Category: Annoyances

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I was about to post this over at my LiveJournal, when I discovered my journal was offline due to a massive server outage. Nice timing, as you’ll see:

Well, the phone’s acting up again. Oddly enough, DSL is working most of the time, even though we can’t get a dial tone. An SBC tech is scheduled to come out tomorrow afternoon, but the guy I spoke with had some suggestions for self-troubleshooting (since if it turns out to be a problem with our equipment, we get charged.

So now that we’ve moved the full-height bookshelf out of the way of the phone jack, I’m about to disconnect the last phone line and see what I can find out. Whee.

On the other hand, now that the shelf is out of the way, I can try rearranging cables to see if it gives us the full DSL speed. We’re supposed to get about 600K, but only ever get half of that, and I suspect it’s the ancient 20-foot phone cable. If I move the modem closer to the jack and use a short phone cord and a long network cable, it might speed things up.

Mood: Resigned.

Update 9:32 PM

Well, that was a colossal waste of time and effort. After disconnecting everything, rearranging the DSL/network structure while I waited, then hooking phones back up one at a time, it seemed everything was working. Same old DSL speed, but at least we had a dial tone on each phone. So I canceled the call forwarding, and called SBC to cancel the dispatch. Then it occurred to me I’d better try to make an incoming call. Half a ring, and suddenly there’s static (and nothing else) on both lines.

So it’s disconnect everything again, wait 5+ minutes again, and this time… nothing. Static, and only static. At least the DSL came back up. That would have really ticked me off. And another call into SBC to reinstate the tech dispatch. Fun, fun, fun! (Grumble.)

Anyway, we’re back to square one. I can only hope anyone who needs to call us before tomorrow afternoon tries one of our cell phones instead.

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I swear, I cannot win with people anymore. I used to have a good, unloseable Spanish accent when saying people’s names. I started losing it on purpose when I royally frelled up speaking to someone who outranked me at the Dungeons & Demons job, and it’s pretty much gone. I wince when I hear myself say “manual” for “Manuel,” but at least I don’t confuse the person on the other end of the line.

Like today. I called a place for info on the file of someone whose last name I’ll say is Rivera. Like a good little white girl, I said it rih-VAIR-a.

“Oh, Mr. ree-VEH-ra?” asked the receptionist, and I conceded. The place called me back later and asked for a return call, and when I got the receptionist again I asked for the person who’d called, on the file of Mr. ree-VEH-ra.

“Sorry, what was the last name?”

*sigh* “rih-VAIR-a.”

“Oh, ree-VEH-ra. Let me transfer you.”

Like I said. No winning.

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OK, one of my pet peeves is people who refuse to walk 50 feet out of their way to a crosswalk, instead dashing across a busy street where cars are more likely to hit them (or swerve and hit other cars, buildings, etc.)

But the number of people who jaywalk from the courthouse to the Starbucks across the street just amazes me. Especially since the courthouse is at the corner. The point where people cross the street is close enough to the intersection that the left turn lane has already opened up.

I mean, talk about a triumph of laziness over self-preservation. Saving ten seconds vs. risking life and limb? And flagrantly violating traffic laws in front of the courthouse?

I just don’t get it.

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We got home tonight, after a good round of beer therapy and poking fun at the evil that is casual dinnerware, and found that we now live in Aliso Springs. They didn’t change the city name, mind you, just the name of our apartment “village.” We’d been wondering how they were going to handle having painted over the metal number plates affixed to our doors. Now we know: artsy little ceramic number plates affixed to the stucco, using slightly eastern script for the “Aliso Springs” and that much-too-popular raggedy calligraphy one for the numbers.

Gag me. These people need to get a clue. This place was never high-class and it’s never going to be. And, considering how frelling expensive it is to live in the kind of place they want to turn this into, it shouldn’t be, not in this area.

I think I need more beer therapy.

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I am honestly in complete confusion as to why all wedding vendors and personnel seem to feel it’s necessary to rebuke us for not arranging everything a year in advance. Sure, we procrastinated like nobody’s business, but we were already getting this at T minus 6 months. What do they do with people who have 6-month engagements, tell them they’re really getting off to a bad start planning their lives together? It’s not like we can say, “Oops, my bad, we’ll remember that for next time.” This is a field where what everyone says doesn’t always go, and the 10% who don’t follow the rules seem to have the best time and come out the least scathed. So it’s natural that I, as one of the 10% in most other arenas, would attempt to bull my way through this. In retrospect, that was a bad move, if only for the flood tide of social censure I’m enduring just because bouncy people make me nuts and I like to avoid them.

But anyway. Do these people not talk to each other? Do cake decorators never speak with dress shop attendants and find out that all their wedding planners give people the same advice? More importantly, do they think this is in any way endearing to the customer, or that it’ll make them want to recommend the facility to someone with better planning skills? Especially when the customer is sick to death of being told how insufficient she is and just wants the thing around the corner to knock her cold when it comes at her out of the promised nowhere so she can wake up after the wedding and go on with her life.

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Last month I finally got around to installing antivirus software on the one Windows computer we have at home. While I’ve found Norton Anti-Virus has worked well on my system at work, I ended up choosing McAfee Internet Security Suite for two reasons: (1) unlike Symantec, they don’t use a product activation scheme, and (2) since McAfee bought Deersoft, purchasing a McAfee-related anti-spam product should help fund SpamAssassin development.

Big mistake.

Since installing McAfee, this computer has crashed at least once each time I’ve turned it on (usually with a McAfee dialog box visible). The privacy service adds another login prompt, whether you want it or not. It tends to pop up dialogs when you’re in the middle of, say, running ScanDisk to make sure the system survived the crash McAfee caused five minutes earlier. And, ridiculously, the software and virus definition update runs through Internet Explorer.

By this I don’t mean that it expects you to go to the website and download an installer. That would be inconvenient, but acceptable (since you could choose what web browser to use). No, it pops up a “Check for updates” dialog box which then opens Internet Explorer, goes through a set of redirects until it opens a pop-up that looks like a download manager (but is clearly done using HTML), and then downloads and installs the update.

Now forget any issues you might have with buggy rendering, feature parity, monopoly abuse, antitrust, etc. Just look at IE’s track record on security.

Why would you want a security system to rely on something so notoriously insecure?

Symantec has its own update program that calls out, checks for updates, downloads them and installs. You can run it manually, or you can set it to grab and install virus updates automatically. Nowhere in this whole process does Internet Explorer come into the picture – or if it does, it’s hidden away where the power user won’t see it and say “What the hell do they think they’re doing?”

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