Join the Fight!

17 comments (closed), posted on february 27, 2003, tags: verizon

Here are a few anti-Verizon images for your linking use. I'd still like for people to post at least one text link to Verizon (necessary for Google-bombing), but if you want to put a semi-permanent link on your site (say, in your sidebar), here are some images you can use.

     
     This badge fits the style of the RSS badges from Antipixel.
     URL: http://graveyard.maniacalrage.net/pics/ap_verizon.gif

     
     This badge is just plain fantastic.
     URL: http://graveyard.maniacalrage.net/pics/jones_verizon.gif

     
     This badge is the same size as MT's and would look fine next to or below it.
     URL: http://graveyard.maniacalrage.net/pics/mt_verizon.gif

Please do not use these images directly off my server. Download them and place them on your own server before using them. Also, all images should link to:

http://www.maniacalrage.net/archives/catihate_verizon.php

Join the fight now. Damn Big Red. Spread the word.

Worst Company Ever

13 comments (closed), posted on february 26, 2003, tags: verizon

I just got off the phone with Verizon. That call was number 3,812 I think. I was told by the customer "service" rep that DSL is, in fact, not available for my apartment. It never was, and never will be. I'm 22,000+ feet away from the central office. Note that last time they ran this loop check I was 19,000+ feet away. And two other times I was around 15,000+ feet. Apparently someone has been moving my apartment around when I'm not there. That's the only way I can explain it. And the CSR had nothing more to offer as far as an explanation goes.

Long story short, he said definitively that I cannot get DSL service. This after the provisioning department called me this morning and told us we could, but it would take until the 6th of March to start. I found out during the phone call with customer service that the provisioning department has been billing me since February 14. So basically, they've has been lying to me and pushing back my start date so they could charge me for the service I wasn't getting. The CSR confirmed this.

I yelled at the guy for a while. Took out some of my frustrations. Called him a fucking moron, told him Verizon was the worst company I'd ever dealt with and everyone who worked there was a fucking stupid bitch, and then I cancelled every bit of the DSL and told him I better not see any charges. He gave me two confirmation numbers which I'm sure would be meaningless if I ever called back.

And so with that my DSL possibilities are over. Every other company providing DSL in my area uses Verizon's lines. No options there. TimeWarner cable has yet to lay cable for Internet service for my side of the block (yes, that's correct—across the street on our block they all have it). So I wait. For how long? Who knows. I am in dial-up hell and I'll be here for a long time I'm sure.

Mother fucking piece of shit. Honestly. That's what this is. To a person like me, this is one of the worst things that can happen. My daily life is completely affected. Everything I do I now cannot. It's horrible.

Help Me:
I'm asking anyone out there who can feel my pain to link my newly formed I Hate Verizon category with the word "Verizon," just like this: Verizon.

The URL is:
     http://www.maniacalrage.net/archives/catihate_verizon.php

I'm hoping this will spread the word about how terrible they are (any maybe put my site near the top of their Google result eventually), so that maybe a few people can be spared. Thanks.

Three Unrelated Items

1 comment (closed), posted on february 25, 2003, tags: entertainment

Saw Old School over the weekend and was more than pleasantly surprised. Laughed far more than I thought I would, right from the beginning. Definitely worth seeing if you're a Will Ferrel fan, although he's not the only good thing in the film. Vince Vaughn has a great dead-pan joke delivery that works really well and can be extremely hilarious. Check it out.

Today I stumbled upon keaggy.com, a fantastic website jammed full of great content from photos of rocks shaped like shoes to randomly chosen poetic dinner ideas. My favorite part of the site, though, is the collection of grocery lists. Some really great stuff in there.

Also worth noting is Ellie's addition of a photoblog using MT. I came up with a PHP solution to reorganizing category display for her, which I'll be posting a tutorial about soon. Until then, enjoy her photos. This is something I plan to add to this site as soon as I get DSL at home (please, Jesus, make it soon?).

Where's the Cork?

posted on february 25, 2003, tags: software

Yesterday I posted an entry about Safari's new tab feature as well as a screenshot of said tabs. I took that screenshot of the leaked build of Safari I got from some random web link after taking a few minutes to scour through some common OS X weblogs and sites. I thought I had done something spectacular—as if I were one of the few non-NDA-beta-testers to have this build of the program—and prided myself on having found something kept so secret and protected.

