Thursday, March 29, 2007

Bell the stupid

Ok LF dropped us a line a couple of days ago about an outstanding modem charge after canceling our account in APRIL!

Well there was a minor bandwidth charge back in December and there was no comment about about hardware costs. Anyway we got a message from a collection agency about a charge of ~$84 outstanding on our account.

So I call the agency to find out what is going wrong. They are just out to collect the $$ so they don't know any of the real details. So I call the dreaded Bell. I start talking to someone at One-Bill billing. "I'm sorry you need Sympatico billing. Please hold on." (Transfer to Sympatico billing). There was a quick discussion about what was going on and then the person confirmed that the modem was returned in January. Excellent! Bill has now been zeroed and we owe Bell nothing. Again. For the third time since April.

Call agency back again and say all is good and you should hear from Bell about this soon. They have confirmed that the modem was returned in January and all is good. This is when the abilities of Bell far exceeded what they have previously done.

-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-
Me: They have confirmed that the modem was returned back in January and that the value of the bill has been reduced to zero in reflection of that.

Agency: Well that is odd why would they have done that? If the reason for the charge was fixed in January why did they send this notice to me in February?

Me: Because Bell is a wonderful company that is highly orderly and stands at the peak of customer service.

Agency: I detect a little sarcasm.
-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-

Anyway the conversation continued happily and all is good once again with the world with Bell fixing their problems .... Again .... For the 10 ^ 8 th time. I hope it stays that way.

I'll be calling the agency in 30 days to confirm that all is good.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Phantom of the Opera

Well went and saw Phantom last night and it was great! The seats we had were good seats but naturally they came at a bit of a cost.

The show was good and the guy that played the Phantom did a great job. I would cite his name but I don't have the booklet with me here at work. Anyway the story and presentation was as great this time as it was the first time I saw it.

I have to say that there were two minor flaws with it though.

1) Raoul didn't provide a very emotional performance. Though from what I gather he is getting better.

2) One of the stage props has squeaky wheels which destroyed the "suspension of disbelief" during the second act.

Still that aside it was a great performance and I'm glad we went.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Just found a new trailer today. Funniest point:
>Barbossa "Thar's not been a gathering like this in our life time."
>Sparrow "And I owe them all money."

Check out the trailer.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Bored

Ok so right now I have a mess of things on my plate. Conference related issues need to be resolved before too long. This is more work than I feel up to doing. I have already done some of the simpler stuff but the real functionality tests still need to be done.

Really I'm just tired. I blame my lack of sleep.

Something else that makes me bored is my job. I just don't do enough there. I'm better than what I'm doing. *sigh* At least they pay me well enough so it doesn't bother me all the time. I guess just I'm feeling a little down about being in a job that doesn't seem to have any forward potential.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Installing Ubuntu Part 2

Ok so one defective disk can can really screw up an install.

The coolest thing about installing Ubuntu is that you can load up Firefox while installing it on a second desktop. So while Ubuntu was installing I was browsing Digg while the install occurred.

Post install I was politely told that I had 138 updates pending download. So now I wait for my 226.3 megs.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Installing Ubuntu Part 1

Ok I started an install of Ubuntu last night. I figured I would let it install all night. I think it froze because it was still at 23% done just like when I went to bed last night.

Tonight will be take 2.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Things to look forward to....

This.

Anyone notice I don't write medium length posts. They are either super long or ultra short?

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Lately....

I just took the Stupid Tester and came up with this:

StupidTester.com says I'm 4% Stupid! How stupid are you? Click Here!


I think I have been passively cheating though because I have been working on a bunch of random stuff that seemed to be in this test. Oh well. Being 4% stupid isn't that bad. Especially considering that 95% of those that took the test are below me :)


Other things in the news .... It turns out that BNL just released a new album that is freely available for download from here".


Well back to work to tell my fellow admins on the weirdness that occurs when downloading PDF files.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Weather

Ok so last night trying to get home was interesting. I left the office at 15:30 to pick up the SO from her office. A nice little 15 minute drive .... Well at least until the weather decided to make driving stupidly slow. I got to her office at 17:00. Now in all fairness I did take a wrong turn which prolonged the drive by about an extra 30 minutes by my guess. Oh well.

Now came the fun part. Getting to the gas station before running out of gas. I should have done this in the morning but I wasn't thinking too clearly.

We stopped by a Sunoco for gas but it was out of gas :( It seems that the fuel shortage caused by Esso's refinery created a more global shortage than I thought of. Darn.

So we continue heading home in hopes of finding a gas station before running out of gas. We did. Oddly enough it was a Esso. I filled the tank at a whopping $36 and went inside to get some dinner. Normally this would have taken about 10 minutes to make it this far down the road. Nope not because of the weather this time. Almost an hour later we managed it *sigh*

We continued home and stopped in a Chinese place for food at 19:00. Again this drive should have taken us about 20 minutes. Ate while the snow stopped. All was looking up again. Until we got outside and realized that the snow had stopped because the freezing rain had started. *sigh* Looks like it will be a longer drive home. We got home at about 20:00. All this from a drive that only should have taken an hour tops, not 4.5 hours.

Now I'm staying home by advice of both the fire and police department because the roads are so bad.