Dead Programmer's Cafe

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  • This EU would like to take a TT and DSLAM somebody

    My trials and tribulations with Speakeasy DSL reminded my of an old phone prank which goes like this:

    Part 1.

    Prankster#1: Hi, I am a phone technician, Do you have a minute to help me test your phone line?
    Victim: Ok
    Prankster#1: Fold your phone cord in half. Can you hear me?
    Victim: Yes
    Prankster#1: Fold it in half again. Can you hear me?
    Victim: Yes
    Prankster#1: Fold it in half again.
    [long pause]
    Victim: What do I do with this now?
    Prankster#1: Stick it up your ass. [hangs up laughing]

    Part 2.

    Prankster#2: Hi, I am investigating some complaints about phone pranks. Did somebody call you recently?
    Victim : Yeah, yeah. Somebody called me pretending to be a phone technician.
    Prankster#2: And what did they tell you?
    Victim : They told me to stick phone cord up my ass!
    Prankster#1: Well, now you can take it out!

    So, back to my DSL trouble. I got on the phone with a very cheerful technician who asked me to turn the DSL modem on, tested something, then asked me to turn it off and again tested something. After a few rounds of this she told me that my modem is finally busted after 3 years of service.

    She said that I have 3 options: to have a Covad tech install one for me ($$$), purchase a new one from Speakeasy ($$) or get one on eBay ($).

    I won a bid for a modem on eBay (which set me back ~40) and proceeded to take apart my own modem (to see if there is an apparent short from dirt backup). Turned out that inside it was wrapped in some sort of metallic wrapper (I guess for shielding). The circuit board said that it was made in Mexico. Interestingly it said “made” and not “hecho”. I wonder why.

    In any case, next day I tried to connect with my supposedly busted DSL modem, and surprise-surprise: it worked. I went straight to Speakeasy support center web page and it said “Waiting on covad to replace the DSLAM card. It was not responding to testing requests. I will update this in the morning” – exactly the opposite of what the cheerful tech told me.

    Well, I guess Covad’s “DSLAM” – “Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer” was causing the outage.

    I Speakeasy support again and told them that I’ve already purchased a new modem. I’ve been told to sell it back on eBay.

    While going through this shit I learned a few interesting acronyms:

    EU – End User (that’s me) and not European Union. I guess it’s pronounced “E-uuu”.
    BERT – Bit Error Rate Test, and not the evil muppet of the same name
    TT – Trouble Ticket , and not the TT (Tokarev Tula) handgun
    CPE – Customer Premise Equipment (a fancy name for a DSL modem), and not Continuing Professional Education

    Now I have a fun task of grading my tech support experience. Hmm, I think I’ll send them a link to this post. Ha.

    Oh, by the way. Speakeasy still rocks. I do like their service. I think it’s the Covad people who are at fault here. If you want to get DSL, get Speakeasy.

  • BERT is Evil

    I am still without DSL. Speakeasy level 2 tech ran something called BERT (which turened out to be Bit Error Rate Test), and need some more tests which hopefully will happen this evening.

    BERT is evil.

  • Boring Stuff

    This was a moderately crappy weekend.

    On Saturday I spent most of the day in a Russian restaurant celebrating my father-in-law’s birthday. Did I mention that I hate Russian restaurants? I have to drink at least 4-5 shots of vodka to stop feeling completely disgusted by music and decor. God, I hate those places. If I were evil overlord, I’d definitely prohibit them.

    On Sunday I spent most of the day cleaning up my crappy apartment. Oh, and trying to get DSL working again. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get something out of a level 2 support tech, because the regular drones that have to work weekends can’t help me.

    Remember I was bitching about cable outage (it took me 3 week to get it back working)? Well, it turned out that the outage was caused by the damn Cablevision techs that were installing digital cable. No matter how much I turboed, I could not weasel out of taking a day off and waiting for the damn tech to come to my apartment. I was so busy at work that I did not even call the Cablevision customer service and get them to credit my account for the outage.

    I’ve spent a few hours installing an old modem I borrowed from my dad. The damn thing wasn’t even PCI. It was ISA. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to install any modem in less than 2 hours. Have you?

    Today a fan fell off from the second processor in my home computer. Luckily it was an Intel and not an AMD chip, so it did not burn, but just shut down my computer. I hear that AMD has fixed the problem with burning chips, but still.

