riari

Getting access to high speed internet is becoming a thing of frustration. Well not actually. It's the 26.4kb/s dial-up I'm currently on that is the thing of frustration. But the sheer lack of options is annoying.

Cable? DSL? Wired internet? Unavailable. And the area I live in may be huge and rural but the street I live on has quite a few people on it. It has a large neighborhood towards the back of the road.

Satellite? I'm sorry to say other than for TV, I have not heard anything good about it. Other than one defender of which after reading he got about 780kb/s down per day, yeah that's appealing. Better than dial-up in speeds but not great latency, service that is at least two times the expense. Sorry, I'm not interested. This would fall under absolute last resort. And even then? The price would make me hesitate.

Wireless ISPs are what I'm looking at the moment. I have a choice or two. Use a celluar wireless card, probably well known as an air card, or find a LoS WISP. I tried one before and the trees and lack of towers meant that they couldn't find a reliable signal.

Today I asked the same provider to come back out, as they've added more towers and equipment has probably gotten better. He did try to find a signal but the pole was kinda flexible and yet again trees were blocking the way. And the wind probably didn't help.

Great. Nature is defeating me.

But they're going to try another site survey again soon with a non-flexible pole. The guy was a recent hire and he didn't have all the equipment to try a higher attempt on him. But I'm hoping they could at least get me at a signal strength that is 1MB/s down or higher.

And I'm thinking a trip to Home Depot might be in the future. Need to get an extension ladder and a chainsaw. There's some tree branches over the house that needs to come down. (We haven't cleaned up the tree damage from Ike yet. Yeah, kinda slow here on that.)

Though I hope they go with what the guy was saying and put a tower up closer to here. Especially since he mentioned that there was no plans for the next ten years to develop the lines on my street. I bet that will change...but it could not. Cause I've been on dial-up for ten years.

But once again I got to surprise someone with the speed I have. And by surprise I mean make them grimace. >_< Yeah nice that people think dial-up in this area is 54kb/s. When it's not. At all.

Oh goody.

Okay, sinuses, whatever spicy food I ate last night is not a go ahead signal to bring back my annoying cough. Seriously. I'm back using cough medicine again. Oh yay. Trying to control this before it redevelops my cold again. Then again, the sinuses draining really didn't ever stop. It just lessened enough so my cough went mostly away. *sigh*

And a new development in my computer equipment. My Palm won't charge. Before you laugh, a Palm is a computer so there. :P And one I use often. I plug the cord in and no charging is happening. It's been finicky on particular cord angles needed to charge ever since it fell with the cord plugged in, but if I can't charge it, I have to get it fixed. The battery only lasts so long. And it's half down already. I wonder if I can pop it open somewhere and take a look.

The Zire 72s I believe are still around and maybe cheaper than when I bought mine. I bought this particular one when the model was just introduced. But I really do not want to buy a new Palm. I rather get this one fixed. ETA: Hehe, well, yeah once again I'm behind technology. Zire now only has the Zire 22 model. Looks like the Zire 72 model has been phased out. Oh goody. Though I did see some at Frys last year. So that's pretty recent I think.

Add that to the computer freezes I'm getting randomly, with the power supply fans being louder than they should be sometimes and who knows if any of the other fans are trying to die... Yeah, the computer gods really do not like me much.

ETA2: Bingo! It's the charger. Which can be replaced easily. Thank goodness. I forgot that my mom got a Zire 72 after I did, but she's not using it. So if mine ever died I can probably get hers. :> But I tested the charger on it, and it didn't charge at first. But twisting the plug around a bit got it to charge again. And it works like that on my Palm. So, yeah, the charger.

ARRRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!

I know I have two costume catalogs hiding somewhere in this damn room. But for some reason I can't find the damn things. They're probably stashed in with other things I thought relevant at the time. Or where ever I had room. Erg. I could have sworn that I've seen them recently too. Probably when I was doing the big room moving around with the bookcases.

Also, I need to find a place/LJ community/auction place that I can sell my Japanese manga at for at least a pittance. Half-Price will either give me 1)nothing and take them anyway, or if I'm really lucky 2) a tiny amount for a stack of manga. Too many books are piling up around here and I have lots of Japanese manga I was interested in at the time but no longer are. (Especially the ones that got picked up for release in the US and are not from CLAMP or a few other select authors.) I don't want to recycle them like I have the anime magazines.

I'm sure y'all all remember my post about the annoying immortal behemoth overlord called the Envoy of Shadows. So, I leveled my character those last two bubbles and then took the Envoy of Shadows again. Which I defeated him rather easily. Since he was conning yellow as an Elite Boss.[/cityofherospeak]

So the arc continues, I do another mission to find the Envoy's true name and finish that up. And then my contact lets me know, "Well now that we have its true name, we have him trapped with some Circle of Thorns in a forcefield. Go and defeat the Envoy again."

*headdesk*

I have to defeat the Envoy a third time? Aw fuck. I hope he cons yellow again, or its going to be a rather frustrating next few days.

*off to try to defeat the Envoy a third time*

ETA Midnight: Was the Envoy conning yellow? Of course not. It was that orange-ish red color. I have found out that you can die so many times that you no longer get debt for it. At level 37, that's 115,000 debt, which for 105,000 debt took me two days or so to wipe out so that's not bad. But somehow, someway, I managed to defeat the Envoy. Luck I guess. But damn am I glad that arc is finished. My contact was all, "and you didn't dispair in such great odds." Dispair...? Maybe. Frustrated and stubborn about defeating it? Oh yeah.