In reality, links to this build of Safari are everywhere—What Do I Know, Spymac, even David Hyatt's weblog for chrissakes—and Apple has done nothing to stop any of it. You would think at least Hyatt would delete the links to the leaked build in his comments.

This says two things to me: one, Apple wants the publicity of this build. They like the idea of everyone wanting this so badly that people are willing to break an NDA and release it, or two, Apple is do damned oblivious they don't know it's happening. I can't believe the latter, though—it doesn't seem possible they could miss all of this. I'm leaning more toward the publicity point. I think this is doing nothing but good things for Safari.

It's one thing to have a public beta, it's another to not mind when the public beta internal betas are leaked, but at which point do they just finally open up completely and start offering nightly builds. And, would this be a bad thing?

Granted, if Apple allowed anyone and everyone to download nightly builds of Safari, there would be problems for people who don't understand that the process includes bug reporting and troubleshooting and crashing, etcetera. But if Apple opened up their beta test program to the web/software development crowd, and offered nightly builds and a better bug reporting system (see Mozilla's Bugzilla), don't you think Safari would progress faster and become an overall better product?

Tabular

31 comments (closed), posted on february 24, 2003, tags: software

Could this be the beginning of the end for Camino? Apple's browser, Safari, will feature tabs that function much like Mozilla's, and Keychain access as well. Once Hyatt gets the CSS bugs worked out, Safari could become a Camino killer for even the hardcore Mozilla fans.

Favorite Icons

12 comments (closed), posted on february 23, 2003, tags: web

Today I spent a bit of time cleaning up my bookmarks in the three browsers on my iBook. I have a habit of constantly bookmarking sites, caused by my habit of having fifteen or twenty windows open at a time and my intense fear of accidentally closing a window before I read something I wanted to and then losing the address forever. So, after a while, I have a lot of junk bookmarks.

As part of the process, I also cleaned up my toolbars, adding a few daily reads as well as consolidating some links I only use from time to time. One of the nice things about Chimera (or soon, Camino), is that it displays a site's favorite icon in the toolbar. The only drawback to this, however, is the fact that a lot of people don't have favorite icons for their websites. Those bookmarks get the default Chimera favorite icon, creating an incomplete feeling to the list of links (see picture).

What I don't understand is: favorite icons are really simple to make. A 16x16 pixel GIF image, and a single line of code in your header. I know it's been written about a million times, but I'm going to take a quick moment to describe how you make your own favorite icon. Perhaps then everyone on my list will have one. This will only take two minutes (except for the part where you have to design your icon...), and it's really simple.

» Continue reading Favorite Icons

MT Macros & Acronyms

3 comments (closed), posted on february 21, 2003, tags: movable type

A few people have asked me how I do the acronyms on this site. You know, the words that have the grey dotted underline and when you mouse over them you get a tooltip telling you what it stands for? Yes, those. It took me a while to find the best way to do it, so I'll go ahead and describe that here. Due credit to Mark Pilgrim and Brad Choate.

» Continue reading MT Macros & Acronyms

More Big Bad Business

5 comments (closed), posted on february 21, 2003, tags: verizon

Verizon has screwed me in so many ways over the past two weeks, I can't even see straight. Just to keep you up to date, after the events of last week, my phone line has been completely destroyed, DSL has been cancelled and reordered, and I've been on the phone for at least 400 hours and spoken with at least 30 people who could care less about my situation(s).

Yesterday a Verizon repair guy came to fix my line (3 days later than he was supposed to), and he couldn't figure out what the problem was. After telling me he needed to string a new line, he left and scheduled a return visit for today. A few hours later, my landlord and I had the line working. We simply found the line in the basement, saw that it was damaged, and rewired it. Now I have a phone line. No thanks to big red.

A few days before that, I was told that my DSL service, which Verizon cancelled because of the problems last week, was being reinstated. I asked how long that would take. They said because I had already had it, it would only take two days to turn it back on. After an hour on the phone last night holding, I was told by another representative that that information is bull shit. My DSL service won't be activated until February 26.

