Happy Holidays!

>> Thursday, December 18, 2008

I know its a bit early, but as I am officially on vacation as of this afternoon, I don't know how frequent this will get updates until after the 1st of the year. I am getting to go spend almost 2 weeks in Arizona with my family and celebrate the holidays there which I am really looking forward to. Apparently my nephew is ready to 'Rock Out!', which is his code for playing Rock Band 2 with me.

I know I said I don't like holiday work parties, but there are exceptions to that rule. Today work put on a killer spread for all the employees. Homemade mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, turkey, prime rib, salads. Awesome desserts. They were wandering around giving away frozen turkeys. Everyone got a gift certificate for free gas and cookies to take with them too. It was a great lunch and we all ate too much. Nap time now methinks.

We are in for a major winter storm tonight according to the weather channel which will make shuttling my son around for his last basketball game of the year, home for a quick shower and dinner and then into nice clothes for his winter music performance quite an adventure. 6-12 inches of snow being forcasted. Another winter storm predicted for Saturday too, which I am really hoping doesn't affect my travel plans for Sunday.

So, if I don't get around to posting, I wanted to wish everyone a happy holiday season. I hope you enjoy your time with family and friends. Travel safe.

/cheers!

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Humbug Indeed

>> Monday, December 15, 2008

Around the office I have a reputation as a Scrooge. The one who doesn't like the office celebration type crap. Its well deserved I suppose. I hate potlucks. I despise office secret santa exchanges. The idea in general of office celebrations bugs the crap out of me. If there are people at the office I want to spend that kind of time with, I'll make arrangements to do it outside of work. Why should I be forced to be 'festive' around people I wouldn't spend time with at all were it not for the fact that they work in the same department I do?

I just don't understand how me buying a $15 gift for some random person at the office in any way makes the holiday season better. Especially in a year where the economy is like it is and some family and friends have agreed to forgo exchanging gifts this year to ease the holiday stress.

And I still don't like potlucks. Everyone likes to bring in that special 'family recipe' dish that only people forced to eat that crap growing up have managed to acquire a taste for. No.. I don't want to try your Bolivian Yak Nutsack Soup or Fermented Green Bean and Liver Jello. If you insist on doing potlucks, have the decency to bring something people actually want to eat. Save your unique crap for people that have no choice but to be polite and eat that crap because its tradition or something.

If you want to celebrate the holiday season.. lets go out and get a couple of beers. Hell alchohol makes dealing with any office function much easier.

Enough scrooge ranting for now though. I watched Christmas Vacation with the boys this weekend. One of our holiday favorites. My brother and sister-in-law came over on Sunday for an epic marathon of Rockband 2. We managed to complete all 86 songs in the Endless Setlist 2. It was about 7 hours straight playing. We had 5 people so we were able to rotate people out for a break here and there. It was long and by the end we just wanted to be done, but it was fun just the same.

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Die Charter Die

>> Thursday, December 11, 2008

I don't have a love / hate relationship with my ISP Charter. I have a hate / want to shank you / incoming shovel to the face relationship with them. I have two options for high speed internet in my area. Charter cable and Centurytel DSL. Centurytel is close to twice as expensive for 1/4 the speed so really, its not much of an option at all. So Charter it is.

For the most part, my internet works fine. Actually, the event that sparked this post, while interent related, wasn't really the fault of my modem at all. I got on last night, fired up Vent (voice chat), started streaming music, connected my IMs and brought up the guild web page. I then went to connect to World of Warcraft. Hmmm.. can't connect. Reboot modem, router and computer. Still nothing. Internet is working fine other than that.

So I start some troubleshooting. As most of you that read this aren't IT savvy, I'll skip most of the details, but I ran a continuous ping to the WoW logon server. This just checks on 1 second intervals to see if it can connect to the server. I was getting 80-90% packet loss. Meaning 1 or 2 out of 10 attempts was actually making it to the server. This does not work well for connecting and playing.

