So, being a lover of the concept of FIOS, I decided to forego my satellite internet service and try one of their bundles.  “It’s a no brainer”, I thought.  How could they screw this up on me?  Ha ha ha, I am so naive.

Well, the service works great: high speed internet access, check.  Nice TV channel selection and picture quality, check.   Easy online account management to pay your bill online, BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT.

Here’s where the fun starts.  Verizon.com is where you primarily login to see your bill, so you might assume you could, you know, pay your bill there.  Hah.  I’ve been trying to ay my bill for weeks and all it says is:

 Our bill payment page is being improved at the moment. To pay your bill now, please sign in to www.verizon.net.

Sure, I can do that!  Oh, wait, I dont know my password cause I never use that site!  Sure, whatever, pasword reset request, insane password strength requirements, good to go right?  of course not.  Trying to pay my bill there, I’m greeted with:

  Because you have a bill that combines Verizon services, we need to direct you to the My Account Sign In page on Verizon.com to make your payment.

You seeing the problem here?  Yeah.  So, I know, I’ll email them and let them know their online payment system is totally fucked, I’ll just click on the “Contact Us” link at the top of the page and…

 

Server Error in ‘/residential’ Application.

---

Runtime Error

Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a “web.config” configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its “mode” attribute set to “Off”.

Verizon, you suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!


sudo su -
apt-get install automake1.9 autoconf autotools-dev texinfo libc6-dev-i386 gcc-multilib texi2html debhelper ia32-libs lib32ncurses5-dev
apt-get source --compile grub
dpkg -i grub*.deb


Wow that was easy. There is a known bug in grub with x86_64. it’s currently broken on x86_64, and not only is tab completion broken in the current version (9.04), it seems that when you try normal command (’setup (hd2)’ anyone?) they don’t seem to get recognized either. Makes installing grub on your migrated drive a wee bit of a pain, especially since grub-install frequently installs something not entirely unlike a bootloader for you, but not like one enough to actually, you know, BOOT.

Just checking in.  I’m still alive, and even happy usually.

On the health front it’s been up and down; the battle with Meniere’s has been hard recently.  In late spring and fall when the temperature (and more importantly it seems, the barometer) swings up or down rapidly I can still have a multi-hour attack and need to sleep it off.  Attacks nowadays now feel more like I’m not seeing things properly and it’s hard to concentrate on any task versus the old straight up room spinning, but it still doesn’t feel great especially for several straight hours.

For any other Meniere’s sufferers out there, if like me you find white-on-black text easier on the eyes, I might suggest the  InvertColors extension for Firefox.
I have had some time (and desire) to work on nano with previous maintainer David Lawrence Ramsey’s departure last year, and after reading some random person complaining about nano not having a real undo.   It turns out adding an undo implementation to an editor that really never intended to have one is hard to get right.  Especially in spaghetti C-code.  But I added some other fun things recently, being able to read from stdin like a pager.  Nano will actually be 10 years old in November 2009, party time.

Being a father of three (and second guessing every decision I make as a dad) is taking up the remainder of my time.  That, and trying to be thankful for my blessings in these times: a wife, three beautiful kids, a good job at a company I love 3 years in, a house, and good enough health that I can get myself to work and back every day without assistance.

Okay, too much negative… Let me try and be more positive here.  So as a good little liberal I do watch a lot of MSNBC (along with any good late model GenXer the  Daily Show/Colbert combo) but I do enjoy Olbermann and Maddow’s shows.  However after midnight  rolls around, what do they put on? “Nightmare on 31st?”  “Lockup: San Quentin?”   Seriously, you expect the same viewer who tunes into your channel for at least relatively in-depth political analysis at 11PM is going to stick around to watch a series of murder re-enactments?    Maybe Bill O’Reilly is right and you should bring back Donahue, but put him on at 12AM.  Seriously anything would be better than what you have on now. I don’t know how those shows are rating but man something has to change.

Okay I tried but didn’t really succeed.

Sorry Dell, you want to continue to employ either incompetent or outright lying customer service staff who tell you your order is cancelled and then don’t really cancel it, you’re going to get badmouthed on blogs. When a customer calls you and says they want their order cancelled (especially when you say an item is in stock and then email saying shipment has been delayed a WEEK) YOU CANCEL THEIR ORDER.

I should have looked at the ResellerRatings for Dell before making the stupid mistake of ordering from them, but no, I had to try and save a few bucks from the wonderful NewEgg which has never given me a single problem. I won’t ever make that mistake again.

Well, I’ve been silent because there hasn’t been that much to write.  No news is good news when you have three kids.  Monique, Bree and Joey are all in good health, and although I had a two hour Meniere’s attack at work yesterday, I was still able to recover in time to go out to dinner with friends, and the last one was probably a few months ago.

By far the most annoying part of the gentamicin injection treatment for Meniere’s is not that you are effectively deaf in one ear, it’s that you cant tell where sounds are coming from.  If you forgot where your phone is, you can’t easily locate it just by calling it.  It’s hard to tell which of your kids is talking when you arent looking at them, e.g. when you’re driving.  Anyway, it’s better than the alternative of sleeping on the bathroom floor once a week to be next to the toilet.

