Welcome to My World

I’m sure Microsoft is shitting bricks at this news: you can now buy a Dell laptop or desktop with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed and pre-configured. Complete with full 3D acceleration, video and audio codec support (MP3s, DVD playback, etc.), and full driver support for built-in hardware, like the wireless cards, fingerprint readers, bluetooth, HDMI, and so on.

It seems the excuses people use for avoiding this superior platform sure are evaporating at a steady clip, eh?

Color me impressed. The laptop’s already back in my grubby paws, with a new motherboard, and all is in working order again. The timeline:

• Sunday (July 13, 2008): First noticed funky behavior in the wireless card.
• Monday: It actually died; found HP’s support article about the problem. Called HP, scheduled a repair pickup.
• Tuesday: HP ships out an empty box to me.
• Wednesday: Empty box arrives, via FedEx Standard Overnight. I disassemble the notebook (removing hard disk, memory, and battery as instructed), pack it in the box, and drop it off for shipment.
• Thursday: It arrives at HP. HP evaluates, repairs, and ships it back to me, all in the same day.
• Friday: The repaired unit arrives back at the house. Purrs like a kitten now.

Damn. That’s good service — two day turnaround, and they actually fixed it. Spiffy. Great job, HP!

HP’s not screwing around this time (unlike my encounter with them when it came time to order a new power supply for my laptop early this year) — right on schedule, a box arrived for me today containing a prepaid shipping label, two strips of shipping tape (heh!), and packaging materials for the laptop. The prepaid label was for FedEx Standard Overnight service, and I managed to get the beast wrapped up and turned in at a local FedEx drop off spot, so this thing will actually get there tomorrow. Of course it may sit there in their lab for a week or two before it comes back, but at least it’s in the system and out of my hands now.

Well dammit, I guess my laptop felt left out of the Dead Hardware Parade. I’m posting this via that very laptop, tethered to my cellular phone for internet access, as its built-in wireless card has given up the ghost. According to Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, this laptop apparently has a bit of a “design issue” whereby it damn near melts itself down. The bulletin I linked there offers up a BIOS update that makes the system fan far more aggressive, but apparently it was too little, too late for this crazy little machine.

Wireless works occasionally, but mostly it’s dead. The Wi-Fi card doesn’t even show up in the device list in Vista, and in Linux, lspci -v doesn’t list it either. I actually had to go through the ritual of hard-resetting my cell phone to make its damned “wired tether” mode work again just to get this thing online at all. To their credit, HP are doubling the warranty period (just for this issue) and are sending a box along with a prepaid shipping label so I can send the monster back to them for repair. Given that they know about this specific issue and had trained the phone monkey in India (he had an obvious accent; sorry guys) how to deal with this directly, I suspect they’re just going to ship me a refurbished unit instead of mine back.

But we’ll see; it goes out the door to them Wednesday afternoon. This move coming up (to Tallahassee) is going to make the return shipment rather interesting

On Fridays I help out at a local business (in Melbourne, FL), and among my duties is answering the telephone when calls come in. The shop gets a lot of telemarketing calls; AT&T is by far the worst offender (they call daily, even on days when the shop isn’t open; on days where someone does answer, they will call up to three times per day), but occasionally others trickle through, too.

Bad news for them. I hate telemarketers. A lot. I am a merciless asshole on a telephone with a telemarketer. I am fiercely proud of this, and I make no apologies for the way I treat telemarketers. I am never rude, never raise my voice, never curse, and in fact I don’t even interrupt. I do, however, ask questions, and get more and more inquisitive as the conversation progresses. I ask the right questions (“who are you?”, “who is your actual employer?”, “what phone number can I call to contact you, or another agent if necessary, to further discuss this product/service?”, “what mailing address can I write to contact your organization with questions or comments?”) so I can figure out who’s being ballsy enough to ignore the Do-Not-Call registry to pester me to buy stuff I don’t need/want, and actually go after the bastards.

I laughed my ass off as I noticed an advertisement on TV this evening for “dianetics.org,” a Church of Scientology front (the book “Dianetics” is one of the cult’s more infamous recruitment tricks, especially combined with their “free personality test” tables). The advertisement itself wasn’t the source of the laughter, though it’s a remarkably ineffective ad (it even includes the volcanoes bit that the cult’s “secret scriptures” include in the backstory).

What made me chuckle was that it was aired during a run of South Park. Yeah, the same show that lampoons the cult mercilessly (particularly in Trapped in the Closet which you can go watch by clicking “lampoons the cult”). First they threaten to sue the show’s creators and broadcasters, but now they’re paying Viacom for advertising time? Heh. Morons. I guess if you’re nuts and you’re on the losing side, doing completely bat-shit crazy things is a completely valid tactic.

Be sure to visit Operation Clambake at http://xenu.net/ to read up on all the destructive and horrid things Scientologists have been responsible for over the years they’ve existed. Then laugh next time you see that stupid volcano ad.

Fox News has long been a “fake” news broadcaster, spinning news like no one else, running smear campaigns against whoever its ownership doesn’t like (or is paid to hate), and it’s encouraging to see an organized effort underway to either stop them or expose their antics enough that their audience dwindles to nothing.

From MoveOn.org, courtesy of Congressman Robert Wexler, comes this petition:

FOX has really gone over the line this past month—using racism, prejudice, and fear to smear Barack Obama. Each time they apologize—then they do it again.

First, a paid FOX commentator accidentally confused “Obama” with “Osama” and then joked on the air about killing Obama. Next, a FOX anchor said a playful fist pound by Barack and Michelle Obama could be a “terrorist fist jab.” And then, FOX called Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama”—slang used to describe the unmarried mother of a man’s child.

Go sign it if you care about such things, or ignore it if you don’t. I suspect you’d do that anyway without me telling you

After two weeks of waiting, faxing paperwork back and forth, and gently “nudging” the agent, I finally received the phone call I’ve been waiting to receive since we toured the apartment complex and filled out the first round of forms. It almost seems anticlimactic after days of phone tag and last-minute “quick, can you initial this little spot where you crossed out something and fax it back to me?” to receive the simple news I got this afternoon. We’ve been approved, and we’ll be given our permanent address and details on August’s move-in specials in a week or two. Since the move is still over a month away, this next dose of waiting isn’t going to sting nearly as much.

Woohoo!

Get ready for a new generation of ijits, courtesy of a redesigned, more efficient, and cheaper milk bottle. It is apparently superior in every respect, from its stackable design to its cheaper manufacturing costs. Apparently, though, some people can’t figure out how to pour milk from the new design.

How fucking stupid do you actually have to be to have trouble with this? Sure, if it’s different and pours differently, you might get hung up the first time. But how can it continue to be an inconvenience after that? What’s your excuse when you’re still spilling this stuff once you get to gallon #10?

If you happened to sign up for a new account recently here, you probably didn’t get the e-mail the site claimed you’d be sent because of a strange bit of misconfiguration between my server and Google Mail’s servers. For once, it actually seems like the goof was on their end. That, or postfix has suddenly gotten even more paranoid about DNS name resolution for MX records (smtp.gmail.com turned into an alias for the real server, instead of actually being the server, or configured for round-robin).

Anyway, the mail queue, such as it is, has been quickly clearing out now and mail’s finally being sent as it should be. I’m finally getting notifications for all the commentary going on at Your New Geek: Care and Feeding Guide, so anybody who actually signed up for an account here should finally be getting that mail so they can actually finish their account setup.

Sorry about that, everybody!