i suck
there’s been a ton of nothing going on lately. the most exciting thing going on is that my schedule at work is switching to 4 x 10hr shifts, which is awesome since i’ll have 3 days off each week.
i’m ridiculously excited about going to north carolina in december. i haven’t really felt like traveling much lately, but i’m stoked about this particular trip even though it’s still 4 months out.
i finally got around to patching up FSX on my computer, so i plan on doing some extra flight-simming stuff in the near future. FSX along with X-Plane 9.4 = mad awesome.
so long at&t (hopefully)
i have this habit of re-evaluating my expenditures every 3-4 months or so, and making changes to stuff. this includes changing insurance providers, phone carriers, tv providers, isps, etc. i think in some aspects of my life (as shocking as it seems) i enjoy change.
this time, i’m changing phone carriers. i’ve had a cell phone for like 8 or 9 years, starting with voicestream (who became t-mobile) changing to cricket, then nextel, had a phone for work through sprint, and then at&t. now i’m moving my personal line to sprint. not only is their coverage at my workplace better than at&t, their roaming agreements make their coverage better across the US and i’ll save $30/month with the same features, sans roll-over mins (which i never use anyway).
i went to best buy yesterday and picked up a palm pre and activated a new line to test it out, with the intention of porting my number over if everything turned out well. i knew my coverage at home was shitty, so i was going to get myself an airave. sprint gives these out to nearly anyone who has shitty coverage at home or at work. it’s a femtocell that acts like a miniature cell site, using your broadband connection to tunnel your voice/1xRTT data to their core.
anyway, i called tech support yesterday, playing dumb and saying i had terrible coverage at home. the first rep put me on hold and talked to account services, who wanted to speak to me about sending me an airave. i got transferred to them and spoke to the rep in AS who told me she’d be happy to send me an airave free of charge and would waive the monthly fee for 24 months. thrilled, i agreed to the offer and she placed me on hold. unfortunately, i got disconnected about 5 minutes later. also unfortunate is that she didn’t note the offer on my account, so there was effectively no record that the offer was made, so i had to attempt to get someone else at sprint to either believe me that i was offered the stuff or offer it to me themselves. i had no such luck and managed to get disconnected a total of 9 times.
the last rep i spoke to agreed to ship me an airave and would waive the monthly fee. she then informed me that they had none in stock and i’d need to get one locally, but i could have the cost credited to my bill and would still have the fee waived. thinking that i was all set, i went to a sprint store and picked up an airave. while i was at the store, the corp store rep tried to add the feature code to my account but couldn’t. also strange was the fact that there were NO FUCKING NOTES INDICATING THAT I WAS OFFERED A FREE AIRAVE AND FREE SERVICE FOR IT. she called sprint customer service and the account services rep asked to speak to me..he offered me a whopping 2 free months of airave service, stating there was no more he could do. i explained that i had spoken to several people that day, both of whom promised that i could be sent an airave free of charge and also could have the service fees waived. he was unwilling to budge. he said he’d added the feature code, i paid for the airave and left the store, annoyed at the whole situation.
i ran home really quick and installed the femtocell, thinking it would be ready to go when i got home that night. i got home and found that the device wasn’t working. of course, the customer service hours are only until 2100 CST, so they were closed. i waited until the AM and called airave support, who informed me yet again that 1. there were no notes regarding having the cost waived for either the service or the device and also that the device had not been activated on my account. after 5 minutes on the phone with her, she got it set up and another 5 minutes later it was active and working. the positive part is that it works great. i think i’m going to contact executive customer service tomorrow (monday) to see if i can get anywhere regarding the cost of the device or in the very least waiving the monthly charge for basic service. i’m not gonna hold my breath.
behold! the ghettotenna mk2!
i decided i wanted a better antenna for my bct15, so i bought a radioshack 70-176 multi-band discone antenna, some zip ties and 10 feet of 1″ pvc pipe. i cut 3′ of pipe off, assembled the antenna and stuck it on the end of the pipe, which i then zip-tied to a desk. it’s so ghetto, it’s awesome and its reception is much improved over the previous ghettotenna (mk1) which was constructed out of a radioshack vhf dipole (rabbit-ears) with a 75ohm balun with an f->bnc adapter on it, connected via rg6.
ghettotenna mk1
changes and stuff.
whoops. slacking at updating again.
so.. got rid of comcast, replaced them with qwest, who have been much, much more stable and reliable thus far. i wasn’t terribly happy with the added latency of interleaving on my dsl circuit, but i sent them a message via live chat and a week later, they took interleaving off. went from 32ms to first hop to 6.
can you tell when i swapped cable for DSL?
notice how stable it is? yeah. that’s how an internet connection should look.
also, i finally bit the bullet and canceled comcast television service. again, i really have nothing against them. they provide TV and interbutts access relatively reliably, but i needed/wanted a change. also, dish network, with more programming and better hardware and more HD channels will cost me less a month than i was paying for comcast.
the new facebook interface sucks goat dick
i hate the facebook. i only have an account because cadie urged me to have one social networking presence she could use to point me out to people.
i logged in today because i got a friend request from another individual i haven’t spoken to in 6 years and suddenly the site went from its tolerable old interface to the new one. great.
anyway, the new interface is so chock full of unintuitive design, ajax, javascript and ruby on concrete blocks that it literally takes privoxy running on a dual P4 3.0GHz box with 2GB of memory over 50 seconds to sanitize the front page. before i made some adjustments to the configuration, there was so much crap that privoxy blocked the site altogether.
yeah. great.
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOOOOSION
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