Never been one to let the carrier drop

Well, it’s been another fun week at the ol’ farm – work on the EV continues nicely, and I haven’t electrocuted myself yet. On the other hand, I have recently discovered what has to set a new standerd for just plain _wrong_ in the spamming industry.

Recently, I’ve been filling out assorted surveys and when they ask for my fax number, I’ve just been typing it in without thinking about it. Apparently I typed it into one too many, because I started receiving – you guessed it – !fax spam!. At first I figured it was a isolated incident – but when the papers started piling up in the output tray, two a day, I realized I had a serious problem.

At first I figured I’d just call up the company and talk to them for a while – hence costing them more in 800 charges than I was worth. This was amusing, and I’m sure I frustrated the hell out of a couple of people (usually phone reps aren’t allowed to hang up on the customers, and this can make for very entertaining moments). But, it seemed clear that doing this wasn’t going to stop the torrents of spam piling up in my fax machine’s output tray – so I decided to try doing something truly nutty – and call the remove number.
Did so. Got a nice cheesy voicemail system.. and evil set in. The options included a number for adding a fax machine. So I added the system.

After that, the voicemail system was down for a few days. When I called back again to actually remove myself (since the faxes were still piling up), I got told that I could get redirected to the new number – for $2.95.

Okay, NOW I was mad. So I called the 800 number for the service on the spam, and talked to them for 30 minutes. Finally at the end they relented (the magic words are ‘can I talk to your supervisor?’) and removed me from the system. But I ask you, is this fair? Now they’re _charging us_ to remove us from a service that _costs us money_ every time they use it? This is just WRONG! Fax spam is technically illegal (see the california penal code segment at the bottom of sheer.org) and yet they have the unmitigated gall to _charge_ for removal.
Ashcroft, meanwhile, is too busy fighting porn to do anything about it.

In the meantime, I’ve recently had most of the mistakes and poor judgement calls of my life detailed on fuckedcompany. Oddly enough, I’m all for this – if we didn’t have free speech, life wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. I’m still a little incensed at being called a script kiddie – but hey, maybe that’s all I really am. It’s hard to tell from the inside.

What annoys me is that someone is trying to make any connection at all between my private life and the work I do. Lately this has been considered more and more acceptable – look at how many employers perform drug tests – and look at the hoops you have to go through to work for the federal government. Let me ask you a slightly pointed question – do you honestly beleive that in a honest world, George Bush could get a security clearence even adequate to sweep the _floors_ in the white house?

Back to drug tests for a second – WHY is it that my employer has any business at all knowing what chemicals I do or don’t use? One could argue that use of controlled substances indicates a lack of respect for the law – but almost any upstanding business breaks the law several hundred times a day, or at least bends it real hard. And with good reason – our laws vary from silly to stupid to unenforcable. For that matter, aren’t those who break the law in ways that don’t hurt other people the ones you want? The best, brightest, and most creative? The non-sheep?

Oh, wait. We don’t want non-sheep – because we’re trying to become America the Mediocre.

Chat… hahah!

I just spent a night hanging out in MSN chat. Not that I really was that lonely, or that bored, but just that I was sort of curious as to what sort of people join MSN chat.

It’s certainly easy enough to sign up. I filled out a few feilds, clicked ‘yes’, and away I went. The interface was nicely intuitive, and I had a wide variety of channels to choose from, all aparently well filled. No shortage of people.

What there was a major shortage of is conversation. I went from room to room, and even tried whispering to a variety of people, but for the most part, the only conversation I could get was ‘Hi’, ‘How are you’, ‘A/S/L’, and the occasional ‘want to have cyber sex?’ or the equivelant – usually
from males not smart enough to check my profile for gender.

Is this really the best we can do? The most interesting conversation I had all night was with someone who was quoting a infomercial to me. Not only could I not get anyone to talk about anything intelligent – I couldn’t even get them to talk about the weather. Apparently, anything more
complicated than ‘hi’ or ‘wanna cyberfuck’ is beyond these people. This really scares me. These are (one presumes) the smarter eggs.

Theseare people who figured out how to get their modem working, their ISP hooked up, got on the net, and decided they wanted to talk. Okay, so they aren’t mega-geeks or they’d know better than to use microsoft’s chat service – but… It’s just disturbing. I mean, have we really fallen this far? Has
television so eclipsed our abilities to think that we can’t even manage to hold a decent conversation? Maybe a little back-and-forth?

And then, of course, at the end of my fine netting experience came the ultimate. Two people got in a flamewar, and I swear it was like watching 3 year olds:

xxx: Fuck you
yyyy: Fuck you too
xxx: like I give a shit
yyy: you don’t, do you. What if I come make you?

OVER THE INTERNET? HELLOOOOOOO! Is there anybody IN there? You’re not even smart enough to figure out what a IP address IS, much less how to map one to a geographic location. About the only chance you have of getting the other guy’s address is if he’s dumb enough to give it to you – which if
what I saw tonight was any sample, MIGHT HAPPEN!