Well, today's quick trip to the dentist ended up costing me $215. I now dislike my beef jerky, even though I'm sure I'll be eating it again on Friday. Turns out it was a filling done back in 1998 that had chipped. I'm still not sure how it even happened. Now it is filled in, even the tooth was covered a bit more by the resin to help the decalcification (which I have on several teeth thanks to back when I had braces).

Ugh. I should have known when the cleaning done last week wasn't going to be the end of it, especially since they didn't need me back to fill in anything. Which is a rarity nowadays with me, which was why I was so pleased to only have spent $130 for the cleaning. *sigh* This October is like last year's October with roughly $400 being spent on the dentist. Meh.

And also, still very tired. Hopefully tomorrow I will be a bit more awake. Or hitting the staff lounge for the free coffee.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what we do not do as a company employee. The first commentor? Is an official LiveJournal/SixApart representative.

There's the words epic fail in there somewhere. (And possibly schadenfraude in the future.)

People get fired for less. When you are hired on a representative of the company and you use your journal making announcements on official communities, you represent the company. Using said official journal to make comments indicating, possibly in jest, that half or more of your users are pedophiles? Not on.

What do I mean by people getting fired for less? I've heard so many stories in my classes about people working for one beer company, going to the bar in their uniform, and drinking another company's beer. When you wear the uniform, you represent the company. LiveJournal is a bit different since it's an online community. But burr86 is an official representative, and should not be making such posts, even in jest. Basically this is fanning the flames.

(There are so many responses to him that I can't even get LJ to show the entire thread for the first comment.)

Thanks to copperbadge for pointing this post out.

ETA: The mod at efw deleted the post. For those curious what he said, click here.

ETA the 2nd (August 6): And there' are two online articles about this now:
LiveJournal arouses the ire of its users…again.
Livejournal Employee Publicly Mocks Fandom I didn't know that Firefox had a news thingy?

Sorry if anybody is sick of this. I'm sick of it too but I keep going back just to see if something has been done on LJ/SA's side. Monday's the start of the business week. We'll see I guess.

I was so, so close to having a half day today. So close.

Just before 1pm, the power went out. I went to check if the next door restaurant still had power and found out the entire street was down. Then it came back up as I was walking back into the store. So, okay, that's abnormal but it happens. A little bit later the power blipped, then went out totally a few minutes after that. Checked again with restaurant and found out the entire street was out again. So while explaining the situation to my coworker, who had just come back from an errand, I saw a plume of black smoke off in the near distance.

Being the curious sort, we decided to go to Walgreens while trying to check out if we could see where the smoke was coming from. Turns out the entire village is out of power. And the smoke was further than we wanted to walk. So I call sarcastic_elf to see if she could find out anything. And heard it from a worker in the salon next door that there was a major substation for the area on fire. The words 'fire ball' and 'explosion' were used. And its not just the village but a much larger area out of power.

So we hung around a bit more, had the door propped open for the cool air, and put up a sign for us being closed. As we were considering leaving for the day a little after 2pm, the power came back up.

*sigh*

And we seem to be the only street up with power in the village (though that has probably changed in the last ten minutes since there was a power truck in the street). We found this out by calling around for open places that had food. And I walked down the street to the corner to see if we were the only part of the street with power.

Today was not too bad, just tiring because I stayed up late. Again. Yeah. I know. The fic was really, really interesting.

Tomorrow is one of my class' finals. I don't think I'll have too much trouble with it. I just need to review the semester of material before I walk in. And get that webpage up with all of the work we've done this semester. Guess who left her book at work with the info sheet in it? Yeah, that's me. I'm not too worried though. Just get the reports I typed up in class posted to the right place and crop some pictures and that should be it. I'll do the html at work tomorrow.

Then I'll start studying for the other comprehensive final for operations management. Interestingly enough, it looks like I'm doing well in this class. I thought I would squeak by with a D but it may be higher.

But to cap today off, my pinky finger was nicely in the way of the screen door closing. And I had to spray my rug down because there were fleas biting me again. Poor new rug. It's gorgeous. Full of colorful squares.

Got some jogging in today though. It's been almost a month since I've gone. Even though it was half a mile before I had to just walk, its a start. I'll get back up to where I was soon.

Also, this e-mail subject is just 'whut..?': "Buy Mom Flowers – Get Security Suite Free!" Oh Zone Alarm.

There's a fic I've been searching on and off for the last three weeks. It's been driving me crazy. I knew the description but not the title. So I've been loading fics that looked promising and reading the ones that caught my attention again.

Just a few minutes ago, I just thought of a search term that actually might flush it out. And Windows' search did find it.

And what do you know? I've been looking in the wrong directory the entire damn time.

Arrgh.

Well, at least I've found it now. And got to enjoy another run through of several good fics. Still, argh.

So, apparently, DHL either didn't deliver my calendar to the right place or they just put it at a downtown location and didn't do anything with it. So, while it says delivered, it has not been delivered to the correct location.

I did call them and they did get a phone number to call back within the hour. Apparently, and I think I heard this right, that they will try another delivery. I certainly hope so. I don't think I want to fight with DHL and Amazon Japan to get another Kingdom Hearts 2007 calendar because DHL decided not to finish the delivery.

ETA: Haha! Now have my very cute Kingdom Hearts calendar. It's funny. I got two excuses as to why it wasn't here when it was supposed to be. The driver said that we were closed when he tried to come by and the company person who was tracking this for me said some excuse about the holidays slowing things down. (Which they do, really. But I think that wasn't the problem for this package.)

So all is well. I got my package and got to bother a company for it. And its very cute.