I Love my AT&T Store.

So this morning, after 3 weeks… I received yet another anonymous text message from some person looking for some guy named Dave. It started a while back. My husband and I were watching House, and I was getting phone calls from this dude who sounded like he was stoned saying, “Eh… is Dave there?”

The problem is, I know several guys named Dave, and in an emergency situation, I could see one of them giving a stoner my phone number if he had no one else to turn to, so I always asked, “Which Dave, I know two and none of them live with me.” Stoner Dude (not his real name), hung up after saying, “Well it was his number this morning. Aww man!” After three days of this, I finally managed to convince Stoner Dude that this was not his phone number, and that he was going to have to come up with another way to get in touch with his friend. I figured… the guy was a stoner. It’s entirely possible he just mis-dialed a lot, or wrote down the wrong number for his friend. Fine. I let this incident go.

All was quiet for like a week. Then I got a phone call from this gentlemanly gentleman who asked me very nicely if “Dave” was there. I told him that he had the wrong number, and that I had already talked to Dave’s friend Stoner Dude, and apparently Dave is giving out my number for some reason. I asked him if he would mind asking Dave to stop giving out my number, and he said that he would as soon as he tracked him down, and apologized for bothering me. I never received a phone call from this gentleman again.

Over the course of the next two weeks, I would randomly get phone calls from catty girls, looking for Dave. I told every single one of them that Dave wasn’t at this number, one of them even called me a b-word before she hung up on me.

By this morning, I had had enough of Dave and Dave’s friends, so when I got a text message from a phone number I didn’t know, I snapped. What you see below is a recaptured conversation from my iPhone, with names and numbers changed.

From Weird Number: “Hey”
Me: “Some guy named Dave has been giving out my number for 3 weeks. Looking 4 him right? Would you mind telling him 2 stop? I’ve had this # a long time and don’t want to change it. Thnx!”
Weird Number: “Who is this?”
Me: “The person who’s tired of Dave’s friends calling her at 3 am. Who also doesn’t know who you are or why you txt msg’d her. Just assuming u are a friend of Dave’s.”
Weird Number: “I didn’t text anyone!”
Me: “Weird. I got a txt from this # Sorry to bother you. No caffeine, little sleep due to phone calls all night.”
Weird Number: “And you got a text from this number? When? Who is this?”
Me: “9:10 am. I’m (random gemini, of course!), you are?”
Weird Number: “Wilson. I am sorry you are getting calls but I have never texted this number before, nor do I know who you are.”
Me (at this point, seething and ready to call my provider and scream… ): “No prob. I’ll call my provider about it.”

Wilson could have let it go there, but this bothered him for some reason, so he kept asking me questions. While he was trying to trouble shoot, it came out that he worked at an AT&T store. So we made arrangements for me to head down there so that we could figure this whole thing out, and then I found out that Wilson’s phone is security locked… no one else could have texted me from his phone. He was confused by all of this, then he asked me to just call the store instead, because he was concerned someone had doubled up my phone number with another customer’s number. I agreed to do this, made my coffee and got ready to call him when I received the following text from Wilson.

Wilson: “Oh wait! LOL! You are not gonna believe this! I did text you! This customer who was in here just now has almost the same phone number as you! He said his texts were not working, his number is 555-1213 (mine is 555-1212) and he gave me the wrong number! I apologize!”
Me: “Thank you so much! Glad it was something simple. You’re awesome! What days do you work? I want to bring you cookies.”

It turns out, Dave had been mistakenly giving out my phone number since getting his brand new cell phone, and didn’t understand why his friends never called, and his phone never rang and why he wasn’t getting his text messages. Wilson straightened the guy out and after giving me his work schedule, he offered to help me any time I had problems with my account.

Now that ladies and gentlemen, is what I call customer service. I was rude to this guy. He didn’t have to help me, and he did anyway. I will be taking him some home made Oatmeal Scotchies tomorrow because he deserves them for putting up with the way I treated him. The customer service hotline for AT&T sucks, but I love talking to the people in the stores where I live. They really care about making sure that I’m happy, even if I’m a bitch.

Vista, Nvidia and iTunes, Again.

