Unruly Behavior

I LOVE T-SHIRT HELL! Best damn shirts ever. At least since The Church Of Euthanasia quit selling shirts. (Links to both on the right -> )

Now I find out that those anorexic (coke snorting?) twins and eBay want to harm this bastion of free speech. Phooey on them!

I say satire, even really evil satire, even satire that makes some people cringe, is important.

BTW - you can see me in my Postal Shooting Tour shirt most weekends now, and my wife looks really snazzy in her Talk Nerdy to Me shirt.

First the Olsen Twins, Now eBay: T-Shirt Hell.com Told to Cease and Desist Selling Their New Christopher Reeve T-Shirt

The Worst ISP, search on ,Google, has jumped to #3 in the results for my favorite Worst ISP. The bomb is working! HAHAHAHA!

Google Search: "worst isp"

How was everyone's weekend? Mine really started on Thursday, and sucked. I'm trying to keep a positive outlook on things, but sometimes I need a day off to recover from my weekend.

On Thursday the wife took the boy (10 1/2 Months old now!) to the doctor. He's been sick almost since we got him home from the hosptial with some sort of respritory problem or pink eye. Now he has "bilateral pheumonia". Whoopie. My wife is freaked out, and he can't go to school for at least a week. One big problem with that, my folks are out of town, they live close by and would usually help out with a problem like this. Since we have to work, the wife is staying with her mom this week, so is the boy. Leaves me here alone with two dogs, a cat and a big empty house. What fun.

On Friday I only had to work half a day. Sounds like a good poblem to have, doesn't it? Only catch, had to get a CT (cat) Scan on Friday at 4 PM. Now here is how this works. You show up an hour early, after not being able to eat since breakfast. Now they give you a little over a quart of barrium suspension. This is a radio active compound that lets them look at your innards. In particular for me they are looking at my pancreas and gall bladder. They are afraid that gall stones could make me sick again, and I have a "pseudo-cyst" on my pancreas that needs to go away or eventually they will do surgery on me to remove it from my body.

My car has been having trouble starting, so I checked all the engine fluids, found the battery was a little low, so I added water. It started better after this.

Oh, drinking the barrium suspension will give you the worst case of the gassy shits you have ever had in your entire life. So for Friday night and most of Saturday put me down for a visit to the toilet about every 90 minutes.

Saturday was relatively uneventful till the end of the day. I puttered around the house, got a haircut, worked on the server here, discovered that the Home Theater PC is broken, hangs at the first screen after the Windows XP Pro greeting. Figured out in Safe Mode that it is something wrong with COM+. Need to work on that some other time. Got the server into the closet and running well. Still waiting for some memory from eBay to arrive.

Also, the cable guy came out, this is my third visit from the Worst ISP. Did lots of testing, the cable is good to the peg, good all the way from the cabe modem to the peg, the cable modem is good, it must be something between the peg and their central office, someone will work to fix it tomorrow he says, they are off on Saturdays.

Rained a little. Cable modem completely quit working while it was raining.

Saturday night. Clothes washer jammed up on the wife. Checked it out, the owner's manual (Whirlpool Calypso), says it is a clogged drain hose. Looked at it for about half an hour, and decided to work on fixing it on Sunday. Guess mowing the lawn will wait till some other day.

Watched 28 days later with the wife. Not as good the second time around. Still entertaining, just not as good as the first time.

Sunday - W Day - worked on fixing the washer. Removed the drain hose. About 20 gallons of water from the tub drain to the floor. Hmm... should have bailed out the tub first. 1 gallon, 1HP Shop Vac is not cutting the mustard. Head to Home Depot, get a 3.5HP 9 Gallon Rigid shop vac. This thing sucks, sucks great, gets all the water cleaned up quickly. Guess I know what the wife got me for Christmas this year.

After the wife and the boy left for her mom's, I started to go to Target to get the weekly supplies. Guess what, car battery is dead, won't start. So I cleaned all the terminals really well. Noticed one of the factory wire harnesses is really fucked up and will need to be replaced soon. Wonder how long it is and how long that will take me. Put the battery on the charger and went inside to clip coupons and watch the news. Thirty minutes later it started. Went to Target and got all my stuff done.

At bedtime the Cable Modem is still not working well. The Worst ISP Speed Test still shows a 128k to 256k connection for my cable modem.

This is just a little of the weekend, the most signifigant parts. I need a day off today to catch up from the weekend!

Found the article linked below at the Business Week website. Seems that Steve Wildstrom is sadly misinformed about the HDTV Tivo, stating:

"...it's more than a little disappointing that sophisticated gear such the Microsoft Media Center PC has such limited ability to handle HDTV. When equipped with a digital tuner, Media Center can show and record HD programming, but only from local broadcast stations -- no ESPN, no HDNet, no HBO. The DirecTV HD receiver, which incorporates a TiVo digital video recorder, has a similar limitation. "

This is absolutely incorrect. My HD Tivo records Lost, Desperate Housewives, Star Trek: Enterprise, Dead Like Me, Penn & Teller's Bullshit and Joey as season passes each week in beautiful HD. I also use it to pause HDTV live, and watch NASCAR races in HD. We've also been watching the Baseball Playoffs this year in HD. It all works great.

What a dumb ass.

HDTV's Copy-Protection Prison

Update:

He removed the part about the Tivo. Not a correction, it just vanished, like it was abducted by aliens. How funny.

Man, I've been waiting for this! Google searchs on my computer. Can't wait to do this to my entire network.

