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Verizon: "You Want Serivce? Hahahaha! We're a Monopoly!"

So I called Verizon back today to inquire about the status of our Business DSL account. Here are the noteworthy excerpts:

  • They could not pull up our order status because “their system froze”
  • The showed no record of our (2+ hours long) phone calls yesterday

The customer service rep I had was quite eager to help. (They always are.) She insisted that my account was switched over to a static IP.
So I asked her, “could you give me the static IP address then?” Within a couple of minutes, I had it.
So I asked her, “if my account was active with a static, why did nobody volunteer this information to me yesterday so I could have gotten back online and maybe avoided 1-3 days of downtime?” Of course, she had no good answer to that.
UPDATE: Not surprisingly, the static IP they assigned isn’t working either. I guess the standard practice at VZ is to just drop all services when someone makes a change. It’s much simpler that way…

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Baby Skunks Are Really Cute

I returned home today to find that our humane pest removers had indeed shown up last night and removed the skunk that we caught. And we have another one today. So the count is at four (out of seven).
Prior to finding out that they had collected one lasts night, therefore thinking that the poor thing was in the trap for 36 hours, I went out and shoved a couple of veggie-kabobs into his trap. One of the cutest things I’ve ever seen was the skunk chowing down on a piece of zucchini. Adorable. Of course, the wife and kid had to one up me by bringing him a leftover bowl of soup and feeding that to him, and apparently him lapping up the soup is cuter than the kabob action.

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Why Do People Have Trouble With Attachments?

People have trouble with email attachments. I’m not talking about opening them, I mean just sending them. And I’m not talking about technical limitations, virus scanners, or file size limits. I mean just attaching a file to an email.
How many times has this happened to you: You compose an email, and you ask the recipient to “please see the attached file.” Only there’s no attachment.
Because you forgot to attach it. I’ve been on the sending and receiving end of this one. Has it happened to you? Do humans just get so obsessed with the composition of their email that they forget to attach the file and can’t wait to hit the SEND button? I don’t know, but I know it’s not just me.

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Verizon, You Suck

Verizon, you suck. You cannot suck enough. I am so looking forward to Fairpoint Communications taking over your business here in New England because I am not convinced that, no matter how bad they are, you are worse.
Thank you, Verizon, for making me take yesterday afternoon off, to wait for your technician, between the hours of 1pm and 5pm, to come and install my new telephone line. Except, you never showed up. Instead, you called me at 5:15pm to say “due to unforeseen circumstances, we were unable to keep our appointment.” (No $#!+.) “We will be sending someone to your location tomorrow between the hours of 8AM and 5PM. You do not need to be there at this time.”
What?! Then why the ^&*@ did I need to be there all afternoon?!
That was yesterday. Then, this morning, I came in to work to find our business DSL was down. Here’s the backstory. A couple of weeks ago, I ordered an upgrade to our account. Basically, it doubles the cost of our DSL so we have a static IP address. I wanted to do this because I wanted to run our Outlook Web Access (Exchange) server on a public IP. Since they block inbound port 80 connections, I wanted the static IP because they allow you to run a web server with that package. Then I realized that they do not block inbound port 443 connections with a dynamic IP address. So I installed a self-signed SSL certificate on my Exchange server, and presto! I can access OWA via my DynDNS-assigned IP address.
So I had my assistant call and cancel the order. Somehow, I knew when it took her almost an hour to do this, that things were not going to turn out right. My suspicions, although put far on the back burner, were confirmed this morning, as our Internet connection was down. After a half an hour on the phone with these jokers, my assistant got

  • confirmation that they had switched us over to a static IP, despite our order to cancel, and
  • disconnected.

I called back, more than a little irate at this point. The charming lady on the other end of the line stated that “I’m not showing you as having a static IP address on your account.” Of course, that doesn’t help, as we still have no Internet connectivity at all right now… So I told her this, insisted that we were offline, and she was nice enough to reconfigure our account so that we could get online again. Total time wasted, 7 employee-hours.
As I was finishing the call, the customer service rep said “Usually when people order the static IP and decide to cancel the order, we tell them to wait until it goes through, and then cancel it, so they don’t have to go through this long down time.” First off, no one told us that. Second, wow. You guys really DO suck. Your internal processes are so messed up that you cannot cancel an order even if the cancellation notice is given over a week in advance.
So, they expect to have things repaired within 3 days. Until then, we wait…

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No Sugar Added

Today I’ve decided I’m going on an official diet. My first step will be to not add sugar to anything I eat. This will be interesting. My first cup of coffee today is bitter, and I’m so tempted to put some sugar or maple syrup into it.
/sigh

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Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You (With Good Reason!)

