Peter’s Soapbox

Verizon: The Saga Continues

Remember that phone line I had Verizon install at our house earlier this week?

It’s not working. According to VZ repair, it’s “an outside problem” and they’ll have somebody take care of it by 6PM on Monday.

Can they get ANYTHING right?

The Man Page Minute Lives!

So, I’ve struck a deal with the Fresh Ubuntu podcast that will essentially be carrying my (as-yet-failed-to-launch) podcast, the Man Page Minute as one of their show’s regular segments. My plan for the podcast was to cover command line basics, specifically on Linux and related platforms so that beginners could learn the power of the command line. This stemmed from a segment that we briefly did on the MacNu podcast last year, but it never really went anywhere.

Here’s a (very) brief outline of the first segment which I’ll be recording shortly, and should appear sometime in an August episode:

• Why use the command line?
• failsafe administration (X won’t load, headless system)
• faster for many tasks (deleting multiple files)
• powerful (regexps, process manipulation)
• faster for remote administration (ssh)
• How to access the shell
• Applications | Accessories | Terminal
• ssh to your machine
• Command of the week: ls
         -a, –all    do not ignore entries starting with .  In other words, show hidden “dot files.”

  -A, –almost-all - Doesn’t show . and .. (the parent and current directories)

  -l     use a long listing format

  -h, –human-readable
  with -l, print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

  -m     fill width with a comma separated list of entries

  -r, –reverse
  reverse order while sorting

  -R, –recursive
  list subdirectories recursively

  -s, –size
  with -l, print size of each file, in blocks

  -S     sort by file size

  -t     sort by modification time

  -1     list one file per line

  -x     list entries by lines instead of by columns

  -X     sort alphabetically by entry extension

“Thank You For Calling Verizon, Your Broadband and Entertainment Company”

I don’t even know how to respond to that. Maybe this whole DSL fiasco is their idea of keeping me “entertained.”

The rep I spoke with this morning apparently had a brain, because the first thing he did was to talk to his supervisor. He put in the request to switch us back to a dynamic IP address (hmm… wasn’t this already supposed to be in the works, you know, from the last two days’ phone calls?).

So now we’re waiting for possibly another 24 hours. Three days without phone and Internet.

Verizon, I swear to God, if I could wipe you off the face of the planet, I would. You are the worst. You’ve surpassed my hatred of Network Solutions to be the number one, most hated business entity I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with. May your stock plummet, your lines turn to dust, and every idiot that works for you suffer an eternal damnation of having to deal with utterly incompetent technical support representatives in hell.

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…

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.