So today, my wonderful geek husband got fed up with my laptop being unable to sync video to my iPhone directly from my hard drive. He put in a phone call to HP and asked if it would be possible for them to provide us with Windows XP recovery discs. He was told they would have to contact a supervisor to authorize it, and waited for the call back. The call back didn’t assist us at all. Not only would HP not be able to provide us with XP recovery discs, but if I choose to downgrade my machine to XP from Windows Vista, my warranty on this machine is void.

WTF?

As I have pointed out many times before, my phone is my life. If there were one other device in my life that were second to that, it would have to be my laptop. For the past five years, I have been very happy with the HP and Compaq machines that we have purchased, and have gotten a great deal of use out of them. Ninety percent of that happiness has derived from the fact that I’ve never had to call HP customer support with a problem, but this is too much. Not only did the customer support staff not speak English very well, but “John”, “Mary” and “Mary” told us that reinstalling Windows Vista would solve this issue, which is positively insane. The problem is the driver for my hard drive, which has not been updated by the manufacturer. How exactly will re-installing the OS fix this problem? Whatever they’re on at HP customer support, they need to start sharing the love.

I didn’t expect HP to actually be able to fix this issue. It’s really not HP’s problem because this is a known issue with iTunes specifically, and everything else works great. What irks me is that I have been told that I am stuck with Windows Vista, and its random BSOD’s from now until my warranty is out in July. Hopefully by then, Microsoft will have updated Windows Vista to the point where I can stand to use it, and this will be a non-issue, but if not, as soon as the warranty is up, you better believe this cookie is downgrading.

To switch targets a bit, I am supremely irritated at Apple right now, far more than I am that my husband had to speak to a customer support center in India that is filled with idiots who don’t speak enough English to diagnose technical support issues. My hard drive controller’s manufacturer, Nvidia, states that there are no problems with the hard drive or the controller and that they have referred this issue back to Apple’s application dev team for iTunes, who has done absolutely jack about the problem.

At least one other guy on the planet is just as irritated about this problem as I am, and has posted a comment on CNet’s boards regarding it.

And here’s a thread about it from SIX MONTHS AGO, regarding the exact same issue I am now encountering.

And here’s an article on a blog about a similar issue with Quicktime, dating back to July of last year, with comments as current as January 6th. I promise, none of those comments are mine.

And finally, this is a thread on the Apple discussion forums regarding the problem.

If this doesn’t show that there’s some extreme neglect going on here, I don’t know what does.

Windows Vista Woes.

Now, I am a gadget girl, but I’m not sure that you could truly call me a computer geek. I keep my husband around to fill in those shoes, still, today I managed to prove that I am geeky enough by pointing out that the only difference between his computer and mine was windows vista and the only known issue that caused a disaparity between his ability to sync his iphone, and my ability to sync mine is windows vista.

According to Apple, Windows Vista machines with SATA hard drives on board have problems transferring pictures and video through iTunes. Lord only knows why, this is just what Apple says. But when I hopped on to see if there was a driver update for my SATA hard drive, guess what? Nada. I followed all of Apple’s suggestions, including disabling some features in Windows Vista that I don’t use anyway (all of this was directed by my wonderful geek husband) and still nothing.

If this were my only problem with Windows Vista, I wouldn’t complain, it’s just that on top of that file transferring across my home network is painfully slow. Connecting to wireless networks via my laptop is painfully slow. Sometimes, when the laptop is sitting here idle with no applications open, it just blows up into a giant ball of BSOD. But more than anything else… Windows Vista and iTunes really don’t seem to get along, which is sad because my cell phone is my life. Also, I’m horribly afraid that my ancient version of Adobe Photoshop will cause Vista to pee all over itself, so at least 65% of the functionality of my laptop is lost to me (especially since Gimp and Windows Vista have major pointing device issues). It’s just a crappy situation.

Am I wishing I’d bought a mac now? You bet. Especially after getting my iPhone.

Am I seriously considering downgrading to XP?

Abso-friggin’-lutely.

Honda Chick

So, my husband finally replaced his old beat up volkswagen rabbit convertible (otherwise known as a cabriolet that is the same age as my little brother, who is now of legal age to consume alcohol).