Last week I read an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You. It’s a really good article.
My first reaction to hearing this was “the writer and editor who approved it should be fired.” There are reasons we don’t want people to know this stuff! So here’s one of the most respected news publications in the country is telling people how to circumvent corporate content filters, access their company files on their home PCs, and how to install applications on their work PC that aren’t allowed. Brilliant, WSJ. Way to turn a bunch of ordinarily (mostly) harmless users into serious threats to network integrity and security. Not to mention how many kids you just informed of ways to circumvent content filters so they can surf porn while at school. Oh yeah, brilliant move.
Yes, like the Anarchist’s Cookbook, if someone really wants to learn how to do any of these things, there are plenty of other places they can go to find them. And now, thanks to the WSJ, a lot more people know this.
However, after further consideration, I asked myself “is just another form of full disclosure?” After all, all the WSJ has done is pointed out that these techniques and tools are out there, which is really no different from what security analysts and hackers do on a daily basis when they find flaws in applications and systems across the Internet. Okay, so now everyone knows about file-sharing sites for sending large files. So we need to YouSendIt.com on our content filter along with Playboy.com. Now they know you can use Google as a proxy. Similarly to how we block Gmail, Google Talk and Google Image Search without blocking the rest of Google itself.
I’m curious to do some further reading on what the rest of the sysadmin/security community has to say about this.

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More Skunks

Just a few hours after re-baiting the trap, we have another skunk in it. This time the poor little thing is out in the rain, but at least there’s a heavy wool blanket (and now, a piece of cardboard) on top of the trap to keep it dry. If I had my own truck, I’d let the thing go somewhere else, but I’m not about to transport it in my Subaru.
Okay, pest removal experts, you can call us back now…

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Baby Skunks Are Cute

Today I got my second look at the skunk who has been inhabiting the space below our house since last year. It turns out that “Murray,” as we’ve named him, is actually “Marie,” and she has at least six little babies keeping her company.
We saw six baby skunks today, after we managed to capture one in a trap. After repeated failed attempts by a professional pest control service to capture the skunk, I took a friend’s advice and baited the trap with a leftover zucchini and orange, instead of the cat food the pest controllers had recommended (and used to successfully catch our neighbor’s cat – twice).
This morning, my wife looked out the window and saw that we had indeed caught a skunk. I observed that it looked rather small. Later, she saw that it was small because it’s just a baby, and that two of its siblings had come to attempt to rescue it. This was the cutest thing I’ve seen in a long time, as all three worked together to try to find a weakness in the trap.
They were soon joined by momma Skunk (“Marie”), who worked furiously to get her baby out of the trap. Her efforts were hampered by her babies, who crowded around her, and whom she would drag, one at a time, back under the house by their necks.
I went out when the mother was gone and stuck a piece of cardboard over the trap so the baby wouldn’t bake in direct sunlight, and we called the pest controllers.
We went shopping, and returned a few hours later to find the mother still there, working furiously to free her baby. She’d dug holes around the trap, trying to get underneath, and as of a few minutes ago, managed to flip the trap on its side. Of course, since it’s latched shut, she’d not going to get it out, so my wife is convinced me, against my better judgement, to assist her in setting the baby free.
So if you don’t see any new posts in the near future, you’ll know it’s because I am busy bathing myself in baking soda and vinegar. Wish me luck.
As luck would have it, my wife’s ex just showed up to drop her son off. She asked if he knew anything about skunks and, ‘lo and behold, he does! He walked right up to the trap, grabbed it, put it in the back of his pickup, and the skunk sprayed! Luckily it was under a blanket that we don’t care about. Awesome skunk removal timing on his part! I guess I need to buy him a beer or two now.
Update: We gave him four.

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The Joys of Rural Internet Access

Since moving back into a rural area, I’ve had to give up my precious high-speed Internet options and settle for what’s left. Downtown, I can choose between Comcast cable (boasting up to 6Mb downloads), Verizon DSL (3Mb downloads), Sovernet SDSL (1.5Mb), or a T1 line in my office building.
Out in the sticks, however, the options are fewer. I am restricted to the wonders of satellite, cellular, and dialup.
We’ve had Wildblue for satellite Internet for the last year, and it’s been pretty terrible. I decided to go with Wildblue after a client of mine had it installed, and it worked extremely well. There was very little latency, and I could run a VPN connection over it. Unfortunately, my experience with the service was not nearly as good, and it turned out to be very slow, and drops several times a day, requiring me to power cycle the modem, and often just going without service for a long time.
I tried using an EVDO card from Verizon Wireless, and also using my Nokia e61 as a cellular modem from my current provider, Unicel. Unfortunately, despite my installing a cellular repeater in my house, the signal is not strong enough to sustain a reliable Internet connection.
So, I’m biting the bullet, and ordering another telephone line. In the year 2007, the best Internet access option I have at my house is dialup. 26.4kbps.
Pathetic.