Year: 2006

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Beating Up Telco Robots.

Lately I’ve had to call several telecommunications companies such as Verizon and SBC/ATT. These companies have decided it would be a good idea to provide their customers with a more personal feel by having us talk to automated attendants using voice prompts as opposed to dialing in menu options. So now I’m made to feel like a fool while verbally repeating back options to a computer such as “support” or “billing” while everyone in earshot can detect pure anger in my tone.

The geniuses that determined this would save money as a way to put a voice on the line without the overhead of actually paying a human should be sent to work in an Indian call center for life. A fitting punishment since that’s the only real voice we stand a chance of getting on the line. Now that “they” have figured out that the only thing cheaper than outsourcing to India is a talking computer we must expect this proliferate. People being replaced by shell scripts is becoming reality.

So here’s what I’m doing to beat the robots: nothing. I hit the mute button on my phone immediately when I hear the first voice prompt and wait. Inevitably the robot will tell me several times “I’m sorry, I did not understand your last response. If you’re calling about tech support, please say support.” Still I remain silent in the face of the tormenting auto attendant. Sooner or later a human is forced to answer the phone. Usually there’s no way for them to send me back to “the voice” even though I know they want to. Muuwaaahaha…. I win. They spend money on a human to provide support. I encourage this tactic for everyone facing the insult of answering to a computer.

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Firefox 1.5 Spell Checker

I recently learned the developer of Spellbound, the best spell checker ever for forms in Firefox 1.0, went to work for Mozilla to incorporate the extension to Firefox 2.0. Therefore there was never a compatible release for 1.5. But I found a little known forum project that has an extension that seems to work just as well.

Before installing the Spellbound 1.5 Dev extension you’ll need to install a Mozilla language dictionary. If you already had Spellbound installed before upgrading to Firefox 1.5 your existing dictionary will work.
Mozilla Dev Language Dictionaries

Just save this file to your desktop, open Tools, Extensions from the Firefox 1.5 menu and drop the downloaded file into the Extensions window. Restart Firefox.
Install Spellbound Dev 1.5

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September 12th

Did you get enough September 11th anniversary coverage? My life’s not a whole lot different. Is yours?

I know it’s not a popular opinion but I don’t feel like the attacks five years ago were the nation changing event the media makes them out to be. We started covering our cars with stickers touting patriotic slogans and magnetic American flags made in China. So things changed but not necessarily for the best. That’s certainly being proven true by the resurgence of the Taliban and the fact that Bin Laden’s an even greater motivation to all of the very popular Madrassa’s in Pakistan. We should have concentrated in Afghanistan and left Iraq alone.

I’m proud to say I’m not a one-time Bush policy supporter who came to a realization too late. I said Iraq was a bad idea from conception, my exact words on ABCNews.com being “Saddam doesn’t even have the ability to shoot a slingshot towards the US”. I was confident in this statement because of UN inspection reports that were contrary to reported US “intelligence”, and have never been proven incorrect. Furthermore, I feel that many politicians who voted in favor of the Iraq invasion did not believe the WMD argument personally but feared voter backlash if they presented themselves as anything less than terrorist-fearing “patriots”.

This appeasement of the voters is an issue that has not been discussed at great length in any media venue I’m aware of. We must trust that our representatives will vote with their morals and their hearts, not strictly within party lines for fear of offending their peers and most certainly not out of fear of offending the constituency when what is at stake is the greater good of our nation.

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Family Alleges Racism At Caswell County Pool

It is absolutely amazing that someone has the nerve to say something like the “pool associate” at Lakewood pool in Caswell County, NC (and to children no less). I recommend we mark this membership as blood-fearing racist and make their families wear this mark of a Neo-Nazis for many generations. You are without question the lowest forms of life on the planet. And make no mistake – I publicly chastise you and those like you and will train my childen to do the same. As should others. Be shamed and be damned. Your only recourse is to revoke your membership with this Nazi organization and denounce those among you who refuse to do the same.

This should be national news and the membership list should be released immediately so that we can mark these people among us accordingly.

The best I can hope for these people is that we soon elect a black president and majority of both houses. The corporate-owned white men certainly aren’t doing us much good.

WRAL.com – News – Family Alleges Racism At Caswell County Pool

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Verizon sucks. <- period.

All of this is documented fact that would hold up in court.