At least I have a phone now, though, so I'm not completely without the Internet. Remind me again why I went with Verizon? And furthermore, why I didn't cancel with them the moment this stuff started happening?

Oh, and in case anyone wants it, I'm gonna go ahead and post the number to the executive office for Verizon in the NY Metro area. They are at least better at handling problems: 1-800-483-7988. Yeah, they don't want people to know that number.

Sanitize Usage

5 comments (closed), posted on february 21, 2003, tags: movable type

Based on some changes I made around here, and a question posed by Shawn Morrison last night, I'm gonna post a few quick notes about Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin for Movable Type. Because this plugin was packaged with MT 2.6x, and because it's turned on my default, a lot of people either don't know it's doing anything, or don't know how to effectively change what it's doing for the better. Brad's simple description of Sanitize is:

Sanitize is a Movable Type plugin that allows you to clean HTML and other markup that might exist in an comment entry.

Basically, you tell Sanitize which HTML tags to allow, and it will destroy the rest. It's a great idea (especially for security's sake), and works well once you get past the learning curve. By default, Sanitize will allow the following HTML tags:

a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ul, li, blockquote

This allows for the most common of tags, although I think most people will question why br and p are in there. There is a reason: Sanitize cleans HTML tags in comments regardless of whether or not you have "Convert Line Breaks" turned on in your comment configuration. If you do, you know that your comments contain proper p and br tags. Well, if these tags weren't in your allowed list, all of your entries would be stripped of these tags... not a good thing. So leave those in there. But it's important to discuss something related to that br tag...

Do you see that a href tag up there? See how it says a and then it has a space and then says href? Those aren't two different tags. Sanitize is smart enough to understand you if you tell it a tag has multiple attributes. But you do actually have to tell it. If you had just said a up there, instead of a href, then all of your links would be stripped of their href attributes (rendering them quite useless, yes?). This must also be done for empty elements in XHTML that require the closing slash (/). Like, for instance, a br tag. Up there in the default list, it's just br. But I (and anyone using XHTML) use <br />. So, in Sanitize, I need to specify that slash by saying br / instead or just br. Make sense?

Now then, the biggest issue: that missing target attribute. 99% of MT users who upgraded to MT 2.6x didn't notice that any link posted in a comment started opening in the same window after the upgrade. This is because Sanitize's default allowed link tag, a href, doesn't allow for the target attribute. To fix this, change your a href allowance to a href target. Simple! Also note that you can add title too, if you wish, to allow for really complete links (eg: a href target title).

So then, we've now got an updated list of allowed tags that fits most common usage. Here it is:

a href target title, b, br /, p, strong, em, ul, li, blockquote

I use a slightly different list (I don't allow lists or blockquotes), but this should work for almost anyone. And in case you're not sure where this goes—in your MT admin area, under Blog Config, in Preferences, look in the General Settings section near the bottom (it's above your welcome message).

Also, if you don't like Sanitize at all, you can turn it off. You'll need to place something inside your <$MTCommentBody$> tag, though. To disable Sanitize, change that tag to: <$MTCommentBody sanitize="0"$> and you'll be all set.

More Changes

10 comments (closed), posted on february 20, 2003, tags: site

In a constant effort to make things better around here, I've made some more adjustments to the site today. Two days ago I upgraded to Movable Type 2.62—a quick and painless process with no problems whatsoever—and today I spent a bit of time bettering the comments popup window.

Changes:

• Added a "post yours" link to the top of the window. Clicking this will send you down to the post form. This will be especially handy if there are lots of comments you don't want to scroll through.
• Text input fields have been widened to fit the width of the comment background boxes. Looks better now.
• Changed the "Remember Info" option from a single checkbox to two radio buttons (idea credit goes to Jeremy Hedley), which now function much friendlier. Select Yes if you want to be remembered, No if you don't. Simple.
• Tab order for input fields has been properly ordered, skipping over the remember radios.
• I've added a list of allowed HTML tags just above the comments text area. Currently, you can use a href, b, i and u. If you think I should include something else, let me know. Note that URLs are not auto-converted to links with HTML turned on, so you do have to write HTML for all of your links. You do not have to include a target tag (see next item).
• All links posted in comments will be automatically* assigned a target tag value of _blank. You don't have to specify this tag, and this will allow for links to be viewed free from the small comment window.
• I've removed the "FORGET ME" button (because of the new remember me method), and changed the label of the post button from "POST" to "Post Your Comment". I mention this because from now on, if you want to be forgotten, just select the "No" radio next to "Remember Me" (as noted above). I've also centered this button (as well as the note below it).
• Added a close window link, center-bottom.
• Added a "Preview" button, allowing you to preview your comments before posting them

