A journal and sounding board for a geek girl in Silicon Valley.

It's been a blah sort of day.

Covad did finally show up last night. (Pity it took them so long, and that I didn't know about it, it would've saved my boss some aggravation.) This stupid loser informed me that I was 12,100 feet away from the CO, and that they only supported 1.1M SDSL lines to 12,000 feet, so I was SOL. He gave me the number of what seemed to be a sales number at Concentric to call and complain at, and I left a rather livid voicemail for them last night. (Something along the lines of, "If it's not supported, why the hell did I get sold the service in the first place?") I got a nice call back from Concentric this morning, and they informed me that I'm not really 12,100 feet from the CO, it's just that PacBell came along and installed bridge taps on my line, which for all intents and purposes extends the length of the line. I'm more than a little irritated that Covad themselves didn't pick up on this, and that instead their immediate proposed solution was to downgrade my line to 768kbps. They then attempted to absolve themselves of all responsibility, and informed me that it was no longer their problem and to talk to Concentric. For all the trouble I've gone to over this stupid SDSL line, I'd better be getting a hefty rebate and a switch to a month-to-month contract.... Moral of the story is, go with Megapath instead - someone who has decent customer service.

I've got my 45gig firewire drive on my iMac, but I'm wondering if it's just causing me problems, as I woke up this morning to find it had crashed. (That's generally not a good thing.) We'll see if it happens again....

Went out to lunch with Lorrie, too. Fiesta del Mar. Interesting food, mediocre service. The only other time I've eaten there, or, well, had food from there was when I was crashed out on Lorrie's couch with my broken leg, and she brought me a mole poblano chicken burrito. Very good, covered in an unsweetened chocolate sauce that sort of looks like shit, but if you can get past that it's very tasty.

Thought for the day: I just don't know why Jon puts up with me.
posted by Ciannait at 10:27 PM

Behind the geek news, there's earnings news driving those geeky companies' stock prices.

A couple of news items interested me today. The first is in regards to Steve Jobs "pledging to fix Apple". Personally, I don't see much that's wrong with Apple to begin with. Their stock plummeted when they announced they weren't making quite as much money as the analysts thought they would, but really, they could've announced they'd LOST money. People have such short memories, they don't remember what was going on five or so years ago when everyone was ringing the death knell for Apple. Everyone I know (who isn't an Apple bigot, that is :) wants a Cube, but hasn't bought one yet. Usually because they are sort of pricey. I think also, the new G4 chips from Motorola should help Apple a lot, which will be very nice. Apple's coming out with quite the hardware (and software!) these days. Definitely more stable than my Athlon....

The other is a news article of definitely a more scary nature.. Microsoft's going after the Palm market with "stripped-down" versions of their Office etc applications. Some of the observations I heard included, "They'll need an add-on memory expansion for those!" and "But the normal Palms won't display blue!" (Which is, of course, required for any and all Microsoft applications.) Personally, I believe my Vx is the last bit of unsullied computer-ish hardware that I own - I'm not about to put a supposedly streamlined Outlook on there. There's no control-alt-delete on it!

And so here I sit, anxiously awaiting the guy from Covad. He said he'd be here between 5pm and 6pm. (His original timeframe was between noon and 5pm, and we can see how far that's obviously gotten us.) Until then, I have crap for outbound bandwidth. And at the rate Covad and Concentric aren't fixing my problem, I'm willing to bet that it goes on longer, too, without a good resolution.
It's been a similarly good day (or not) on all fronts too, including a nearly five-hour downtime that wasn't my fault but really made me look bad anyway. I'm hoping tonight gets better, once Jon comes home.
posted by Ciannait at 5:08 PM

Well, we lost the bid on a 2924. I can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but now we have yet another bid on yet another 2924. Which then drove Jon eBay happy, and he bought a beige G3/233 in feverish last-minute bidwars. He wants to run OS X on it. He's also talking craziness about selling his PowerBook and buying a Cube with the money but dammit, I'd rather be given the PowerBook. :)

I think I need to wean the two men in my life off of eBay, else none of us will have any money left for, say, RENT. (For those of you late to this story, one's a roommate and the other's a boyfriend, so get your minds out of the gutter. :)

IE wins points, too, as it didn't lose my blogger entry when this window went to another page. I hate to have IE do anything better than Netscape, I feel very un-loyal.

