20kg of computer sitting on top of them.

If the space bar on your keyboard doesn’t work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin crumbs and
nail clippings in them.

When you get a message saying “Are you sure?” click on that Yes button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren’t sure, you wouldn’t be doing it, would you?

When you find an I.T. person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don’t have any
money to speak of anyway.

Feel perfectly free to say things like “I don’t know nothing about that computer stuff”. We don’t mind at all hearing our area of professional expertise
referred to as stuff.

When you need to change the toner cartridge in a printer, call I.T. support – hanging a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard
recommends, that it be only performed by a professional engineer, with a master’s degree in nuclear physics.

When something’s the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who
doesn’t know anything about the problem.

When you receive a 30mb (huge) movie file, send it to everyone as a mail attachment. We’ve got lots of disk space on that mail server.

Don’t even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the queue.

When you lose your car keys, send an email to the entire company. People like to keep abreast of what’s going on.

When you bump into an I.T. person at the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question. We do weekends.

Don’t bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own. Computer names are just a cosmetic feature.

When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office, leave the documentation at home. We’ll find all the settings and drivers somewhere.

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• Do they not follow the rules by now…?
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• Note to self: do not try troubleshooting the intarwebz at 5:00 in the morning.

So I call them up, somewhat reluctantly (I’m still used to Bell’s tech support. Sue me.), and turns out it’s a known issue with the modem that when powercycled, it loses the configuration settings and needs to be set up again. Well fuck, again. At least these guys have a clue what they’re talking about, anyway. About 20 minutes later on my slower than the second coming laptop, we had us a newly reconfigured modem. Another 30 seconds and I was back online. For… 45 minutes. Further investigation revealed it had decided, yet again, to forget my settings. And this time it wasn’t because I powercycled. Well fuck, and fuck again. I didn’t wanna do anything productive tonight anyway.

So while on the phone with someone because, well, I likes me some damn good conversation and she usually provides an awesome one, we get to talking about music. It gets to a song she hasn’t heard that I figure she’ll find absofuckinglutely hillarious, and then I’m reminded. Duh, moron, you can has no internets. Which meant another 20 minutes because, to demonstrate my utter lack of preparedness for chrisis situations, I’d turned off my slow as hell laptop in favour of the much faster beast in the living room, which I’m using now, and which is conveniently nowhere in ethernet cable range of the craptastical modem. Clearly I was on some serious crack when I planned the layout of this network. Needless to say it managed to be fixed a second time, and it *looks* like the temporary bout of amnesia we were fighting has apparently subsided. Or at least has gone on a hopefully permanent vacation. I did learn something from all this, though. Speedtouch modems, or at least ones of this particular model, are absolute crap, and should be set on fire. *After* a suitable replacement is located.

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• Things I will always miss about tech support, number 98562.
• My moment of tech support failure.
• This is why I do tech support in a call center, folks.