I hopped on charters support page where they have chat based support. I have found this is much faster than jumping through the hoops of the automated phone system. I start up a tech support chat and after a few minutes of pleasntries and verifying who I was, I explained that my tracert showed that the packets were having an issue getting from Charters network onto AT&Ts network. The woman I was talking to didn't even acknowledge that I had spoken and promptly tells me that she has reprovisioned my modem on their end and that all I need to do is reboot everything and I should be all set. I questioned this of course as the problem is not with the modem, but she refused to even talk to me more about it til I had rebooted.

So I went through the whole process again .. and of course the problem was still there. So I hope back on chat and get a different person. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Here's my acct info (blahblahblah). I already talked to someone and went through the reprovisioning, rebooting etc. I am NOT having a modem related problem. I am trying to talking to someone to get an investigation going on a problem with routing from Charter's network to AT&T that is preventing Charter customers from connecting to World of Warcraft servers.

CustomerServiceIdiot2: Do you have a router.

Me: Yes, I have a router. The router and modem are functioning fine however. I am online talking to you via that router and modem. I am streaming music and doing voice chat as well as surfing the web. Its not a hardware problem on my end, its a routing / connectivity issue between Charter and AT&T. I have a tracert I can show you.

CSI2: Sir, I need you to plug your modem directly into your computer to eliminate that as a problem.

Me: To what end? It is not the router. It is not the modem. Its not my computer. If the router was the problem, I would be experiencing packet loss on everything I am doing on through that connection, not isolated to one specific server on the internet.

CSI2: **Stunned silence for over 5 minutes while she furiously googles a response that might sound plausible.**

CSI2: Well see if there is heavy traffic on your through your router it can cause buffer overflows which might cause the kind of problem you are seeing. (*she crosses her fingers and squints her eyes hoping I will buy it)

Me: Yeah.. I don't think...

CSI2: I cannot help you further. Please remove the router and then call tier2 support at xxx-xxx-xxxx aka 1-800-WeRRetarded.


I know that statement doesn't mean much to most of you, but to put it into perspective, it would be much like your mechanic coming out with a bewildered look on his face clearly indicating he has no idea what is wrong with your car and then trying to tell a guy who rebuilds engines for fun in his spare time something along the lines of:

"Well see its your flux capicitor.. it wasn't getting the necessary 1.21 jiggawatts of power which caused it to warp and impinge on the round whirlygiggergizmodoohicky."

Anyway.. after marveling at the level of stupidity .. I called 'tier2' support. Turns out it was the same generic level of support you can get just by calling the usual 800 number. Which means.. if thats considered tier2.. then the idiots that cant even make that level man the chat lines and are probably sharing the same 3 brain cells among the pool of them. You just have to hope that the one you talk to is in current possesion of at least 1 of the 3 aformentioned brain cells.

So I call in.. jump through the hoops .. and after yelling 'AGENT' at the automated system for a few minutes I get to talk to a live human being. I explain everything to her .. offer to send a tracert log to her. She promptly starts to 'reprovision' my modem. I had to tell her to stop. Long story short, she couldn't help me. Her supervisor couldn't help me. None of them at that location were actually allowed to interact with the IT staff that would actually investigate such a problem. The best they could offer me was an email address to send the log too.

After arguing with all these people for over 25 minutes, I finally gave up. I was told to wait 48 hours and try again. I couldn't take it anymore. Someone was going to die if I didn't get off the phone. So I told them I would email the log and that they should review their procedures and be able to transfer a problem like mine to appropriately trained personell in a timely fashion. I was in the process of hanging up politely when I heard:

CSI3: Wait a second please Sir. I notice that you have our 5Mb interenet service. Are you aware that we have a 10Mb service and that currently its only 12 dollars more per month? Also did you know that we have excellent bundle packages to include that 10Mb service as well as digital cable?

Me: Stunned Silence for 30 seconds.

CSI3: Sir are you still there?

Me: Oh I'm here. See I was going to try to end this conversation without getting really upset, but you have made that impossible. Are you SERIOUSLY trying to upsell my account when my interenet connection is not working the way it needs to and you are completely unable to even understand what I am talking about much less be able to fix it or get me in touch with someone how can?