This is TERRIFYING! No wonder microsoft gets away with writing such horrid software – the users probebly just think it’s their fault when the computers crash anyway. Is this my imagination? Or has thinking in general gone out of vouge in favor of simply accepting the grass that’s handed to you like a good little cow?

At one point I commented that I didn’t like Las Vegas, except for DefCon – and someone asked me why not.. I gave four reasons, and she agreed with every one of them. Then I commented that I was glad it suited her even though it wasn’t for me – and she hemmed and hawed and it came out that
she basically didn’t like it much either, but she felt the need to defend it because it was ‘her city’. Is this why my parents keep telling me what a great place America is? I’m not sure…

Whatever happened to trying to _change_ the things you don’t like? Okay, so we’re never going to make Lost Wages any less hot.. in fact, I think the best solution is to just abandon the city – geothermal cooling won’t even work there because the _ground’s_ too hot – but we could certainly
figure out some way to make it so people didn’t always look so miserable coming in. Not sure how, but surely it could be done… I don’t know. Just ranting.

I think I’ve just been through hell.

We lost a motherboard the other day, to lack of tender loving care or something. It actually still works, except the USB ports and PCI slots. But seeing as to how it was the board for a gaming machine, this was deemed unacceptable and I went to get a new motherboard.

This was great – in theory. In practice, I discovered that the state-of-the-art slot 1 has been discontinued in favor of socket 370, a less reliable socket with the SAME PINOUT!

You’ve gotta be kidding me.

Tried every local place i could think of. No slot one motherboards, sorry.

Then I started noticing a more disturbing phenomenon.

No one sells processors any more..

I guess they decline in value so fast that you can’t make any money buying them – because trying to find these things was like trying to find R-12 – that is to say, I’ve had easier times trying to buy illegal drugs. I went to several computer stores, and the story varied.. sometimes it was ‘we don’t sell processers any more’ (but they still sell the motherboards.. wonder what they think we’re going to do with them?) and sometimes it was ‘we’re out of that particular product – try back in a month’.

Sooner or later, I started to get annoyed. I mean, they had these $900 celerons (who is going to pay 900 for a celeron? I don’t _care_ what brand name you stick on the front, it’s still a effen’ celeron, and it’s still a $300 computer).. but they didn’t sell processors. No, sir, you should really just buy a new computer. I mean, it’s the safest thing.. are you sure your processer’s bad anyway?

Finally, something snapped.

“NO, MY PROCESSOR IS NOT BAD! YOUR SELECTION IS BAD – YOU AREN’T SELLING A SINGLE MOTHERBOARD WITH A SOCKET THAT WAS STATE OF THE ART TWO YEARS AGO – THIS IS NOT WHAT I’D CALL GOOD SUPPORT…”

“Well, sir, no reason to get upset – that’s a obsolete motherboard”.

Great.

Then I got everything home, and foolishly threw away the boxes – not realizing that I’d need them so I’d know what product i had to install the drivers. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they no longer give you CDs suitable for merely your product – no, that’d be inefficient. Now they give you drivers for every product the company you bought your product from has ever made on the CD. Actually, in some cases, there are several companies to choose from. I have to wonder how the Rage 3D drivers, NVidea drivers, and Voodoo 5 drivers all ended up on the CD for my video card. Must be a interesting story there.

Actually, it gets worse – I decided to crack the cover and look on the card itself for the model number – you’d think they’d put that on there somewhere, wouldn’t you?

You’d be wrong.

And, as usual, to get the ROM drive working, one has to install the IDE drivers – which are conveniently provided on CD-ROM.

Am I the only one who has this problem?

You know, maybe there’s a _reason_ the bottom is falling out of the computer industry. When it takes me three hours to get a PC up and running, that’s _sad_. I mean, we could blame this on me, and in the sense that if I’d been a good little consumer and bought the package system this wouldn’t have happened, this is my fault – but it still seems to me like the manufacturers really don’t want me building my own computer.

Have I ever talked about my theories about selling each other hamburgers?

–Begin quote–

re: Love them mnemonics Jun 20 2001 06:10AM EST
—————————————————————————–
quote:
—————————————————————————–
Originally posted by Buzz Word:
RIF, LOA, MIP, RNC, etc.

As in “Combined with our

MIP offering, we will be positioned to emerge from this recession” blather.

What recession? The economy is doing reasonably well. The problem is that the stupid funding bubble of dotcoms is over.

Years ago, we had to contend with confusion between “revenues” and “net profits”. Now, the dotcom industry is confused between “capital funding” and “revenues”.

Everything is just fine outside the dotcom (and the related telecom) implosion.
—————————————————————————–

Keep telling yourself that until you beleive it.

You and I both know that many of the non-service jobs in this country have gone south or north – that most clothing, auto, farming, etc happens off these fair shores.