Work continues to be great, so I assume Im going to be fired or something else, because I’ve never liked any of my jobs after 2+ years in.  Who knows, maybe Bahhhhhhston is the place for me after all, in spite of the Red Sox and Pats.  I guess when you surround yourself with a bunch of other New Yorkers even that part isn’t so bad

Yes I loved my original 4G 7″ eee netbook but boy it is hard on the hands when working on nano or work stuff for more than short burts.  The 1000H however, in spite of coming with WinXP out of the box, looks like the perfect travelling companion for the coder/sysadmin on the go/on call.

First thoughts:

• 1.6 Ghz Atom processor is snappy enough and means the lappy doesnt get too hot even while charging via AC.  Underside gets a little warm but the kb and trackpad are a nice temp.
• Big surprise and I hadn’t realized how much I liked it until it was gone: no hardware scrolling (vertical or horizontal) build into the trackpad.  UPDATE: Ahh, they have a multi-touch thing going on.  I guess I can get used to two finger scrolling.
•  Definitely more comfy keyboard, many reviews talked about excessive flex but I’m not seeing that much.  Much more concerning is that it sounds like the hard drive on this unit is defective as there is a strange ‘clunk’ every 30-60s.
• The usb ports (particuly the two on the right side) are VERY tight.  I had a few issues getting Ubuntu to boot off my flash drive, it seemed like there needed to be some kind of reseating every boot in order to work.
• Wireless is a “Ralink rt2860″ according to the windows driver.  Works happily over ndiswrapper.
• On-board ethernet does NOT seem to work out of the box.  lspci says:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Attansic Technology Corp. Unknown device 1026 (rev b0)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Unknown device 8324

or using -n:

 03:00.0 0200: 1969:1026 (rev b0)

Anyway overall very happy with it (assuming I’m wrong about the hard drive failing), and as the 6 cell MSI Wind is still a ways off, nice to have something now even if it was $550; still better than $650 (thanks NewEgg!)

Yes, I strongly prefer Free Software where possible, but sometimes no source solution exists, so you have to settle for free as in beer.

Let’s say you have a phone which claims to solve all your problems for you (yes I mean the iPhone), except syncing your calendar app over the air with something useful like Google Calendar. That is where the good folks at Nemus Tech come in. NemusSync is the solution you’re looking for as it’s completely free and fully featured. Other people hawking solutions to this problem want $40 to do this for you, or how about £20 if you want to be able to sync more than one calendar?

Anyway, the best way to ask for someone to open their source is to pony up first, so i did exactly that, and if you have the means please consider doing so as well. The donation page is at the very bottom of the programs’ main page; do the right thing folks.

So being the great and selfless (did I mention modest?) person I am, I decided to donate to the Red Cross to help with the earthquake relief effort.  This time, I used my relatively new bank card which I had maybe used once, and certainly had not yet used online.  I go to their spiffy web site, enter the info, and boom, donation done.  I think I’ve done a good deed.

Two days later I am checking my bank balance and notice that it’s showing $1200 less than I’d expect.  “That’s odd” I think to myself, so I give the good old bank a call and see what’s going on, since they have some odd issues with deposits being held some amount of time with new accounts, but everything Id deposited had cleared.  After a LOT of hold time and chats with the supervisor it turns out Overstock.com has an order with my credit card on it, except I didnt place it.  “That’s not possible” I say, I’ve just gotten this account and only used it at most twice.

Now dealing with my bank took one phone call, and overstock had to transfer me once to get to their fraud department.  That’s fine, and hold time is fine also, even if it was probably an hour or 90 minutes on the phone, fraud is serious business.

Try getting a hold of someone at the Red Cross to tell them you think you CC– was stolen after you donated.  It’s like a dummy corporation or something.  Should you use the “Fraud, Waste and Abuse” number listed on the web site?  No you silly, there is a separate number for that, no I can’t transfer you!  Call that number. “Oh, no Im not allowed to handle that type of incident, you need to call these folks”.  No transfer.  Third number you can’t even talk to a human being, you’re supposed to leave a message and they will get back to you.  I did, they didn’t.  Finally they have some  random web form which promises a response RSN.  It’s been a week, nada.

I am quite aware of the emergencies going on in the world, but if you expect people to donate you have to have SOME infrastructure in place which ensures

• People’s credit card info is safeguarded
• If it is compromised, you either let your donors know or at least give them a person they can call who can then give them false hope of resolution.

As it stands, Ill have to go back to donating to Doctor’s Without Borders.  Enjoy that money red cross, until I have proof that somehow my virgin credit card was stolen via some other means you’ll not be seeing another dollar from me.

So, as a nerd (I know what a shocking confession!), it was nice to see my employer sponsor the documentary Nerdcore Rising’s first showing here in Boston.  It was also nice to they gave me a free ticket to see it.  What was awesome is that the movie is actually really freakin’ good, and MC Frontalot’s music is pretty awesome to boot.  So if you are interested in something new, I’d highly recommend taking a brief moment of your time and request a screening of the movie using this link.  You don’t have to BE a nerd to appreciate this film of course, though if you need any more help understanding them (us) the film may help.