The Adventures of Recalcitrant Toy

Hiya folks. We've made it ok through the storm. Power out, but if you sneeze too hard our power goes out. The generator is working pretty well. FIOS is up. Cox Cable is not. 4G LTE is up. Given the hell along the coast, and NYC...we're considering ourselves very lucky. Raw sewage is pouring into the Pautuxent River. I'm still able to work, as work from home is a fabulous benefit. Very sorry for the folks who are flooded.

We haven't seen the feral black kitty for a bit. She demanded to go out. I thought she was going to go out and come right back in, but she disappeared. Hopefully she's fine. Recalcitrant Child couldn't get home last night as Georgetown Pike was closed with down trees, so her father put her up in a hotel for the night. She is emergency personnel for private ambulance dispatch, and they are a backup for 911 so she's doing work for the greater good. Go RC. The dogs are fine. The parrots are fine. The fish are fine. We don't know if we can get out yet, but there's no need at the moment. We have ample food, water, generator power for part of the house, trees down but luckily not hitting the house as yet. VERY pleased that we have redundant Internet access today. The cable went down at the same time the power did. We're hearing reports of lines down at Old Dominion and Georgetown Pike so that could have taken the cable. Thank goodness for FIOS and generator backup.

The only real mess I'm going to have (so far) is that the power went out in the middle of a wash cycle on a front load washer. When I can finally get that door open, it's going to be...uh....rather disgusting likely. But it's just pillow and I can trash them and get new ones.

Today will be check in to make sure everyone else is ok. A small amount of work (not much coming in right now), and maybe some more cleaning and organizing.

Hope everyone else is also ok.

Spent the day fighting with technology and being beaten noncon by it.  So, who would have possibly thought that the Google+ API would be read only?!?  I can't auto post from my blog on http://www.barrylawfirmpc.com/blog to Google+.  Really?  It can only be done from Google+ back to the blog.  Can't even do it by using Google Reader because Google Reader only lets you share the posts to your personal stream, and NOT to your business page.  

*sigh*  People have been asking for this for months from Google and stupid me thought it might be available by now.  But NOOOO.

Wes says that my playing with this caused the GMail outage today.  heh.

I've had Cox business Internet service for years now, and when I was working and not using it 24/7 (since I never sleep), the intermittent drastic drops in throughput weren't a terrible problem.  But now that I'm home, connecting to bunches of servers to fill out job applications and the like, not to mention web hosting and the other things I do with Internet service, it's really getting to be a pain. Some users have complained about speed issues, I've been disconnected from servers because the speed was too slow for them to handle, etc. etc.  And so I tried to deal with Cox Tech Support.  Except that navigating to the business site gives you a link to support that goes to RESIDENTIAL support, which I didn't know when I started up a chat session.  After being told that the residential people can't possibly help me since they don't have access to business accounts, I actually had to ask for a supervisor to finally get an email address for tech support.  "You have to CALL them."  No amount of "I do not use the telephone" stopped them from telling me I had to CALL them.  Or, they offered, fill out the web form.  Well, I had filled out the web form at least 20 times over the years and had never, EVER received a response.  I may have found out why...but that will come later.  I persisted in asking for an email address where perhaps a person would be able to answer, and asked whether they could possibly see the irony of not being able to use the INTERNET to deal with INTERNET service for business, when if I called it a home account, I could use the very chat feature I was on.  

After a very, very long time on chat, the supervisor gave me two email addresses, one for a supposed tech support person, and one for my account manager.  I wrote to both.  I provided speedtest.net graphs over time, an infospeed.verizon.net breakdown of all of the little bits involved showing nothing was wrong on my end yet throughput still sucked, and asking them to get hold of me ASAP.  The account manager (whose name was the same as mine without an "a" and lastname,firstname...found that amusing)  wrote back to say he sent it to tech support.  So I got an email from Brandon giving me PHONE NUMBERS again.  I wrote back that I don't use the telephone, I wanted to do this online. A bit later on, I got a PHONE CALL from Brandon, on my cell where he insisted that we do this by telephone.  At the time, I could hardly croak and was having trouble being on the phone, yet Brandon persisted.  I told him once again I do not use the phone, pony express, telegraph, or fax machines.  It's 2012 and I buy Internet service from Cox, so why can't I use it to contact Cox.  

