“Our strategy has been that we’d rather customers run unlicensed than run Linux.”
Sadly, we were not recording this meeting.
Meeting with one of our Microsoft reps
27 08 2009Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Work
Categories : None
Withdrawal
27 08 2009My cable and Internet have been down for at least 30 hours. Comcast customer service claims the outage affects several neighboring cities and will be resolved tomorrow…
Smells like bullcrap to me. Not a peep about large-scale outages in the local news websites or the usual broadband forums. Hopefully I can catch some of my neighbors in the morning and ask if they’re having probems too.
Update: Did an online chat with Comcast from work in the morning. No outage:
I’m 99% certain that what happened was someone was dispatched on Tuesday to connect or disconnect a neighbor, and they either stole our line or disconnected ours by mistake. Of course, they won’t give me an appointment to correct their fuck-up until Saturday. I’ve escalated but they way Comcast works I probably won’t know if a technician is coming on Friday until one shows up at my door. Well, actually, they probably won’t come to the door anyways… It’ll either suddenly start working tomorrow, or it won’t.
Update 2: Also confirmed with a neighbor that there was no outage. I’m saddened by how well I know how these people operate…
Saturday Update: The technician they sent said he couldn’t fix the line problem. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that it was raining and the end of his day. Now we’re supposed to wait until Wednesday for another tech to come out. I really would love to ditch Comcast but the fastest DSL I can get is 1.5Mbps / 256 vs my current 16Mbps / 768.
Wednesday Update: I’m finally back online. Yay.
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Fail, Fuck Comcast, Rants
Categories : None
Road Trip Planning
24 08 2009Suckered my boss into approving 13 vacation days for next month — for five years I’ve had managers that are reluctant to approve two weeks off, and the time I’ve chosen couldn’t have been worse — which gives me a total of 19 days for two wheeled roaming. The first few days will be traveling to the FJR Eastern Owners Meet to spend a weekend exploring the mountains along the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. They’ve posted up the routes for seven rides, all of which look fantastic so it is going to be difficult to choose which rides to make…
Then I’ve got a vague notion of doing the Blue Ridge Parkway — which my father has been telling me to drive since I was a teenager — and Skyline Drive. A friend suggested that I spend a day or two in Washington D.C., which is appealing since I’ve driven around or through dozens of times yet never actually visited my country’s capital, but it does pose logistical challenges if I’m not to be disarmed for this entire trip.
From there I’ve probably got another 10 days to fill out. There’s the family option in Jersey, or I could swing down and out to Texas to visit friends… Or I could skip the mid-Atlantic area altogether and make a run out to the Grand Canyon.
Decisions, decisions…
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Motorcycle
Categories : None
Faith
23 08 2009Reading about the trial of yet another nut-job family that let their child die rather than seek medical attention because God should heal her, I’m reminded of the joke about the man and the approaching flood:
When in Heaven, the man stood before God and asked, “I put all of my faith in You. Why didn’t You come and save me?”
And God said, “Son, I sent you a warning. I sent you a car. I sent you a canoe. I sent you a motorboat. I sent you a helicopter. What more were you looking for?”
I used to think that I struggled with faith, then I realized that it was the actions — and inactions — of the faithful that confounded me.
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Categories : None