* Using a simple JavaScript function, you can make every link on a page open with the target of your choice. The drawback to this, of course, is that every link will get this value if it doesn't already have one of its own. To avoid problems, set any links you don't want to open in a new window to have a target of _self, and then place this in the HEAD of your document:

function reTargetLinks () {
     for (var i=0; i<=(document.links.length-1); i++)
     if ((document.links[i].target == '') || (document.links[i].target == null)) {
          document.links[i].target = 'blank';
     }
}

Then, in the BODY tag of your document, invoke this function when loading:

<body onload="reTargetLinks()">

This will make every link without a target tag open in a new window. Thanks to Ben Trott for the idea. Works well.

Bloody Hell

2 comments (closed), posted on february 18, 2003, tags: me

Due to the enormous amount of snow currently blanketing my apartment, street, city, state and areas surrounding, as well as another blunder from Verizon, I currently have no phone line working at home and therefore no Internet access what so ever. This will remain (as it has since Saturday) until at least tomorrow. I will be slow to answer email, as I have to do it from work. Hopefully both my phone line and DSL will be up and running within the next three days. Until then, just be patient.

Little Tip

2 comments (closed), posted on february 15, 2003, tags: site

As I was making the changes here I came across a few little problems with CSS layout techniques that caused little glitches in Safari and Internet Explorer for the PC. One of the most annoying was finding a way to make certain layout styles show up properly so that a 100% of the vertical width of the comment popup contained the proper white area with its correct borders.

I use several nested DIVs to lay out the comment popup. The first specifies the width of the content area (in this case, 360 pixels), and inside of this DIV I have four others. One is only used to make sure the contents don't have extra margin space and the other three make up the two 8px borders (left and right) and the center column that contains the content.

If the content does not contain enough copy to fill the popup vertically (the window is 440px high), there's a problem. Because CSS won't just fill to the bottom of the window, if there are no comments for a specific entry, it's possible you'll see the white background of the three columns ending prematurely on the page. This is no good. In an effort to fix this, I assigned the main DIV (that holds all others) a margin-bottom of -5 pixels. In theory, this would tell that DIV to be 5 pixels longer than the bottom of the page, and hopefully that would mean even if there isn't enough content, the background would fill the whole window.

This works in Mozilla, but not in IE or Safari. Looking for a solution, I tried assigning the main DIV a position of fixed, and giving it a specified height of 442 pixels (roughly two pixels taller than the window itself). This worked in IE, but not in Safari. Always looking for the complete solution, I began to dig through the CSS2 Specification, looking for something that could help me. I hoped there might be something like minimum height, and I was happy to find there was. Min-height did exactly what I needed. I set the minimum height of the content column DIV to 460px, which is 20 pixels more than the height of the window (Safari pads its popups, so this makes up for that), and now the background is flush to the bottom of the window even if there isn't any copy in the content column. The DIV style looks like this:

#ccontent {
     background-color: #fff;
     margin-left: 8px;
     width: 342px;
     text-align: left;
     border-left: 1px solid #d1d1d1;
     border-right: 1px solid #d1d1d1;
     min-height: 460px;
}

Note that I add two lines for people using IE on a PC. I do this using PHP, as I have my CSS files set to be parsed by the PHP engine in Apache. The IE style looks like this:

#ccontent {
     background-color: #fff;
     margin-left: 8px;
     width: 342px;
     text-align: left;
     border-left: 1px solid #d1d1d1;
     border-right: 1px solid #d1d1d1;
     min-height: 460px;
     height: 460px;
     position: fixed;
}

I thought I would post this because I don't think very many people know about the min-height property, and it really came in handy for me. There have been plenty of times in the past when this information would have helped me out quite a bit, and maybe it will help one of you out in the future.

