Last night’s storm knocked the electricity out of virtually all of Sterling, except my condo complex, it seems. Unfortunately, the price I paid for this is a fried modem. It accepts the AT init strings and everything, and will carry the dialtone — I can plug a phone into the out jack and get a dialtone — but the modem itself won’t detect the tone.

Thus, I am in the market for a new modem.

From Best Buy’s website:

Easy-to-connect external modem comes with everything you need to get on the Internet. Enjoy quick connections and fast Web browsing at speeds up to 56 Kbps.

There is humour somewhere, in this statement, but it eludes me.

The necessity to buy a new dialup modem. It’s so… demeaning.

Who says that writing to the newspaper doesn’t do anything?

Read these relatively recent comments with regards to this much older story on leesburg2day. The things said totally echo what was said in my original letter to the Washington Post.

The trials will be attractive to those who are frustrated with their 512kbps connections and should make downloading bulky files like music a lot speedier.

Uh-huh. Cry me a freaking river, will ya?

27 August 2003

To whom it may concern:

I recently received a parcel from your corporation, containing
unsolicited advertising for the Best Buy electronics retailer. As this
was apparently dated material, it was sent via UPS Letter.

Due to this delivery method, I was required to sign for this package,
per UPS policy, and in doing so, I was required to miss two hours of
work, waiting for the delivery.

Please note that I have an extremely busy schedule, and this unsolicited
delivery has put a pinch on my timetable. Thus, I have attached an
invoice, billing Banta for my lost time, waiting for this parcel to
arrive.

Attachments to this letter:
* Invoice
* UPS Tracking Details (Copy)
* Best Buy Unsolicited advertisement (Copy)

Prompt payment is expected upon receipt of this notice. Please also note that the Direct Marketing Association, the Federal Trade Commission, and several local consumer groups will be receiving word about this mailing, should this situation not be resolved in a timely manner.

Thank you for your time and understanding, regarding this matter.

Sincerely,

(signed)

And if you don’t think I’m sending this to Banta DirectMarketing, certified mail, you’re way wrong. Best Buy will be receiving something similar, too.

But in the end, he insists, it won’t really matter. “If you give a woman a choice between a 2-carat stone and a 1-carat stone and everything else is the same, including the price, what’s she gonna choose?” he demands. “Does she care if it’s synthetic or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and ask, ‘Is that synthetic?’ There’s no way in hell. So I’ll bite your ass if she chooses the smaller one.”

Do I even want Adelphia, once it reaches my area “on October 1st” (ha-ha-yeahright-ha-ha)? It seems now they’re blocking pings and traceroutes.

How cool is it when one of your friends is interviewed by National Geographic regarding his experiences as a river guide on the Gauley?

Dear UPS bigwigs,

When your carriers leave a note on your door, saying they tried to deliver a package, they check one of four checkboxes, regarding when the delivery will be re-attempted. They clearly read:

Before 10:30
10:30-2:00
2:00-5:00
After 5:00

Please note that these are fairly wide ranges already, and while that can be inconvenient to the recipient, I can understand the need to cast a wide net, in this sense.

However, when the “After 5:00″ box is checked, and I get home at 4:20 to see that that the deliver guy has already been here and failed to make delivery because no one was home, it makes me want to do bad things to your domestic animals.

“What can Brown do for me?”

…You can shove it up your arses.

What, did CNNSi fire all the web designers and hire a couple of crack monkeys?

They redesign the site, and now they have stupid dropdown javascript menu boxes, the kind that are designed with bad JS, and thus dont’t work with Moz/Firebird.

THEN, when I finally get to an article, I note that they are, for some reason, using some half-assed character character coding, one of the Windows ones that ends up screwing up the apostrophes. So instead of getting “it’s” or “they’re”, I get “it[BIG ASS BOX]s” or “they[BIG ASS BOX]re”.

This, from an (AOL)TW Company. You know, those guys who own Netscape.

Not that this means anything anymore, of course…

Update: Now I’m starting to see the missing apostrophes elsewhere, too, like here on LJ. Strange. I haven’t screwed with my character codings…

Just got back a bit ago from hiking Signal Knob. If the desire to sit in my jacuzzi bath, while listening to The Velvet Underground & Nico makes me ghey, so be it. In the words of Henry Rollins, “…my body feels like Billy Idol himself”.

ok, ok people, while it’s kind of grotesquely fascinating, and perhaps a little fishy, it’s not terrorism, so we can all stop peeing our pants, mmmkay?

Here is the down and dirty regarding the WinBlast worm.

And here is the Symantec program to clean it.

And finally, here is where you get the patch… choose the appropriate OS under “Patch availability”.

Note: This affects only NT, W2K and WXP — None of the Win9x variants, including WinME, are affected.

Why people continue to stick to an OS monoculture, I don’t know.

Checking my httpd logs, I keep seeing all these records in error_log, akin to the following:

[Tue Aug 12 12:25:02 2003] [error] [client 10.2.176.61] File does not exist: /home/httpd/html/favicon.ico

Doing a little research, it has come to my attention that IE looks for a “favicon.ico” everytime it loads a site. How ridiculous. How annoying that it fills my logs with that stuff.

Leninade, da?
Mmm, spasiba, moy drook! Das vedanya!

Also cool is the fact that these guys sell the old Skeleteens sodas. Rawk!!

No Josta, however

Dear Corey,

And lest anyone ask, I didn’t query regarding payment, only photo ownership. It woulda been negligible anyway, from what I can tell, and all that’s important to me is the credentials.

We all know that weblogs are fine battlegrounds for the modern-day soap opera.

In that light, it’s even more amusing to me that squabbles equally petty exist amidst the weblog infrastructure, as well.

It’s all the same thing, the same tired war of egos, only this time its main battle lays outside the contents of a weblog itself – although I’m sure there are plenty of rude words, from both sides, in weblogs all over the place, albeit masked in a vague curtain that feigns civility.

I am beginning to think that, for me, there are only two seasons: Sundowner season and Birkenstock season.

M and I watched the 1998 movie Gia tonight. Terribly sad movie, at least that’s the way it struck me.

I met up with T this weekend. I hadn’t talked with nor seen him in about three years, and this was mostly my fault. It was good to see him. He’s the same ole T, though. Maybe a little more mellow now, but pretty much the same. It was good to catch up.

I realise I am addicted, I have an addiction to talking with Sarah. I need my fix, I am seriously jonesin’. I can’t wait until she gets back, so I can hear her voice again.

Goodnight.

Months ago:

We’re sorry
Adelphia Power Link is not available in your area.

Last week:

Adelphia Power Link may available in your area.

Today:

Congratulations!
Adelphia Power Link is available in your area.
Call now 1-888-ADEL-NET or click here to sign-up on-line:

So I called Adelphia to confirm availability. Guess what? It’s not available!