Now, This Is Way Retarded

Animation cells. there are millions of them made while making cartoons. And most are amazing pieces of wall art perfect for any geek’s cubicle or bedroom wall. Fox sometimes sells Simpsons and Futurama cells as well as limited edition posters in one of the conference rooms at a discount to Newscorp employees. I’ve visited a few times, but still shelling out $150 – $200 for one seemed a little bit extravagant. I mean, for that kind of money I can get something more awesome.

Now, just this morning the best post-Soviet animation company Pilot was moving to new headquarters. What do they do with archives? They throw the entire thing into a dumpster without warning anyone. Animators and everyone else rush to grab what they can. What kind of fucking stupidity is that?


I absolutely loved early Pilot cartoons. I think I’ll check at the friendly neighborhood Russian bookstore if they have Pilot DVDs.

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.