Also, related to design, Steve is finally back online.

Kitten Day

5 comments (closed), posted on february 15, 2003, tags: me

For Valentine's Day this year, no flowers were given. No cards, no chocolate, nothing of the sort. Instead, Katia and I got kittens. Two of them. Felix and Oscar, brothers of three and a half months, now live with us here in the new apartment.

Felix is black with white on his underside, paws and face, and Oscar is gray with the same white areas. They were both found in New York, and Oscar seems to have been stepped on when he was a baby. His tail was broken and healed bent in on itself, forming a shorter tail that's twice as thick. He also has a screwy hip, and from time to time walks a little funny. I'll never understand how people could injure (or abandon, for that matter) animals, especially kittens. They're so fantastically cute.

Now they're chasing each other around our place, purring and lying around. Pictures will come as soon as I get DSL (along with pictures of the apartment for those who are curious).

Absolutely Ridiculous

11 comments (closed), posted on february 15, 2003, tags: verizon

I was supposed to have DSL two days ago. In fact, it had been turned on. But, you see, I'm going through Verizon. That alone should tell you there would be problems. Oh, and there were. A multitude, actually. Let me just quickly tell you that I don't have DSL right now.

When I called Verizon to set up this service two weeks ago, they checked my phone line and told me I was able to receive DSL. They started the ordering process, and my equipment was sent on its way. Verizon told me to wait for an email notification of the DSL start date. And so I waited. Until last Friday. February 14, at 6PM, my DSL would be 'clicked on,' and I would be able to set up the modem and start using it. Then, on Thursday, February 13, I got an email stating that my start date had been pushed back until February 24. Almost two weeks later. I was angry. I called Verizon and yelled at four different people, all of which told me it didn't matter if I was angry. I asked to talk to someone in charge of this, and they told me those people didn't talk to customers. "And even if they did, they would say the same thing to you—wait your turn, pal." I told them this was the worst customer service in the world and that I hated them. "Would you like me to transfer you to cancellations, then?" I couldn't believe it.

Four hours later, I guess they finally decided I was worth having as a customer, because I got an email stating that my service had been turned on. Thank god. I went home and set everything up. I plugged the modem into my computer, plugged the telephone line into the modem, and went about the setup process. But I couldn't get a signal.

I spent an hour on the phone with Verizon DSL Support, which eventually ended when they did a "real-world maintenance ping" on the line. They told me they didn't understand it, but I was way too far away to get service, and that I never should have been told I could have it from the beginning. I was furious. I spent the next day on the phone with other companies, trying to find someone who could provide service. I checked on DSL Reports, and was surprised to find that a distance check was well within range to not one, but two Verizon COs (central-offices). I signed up with Covad, and they said that even if Verizon couldn't do DSL, they might be able to. At least that's something, I thought. It's possible.

Then, by random chance, Katia called me from our apartment. When the number popped up on my cellphone, I was confused. I answered it, and asked where she was calling from. She said, "Home, where do you think?" I said that couldn't be true, because the incoming number wasn't our phone number. And then, quite suddenly, it all starting coming together.

See, three days prior, a Verizon guy came to our building to do some checks. Shortly after, we started receiving hundreds of calls from Asian people looking for someone named Sung. I kept telling them they had the wrong number, and asked them what they were dialing. They all said the same number, one that wasn't ours. I thought they were all just idiots. But they weren't. Because somehow, we had our phone number crossed with a 65 year-old Asian man who lives in Sunnyside, Queens. I bet you've already guessed that Verizon's "real-word maintenance ping" of our phone line had actually checked for a distance in Queens. And I bet you understand now that this mixup means the following: I can get DSL, Verizon is the worst company in the word, this is all their fault.

Needless to say, it's being fixed. Today our phone number issue was fixed, and I'm told DSL will be working by "the middle of next week." If any of you out there are going to have to choose a local phone company in the future, I urge you—do not choose Verizon. They could care less about you as a customer*. Their customer service is sub-terrible.

But thank god almighty, I will have DSL next week.

* As a glaring example of this, please take into account that Verizon charges you a $55 returning customer fee. This means if you go back to them after leaving, they actually charge you for your business. Disgusting.

