Random Ideas, Comments & Thoughts, Sometimes Political, Sometimes Adult… Hope you don't choke.
We’ve been without power since about 10AM I’m sitting on the deck with the laptop on battery and transmitting via my cellular hotspot.
All is well except that it’s only a 2G connection here at home which means it’s tediously slow and the connection times out.
The practical upshot of which is…
I had to resend the previous blog entry several times. And editing??? Fagetaboutit!
Have a great afternoon.
This image was tweeted the other day.
I’m posting it full size so that you can see what I’m talking about..
At first glance you think Oh Hell NO!
Anyone would because it’s just so obviously wrong.
This is not what America is about. Most people would agree that America.. ie the American Tax payers don’t owe anybody anything.
Certainly not Houses and certainly not under threat of force.
I didn’t look at the image at full size and so didn’t notice the artifacts that indicate the picture has been altered.
It wasn’t until I was discussing the implications of the photo that I wondered if it was for real.
Well I thought… I’ve got that shiny new copy of PhotoShop let’s take a look.
I downloaded the image, then I started really looking at it.
The artifacts were popping out all over the place. I zoomed in on the area in the red circle so I could show the evidence better.
See the smooth looking area? Thats where someone wiped out the rest of the text after House & Food
The grainy appearance around the letters is what should be there. It has to do with the jpg compression in the camera that took the original image.
The smoothing is evidence of an image editing tool like Photoshop being used.
Unfortunately without knowing where the image came from, there is no way to tell what the original sign said.
There’s another artifact visible in the image if you look at the lower sign.
I’m really not sure what’s going on there. It looks like a bleed through of something else but i’m completely in the dark on that one.
The point is…
Even though you see something, in the paper but especially images on the internet. Take them with a grain of salt.
I reacted retweeting and commenting on this photo before I really thought about it.
It was so damn offensive I went off like a shot.
10 minutes later when I thought about it and realized I had the tools necessary to evaluate the image. After I really looked at it, I realized that I’d been fooled.
I reacted exactly as the creator of this image wanted me to… I got angry!
So the rule is “Take a deep breath, try to confirm what you’re seeing or reading, and then if you’ve come to believe the data is accurate take action.“
I guess if all of us did that more often we might be communicating with each other better.
Have a great day and remember…
“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” – Benjamin Franklin
Why so very many people hate them!
Internet goes down.
Modem says problem Bad & at their end.
Call Verizon.
35 minutes of screwing around with their stinking voice obfuscation system which is all the while telling me that I can resolve my problems by visiting them on the web at www.verizon.com.
To which I say If I could visit you at www.verizon.com I’d sign up FOR THE CARRIER providing me with the ability TO visit www.verizon.com.
Then I finally get to some female in god knows where but based on the static and her accent I’d bet she was in India somewhere. I ask her a simple question. “Is there a service problem in my area?” All I needed was a simple “Yes / No / I don’t know let me check”.
Instead we went down the rabbit hole which is all too common these days.
“What is your operating system?” – I’ve gotten in the habit of simply telling them UNIX. It’s true and then we don’t have to deal with the bullshit Windows questions.
“What is the Model of the modem you’re using?” – It’s a Netgear ADSL2+ DM111PSPv2
“Do you have a Verizon Modem?” – Nope, the one you sent me died and I didn’t feel like waiting 2 weeks for you to get ’round to sending me a new one so I bought this one a year & a half ago and it’s been working just fine since I installed it.
“Can you connect your computer directly to the modem?” – Uh NOPE, I’m not going to tear all my wiring out just so you can say I did.
“Is the modem connected directly to the wall?” – UH YEAH… the Modem reported to me that at 12:53 PST it lost contact with your DNS Servers and was no longer able to obtain a DSL address.
“What are the lights on your modem indicating?” – FUCK!!!!! Power Green, Ethernet Green, DSL Signal Green, WWW/WAN RED
“Do you have a wireless router?” – Yes
“What is the make of the wireless Router” – It’s an Apple not that it’s of any importance to this situation
“Is the modem connected to the Router” – GRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!! Everything was working and has been working just fine. Can you please just run a damn line test?
“Can you directly connect you computer to the modem?” – Look lady, I’ve got 10 computers of various types, and operating systems all running and communicating to a bunch of hard drives just fine via the router that you’re obviously trying to blame for your companies failure to provide internet service.
SO NO I’m not going to rewire my shit unless you can give me a seriously fucking compelling reason to do so.
What is the result of the line test?
