Unruly Behavior

I really like Penn & Teller. Went to see them in Vegas this year. Some of the best performers, and nicest guys you will ever meet. And if you go see them, you do get to meet them, as they come out in the lobby after thier show and sign autographs and talk with you for a while.

I'm not sure how this link got into my Google Desktop Bar, but it is an essay from Penn Jillette titled, "There Is No God", and I can't say that I've ever agreed with him more.

Here is an exerpt, really, my favorite part:

"Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around."

Check out the link to read the whole thing.

Ok,

Had another typically great day in IT today.

First client - is a large hospital in the Houston Medical Center where we are replacing 550 PCs over the next couple of months.

Forgot to take a pen from the staging area to the work area. Went to the nurse's station and asked, "Do you gals have a pen I can borrow? I forgot mine, sorry." They gave me a pen and a ditry look. Then they called the guy supervising at the hospital and told him that I had been offensive because I referred to them as "gals". No shit. Fucking old wrinkled bitches would have been a better reference I guess.

Lost my parking card at the hospital and got chewed out by the boss for being late.

Next client is a title company. "We haven't been able to get this PC to work in months." So I plugged it into the wall. Nice to come out and bill someone $150 plus travel because they are stupid.

Next client is a retail store. They have SPAM in their webmail client that is provided by their corporate office. They want me to make it stop. Another $15o for stupidity. Another big emergency I had to rush to and fix nothing.

Next cilent. Electrical contractor. Tried to upgrade Quick Books from V 5 to V 6. They are in a Terminal Service environment. Big mistake on their part. Had to roll them back so they could start working again. Tried to save some money by not calling us first. Now they are out $300 for my two hours and they didn't get things upgraded.

Last stop of the day, the offfice. That motherboard from Dell mysteriously appeared and I got it installed. It works. Get to take it to the client tomorrow.

Did get some good news today. My wife is knocked up again!

Wohoo!

-The Dren

Dell. You continue to annoy and confound me.

On Thursday I called with a bad PC, the caps on the motherboard were bad. Even though I could see ruptured capacitors on the board, and the system failed to boot, your tech still insisted that this might not be the problem.

Finally, I got them to issue an RMA and ship a new motherboard. Was told it would ship out on Thursday becuase the RMA was issued by 4:00 PM.

Board did not arrive in our DHL shipment on Friday. Board did not arrive in our DHL shipment this morning. Tried to use your automated tracking system. It gave me a tracking number that would not work at DHL's packag tracking website. It also indicated that the product shipped out yesterday, a full 3 days after it was supposed to ship.

You suck. Your service continues to suck. The only reason we keep using you is you suck less than HP and Gateway. Not really that big accomplishment when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of the situation.

Now I've been on hold for nearly half an hour and cannot reach a human to find out what has happened to the replacement part. Wanna bet they can't help me? You suck.

Die, die, die, Dell.

I fired SBC as promised this weekend.

I got my cable modem back from the Worst ISP.

True to form, the connection has gone squirrley tonight, and I know more than the tech I contacted on the phone.

You see, when you connect to Road Runner, they have you go to their local site and download a file from the local server where you are to prove that the speed is fast and good.

If you have a problem with anything outside the local area, they cannot help you.

So right now I'm getting 2.5 Mbps over my cable modem, but only .110 Mbps if I leave the Houston area. I tried to explain this to the tech, and even ran a traceroute command for him, and got:

U:\>tracert pcpitstop.com

Tracing route to pcpitstop.com [64.29.201.21]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 3 ms 3 ms 4 ms 192.168.0.1
2 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 10.50.32.1
3 15 ms 10 ms 13 ms gig2-2.hstntxala-rtr2.houston.rr.com [24.28.100.113]
4 13 ms 12 ms 11 ms srp13-0.hstntxtid-rtr1.houston.rr.com [24.28.100.17]
5 30 ms 14 ms 11 ms pos12-0.hstntxtid-rtr3.houston.rr.com [24.93.34.94]
6 16 ms 13 ms 12 ms son0-0-3.hstqtxl3-rtr1.texas.rr.com [24.93.33.161]
7 * * 71 ms so-0-0-0-0.gar2.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.78.234.9]
8 19 ms 20 ms 20 ms ae-11-53.car1.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.68.122.77]
9 25 ms 22 ms 19 ms unknown.Level3.net [209.246.152.194]
10 21 ms 26 ms * daa.g921.disa.datareturn.com [64.29.192.230]
11 21 ms 20 ms 24 ms daa.g906.p40a.datareturn.com [64.29.192.213]
12 63 ms 64 ms 61 ms port-64-1952021-da120383www002.devices.datareturn.com [64.29.201.21]

Trace complete.

U:\>

You can actually see the hops from my home network to the Houston Road Runner routers to the Texas Road Runner router and where it hangs up at the jump to the Level13.net router in Dallas. But he could not help me with this. I think it really freaked him out when I told him I could trace the problem and just wanted to talk to someone that could fix the problem.

Oh well. There really seems to be no good ISP in the area. I'm just waiting anxiously for Verizon FiOs to my house when it becomes available.

Hey,

You don't have to know Carlos to know that he sucks. So now, for a limited time only at the Unruly Store, get your official CARLOS YOU SUCK baseball cap, in your choice of black or baby blue.

While you are there, you can check out your official Katrina Relief or Cheaters T-shirt.

Have a great day!

That Micro$oft really does not care about it's customers.

They are purposefully restricting XBOX 360 supplies at launch for the publicity it will generate.

Hey, buy our product, you really, really need it, but we're not going to ship it in quantities where it is easy for you to purchase.

Bastards.