Slight Adjustments

11 comments (closed), posted on february 13, 2003, tags: site

Over the past few days I have made a ton of small adjustments, improvements and additions to this site. In case you didn't notice, I'll give you a short list. Please feel free to post comments/questions or suggestions.

General:

• Select menus on the right hand side, replacing former textual monthly archive links. This is a much tighter way to give you access to not only all of the monthly archives, but the category archives as well.
• Addition of a "Font Type" menu at the bottom right. This allows you to choose either Serif (Georgia) or Sans-Serif (Lucida) font face display. This will set a cookie and be remembered. I added this primarily because this site looks amazing in Lucida Grande in OS X.
• Slight change to link styles. Links are now underlined with a dotted line rather than a solid one. Also, gray links (as well as gray text in general) has been made darker.
• Reorganization of page bottom—looks better and from now on that block of stuff down there will actually stay flush to the bottom like it should have been before
• Changed vertical dividing line between content and navigation columns to a dotted line rather than a solid one.
• Widened navigation column, narrowed content column (slightly).
• Changed "Permalink" to "Link" in entry footers, also added entry's category (which is a link to that category archive) between link and comments.
• Cleaned up comments pop-up for all browsers and made the "Remember Me" box show as checked if your information is already remembered.

Archives:

• Better construction of the inter-monthly-archive navigation. Now, at the top of all montly archives, there's a clearer way to navigate back and forth.
• Added descriptions for each category on main archives page.
• Added ability to show/hide a list of all entries by title on main archives page.

That's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure there are more changes. I think the tweaking has paid off, and I feel the site is a bit tighter than it was a week ago.

Note: If you're using the web browser Safari (OS X), please download the new beta that came out yesterday. It fixes a lot of problems and CSS issues, and will make your experience here much better.

Also: If you're using Mozilla on a PC, you should upgrade to a build at least as new as 1.3a {2002121215} or the newest build, 1.3b {2003021008} (both be found here). These builds will fix some CSS layout issues that affect this site.

Ikea, I Love/Hate You

11 comments (closed), posted on february 9, 2003, tags: new york

Yesterday we spent a while at IKEA, finding some furniture to fill our new apartment. It took us about three hours to find a kitchen table, a television stand* and a coffee table. We also managed to get some curtains and some really great lights for the living room.

I don't know how many of you have actually been to an IKEA, since there aren't many locations in the US, but if you have, you'll know exactly how it feels to be in that place on a Saturday. It's horrible. There are usually at least 30,000 people all crammed in there—it's loud, crowded, and frustrating—and from the moment you get in you just want to be out as quickly as you can.

And it's not like their furniture is all that great, either. It's all fake wood on top of particle board, but for some reason you just ignore that when you realize that in a short amount of time (and usually for a relatively good price), you can completely furnish your house or apartment.

But the place makes me so mad. By the time I leave I'm pissed off for reasons I don't even understand, and I just want to scream at all the employees for their lack of customer service skills. I want to cry out in anger that the coffee table we picked out is in the "self-service" area, and it's not sold out, but we get down there and it is in fact sold out. And I hate that I get told by a cashier that she's closed because her light is off, so I find someone with their light on only to be told that she's closed too because her "gate" is closed.

IKEA, I hate you. But I'll be back in a week to pick up that coffee table. Damn you.

* On a related note, we bought our television at Circuit City, which is remarkably different to do in New York than in New Jersey. We couldn't fit it in our car, so we had to pay some random guy with a van $25 to drive it back to our house (he didn't even work for Circuit City, he just sits outside the entrance and works like a cab-driver for your purchased items). Then he even helped us carry it up the stairs, although he almost broke my leg in doing so.

Closing Doors

4 comments (closed), posted on february 6, 2003, tags: new york

There's a reason subway conductors (and that annoying recorded voice) tell you to "Stand clear of the closing doors, please." It's because when those doors close, they do so with a force that's both frightening and powerful.

I've never been the type of person to force my way through closing doors, due to the fact that I've seen how strongly they close as well as heard the stories of people who get stuck in there and have their arms ripped off. But, unlike me, there are countless people who do it with regularity every day. Every now and then you'll see a look of fear as they grab both sides—almost as if they are suddenly realizing they could get stuck—but usually people do it as if it were actually the proper way to board the train.

