mcgrew's Journal: Hardware

"High speed internet, $15 per month! No home phone required!"

I'd been getting this AT&T snail spam for quite a while, and since my netbook was stolen I no longer had intenet access, since there was always an open hotspot around. The new computer I'd built from junk and used parts sat there next to the 42 inch TV pretty uselessly. So I finally called AT&T.

I'd been hesitant - very hesitant, since my incredibly bad experience back when they bought out Cingular and my bills started going through the roof. AT&T isn't as bad as Sony, but then nobody but the Koch brothers are as evil as Sony. This is a very unChristian thing to say, but I hope Sony's HQ was right at the epicenter of that earthquake; at least then there would have been some good coming out of that horrible catastrophe. I found out the other day that it had impacted my extended family -- my dad called me and said that my cousin's daughter lived in Japan, 150 miles from the epicenter. "They're ok," he said, "except they were out of power for two days."

I had a lot of questions for the AT&T phone monkey. Questions like "what does it REALLY cost after fees and taxes and fees and fees and fees?" It turned out that the fifteen dollar offer was for landline users only, the lying rat bastard assholes. Wikipedia says that wanton lying is one of the symptoms of sociopathy. If you have three or more of the symptoms you're a sociopath, and most corporations have at least half the symptoms. This tells me that the heads of these companies are probably sociopathic as well.

Without an AT&T landline it was twenty bucks for 3 MBPS. The phone monkey said another five bucks and you got six MBPS, so I went with it. The hardware was a hundred bucks that he have me a twenty five dollar discount on and showed up on my doorstep a couple of days later. I hooked up the modem, didn't bother with the Cisco router since I no longer had the netbook and waited for the connection date.

The connection date came, and at the prescribed 8:00 PM I turned on the modem. The card said it would take twenty minutes and the modem would boot twice. Two hours later the DSL light was still blinking red. I went to bed.

The next morning as I was drinking my coffee I noticed the light flashed green a few times, then back to red. It did this randomly. I called their tech support when I got home from work that evening. Theyd send a technician out Saturday, they said, and it was going to cost another fifty bucks. "He'll be there between twelve and four. He'll call you about fifteen minutes before he shows up. Is the phone number on your account a good one to reach you?"

"No, that's my work phone."

"Is there another number?" they asked. If I'd been thinking straight I'd have given them the number for Felbers and waited at the bar, but I wasn't thinking straight and gave them my cell number. "PLEASE don't send any phone spam to that number!" I pleaded. "Don't worry," he replied, "we won't."

Saturday morning I got up, drank coffee, ate breakfast, read a little, and walked up to Felber's around eleven to retrieve may car. I drank a beer and went home about twenty 'til. No sooner had I walked in the door and a young thin black man knocked on it. "AT&T", he said. I explained what it was doing and what it wasn't. "I should have probably saved fifty bucks and sprayed all the connections with switch oil" I said. He unscrewed the phone outlet, and I mentally kicked myself for not doing that when I first tried to get it working -- the problem was obvious. The wiring was older than I was. The tech said if he rewired it it was going to cost another fifty bucks. Somehow I thought that if I said "no" and rewired it myself it would "mysteriously" not work after I rewired it and cost me even more, I didn't have any phone wire, and it would be a hassle in any case. "Go for it" I said.

I moved the bag of empty smashed beer cans I save to recycle for more beer money from in front of the basement door; even though I earn more than the median income for Illinois, after booze, money, and tech I'm often broke. He proceeded to try to drill a hole in the floor, but something was in his way. "Probably a floor joist" I said, and walked downstairs with him. The poor fellow was having a hell of a time with it, unable to snake the new wire up the hole. I pulled the big forty two inch, 215 pound TV away from the wall, and a few neurons actually fired. "Hey," I said, "I see light through the hole the cable goes through. You could run it through there."

"Wow, thanks!" He got it wired and gave me an address to type into the browser. I fired up the computer, pulled up Konqueror, and typed in the address. No good -- it could reach the AT&T server, but AT&T obviously hates Linux and wouldn't let me in. He plugged the network cable into his laptop to set up the account there. "User name?"

"Um, mcgrew." He tried it. "That one's taken" he said.

"stevemcgrew".

"Nope."

"pattymcgrew."

"Nope."

"leilamcgrew."

"How do you spell that?"

"L-E-I-L-A."

"L-I-E-L-A?"

No, L-E-I-L-A".

"It took that one", he said. He unplugged the cable after a few more questions and I stuck it back into the HP. Google came up - it worked. "Thanks", I said as he left.

He was back five minutes later. "Um, er, is there any way I can get a jump from you?"

"Sure, where are you parked?"

"In the alley." I drove around the block and got his AT&T started.

"Thanks!" he said. "I'm not going to charge for the installation, it'll only be fifty instead of a hundred.

"Hey, thanks!"

I went back home and fired up slashdot.

"You have fifteen moderator points. Use 'em or lose 'em!"

I scrolled down to see the headline -- "AT&T to impose data caps on DSL users."

Figures.

Karma

[E IS mC(Square)]

>> "You have fifteen moderator points. Use 'em or lose 'em!"
>>
>> I scrolled down to see the headline -- "AT&T to impose data caps on DSL users."

Well, Karma is a bitch, isn't it?

If it has to be in Japan...

[GameboyRMH]

This is a very unChristian thing to say, but I hope Sony's HQ was right at the epicenter of that earthquake

Hey if the epicenter has to be somewhere in Japan, might as well be Sony HQ right? :D

Also it could be useful to set up a cracked Windows install in a VM just in case of such odd occasions if you don't have any Windows PCs in the house. One time my telco wanted push an upgrade to everyone's routers and they did it with a Windows executable |:-( I could have run it in WINE, but I wasn't risking that, even on the off chance that it worked.

All it needed to do was telnet to the router, identify the model and exe

Also, tips for living with bandwidth caps

[GameboyRMH]

Oh I wish I remembered this in my last post, but here are some useful tips for living with bandwidth caps :P

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-secretly-horrifying-implications-atts-bandwidth-caps/ [cracked.com]

Firefox/Iceweasel?

[sjaskow]

If you have FireFox or Iceweasel installed, this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/ [mozilla.org] seems to do a pretty good job of faking user-agents. Hell, it makes a SAP website work with Namoroka on Ubuntu 8.0.4 when the site says "Internet Explorer Only". :)

Re:

[mcgrew]

Well, there's an old Windows partition with data I need to get off, an old Mandriva partition with more data. I need to move all those files to a DVD and reformat the hard drive, so I don't want to install any software unless absolutely necessary since I'll be installing it again anyway. But I'm having a hard time with the DVD burner. If I put a South Park factory-pressed DVD in the player, Dolphin (kubuntu's default file manager) sees the files, but with a burned Avatar movie it doesn't. Nor does it see a