It all started on his birthday. On his birthday, he picked up our son from school and stopped at the mail box to get the mail. When he got back in the car, it wouldn’t start. He and my son had to push the car the rest of the way up the street and into the garage. Little did I know at the time that this was the beginning of the end.

The car has died like this on numerous occasions, so many that I became nervous about taking the vehicle out for family trips in the summer (which is kinda the whole point of owning a convertible anyway, isn’t it?). One time, a county sheriff had to push the car out of one of the busiest intersections in town, into a grocery store parking lot, and I had to go pick up my hubby and take him home. Previously, my hubby has taken these things in stride, saying that he’s just not doing a good enough job maintaining the car, or he hasn’t found the right guy to work on it yet. But this last event… was entirely different.

I knew something was wrong when the mechanic had the car for over a week and he said to me, “Well, we can’t sell it if it’s not running.” Sell it? What? Are you kidding me? I’ve been trying to convince you to sell this car –which would make a fantastic hobby car for someone who loves to get his hands greasy, but really isn’t a great car for a guy who makes his living as a computer geek– for four years and now you’re telling me that you’re going to sell it!

At first I was angry.

Then the phone calls from the mechanic started rolling in.

The place where we took it to have a tune up put in the wrong size spark plug and damaged the head. The place that installed the new wiring harness –the local VW dealer of all things– not only overcharged us for the part, they installed the wrong one AND did it incorrectly, this contributed to draining the battery somehow that I wasn’t able to follow. To top it all off, the exhaust manifold was cracked and the part is no longer manufactured by Volkswagen. Even after all of these repairs were made, the car was still running rough and the mechanic loves working on old cars like this… and could not figure out why it sounded so unhappy for the life of him.

That was when my husband started talking about buying a Honda, the day we picked up the VW from the shop. He drove it home and began surfing and showed me pictures of the CR-V that day. I tried to talk him into something else, I suggested Subarus because they last forever and my dad works at the plant, so we get a discount on buying Subarus. He went and looked at Jeeps, and we finally came back to the Honda CR-V. After some finagling and moonshines, we bought the car and picked it up earlier this week.

This is where the story really begins. Along with the car came “Honda Chick.” My husband spends more time with this gal than he does with me, and to be blunt, it’s really starting to piss me off. He looks forward to getting to have quality time with “Honda Chick” every single day. I don’t think we’ve had a conversation that lasted more than ten minutes that took place outside of his car since he brought “Honda Chick” home. And when I call him while he’s driving home, she annoys the crap out of me with her “Left turn one quarter mile” bull crap. As if he doesn’t know how to get home! Come on lady!

She’s absolutely, one hundred percent, a backseat driver. It gets on my nerves and I’m not even driving the car.

If this doesn’t stop, he’s going to have to make a choice.

Me, or Honda Chick.

I’m back!

After six days of living in absolute hell because our hosting provider was knocked offline for the stupidest reason, the Random Gemini is back!

If you’d like to read a news story on it, you can view it here. However, the article lists that the problems began on Saturday, when our website was actually taken down on Friday. Basically, it was a planned outage that went awry because the tech staff at our hosting service are completely clueless. They kept claiming errors that had nothing to do with the fact that their name servers were offline.

I have never, in my life, dealt with people that were so technically inept. Hopefully, none of our data was lost. We’re trying to determine the level of damage to our data now.

Wish me luck!

Ellen and the Dog.

After reading the comments on this article in wapo, I had to say something.

Many of the commenters in this article are obviously clueless. One particularly irritated me. “Susie” wrote: “And to limit dogs to families with no kids (14 and over is essentially no kids) is ridiculous as well.” I’ve met many a dog that has no business being in a home with children, and many a child that has no business having a dog. There are lots of dogs that love and adore children, a friend of mine has a fat and happy golden retriever that absolutely adores children, and his other dog, a yellow lab/german shepherd mix, while an old lady these days, still manages to get some bounce in her step when she has children to frolick with.