Today, though, I witness something absolutely fantastic. After boarding the L train at 14th Street, I watched from my seat as a young woman ran up to the closing doors with a large hard-cover book open in her hands. She managed to get her two hands into the train, still holding the book, just far enough for the doors to close directly on the book in its open state. The doors closed quickly, bending the book obtusely until I heard the spine crack, and then they opened again for a moment before closing again—this time catching the book perfectly horizontally and smashing both covers toward one another, sending pages flying outward.

As if this weren't enough, the doors opened once more and the woman, paralyzed in shock and disbelief, stood staring as the doors closed one final time, taking the book by the remaining pages. She pulled back as hard as she could, and I watched through the window as the train pulled away from her standing there with a mangled pile of paper and board in her hands.

Another Reason

posted on february 5, 2003, tags: tech

It's not like I used to take my iBook around the apartment in New Jersey all that much. Every now and then I would bring it into the living room and watch television whilst browsing the Internet, and occasionally I would sit on my bed, 'Book on my lap, writing at night.

But now that I'm using dial-up, I have to wait to use my wireless router again. And the fact that now I can't take the iBook out of this room, even if I didn't want to, bothers the hell out of me. I think I actually hear the AirPort card crying out from under the keyboard, "Please! Use me! I will allow you to browse the Internet from anywhere in the house!" Something about the router sitting on my desk waiting to be used feels very trapping. It feels like this laptop is nailed to this desk, and I'll never free it from its place.

Granted, the minute I get wireless back up and running next week, the iBook will still be sitting on its stand on the desk. But at least I could take it with me into the bathroom if I felt like it.

Mouse and PowerMate Try to Kill P4

1 comment (closed), posted on february 5, 2003, tags: tech

Last night I turned my P4 desktop on for the first time in the new apartment, because I wanted to grab some stuff I had been working on before the move and burn it to a CDRW. My plan was to put that CDRW into my iBook and work on that, since I've only got the dial-up working there (no modem in the PC).

The machine started fine, and after I logged into WindowsXP, I moved my mouse (Logitech MouseMan® Dual Optical), nothing happened. I knew what was wrong instantly, because it happened the first time I installed my PowerMate. The PowerMate has this nasty habit (I've heard only on PCs) of acting like it's your mouse when installed, before you install the PM software. I knew why it happened, too—I had plugged the PM into a different slot on my USB hub than it had been in before the move. My mistake. I unplugged the PM, unplugged and plugged the mouse back in. I saw an hourglass for a split second, and then the mouse lit up underneath. Good. I moved it. Fine. I moved it again.

And then the screen turned that familiar blue (not nearly as familiar in XP) for a split second, then the computer shut off. What the fuck, I thought. It restarted automatically. XP said it needed to check the disks—Fine, whatever—and then loaded properly. I logged in, moved the mouse, and it did the same thing. Fuck.

On the next startup, the disk-check found a bunch of corrupted system files (which it fixed) and then I was back to logging in again. I logged in, moved the mouse, it shut down. This happened again and again and again. I started to get nervous, because the list of corrupted system files got longer upon each startup. Finally, I unplugged the mouse and started once more. Logged in, waited... everything was fine. Messed around a bit via the keyboard, opened applications, and decided it must have been a glitch. Plugged the mouse back in, moved it, and it shut down again. At this point I'm getting mad. I can't figure out what is wrong. It was late, so I went to sleep.

Tonight when I got home I unplugged the mouse, booted into safe mode, uninstalled every USB item, the Logitech MouseWare software and the PowerMate software. I rebooted into normal mode and plugged the mouse in. It started asking me for DLL and SYS files, which I found strewn in tons of different folders on my system. Finally, after 10 minutes of searching and using only my keyboard, I had the mouse working again. I restarted and moved it and everything was fine.

Thank god I know my way around DOS, safe mode and Windows. I have a feeling if I were just some regular schmuck, I would have been to the point of taking my computer somewhere for repair (at which point, most likely, I would have received an answer like, "It needs to be reformatted"). I feel bad for people out there who don't know how to deal with these kinds of problems.