Google Desktop Search Download

Update:

Wow, this thing kicks ass. I now have 22,864 items on my laptop indexed. That is a shitload of stuff. And when doing searches in Google, or via the Google Toolbar, I get results of what is on my PC at the top of the list. This is going to be really handy.

A while back, I tried to start a Google Bomb for my nominee for Worst ISP, Time Warner's Road Runner service. It never really took off, as you can see from the Google search below. Up until recently, they have been my only choice for Broadband Internet Access at my house.

Well not any more, SBC is offering DSL in my neighborhood now. Looks like after all the efforts I went to in getting rid of their telemarketing calls, I will now have to investigate going to their services. Funny how things work out.

See on September 26, 2004 my Cable Modem from the Worst ISP started working really slowly. So I called their tech support. I'm the only house on my node, so I should have really fast speed. Instead I was testing at 200-300 kbps. (I should be running at 1.5 Mbps or higher.) After nearly an hour of testing, which required me to disassemble my network and attach a laptop directly to the cable modem, the tech told me that there was a problem with my line, and a tech could come out on Saturday to fix it for me. This is the third time that the line has died at my house, so I was pretty upset, but figured I could work things out with them. On Saturday the tech showed up on time and was very nice. He informed me that I was getting, "Corrected Bits" from the head end of things, which were at their Central Office (CO) and the problem woudl be corrected by Sunday night. Still kinda peeved, but I guess I can wait one more day. So come Sunday night, things are not working, I call tech support again. They tell me that there is not a problem at my end, but that the cable at my house is good, and a cable tech will be out in 7-10 days to replace the cable. When I asked why that differed from what the tech told me, they said I probably misunderstood. Keep in mind that I'm an MCSE/CCNA and work on networks day in and out, so I'm not just some Clueless Fuck that got a cable modem, I actually can troubleshoot problems like this easily. Customer Service is closed on Sunday nights. So I'll call them on Monday and see what they have to say, maybe I can get their current introductory rate of $29.99 for six months out of the debacle. At least then I could get something for my lost time, and not being able to work at home for at least two weeks. Monday comes, keep in mind that this is the 9th day in which I've had service interruptions and poor performance. The customer service rep I spoke with was nice, but about as useless as a Football Bat. There was nothing he could do for me except give me two weeks credit, and by the way, the tech on Sunday was wrong about the cable guys coming out, since the ticket was started on the weekend, it wouldn't get into the system till late Monday, so it would be 7-10 days from Tuesday till things got back up and runnig.

Sorry, TWC, as a certified Uber Geek, I can no longer recommend your services as I have in the past. Your service is so rotten I can't begin to describe it's stench.

Oh, and feel free to add the Worst ISP link to your Blog/Web page, it is never too late to get a Google Bomb up and running.

Current Monthly Cost of TWC Cable Modem at 1.5 Mbps - $49.99 Plus Tax (Roughly $52.00)
Current Monthly Cost of SBC DSL at 1.5 Mbps - $26.95
Current Monthly Cost of SBC DSL at 3.0 Mbps - $36.99

Plus SBC will throw in 4 movie tickets, a $32 value where I live now. Hmm... What should I do...

Google Search: worst isp

Don't know why I didn't think of posting this here before, but here is what we're watching at Casa Dren...

The Dren's DVD Collection

Anyone have an e-mail address for the company below? I can't fine one, but one of their customers keeps using my cell phone number as a Fax number. They won't tell me who it is, or stop faxing to my cell phone. I promised them that tongiht I would fax them about 500 blank pages from my PC via my home phone. Maybe they will get the point. Doubt it however.

Homeline Mortgage

I've now spent:

2 Hours trouble shooting a bad NIC on a Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop that goes from one bank branch to another.

45 Minutes on the phone with Dell confirming it is still under Depot Warranty, and that they can pick it up for service.

1:45 On the phone with Dell Support, retroubleshooting everything till I told them that maybe my customer should buy another laptop, not a Dell, and never purchase another Dell product (the customer site is 100% Dell, even their Network Switch), if they would not honor the warranty on a $10 part, and make me spend 4.5 Billable Hours at $100 per hour to get something like this fixed. That got their attention.

Now I have to call Airborne to get them to pick up the system, Dell cannot take care of this step for some reason.

And their website calls their service "Award Winning". Wonder what kind of crap award they won... "And now, in the "Frustrating their customers so that they buy a new one instead of getting warranty work done category..."

Ok, took 10 minutes with DHL, the laptop will be picked up tomorrow. That was the easiest part of this ordeal. Beware if you buy a Dell Support Contract.

Dell - Support

Ok, I've been drinking Jack Daniels Old No. 7 since I was about 16 years old. It has always been the same, great Whiskey, always with a good kick and good taste.

Now Jack Daniels, with little fanfare, it's not even mentioned on their website, has changed Old No. 7, dropping it from 86 Proof to 80 Proof. They say this gives it a sweeter flavor they say, that people prefer. What they don't say is that Jack Daniles has been avavailable in 80 Proof as Green Label for years. If it was so preferred, why wasn't it their top seller? Instead it was always next to at least three times as many black label bottles, seems to me that folks didn't prefer it, and this is just a way for Jack Daniels to make more money on their product. More dilution means more bottles per barrel, more profit. Less taste.

Here is a petition to bring Old No. 7 back to 90 proof, it's original formula:

Sign The Jack Daniel's Petition

Here is a link to Jack Daniel's customer feedback:

Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey-Contact Us