You and I both know that the federal government owes more money than bill gates could ever dream of having – our tax dollars just go to pay the interest.

You and I both know that Bush is going to drum up a war, just to try and get the hard-stalled service-bullshit economy to (maybe) crank over.

Yes, the DJIA looks good. But in the real world, the situation is grim. 1% of the population is in jail.. something like 8% works for the government.. another 5% (!) works in the transit industry, in one way or another (insurance, car sales, car repair, airline, etc) – oh, and let’s not forget those who don’t work at all.

You may think the economy is healthy and everything is going just fine. But I have bad news – you can only sell each other hamburgers for so long..

The internet is a real innovation – the computer in general seems to be a american thing – but unless it’s successfully deployed internationally, it doesn’t pay the bills. With IPv4 so entrenched in it, it won’t be deployed internationally because the addressing doesn’t permit it.

Also, the government and the Powers That Be are quickly deciding they don’t really _want_ information to flow freely. Gives us too much ability to think. Thinking’s bad. Sit in front of your TV, load up the credit cards with the products we advertise, and be good little consumers. Yay.

Mark my words: This one aint gonna fly long term.

Sheer

I’m reposting a bunch of rants from TheSadTruth – they were taken down there [apparently I suck too much to be worth saving, or else wasn’t writing often enough]

Anyway, I figured I wanted to save them somewhere, and this is as good a place as any…

So, the next few entries will be rant reposts

Okay, I don’t know what that title was about either, but it was in that fun little ‘scrollback of titles’, so I thought, why not?

D. (or was I referring to him as V.? I can’t even remember. Fuck it)’s significant other is pregnant. I’m happy for them, I suppose.

M. proposed to her SO, who I gather said no. These things happen. Better luck next time! [or something of that sort]

And me? Well, Bill, you don’t even want to know my situaton. [I may take up sati’s approach of thinking of my reader as a 18-25 year old guy named bill. It has a certain humor value to it. Or I may think of my reader as a beautiful 18-25 year old female who really.. wait.. no..

Does anything besides love matter, in a relationship? I can’t decide.

I wish I could find the energy to do some work. There’s so much to do be done.. but it seems like today, I’m lost in listlessness. I can’t even think of anything to babble about in my journal. Bad sign.

Wading in the velvet sea, Phish

[Chorus:]
I’ve been wading in the velvet sea
I’ve been wading in the velvet sea
I’ve been wading in the velvet sea
I’ve been wading in the, I’ve been wading in the
[repeats]

You won’t find moments in a box
And someone else will set your clocks
I took a moment from my day

This stupid group-by function for evparts’s new web site is going to drive me _nuts_!

Anyway, for those who asked, my myers-briggs type is INFP (hrm.. I wonder what P.’s is?). Below is a description of same:

You focus deeply on your values and devote your life to chasing ideals… you often draw people together around a common purpose and work to find a place for each person within the group. You’re creative and seek new ideas and possibilities. You quietly push for what’s important to you, and rarely give up. You might be somewhat gentle or have a good sense of humor, you could be hard to get to know and overlooked by others…you like to make the world more in line with your vision of perfection.

Duplicate entry – clicked twice – oops – deleted.

can be found here. I didn’t get through the whole thing, but sometime maybe I will.

[Nice thing about a LJ – I can ‘bookmark’ things that I’d like to look at sometime. I really wish that bookmarking things on the net wasn’t so questionable.. sometimes pages are there forever, other times they dissapear in a matter of days, so a bookmark on the net is less than totally useful.

I wish it wasn’t so copyright-questionable to mirror content that you like on your own web server so you can directly link to it.

S.

So I presume all of you know that the EPA has finally come out and admitted that yes, um, global warming is in fact real.

They’ve added a prediction that the earth will heat up by 10 deg F over the next hundred years.

I was listening to the Midnight Oil song ‘beds are burning’. I’m going to cite the lyrics, just in case my readers, like me, don’t actually know them.

Out where the river broke
The bloodwood and the desert oak
Holden wrecks and boiling diesels
Steam in forty five degrees
The time has come
To say fair’s fair
To pay the rent
To pay our share

How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning
Four wheels scare the cockatoos
From Kintore East to Yuendemu
The western desert lives and breathes
In forty five degrees

Let me put this as plainly as I can. The australian desert – home to some of the most unique life on earth – doesn’t have the headroom for global warming. It’s just not there. Things are already just about as hot as they can be (45 degrees C!).

If you drive a gas car, you are a party to the extinction of hundreds of species. You’re killing them, with your hands, every time you turn the key forward. _there is another option_. bush & the automakers won’t tell you about it, because they really want you to keep burning oil, but electric vehicles are perfectly practical commuter machines.

Once again, if we follow the path we’re currently on, the outback will die.

Have you ever been there? Do you know what you’ll be killing?

Can you in good concionce load the gun, aim it, and pull the trigger? Apparently we all can..