My own dog is another story. He likes his children, but only his children. My dog and my daughter haven’t been famous friends, and my dog has been terrorized by my neighbor’s children in the past, and I only discovered it after I cleaned up cuts and knicks in his skin after a whole fist full of rocks were hucked at him. As a result, my dog doesn’t like children that are more than three feet tall and less than five feet tall. Placing this dog in a home with young children would be sheer idiocy and many dogs that end up in rescue programs end up there because they don’t get along with the children in the home. The rescuers are not doing it to “hoard” the dogs. They’re doing it to save the dogs from an inevitable death in a shelter or on a veterinary table because, for a growing number of dogs out there, dog + children = bite.

It really is down to the fact that so many people just assume that because they have children, they must have a dog. Dogs aren’t part and parcel to the whole parenting schtick, and being a good parent doesn’t mean that you’re a good dog owner. These things are mutually exclusive.

As for Ellen… honey, you should have read your contract. I agree that it is sad that the rescue organization seized the dog from what appears to be a good home, but in the process of trying to get your way you have made it harder for the organization to place other dogs in homes. This isn’t about one dog. This is about a nation of dogs who have been abandoned by their owners for whatever reason. Some of the reasons that I’ve heard for people dropping off their dog at a shelter have shocked me and vary from “Well, I’m moving and he’s too big for an apartment.” to “He didn’t match our living room furniture.” While I understand that your intentions were good, many people are too stupid to own dogs and the rescue organization is just trying to protect the dogs from stupid people. Please try to put your own feelings aside and believe that the rescue really does have the best interests of the dog at heart.

Democrats Fiat Vote on Welfare for Illegal Aliens

This first made the news on Thursday, so I’m behind the times but… I just want to say to the democrats in congress that you guys are scum.

You cheated the system to get a vote that would take money from tax paying citizens of this country, so that you could give it to people who can’t even be bothered to take a fucking test to become citizens and pay taxes so that they qualify for aid.

For God’s sake, what makes you think that our government can support people who don’t pay into the system that’s paying out to them? What in the hell makes you think we have room for this?

What makes you think that you have the support of the American people on this? The polls say you don’t. Maybe you should read them every once in a while.

I have never voted blanket, across the board for one party on a ballot before. Never.

I will be doing so this year. Not a single democrat who was sitting in congress when this incident of a bill failing, and a re-vote being taken to forcibly pass a bill that the American people do not want which is against the voting rules, not a single god damned one of you deserves to receive another vote from another American.

You betrayed The United States of America for your selfish politics. You were not thinking about the United States last week. If you weren’t thinking about it then, when do you think about it exactly? When does the will of the people actually matter to you? If it didn’t matter last week, I suspect that it has never actually mattered and each and every one of you are the worst public servants ever elected.

You should all step down for caring more about yourselves and your politics than about the people you represent. I wish we could impeach senators and congressmen by popular vote. Things in DC would be very different if they actually had someone to answer to for the choices they make.

Old Dog

My old dog woke me up this morning. The sad part is, it wasn’t because he needed to go out. No, no, instead he sat in his crate and flapped his head around until his ears made this noise that sounded like my grandmother was standing right next to my head, flapping out the sheets in the breeze so that the folds would be nice and crisp and the sheets wouldn’t get wrinkled.

I groaned and called him over to me when I realized that he had yet more ear infections and scratched his ears for him until he settled down. Then I tried to go back to sleep, but of course, it didn’t happen.

I couldn’t sleep because for some reason, it occurred to me that my brother told me that my grandmother’s dog had passed away the other day. My grandmother and grandfather got that dog a month or so before I came home for the first visit from Spokane. I think that Grandma got her because my heart dog, Duchess, passed away a month after I moved here. I’m pretty sure Grandma’s reasoning was that she didn’t want me to come home and not see a dog in the yard.

Snuggles wasn’t my dog, and she wasn’t really my grandmother’s dog either, but she was as sweet as she could be and lived a good long life. I hope Duchess and Beau and Emily keep her company at Rainbow Bridge.

The funny thing about all this is that my brother told me about this some time last week, and it didn’t really sink in until this morning. My mind has been that way lately, it’s like things just sit on the surface and gradually sink deeper and deeper until all the sudden, they hit terminal velocity and smack me in the face.

A friend of mine told me several weeks ago that his mother isn’t doing well, that diabetes is crippling her memory and that she can either have this surgery performed, or live another two years. I completely forgot that he said anything until his wife said something to me again, and then I went to say “Man, that stinks.” and he told me that he could have sworn that he’d already mentioned it.