On a side note: I have never had a problem like this with my iBook. I'm not saying Macs are better, or so simple that it's not possible, I'm just saying that sometimes I feel OS X was built with a little more care than WindowsXP. I could be wrong. Anyway, I just thought I would share this useless story for anyone out there who can relate (I'm sure there are plenty).

Babelfish, You Bastard

1 comment (closed), posted on february 5, 2003, tags: random

Japanese looks really complicated. And it is. I had friends in highschool who took Japanese when they finally started offering it in our junior year, and they spent two full semesters just learning how to draw and pronounce the alphabet. By the end of the year, they were able to count and read/say hello, goodbye and similar things that even retards could learn. It's that complicated. So much so, in fact, that even computers can't understand it most of the time.

Babel Fish, via AltaVista, tends to translate Japanese into very funny gibberish. Today I took a look at Apple's Japanese Switch Campaign via Babel Fish and got some great stuff. The names are the best—since Japanese names tend to have actual meaning, Babel Fish makes these people sound crazy. Click the picture of "Bamboo Warehouse Hiroshi Atsushi" up there for a look at the entire list.

Remember When This Was Normal?

7 comments (closed), posted on february 4, 2003, tags: tech

Well, the first thing I forgot about was how long it actually takes to connect. It was at least 25 seconds before I finally saw the timer begin. Then I forgot how slow dial-up actually is. That hit me the moment I opened Mail and Proteus. I had 28 unread email messages—none bigger than 4k—and it took about 1 full minute to get them all. Proteus (an OS X AIM Client) took about 15 seconds of adding chunks of people to my buddy list before it was ready to go.

And then there was the real test: I opened Chimera and loaded my "weblogs" bookmark—which opens 10 sites I read at least twice daily—and waited as the tabs slowly loaded. The nice thing is, a majority of the sites I visit use really simple designs, light on graphics and heavy on CSS, so it wasn't too bad. I actually had them all loaded in about 20 seconds. Still, normally it's only about 2 (on a cable modem).

I don't know how anyone can live like this. I know I wouldn't be able to. Here in our area of Brooklyn, we can't get cable Internet service (boo), but we can get DSL. It's just annoying that Verizon takes over a week and a half to set it up. So, until the end of next week, I'll be using good ol' Earthlink dial-up on my iBook. It's not the end of the world, but it's definitely not great.

After I Arrive

posted on february 4, 2003, tags: me

Pioneer Rentals is $120 wealthier and I'm sore everywhere, but now 99% of my things have been moved into the new apartment. I've got to make a trip back to New Jersey next weekend to take of a few things, but for the most part I am completely moved. Many, many, many thanks to Shawn, pretty much the only person who was willing to help (and did so, all day, lifting crazy amounts of things and driving around with me in that huge truck in Manhattan).

The unfortunate part about the next few days is the lack of Internet access and cable television as I await visits from TimeWarner and Earthlink. Television should be ready Wednesday, and hopefully Internet shortly thereafter.

The first night in the apartment was great—we slept well (minus the fact that we have no curtains up over our bedroom windows yet)—and I look forward to getting home tonight and finishing up the unpacking and putting-together-things phase. Once everything has been set up I think it's going to be great.

For the next few days I might be slow answering email, as I will only be able to do so from work.

Before I Go

17 comments (closed), posted on february 2, 2003, tags: random

A few quick thoughts from today (amidst packing, ugh):

Columbia breaks up upon reentry, and I didn't hear about it until 4 or 5pm. Worse yet, I didn't even know Columbia was up there. Even worse is that it didn't bother me all that much. What does that say about me? The first thing I thought was, "Well, it's a dangerous job. And, as much as it sucks, more people will die in car accidents today." Perhaps 9/11 has lowered my disaster scale. I don't know. I'm not a bad person, I don't think.

While looking through old stuff and throwing away all of the crap I've been dragging around with me in the past few moves, I came across tapes the college radio show Steve and I did. I miss that show.

Packing is really, really, really shitty. I don't know if I've made that clear. I don't ever want to do it again. I plan to stay in our new apartment for the rest of my life, no matter what. I do not like packing.