CSI3: Im sorry I can't do more, but are you interested in the 10Mb connection at all?

Me: What the hell? You are still trying to sell me a bigger package when you know I can't do what I want to do on the current one? So I get the 10Mb service and I can get stuck not connecting to the WoW servers.. ummm.. twice as fast? Are you seriously forced to try and upsell someone even when you know its a horrible idea at the time? Are you going to get fired if you don't?

CSI3: Im sorry.. is there anything else

Me: Look, I hate to rage on you because I know the policies are set for you. But use some common sense. If a customer is already upset over your companies ineptitude and inability to even get started investigating a problem, why on earth would said customer want to buy more services. That has all the tact of walking up to a widow walking out of a funeral for her husband and asking if you can have dibs on his big screen TV.

CSI3: Im sorry..

Me: Incoming yule log to the face. As I know you obviously weren't smart enough to realize what a crappy situation you were getting into with this job and their lack of technical knowledge and training, I shall only beam you once. Your supervisor is getting have a dozen whacks to the cranial region. I will then give him a yule log of his own that he can pass along said message to those responsible for the tragedy that is Charter tech support.


Ok.. so I the last line didn't really happen. It went more like **click** as I hung up the phone on her. I was thinking it though. Seriously.. it would have been just as effective if they set up a monkey at the zoo on tech support. Put a poster on the wall outside his cage with options like "reprovision modem" and "blame router" or "reboot computer". Then give the monkey big piles of poo and let him just go to town. Any square that get his by poo is what is given to the customer to try as a 'fix'.

I have had to call Charter tech support probably a dozen times over the years and not once have I had contact at the help desk with anyone I would say is even remotely knowledgeable in the area. They are clearly reading scripts and following a few procedures they know how to do but don't understand. Its maddening how frustrating it is dealing with them.

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I hate my life...

>> Monday, December 8, 2008

Please read this disclaimer before you email, call, txt, IM or otherwise try to contact me. I do NOT actually hate my life. I am fine, things are fine and all is well. Read the post before jumping to conclusions. :P

There is a song I head a couple nights ago that I just had to get and give another listen to. It's called "I Hate My Life" by Theory of a Deadman. What got me about this song is its catchy.. very catchy.. and yet its a guy basically bitching about all thats wrong in his life and how much he hates his life. Its almost like you take a morose country song's lyrics and put it to a upbeat, catchy rock tune. I love it. So many things in the song just crack me up. Here is the song.. the video is just a slide show as I can't find the actual video, but the song is right:



Lyrics like:
I hate all of the people
Who can't drive their cars
Bitch you better get out of the way
Before I, start falling apart

or

Well I hate my job, all my rich friends
I hate everyone to the bitter end
Nothing turns out right, there's no end in sight
I hate my life


I don't know.. they crack me up and I can relate at the same time. There are certainly days when I feel like nothing is going right. There are days when I road rage at the stupid people who can't drive to save their lives. Days when crap is coming down at work.. or in my personal life that makes me feel overwhelmed and that is when I start feeling the desire to pummel people about the head and neck reason with object like shovels and frozen turkeys.

Really though, in general I am a very easy going, happy person. I like my life. I just have those moments, as we all do, where you just want to go "WHAT THE FUCK?!?!" People, events .. that set you off or make you hate your life at that point in time. It happens. Things you think are going well, change. Stuff you expected to go one way, go another. Unexpected things that you just REALLY didn't need to happen right then. That's life unfortunately.

So to clarify and allay my mother's fears, I am fine. Things are good. I am happy. I just happen to love this song and had to share. Enjoy.

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In shock

>> Wednesday, December 3, 2008

So my Xbox 360 died. Surprisingly enough, it wasn't the Red Ring of Death, which is the Xbox version of the blue screen of death for Windows. The DVD drive started making horrible noises when it was spinning up a disc and it was no longer able to read the games. This of course happened ON Thanksgiving.