It’s making me feel like the one who’s getting old isn’t the dog, it’s me.. and I’m contracting Alzheimer’s.

The scariest part about it is that my great-aunt, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, passed away a month or two ago. I have a completely different blog post about that… but I do have to wonder if my memory is starting to go because I haven’t been drinking enough coffee lately or something.

*sigh* Weirdness is…

Sony Gets Sick of Rootkit Infamy.

In an interesting business move, Sony BMG has filed a lawsuit against The Amergence Group for providing the MediaMax software that led to the rootkit scandal which has several people frothing at the mouth for Sony’s demise.

Oddly enough, this suit says what I said at the beginning of this whole mess, that Sony did not write the rootkit and that it was extremely likely that Sony had no idea that the rootkit mess would emerge from their attempts at copy protection. They hired a third party to handle copy protection for them, they trusted the third party to respect Sony’s customers. Sony put their trust in the wrong company. Simple as that.

Sony’s not looking to recoup money lost from the rootkit scandal. Money on this magnitude is small time for a company like Sony. What Sony is doing with this lawsuit, is using it to recover their good name because they’ve finally gotten sick of the slashdotters and diggers who constantly blame Sony for all the world’s ills because “Sony made a rootkit!”

Sony’s out to prove them wrong, and Sony is right to do so.

Good luck Sony.

A Music Lover’s Response to Rolling Stone.

On the 19th of this month, Rolling Stone released an article which discussed the decline of the recorded music business, and attempted to analyze it’s fall.

Much of this article makes complete sense and it is precisely what many music lovers have been saying since the RIAA filed its original lawsuit against Napster. Give us digital music. Do not tell us how we will listen to music that we pay for the right to listen to, we will decide that for ourselves, thanks. Do give us a better way to fill our lives with music at a price that makes sense.

Note what I said there: Pay for the right. Most people believe that when they pay for something, that means they own it. Now, obviously I don’t have the right to release tons of copies of James Blunt’s latest CD and make money off of them… but *I* do have the right to listen to the CD because I paid money for it! And if I want to listen to it on my iPod, or in my car or as a ringtone on my cell phone, why should anyone else care? I paid for it and that means that I should get to choose how I listen to it.

That is what music lovers believe they have purchased when they buy a cd or download a song off iTunes, and the music industry has never been able to wrap their head around it and it’s only part of why their business is failing.

The other reason why they are failing is because of people like me.

I have been desperate to find CDs to blow my money on, but I can’t justify spending my money on the latest pop act. My teenagers don’t even listen to that bubblegum crap. The last CD I bought was originally released in 1999 (Powerman 5000’s Tonight The Stars Revolt), and I purchased that CD a few days ago. The other two CDs I bought with it were both released in 1991. The most recently released CD that I purchased for myself was an anime soundtrack. Before that… I picked up a copy of The Rolling Stones 40 Licks, and The Beatles 1. Why? Because these CDs have good music and I was guaranteed to not get ripped off.

I purchased a CD not that long ago by Evanescence. I was in love with “Bring Me to Life” until the radio overplayed it so much that I stopped turning on the radio in my car so I could avoid listening to the damned song. The rest of the CD… was a waste of my money. I never listen to anything else off of it. I spent 15$ on a CD so I could listen to 1 song. This is how it goes with every CD that I have purchased that is not at least 7 years old.

As a result of my experience with purchasing music from new acts, phrases like this one at the end of the Rolling Stone article… simply blow me away: “We have great records, but we’re less sure than ever that people are going to buy them,”

Let me put this into perspective for you guys as a music lover who listens to her iPod every single day: If the recording industry had great records, I would buy them!

I would not be importing CDs from Japan! I would be walking into Wal-mart or Best Buy, or I would actually sign up for an iTunes account because there would be music that I would want to spend my money on available to me… but there isn’t! What I would want to spend my money on, I already own on CD because it’s been around for ten years.

Music right now… is shit, and when the occasional rare gem comes along, it is destroyed within weeks by radio stations overplaying songs to death. I can’t blame the DJs for that, even though I know computers do most of the DJ’ing for them… good music is hard to find, especially in this day and age.