Calm is Contagious

I decided to just post this excerpt from a conversation I’m having with friends over on Pownce.
“I’m actually more partial to Facebook and Twitter now, for a couple of reasons. Both of them support a mobile interface, and although this is really minor, I hate the fact that I cannot login via the Pownce homepage – I need to hit pownce.com/login before my username and password ever work. Annoying. Facebook’s customization is also nice too. It seems to me that most of the social networking tools are trying to either kill Facebook, or to strike the right balance between Facebook and Twitter. That’s how Pownce feels to me now, only I’m not seeing the advantage of using it over Facebook, except that it’s nice enough to include messages in my email notifications.”
Facebook has appeal to me for several reasons right now:

• I can add lots of cool apps to it
• I have more friends on Facebook than any other social network except LinkedIn, but those aren’t all “friends,” they’re “contacts.”
• Facebook has a mobile interface. Pownce doesn’t.

Those are the big ones. I guess the place where my friends are is the biggest factor. What’s the use of a social network if there’s nobody in it?

Power on the (4 year-old) PowerBook.
Insert the Debian CD.
Hold down the C key to boot from CD.
Follow standard Debian installation.
Done. Wow. After all of those howtos I was reading on installing Debian (and other distros) on a PowerMac, that was really, really simple.

You know, if you tell someone that you’ll have their issue resolved in 24-72 hours, every time they call, sooner or later, (sooner, in my case), they’ll stop believing you.
Yes, as of this morning, our Business DSL is still not working. And they tell me they’ll have it fixed within 24-72 hours. Except, that’s what they’ve been saying for the last six days.

Today, around 12PM, our DSL service went out.
After they fixed it on Friday afternoon (back to our dynamic IP account), they turned it off again today. The rep today says “I’m still showing you as having a static IP – it should have never worked with a PPPoE account). And yet, it did, all weekend.
Curiously, it’s not working with the static IP they’ve assigned either. After 30 min on the phone with them, they’re “opening a ticket.”

Remember that phone line I had Verizon install at our house earlier this week?
It’s not working. According to VZ repair, it’s “an outside problem” and they’ll have somebody take care of it by 6PM on Monday.
Can they get ANYTHING right?

So, I’ve struck a deal with the Fresh Ubuntu podcast that will essentially be carrying my (as-yet-failed-to-launch) podcast, the Man Page Minute as one of their show’s regular segments. My plan for the podcast was to cover command line basics, specifically on Linux and related platforms so that beginners could learn the power of the command line. This stemmed from a segment that we briefly did on the MacNu podcast last year, but it never really went anywhere.
Here’s a (very) brief outline of the first segment which I’ll be recording shortly, and should appear sometime in an August episode:

• Why use the command line?
• failsafe administration (X won’t load, headless system)
• faster for many tasks (deleting multiple files)
• powerful (regexps, process manipulation)
• faster for remote administration (ssh)
• How to access the shell
• Applications | Accessories | Terminal
• ssh to your machine
• Command of the week: ls
  ?????? -a, –all??? do not ignore entries starting with .? In other words, show hidden “dot files.”
  -A, –almost-all – Doesn’t show . and .. (the parent and current directories)
  -l???? use a long listing format
  -h, –human-readable
  with -l, print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
  -m???? fill width with a comma separated list of entries
  -r, –reverse
  reverse order while sorting
  -R, –recursive
  list subdirectories recursively
  -s, –size
  with -l, print size of each file, in blocks
  -S???? sort by file size
  -t???? sort by modification time
  -1???? list one file per line
  -x???? list entries by lines instead of by columns
  -X???? sort alphabetically by entry extension

I don’t even know how to respond to that. Maybe this whole DSL fiasco is their idea of keeping me “entertained.”
The rep I spoke with this morning apparently had a brain, because the first thing he did was to talk to his supervisor. He put in the request to switch us back to a dynamic IP address (hmm… wasn’t this already supposed to be in the works, you know, from the last two days’ phone calls?).
So now we’re waiting for possibly another 24 hours. Three days without phone and Internet.
Verizon, I swear to God, if I could wipe you off the face of the planet, I would. You are the worst. You’ve surpassed my hatred of Network Solutions to be the number one, most hated business entity I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with. May your stock plummet, your lines turn to dust, and every idiot that works for you suffer an eternal damnation of having to deal with utterly incompetent technical support representatives in hell.