Now when I bought my 360, Best Buy asked me as they always do if I wanted the 2 year in-store replacement warranty. Normally I don't bother with this kind of thing. The technology gets faster and cheaper so quickly that if you get year out of something its probably cheaper and better to buy a new one when it dies than it would have been to spend the extra on the warranty and get it replaced. There are a few items however that its worth putting this protection on. The 360, which is notorious for RROD and other problems, is one of those. So I paid the extra 30 bucks for the 2 year warrant figuring that if I had to pay insured shipping back to Microsoft if there was a problem, it was going to be close to that anyway.

So, I was happy in the fact that I knew I could just take my 360 down to BB and get it exchanged. Problem was it was T-day, so BB was closed. Also, since it was T-day, it meant the following day was Black Friday.. and there was no way in hell I was going anywhere near the mall on that day. So we had to wait til Saturday. I called though to ask what was involved and I was told to just bring my 360 down with the warranty receipt and they would take the hard drive off my old one and put it on a new 360 for me. So thats what I did.

I got there on Saturday and waited about 10 minutes in line. I got to the counter, explained the situation, and the conversation with the girl goes like this:

BBGirl: I need all the cords so we can test it and duplicate the problem.

Me: You need my specific cords? I was told on the phone to just bring the unit.

BBG: Yes, we need your cords to hook it up to test it.

Me: Are you trying to tell me that in all of Best Buy there is not ONE set of Xbox 360 cords that you can use?

BBG: No, we don't keep them around.

Me: You have at least 75 360s under the counter here.. right by my knees and if you are replacing my unit you are going to have to crack open a box anyway. Can you just use the cords from one of those to test it?

BBG: You have to bring your own cords sir so we can hook up your 360 and test it before we can replace it with the warranty.

Me: Ok, I will go home and get all the cords and accessories. Oh, and my you find a growth on you that not even the vast knowledge of science can identify. I will also bring back with me a Yule Log. Being that I am trying to stay with a festive holday theme, I can no longer use a frozen turkey to pummel you about the head and neck region and I will instead use a yule log. Not as quite as satisfying as a shovel, but hey, tis the season!


Ok, I didn't really threaten to beat her with a stick.. but I wanted to. I angrily drove back home to pick up all my cords. This time I brought EVERYTHING. Cords, manuals, headset, network cord, controllers, box, original packaging. EVERYTHING. I even brought one of my 360 games to test with in case BB decided to claim they didn't have any 360 games in the store to use either.

Stood in line .. again. Different girl this time. She took my 360 back to be tested. I told her what was wrong with it. She apparently didn't tell the tester so he hooked it up, turned it on and was playing with the menu system. Well that was of course working fine since it was a DVD drive problem. So he comes over and tells me its working fine. I gave him my game and told him to try and play it. 5 minutes later he comes back and tells BBG2 (Best Buy Girl 2) that the drive is indeed bad and will need to be replaced.

So here is the conversation with BBG2:

BBG2: Ok, if you will grab me one of the 360s under the counter there, I'll get going on the swap for you.

Me: You mean you have 360s right here? Oh wow.. you have a LOT of them. Right here at the testing / exchange are. Convenient. Here you go.

BBG2: *scans new 360* Ok.. looks like the price has dropped on these. In order to do this right, we'll have to do a refund on the original unit, prorate the warranty and then basically "sell" you a new one and put the warranty on that unit.

Me: Whatever you have to do, just make sure I get my original HD on the new unit so I don't lose my downloaded content for Rock Band.

BBG2: No problem, I will have them do that when he bring is over here. Lets get this switched out. *works her magic*

BBG2: Ok, with the unit being cheaper now, that lowers the cost on the 2 year replacement plan. So I am going to have to give you store credit for the difference on the 360 and the lower cost on the replacement plan. You will have a gift card for 51 and change.

Me: So, to clarify, you are giving me a new 360 with my HD on it AND 51 bucks on a gift card?

BBG2: Yep, you will have a whole new unit, so you'll have all new cables, controller etc. as well. Also, since we basically sold you this unit today, you get a full 2 years on the replacement plan on this new unit.