    I need to get new fans. Those Thermaltake orb coolers only look cool. They are noisy and don’t work very well. I think I’ll get a pair of normal Intel fans. It’s not like I am overclocking or anything, I don’t need anything fancy. Any suggestions?

    Now, that the boring part is over, here are some artsy-fartsy New York-ey pictures.




    This was a moderately crappy weekend.

    On Saturday I spent most of the day in a Russian restaurant celebrating my father-in-law’s birthday. Did I mention that I hate Russian restaurants? I have to drink at least 4-5 shots of vodka to stop feeling completely disgusted by music and decor. God, I hate those places. If I were evil overlord, I’d definitely prohibit them.

    On Sunday I spent most of the day cleaning up my crappy apartment. Oh, and trying to get DSL working again. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get something out of a level 2 support tech, because the regular drones that have to work weekends can’t help me.

    Remember I was bitching about cable outage (it took me 3 week to get it back working)? Well, it turned out that the outage was caused by the damn Cablevision techs that were installing digital cable. No matter how much I turboed, I could not weasel out of taking a day off and waiting for the damn tech to come to my apartment. I was so busy at work that I did not even call the Cablevision customer service and get them to credit my account for the outage.

    I’ve spent a few hours installing an old modem I borrowed from my dad. The damn thing wasn’t even PCI. It was ISA. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to install any modem in less than 2 hours. Have you?

    Today a fan fell off from the second processor in my home computer. Luckily it was an Intel and not an AMD chip, so it did not burn, but just shut down my computer. I hear that AMD has fixed the problem with burning chips, but still.

    I need to get new fans. Those Thermaltake orb coolers only look cool. They are noisy and don’t work very well. I think I’ll get a pair of normal Intel fans. It’s not like I am overclocking or anything, I don’t need anything fancy. Any suggestions?

    Now, that the boring part is over, here are some artsy-fartsy New York-ey pictures.




  • Dream a Little Dream of … Cthulhu?

    This morning I had a short, but unsettling dream. I was searching for the word “Cthulhu” (which I pronounce “k-TU-l-hoo”) in a folio-like dictionary. Could not find it, but found something like “To Cthulhuize”, which had something to do with creation of imaginary worlds.

    Holy crap, I hope I am not reading “Necronomicon” in my dreams…

  • Murder at the ABA or The Pod People

    There is one project that I am glad I was not on. A few people that were sitting in a octapod next to me at iXL worked on the http://www.aba.com website. It turned out to be a horrible death march. I found out about the project because one of the coders had an Asimov’s book displayed on her table (interestingly enough, I had that book in my collection).

    The book in question was “Murder at the ABA”, a detective story about a murder at the American Bookseller Association convention.

    Oh, if you are wondering what the “octapod” is. An octapod is this weird replacement of a standard cubicle. It looks somewhat like this:

    In other news: Scient that swallowed iXL has now been swallowed by sbi. So long to Scient, Viant, Sapient jokes.

  • Lunch notes

    I’ve got mail!

    Today’s arrivals: Ted Nelson’s(of Project Xanadu fame) “Literary Machines” and T. Edward Damer’s “Attacking Faulty Reasoning”.

    I wanted to get “Literary Machines” for a long time. Ironically for a book about the future of books, it’s rather rare. I paid $35, which is a pretty good deal (I snapped the book up as soon as it came up in my abebooks.com notifications). It’s the second edition though. I’ll write more about Nelson when I have the time.

    I am so happy that I can afford about 70% of all the books that I want :)

    For lunch I had some shawarma from “Bread from Beirut“, a very nice middle eastern restaurant. I wonder if it’s possible to buy one of those shawarma slabs and keep it in a fridge. Shawarma is a great low carb food.

    Lunch is over. Back to codin’.

  • Fugawi

    While researching the GPS stuff today I came across Fugawi, a company that sells GPS software. They must have had some balls to call their company that :)

    From what I understand, the name comes from an old joke about Fugawi Indians, named so because they often get lost and often say “Wherethefugawi?”. I’ve heard that on “The Sopranos”, but the joke probably goes back to WWII or even earlier.

  • Don’t Drop the Soap

    Ilya, congrats on your new job. Just don’t drop the soap :)
    The Register writes: Sodomites overrun Amazon.com
    Oh, and could you find out about OBIDOS for me?

  • I am in MLP mood today.

    For Russia’s new rich, $4,500 fake tree is Christmas must-have