“Oh the line test has indicated a problem, can you turn you modem off and back on?” – Yes… climbs back up on the ladder to push the button.
Ok modem restarted…
Static ~ Static ~ Static ~ Long Long Long wait…
“I’m so sorry that you have been inconvenienced you will be receiving a phone call within 24 to 48 hours explaining when you can expect your internet service to resume.“
So the line test failed… “Yes, the line test failed, We have received reports that DSL service has been disrupted in your area.“
So had you received those reports Before or After we began this little conversation?
“We knew there was a service outage in your area“
Great! Thanks for wasting my time.
I Hang up.
Why the hell is it so damn hard for people to just answer the question? Better yet why the hell didn’t Verizon route me to a recorded message based on my phone number that simply said
“DSL Service is Temporarily Down in your area. We are working to resolve the problem.“
That would have saved me the annoyance, and the “Technical Support Monkey” in India a lot of frustration.
This blog will not have any pictures…. I may add some when the internet comes back up.
How did I post this you ask????
I’m using the hotspot in my cell phone. It’s only a 2G connection but it’s working.
Sigh…
Saturday Update:
They’re at it again. This morning Verizon was giving my modem an ip address… every 20 seconds. However the data rate was 2000 BITs per second.
Rough math says that’s about 250 Characters per second which means that if you were just reading text based information you’d be able to easily keep up as the text scrolled across the screen. That is assuming that you can actually read… I guess if you’re here reading this blog you do know how to read… Good for you!
However with todays content rich websites… the reality is that you’ll see nothing but a blank page.
After restarting every single system in my network (Modem, Routers, Computers, WiFI extenders), I realized with horror that I’d need to report the problem to Verizon.
After Irishing my coffee… I was once again on the phone working my way through the insanity that is Verizons menu system.
It’s all voice activated and apparently tuned for non English speaking people because even when I’m speaking to it calmly (Before it pisses me off) it doesn’t understand me.
As an aside… I really hate voice recognition/prompts that have Genuine People Personalities I find them annoying and condescending.
This time I tried to work with the damn machine.
I was able to get it to run a line test. It determined that something was wrong and told me that it was going to transfer me to a human being.
“Cool” I thought.
Then for my protection, it wanted me to enter the last 8 or 10 digits of my account number. As If I had that handy!!!! Failing that… They wanted me to enter the amount I’d last paid them. UHHH Yeah! RIGHT! If I don’t have the account number handy, I’m sure as hell not going to have the last amount I paid handy.
I mean I could look it up ON THE INTERNET except that I can’t get to the Verizon web pages.
You know… The web pages where we’re all asked to “Go Green” and Save paper by signing up for automatic payments? Yeah… THAT page.
Which takes me into the loop where the Genuine People Personality tries to get me to pull this information out of my ass.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”
At this point I’m heating up for a full on explosion.
Then I remember being told once swearing foully at these systems can get you to a human being. So I channel the spirits of some of my favorite Marines!
It did break me out of the loop… and I felt better too!
Then I’m in a hold queue where a very nice voice complete with Indian accent is telling me they’ll get to me in less than 15 minutes and that she’s sorry for the inconvenience.
I’m calmer. I go back to my desk. I’m watching the modem performance statistics.
The indian accent lady is telling me they’ll get to me in less than 15 minutes and that she’s sorry for the inconvenience. AGAIN
When all the sudden the stats jump way up Bits… Kilobits… Megabits… per second. the throughput stabilizes at 2.96Mbps (normal) for my DSL service.
Still, the indian accent lady is telling me they’ll get to me in less than 15 minutes and that she’s sorry for the inconvenience.
I hang up.
Whatever the hell the problem was… they must have gotten thousands of calls about it.
I’m guessing that was enough to light a fire under them.
Good!
Remember these Utilities WORK for YOU!
They need to be reminded of that on a regular basis.
Yeah… I’m all Nebari today. So what?
I’d decided that I was going to refer to whoever I spoke with at Verizon in the Nebari way.
“Servicer… I will give commands, you will execute commands“
I probably wouldn’t have made and friends… but I sure as hell would have felt better!
I just got a box from Amazon!
Whoo Hoo!!!!
Season Four and Five of TrueBlood.
And Cinemax Season One of Strikeback.
And the very cool parts are that They include Digital copies, and DVD copies!!!!
Alright… so I’m a little excited. I’ve really gotten into watching programs that I like on my iPad or over the Apple TV.
I really like being able to Buy Once and watch on whatever the hell device I decide to watch on when I’m damn good and ready.
It’s been a day of software woes in this household.