Me: *stares .. patiently waiting for the punch line*

Me: Am I being punked? Where's Ashton? Is he behind the counter?

I couldn't believe it. Other than being misinformed about the need to bring EVERYTHING with me. The procedure took less than 20 minutes and I had a brand new 360 with my HD on it, a new 2 year warranty on said unit, all new accessories and cords, and a 51 dollar gift card. Needless to say, I decided that BBG2 was my new favorite person and I gave the Yule Log to G to hold as we weren't going to need it after all. So we took that gift card and went and picked up the new wireless drum kit for RB2 as once again our RB1 drum kit had broken.

So there we are at the register. I show here all the warranty and replacement documentation for the 360 I have and then she rings up my new drum kit. She jokes about how she is seeing a lot of those being sold both for the fact that its wireless now for RB2 and because the drum kits have a horrible track record for breaking. She rings it up, applied my 51 bucks that was on my gift card and then looks at me and says "Would you like a 2 year replacement plan on this drum kit? It's 12 bucks, but I highly reccomend it as they only have a 90 day warranty and are known to break pretty often".

I couldn't believe it. I didn't even hesitate. The only thing that is more prone to breakage than the 360 itself is the Rock Band instruments. I have been through 2 drum kits already for the original game. I know people who have been through 4 and 5 kits in a year. After my 360 replacement experience, I knew the extra 12 bucks was well worth it to be able to just come in and swap the drums out should they break.. which is quite likely in the next two years. And hell, when they drop in price I can make money on the deal again. :P

Now don't get me wrong, normally those warranties are a waste of money and unecessary, but they can be good values on the right items. So we went home happy and the boys and I rocked out on our new drum kit which is killer by the way. The kit is at least 50% quieter, more repsonsive and has a METAL bass pedal. It's wireless and the pads are velocity sensitive, meaning they play quieter when you are tapping them and will give you loud pounding drum sounds through the game if you are wailing on them. Very cool.

So I left BB a satisfied customer. G looks at me and says what am I supposed to do with this log? I thought how dissapointed I was that I didn't get to try out my new seasonal beat stick, so we went to the movie gallery and asked if they had any employees that like and would reccomend a movie with Kirsten Dunst in it. I am happy to report that while a tad on the unwieldy side, the yule log is an effective melon smasher. Sure, it wasn't Snaggletooth herself, but I considered it a step in the right direction if there is one less delusional person in this world telling people that she is a good actress.

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Thats gonna sting...

>> Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Its winter here in the midwest. That means of course cold weather. Its really too cold to just 'be' outside. Sure the kids can still get bundled up and go play in the snow when its here, but its not the same. So here comes thanksgiving day. My brother and sister-in-law were gracious enough to host us at their place for t-day this year and so as we were getting things ready to go, the boys said they were going to go outside til I was set. So they go out with just jackets on .. no hats.. no gloves etc.

About 10 minutes later they come in. Their cheeks are all red. Their noses were red. B puts his cold hands on my head.. and they were indeed freezing. Not to be outdone, but convinced of his own cleverness, his brother doesn't try to put his cold hands on me, he instead puts his hand up and says 'HI FIVE'....

*pause for effect*

For those of you that have never left the desert and don't know what happens when your skin is very cold... it gets itchy, tight and above all else, hurts like a mother if it gets hit hard. So there is G .. sure of his own genius.. standing there with his hand in the air waiting for my high five. He was convinced that I would hit his hand and the cold from his skin would be unbearable for me and he would have his smug victory.

That didn't happen however. I, being wise in my years, was way ahead of him. I was already thinking about giving their frozen earlobes a good flick just for fun, but this presented a far superior option. Queue the Todd:



I gave him a high five like no other. Sure.. I know you are saying that it was mean. Or cruel. But really, no lasting harm was done and it was beneficial for all parties involved. It was immensely entertaining for B and I, and G got a good life lesson! It was tough love for sure, but that is the kind of caring parent I am.

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