Later that afternoon, I was at a job interview when the phone rang AGAIN.  Yep, it was Cox.  The voicemail that was left included "I understand you don't want to be contacted by phone."  GAK!  I mean total GAK!  This was Craig, not Brandon, who also again gave me a phone number to call, but also said that now that they had my email they would use that.  Uh, really?  But wait, there's more.  Craig told me that business support has no web portal where anyone could send information, so he was confused by my statement that I had sent at least 20 messages through there that had been ignored.  And where could I possibly be seeing this?  

It's right HERE:  https://ww2.cox.com/business/northernvirginia/lead-generation-form.cox

So WTF.  Tech support doesn't know about its own web portal?  Craig said that he hadn't found any messages from me.  Wonder where that portal goes to then.  It's got a nifty little "support" button on top but apparently goes to /dev/null or something.  They are "investigating."  I, on the other hand, am checking out FiOS.  

Scheduled for next week instead.  RATS!  The show is SO much fun, I was really looking forward to doing it again tonight. 

http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/11/gay-rights-victory-to-vanish/

So very not good.

This is pretty cool actually. Supposedly this app will post the same thing to several different places. So, I'm testing things out now to see if this actually works the way I hope it works. Wheee.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The tornado watches and warnings aren't a joke. Please don't take stupid chances....like the guys insisting on working on our pool today. ARGH!

It would be great if you could go and support Team SNVC

Interesting. On the quest to simulcast certain blog posts that might be important to someone, like let's say the dogs. Being dogs, you can't expect them to run all over the net looking for my words of wisdom, so instead now with just a few clicks, I can blather my stuff all over the net. Oh the wonders of technology.

I wanted flash support. I also wanted 4G capability. The dual cameras were no big deal. The form factor..well, I'd rather have had iPad form factor since I have accessories for it. However, the Xoom called to me and I had to check it out.

The Xoom is not ready for the market. It's sad because the machine has so much potential. Its specs are respectable, price point is not insane, data plan isn't so bad, but Android 3.0 is pretty much a fail at this point. And Motorola tech support is a joke reminding me of "Peggy" from the Capital One commercial. I expected someone to say "Happy Time" and ring a tin gong for the amount of help I got from them.

Major Failure Issues:

1) No root certificate import capability without rooting the machine. This means I can't get email at my house using the built in email program. So I downloaded K-9 which I used on my droid. On that I can get my home email but not my work. "Accept all certificates" does not. iPad on the other hand "just works."

2) Google writes Android. You'd expect Google's highly touted "Google Body" that says optimized for 3.0 Honeycomb would actually work. No. It crashes 100% of the time.

3) Logistics. When I bought the pad, I also bought a "portfolio case" for it also from Verizon, where I got the tablet. In order to use the portfolio case, you click it into the plastic portion, and the fold over portion doubles as a stand. That's great, but you can't plug it IN while it's acting as a stand. And taking it out is cumbersome and wears out the attachment points on the case.

4) Charging. Some total nitwit put the charge point on the bottom of the tablet, and then provided a charger that consists of a very thin pin attached to a 3/4 inch long plastic piece, attached to a wire. Guess what winds up pressing the plastic piece against the wire when you put the machine in a stand of any kind?

5) Charging 2. The same nitwit decided that attaching the tablet to your computer with the handy USB to mini USB cable would NOT also charge your tablet. No, you MUST use the flimsy thin pin approach.

6) Apps Market. A huge number of Android 2.x apps just plain do not work with Honeycomb. The Apps Market doesn't have them separated out as "optimized for 3.0" or anything like that. If you're lucky they may mention it somewhere in the description.

7) Quitting apps. Not so easy. You almost have to go to the task manager to quit the process to get the app to quit unless you reboot the tablet. Of course, the task manager is not optimized for 3.0 so you get a teeny tiny window.

*sigh* and I so wanted to like the Xoom...