It started with my partner handing me their cell phone which was clearly in a loop. Every 15 seconds a message was displayed that said Genius has stopped responding press OK to close the application.
So you’d press the helpful OK button and the message would disappear then come back 15 seconds later. After fiddling about I managed to get deep enough into the layer upon layer of menus till I finally could clear the cache for the application that was misbehaving.
Problem Solved.
Mind you this was before my first cup of coffee. It’s nice to know that my digital interfaces appear to come online before the rest of my brain.
On the other hand it’s kind of scary that my computer related information is at that low a level in my brain. I mean what happens if someone asks me a question while I’m sleeping? Do I start spouting free technical support information?
Humm gotta change the programming so that tech support information is only available after sex… I’d get laid a lot more often!
Then my partner said they’d been trying to fix it on their own for 3 days. So I felt guilty for making it look so damn easy.
You’d have thought that someone would have encountered this in testing and had the programming folks build in an automatic clear of the cache.
I’ve been dealing with software issues of various types for the past couple of days but all those issues came to a head today.
In general dealing with musicians, composition software, mixing software, or simple recording software, is absolutely nothing like dealing with normal software.
Imagine if you will the annoyance factor of someone like myself who sits down at a piece of software and is presented with a button that looks like a waveform.
When I press that button instead of a nice waveform graph that I can edit, the volume goes up.
But that makes no sense because right next to the waveform button is the master volume slider but moving that does nothing.
Because by “volume” the creators of the software actually meant Input level.
And so on until I’m pulling my hair out because absolute nothing is intuitive except that what I would intuit is completely incorrect every single time.
So I decide this software is not for me…
I download another manufacturers demo version. Before they allow me to download their software they want me to create an account. Then they allow me to download the DEMO.
I could understand it if I’d purchased the software, but it’s a DEMO.
That’s like having to fill out, and have a credit application approved before you go on a test drive.
After jumping through their hoops, I have the software downloaded. I install it. Guess what? It doesn’t install.
It goes through the motions, it modifies the shit out of my computer, but the installer of the main application throws an exception ON INSTALLATION and my system shuts down the extraction of the file.
After fiddling with it for an hour I gave up, then spent another hour painstakingly removing bits of their software and backing out their changes out of my system.
Next manufacturer… Was a completely no way in hell. They wanted 1000.00 for their application and there was no demo available. This manufacturer ended up doubly on my personal shit list because of what was going on in the next room.
My partner had been trying to upgrade a version of composition software. From the same company that wanted a grand for their mixing software. 12 hours later my partner successfully completed the upgrade.
First, their system wouldn’t acknowledge the email address. The serial number was fine but the email address wasn’t in their system. Then phone calls to their offices resulted in conversations like:
“Hi could you give me the number to your sales office? Thanks. Did you know that your web site has the wrong number listed?“
Their answer: “Yes” CLICK!
“Hi I’m trying to upgrade my notation software Sibelius First Note… It’s notation / composition software… Yes I’m sure you sell this… I’m looking at your web site… Well that’s the problem… your web site won’t process the purchase… Hello? Hello?” They hung up.
“Hi I’m calling from California, is this the corporate office of AVID Technologies? Good, could I speak to someone in customer service? Yes, I’m having trouble completing a transaction. Yes I’m trying to upgrade some software I own.
Customer service? Hello I’m having trouble upgrading some software. Yes I know I should be calling your California office that’s part of the problem. They’re not answering their phone. I’ve tried your web site, it’s not processing the transaction.
Look, I’ve been on the phone and on your web site looking for assistance for the past 6 hours, isn’t there some way you could just take the $40 and send me a link to download the software?
No, I’m not trying to be rude, I’m just trying to complete this business so that I can get on with my day. Hello? Hello?” GRRRRRRRRRR!
After spending most of the day talking with these people and getting nowhere my partner tried the website again and this time the serial number and the email address worked.
My recommendation at about the 4 hour mark was to just go to the competition.
The point of all of this is to highlight the ever increasing frustration caused by arrogant attitudes, and frankly shitty software testing.
Android applications that are part of the CORE Android OS and can’t be removed that obviously weren’t tested with corrupted caches.
Installers for DEMO software that don’t work. Really? do you think I’m going to BUY your software after such an obvious failure?
Overpriced software which might work but that I can’t even try before buying. ( I notice today that there are demo downloads available)
Nasty people on the phone who think nothing of hanging up on an existing customer?
I’ve gone back to the irrational piece of software that I’d decided to abandon in the first place.
Maybe it isn’t so bad after all.