Posts Tagged ‘argh’

Gee thanks T-Mobile

Monday, November 21st, 2011

This morning, I’m trying to surf from my phone, and I get this content filtered err message saying my phone has been enabled for “Web Guard” which has determined I’m trying to go to a naughty page, which can’t be allowed.

So I call tech support. First there’s the ‘helpful’ phone system that says it understands speech and touch tones, but doesn’t understand either, and if it doesn’t like your response three times in a row, disconnects you entirely, instead of passing you on to a human. I finally figure out something it recognizes and get a human, who is full of fail on my problem, and of courses asks me to do the traditional reboot of the device. At which point my phone stops powering on correctly. It gets 75% through booting and then hangs on a blank screen.

Seriously? I call for messed up internet, and now I don’t have a working phone at all? And of course he helpfully suggests that I can buy a new phone since I’m out of warranty on this one.

Now I’m regretting not pick up one of birdie’s spare iphones.

UPDATE: I spent an hour or so seeing if there was any way to get at my storage on the phone, so I could backup anything non-cloud, but no joy. After doing a factory reset, the phone seems to be working again. At least with Android I’m not missing any contacts, just all the text messages since the last time my G1 died.

UPDATE2: It looks like this new life might be temporary. The phone is running hot and crashed once so far, while trying to re-download all my basic apps. And I notice it’s stuck in edge mode instead of 3G. Hrm.

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Cat Frak

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

Like a car that’s just clocked the first mile beyond warranty coverage, my cat seems to be finally showing the signs of age. Vet called today to give me results for the follow up blood testing for his radiation treatment, and while it looks like the hyperthyroidism is under control now, this time his urine has gone from too dilute to too strong AND shows signs of white blood cells. ‘Hopefully’ it is just a minor UTI. I’m not looking forward to giving him the meds, or rather my fingers aren’t looking forward to the inevitable biting.

The vet’s office just called a second time to tell me the exact same thing, but this time also make an appointment for the follow visit for after the antibiotics. oy vey.

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At Least Tell Me…

Friday, February 4th, 2011

I get that in the midst of a cooling failure, you’ve got to shut some machines down in the lab. What I don’t get is why you went through unplugging some machines at random, while leaving others still running, but in basically-dead-state so that they were still generating heat, but weren’t usable to anyone. And didn’t tell anyone.

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CIFS over SMBFS

Monday, January 31st, 2011

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I found a suggestion that solved all my Samba vs UTF-8 issues.

It seems that the solution is to just give over and use CIFS instead of SMBFS.

mount -t cifs //server/path /mount/path -odom=DOMAIN,user=USER[,password=PASSWORD]
#I’m optionalizing the password option for safe ps’ing.

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Posted in oh-well, tech stuff, unix | Comments Off

Housing GRAR

Monday, August 16th, 2010

I get home today to find a 10-day quit-or-comply notice on my door.

WTF?

It turns out they somehow ‘forgot’ my cat deposit/etc, and now want another pet deposit, plus they want to start charging $10/month for pet-rent.  I went down, and the lady flips through the paperwork several times, before she finally finds a deposit in my name that says “$400 total, $200S, $200P”.  I also point out that my lease is not up for renewal, so they can’t start charging extra until it is.  While I’m waiting for her to look up these basic facts, another 2 tenants in the same position of having paid their deposits years ago, and now getting nastygrams, show up to complain as well.

Without something in writing from these people appologizing for their terrible record keeping, I’m not inclined to trust that they won’t still be trying to evict me in 10 days.  Time to call the Tenants Union of Washington State, I think.

And starting the painful process of sorting through 4 years of piled up “too important to throw away” papers that I didn’t get sorted properly when they first came in.  D’oh.  If lawyers end up involved, they’ll want those papers, I’m sure.

UPDATE:  Found the original lease, which indeed has the check box marked for pet deposit paid.  When I go down to show her where to look on her copy, there are 2 other people waiting to do the same basic thing, and a 4th shows up before she gets back.  She accepts are proof with good grace and tries to explain that the corporate office is in texas, and is unresponsive, and that we should expect things to get worse, and to have lots of empty apartments in the near future.  oh joy.

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Kindle DX, now with pre-dead battery

Friday, November 20th, 2009

So, I’m guessing that perhaps the Kindle DX isn’t selling as quickly as the regular kindle.

I guess this because the one my mom just bought me, happy birthday to me oi oi oi, won’t charge it’s battery.  It’s acting like it sat in a warehouse with a partial charge so long, the battery has a memory.  Or mabye I was just lucky enough to get a defective unit.  I’m following the instructions from the first line of support.  We shall see.

It is friggin huge, compared to the original.  Haven’t yet tried a PDF on it.  Have to find one that isn’t just pictures….then again, it’d be nice if the MAD magazine Official PDFs worked with it.

UPDATE: Oh the life of a tech support drone, having to follow a script, even when it’s obvious the device has a hardware fault.  So, in addition to having to redownload my books, and reconvert the personal documents–not paying to resend them again, we’ll see about getting a credit for that bit when we proved the battery is pre-toasted–I have to wait Another 3 hours to prove to them it still doesn’t charge.

UPDATE2:  Well, another charge cycle attempt ends in failure, but at least the new kindle is one the way, and ranting politely got me a $20 credit for future purchases.  shrug.  I’d rather have the working kindle now, but Monday is better than nothing.

UPDATE3:  Oh come on!  I thought everything was golden yesterday, well as golden as it can be with a lost weekend of reading.  Then I get an email from amazon, “congratulations, we have shipped your order.  for a kindle dx COVER.”   It’s like they are trying to make this the worst kindle shopping experience ever.  If we believe the latest support droid, the replacement kindle will still be here on monday.  I’m not holding my breath.

UPDATE4:  The nightmare continues.  Turns out this droid shipped the kindle alright, to my mother’s house in vegas, where no one will be for weeks, AND they won’t take it on faith to ship the kindle to the correct address, but instead are making me wait the full 2 weeks it’ll take for Fedex to give up and return it to them, before they’ll start the re-re-return process.  But I still have less than 5 days to ship them the broken DX.

UPDATE5:  All’s well that ends well, so sayeth the bard, and I’ll defer to him this time.  My mother got someone at Amazon to do the return-to-sender on their end for the kindle they sent to the wrong place, and got them to fedex one out to the right address in time for the T-day trip.  I’m still not used to the extra size of it all.

Kindle 2 vs DX

The PDF support is … interesting.  With a mostly text pdf, it’s a little small, but readable.  You can’t highlight or look up words though, or even write notes attached to the file in general, which is most annoying, since there isn’t a generic note taking app built in, so there’s no workaround solution.   With a DX conversion address, they won’t even attempt to convert a text pdf to an azw, they just send you back the pdf.   I tried one of the MAD magazine pdf’s.  The lack of zoom made it unusable, but it did work.

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