Peter’s Soapbox

Thank you, Fairpoint (FKA Verizon)

Today, unprompted by me, a technician from Fairpoint Communications (formerly known in these parts as Verizon) showed up, saying we had a “crossed pair” on our line.

I asked him if this could have anything to do with some issues we’ve been having on our line for quite some time, including

• Incoming calls not being answered (because we never heard them ring)
• Dropped calls
• Outgoing calls hanging up after one ring
• Noise on the line
• Incoming calls not rolling over to our second line on busy/no answer

He looked, nodded sagely, and said that all of those things could be caused by the crossed pair, which did not surprise me.

I’m glad to know that this was a) not our fault, b) not a problem with my Asterisk box, and c) something that he was able to fix. As he was leaving, he commented that he hadn’t worked in Bethel in many years, and that everything is “all messed up.” Again, this did not surprise me.

Now, the only remaining question I have is what have the other parties who’ve been getting my calls been doing with them? Thank goodness it wasn’t a competitor.

So Long, Wild Blue

Several months ago, Wild Blue, my satellite Internet provider, stopped working at my house. After repeated, 1 hour or longer phone calls to technical support and customer service, it was revealed that they had the wrong credit card information on file. However, despite repeated 1 hour or longer calls to resolve this, they didn’t re-enable our account. The effect was, we were without service for approximately a month from March to April. Continue reading So Long, Wild Blue…

Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju

Actual phone conversation I just had:

MS: “Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju, may I have the first six numbers in the activation window?” Continue reading Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju…

Fake JetBlue Tickets Too

As reported this morning, apparently I wasn’t the only one who got malware delivered by a fake email from an airline.

How I Fixed Firefox 3’s Annoying Crashing Problem on Windows

It took a while, but I finally decided to read the error reports. When I did so, I found that nearly every one of Firefox’s crashes that I experienced was related to a specific extension. I dug around in the registry and the extensions folder, and found that it was none other than the Java plugin.

Living on the edge, I decided to just remove it. I uninstalled Java, then deleted references to the plugin in the registry and filesystem. Voila. Everything works and Firefox hasn’t crashed on me in over a week.