A couple of months ago I attempted to get DSL service provisioned by Verizon into a new facility location for Pack-Rat. They screwed up and cancelled the order three times only to re-open it every time. We even paid $49.00 to have a tech go out an install the service for us. They never showed for three scheduled appointments delaying our ability to open for business by two months. In the final call I made to Verizon regarding this provisioning I was told that the installation tech that was suppose to go on-site to install the service would not be available for a “truck roll” for another week. I indicated that was not acceptable. Verizon charged us for the install, no truck rolled and the rep actually asked me if I would “like to cancel” if the option of waiting another week was not to my liking. I cancelled. Covad’s getting the business.

But that’s not as bad as it gets. 2 weeks ago I called Verizon to get order a PRI for our corporate location in DC. We already have four analog lines with them in that location. I was told by the sales rep that we would have to be referred to a sales rep and the request would be “put in queue”. 2 weeks later – no call. So I called them this morning. I was told that the request was “picked up” by Russell Noll, someone I’ve never heard from.

Is Verizon in the business of selling telecommunications or not? They are no more than another company that got so busy with a large customer base they do not care one bit about new business or customer service. May their stock drop like Bell South’s and burn into bankruptcy and corporate corruption scandals. For the record, I’ve heard their cell coverage sucks from those I know stuck on one of their plans. Probably overloaded their network in this area.

And don’t even get me started on the voice prompts when you call Verizon customer service. They are truely a company that has lost the ability to make customers happy while generating new business. They’re like Republican’s in Iraq. They won the first round of the turf battle but now they’re neck deep into something out of their control. Could this be the beginning of the end?

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August 1st

Yesterday was an unexpected series of events. A whole lot of stuff happened good and bad. It started off real bad then it got great….

I installed the new Pack-Rat BlackBerry server at our hosting location Peak 10. After getting it into the rack I was looking at the back of the server to check which port I had the network cable plugged in to. Out of nowhere the end of an industrial zip tie that was holding together some cables sprang loose and hit me straight in my right eye. I walked out with blood dripping from my eyelid down my face. Nice. I went to Urgent Care and other than not being able to sleep much last night everything’s okay. It feels like I’ve got sand in my eye.

But that didn’t stop me from going to the driving range last night where I FINALLY GOT RID OF MY SLICE for the season. No more over the top. I remembered the rule: Always release – do not pull. And that would be the best news of the summer except for one other thing I found out yesterday:

Amy is pregnant again. Connor is going to have a little brother or sister by March of next year. She’s just as excited as she was the first time. I love her. And my little man.

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WinVNC4.exe virus

Had a really strange virus break out on our network yesterday. Here’s the breakdown:

Trend Micro Office Scan detected an initiation on a workstation at 12:21 PM. The virus was located in the file C:\Program Files\RealVNC\VNC4\WinVNC4.exe. This is a legitimate file and location for us as we have VNC server installed on workstations for remote admin. Trend reported the virus name as Trojan_Generic and it could not be cleaned or quarantine. It propagated through an unknown transport to random machines on the WAN in a matter of 10 minutes.

15 machines got infected before I shut down the MS Exchange services just in case it was using the address book as a transport. It didn’t seem logical that this was the propagation mechanism but the outbreak seemed to subside. We then removed VNC from the machines that got infected and I restarted the Exchange services. Two more machines were infected after this but no more. Several other workstations on the network had VNC server and the port open but were not ever infected.

One more interesting lead I have is that the machine where the outbreak initiated was the only one on the network with ports 6697 and 9234 recently opened for a custom IRC application. These have been closed. Anyone with any information about this outbreak is welcome to leave a comment.

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Update: 07-26-2006

Turns out this was a “false-positive” in Officescan virus definitions release 5.99.

Upgrading to the 6.07 definitions clears the problem.  I still think Trend Micro is the leader in the Anti-virus industry.

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Why does Acrobat 7 suck so much?

I had a full copy of Acrobat 6 on my machine at work. For some reason only known to Adobe it decided to start hosing and wouldn’t open any documents. It just froze a blank white box on the center of my display. So I uninstalled it and put on a copy of Acrobat 7 reader. I needed to open some documents damn it.

Acrobat 7 ran flawlessly. Once. Then any time I tried to open a subsequent document it gave me an hour glass and the Acrobat process chewed up 45-50% of my CPU with no results. What a piece of sh*#!

Flush Acrobat – Get Foxit PDF reader and never look back. Adobe should pay as much attention to these readers as they do Photoshop. And what’s to happen to all the wonderful Macromedia products now that they’ve entered the Adobe family as step-child applications? We will know shortly. Until I know I won’t give up my old copy of Dreamweaver.

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