In keeping with yesterday's Damark rant, it turns out one of the old sysadmins there is going back to Damark, for reasons I can't really fathom. He had gotten nice jobs at Veritas and VA Linux, yet he's going back to the sinking ship that is Damark that has now had beyond total turnover in its sysadmin dept. ClickShipDirect, Inc (nee Damark) which is really still Provell (nee Damark) is going nowhere fast. They can't even afford to pay the property taxes on their recently-completed Brooklyn Center warehouse, so they can't move operations there. CSDI also recently indicated that they might not (read: probably won't) be able to afford to split off from Provell, either, due to the fact that no one wants to trust "dot-coms" anymore, and CSDI's entire business model is Internet-based. Not to mention the fact that Damark never made money anyway. (The stock price soared to 45 or so after Damark revealed they lost less money than they thought they would, after a bit of creative bookkeeping to ensure the mucky-mucks got their nice big bonuses.)

Anyway, this is starting to sound like I have an axe to grind, but I'm just really glad I left.

I think blogger's timestamps are off - we'll see what it says about this entry.

Gratuitous Shoutcast reference... I got everything moved off onto my 45gig drive on the iMac, and it turns out my entire personal collection only takes up 10 gigs. I must fix that. >:)

I was reading about dreams the other day, and about a new study that suggests that dreams are the brain's way of cataloguing information it decides it should keep, and strange dreams occur when the brain has nothing to cross-reference it with. (Explaining, of course, why one might have dreams about being paddled with a spatula by Aunt Jemima.) This is especially interesting to me for two reasons, one of which being that I myself often have very odd dreams. The other has to do with people who join #wicca on EFnet complaining that they have dead people talking to them in their dreams. "They want me to do stuff for them", says one. I say this person has seen The Sixth Sense one too many times. I often feel like I'm obviously not really pagan, since I think most of the people who complain about being contacted by spirits, ghosts, and other apparitions simply need a higher dose (or lower, as the case may be) of whatever medication they're on.
I mean, cmon, a spirit isn't going to knock on your door and say, "Pardon me, old chap, but could I trouble you for some Grey Poupon?"

Get real. :)
posted by Ciannait at 9:36 PM

Oh, btw, the Shoutcast stream is currently down while I transfer all the files and sort and organize them on the iMac. I figure no one will really care, since the bandwidth has been so awful as of late. (The relay to Live365 barely works most of the time, and there's still severe lossy issues with it.)

Any questions with that, please feel free to mail me.
posted by Ciannait at 2:37 PM

The latest in the XO drama is that they've decided after looking at my router, that it's faulty and needs to be replaced. This had better fix it - I got better throughput on my USWest 256k ADSL line in the Twin Cities. The only problem with this is that they want to replace it on *Thursday*. This will require me to take the afternoon off, as they don't nail down a time, they just show up sometime in the afternoon.

And Cameron pointed out that I was incorrect - Terri's going to Wells Fargo. Whoops, sorry Terri.

In other strange news, the below-mentioned director just emailed me today. I wonder if he reads this page still - I know he used to. (Hi Bruce!) This was the power he held over his employees - I still worry to some degree that I pissed him off, but it's not like any of it wasn't true. Working at Damark was like working in the office from Office Space - only worse.

I'm frightened. My roommate's so pissed off at our home network, that he's bid on a Catalyst 2924 on eBay. Granted, downstairs we have one switch, one hub, and one NAT box, but still - it's not THAT bad. The problems only started occurring recently, I swear. :) Just what we need - more toys. The only problem with being a well-paid geek is that instead of paying off credit cards and things, you just rotate the debt some more and buy more geek things (like 45GB FireWire hard drives - oy).

I'm working on my Shoutcast playlist some more, too, and copying files over the iMac now that I have room for them there. I ordered a bunch of Celtic music cd's from Amazon (Silly Wizard, Solas, the soundtrack from 'Secret of Roan Inish', etc) in order to attempt to balance the playlist out. It *is* named "Celtic stuff and chick rock" after all, and it was getting a little "chick rock" heavy. It's a little strange that I'm buying cd's based on my Shoutcast playlist, and what people might want to hear, instead of what I want. (Well, the two Smiths cd's were for me, admittedly - mine were all scratched from being tossed in the back of my Neon over the course of two and a half years. And it's not like it's any great chore to listen to more Celtic music. :)
posted by Ciannait at 2:31 PM