Someone emailed to ask if DC was affected by the blackouts. We were spared, of course.
In fact, as I sat at home yesterday evening, after riding the Metro home, reclining on my couch drinking a cold beer from an icy mug, air conditioner going full-blast against the 95-degree, 80% humidity sauna outside, watching those poor NYers schlep home across the Queensborough bridge on my 35″ TV, with my laptop plugged in and resting on my belly, fat from just having microwaved leftovers for dinner, I thought “Holy crap, I’d bloody well kill myself if the power went out right now.”
Then I turned on all the lights in the apartment and danced with the running vacuum cleaner to revel in my freely-flowing electrical power. Thank you, Edison, my hero!!
Clearly, I live alone.
Personal
Just got back from the Supernova Conference Bloggers Party at Casablanca in Old Town Alexandria, VA (just outside DC). I had a crummy day, so I wasn’t feeling super social, and, frankly, I nearly copped out and didn’t go. In retrospect, I’m glad I did.
DC Blogger turn out seemed slim. Most of the partygoers seemed to be there to attend Supernova. I did chat with Derek from The Scoop, Tom of Off the Top, Jeff Gates [no relation] of Life Outtacontext, and Bill Kearney, creator of Syndic8. I know I talked with some other locals, but my memory for names sucks big time.
Sadly, I took no photos of the local bloggers. (Dude, what’s up with that?) Being the starstruck fool that I am, I took photos of people like:
Scott Johnson, creator of Feedster, getting jiggy with the belly dancer.
Halley Suitt of Halley’s Comment giving lessons to the belly dancer. Show her how it’s done, Halley! (Halley says she has a plan to muscle those ornery Christians outta my way!)
The Movable Type gang (left to right: Anil Dash, Joi Ito, and MT co-creator Mena Trott) kicking it with yours truly.
Personal
Off to the SuperNova Conference Blogger Party, digital camera in hand (well, more like “in pocket,” but you get the drift).
Pray that it doesn’t rain again, because I have no umbrella with me today.
Personal, Weblogs
Flour’s purpose in the universe is to serve as a delivery vehicle for butter and sugar.
Personal
It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Dave Winer, but I do agree that Verizon sucks.
I recently signed up for Verizon DSL and haven’t been very happy with it.
I’m not as suprised as Winer that it filled in the Outlook Express email settings and re-branded Internet Explorer. Lots of non-tech folk probably appreciate that (the settings moreso than the re-branding). Doesn’t matter a lot to me since I use Mozilla for browsing and email.
I am annoyed immensely by their support . . . or, rather, lack thereof:
(1) Everytime I send an email from Mozilla email, I get an auto-response from Verizon with the title “URGENT: Updated your E-Mail Settings.” Of course, my email settings are configured precisely according to their instructions. Note that there’s no problem sending email . . . though Verizon seems to think there is. Trying to figure this out started the whole saga with their crappy support processes.
The email contains a link to the support page which contains a link to a form for email support. . . which leads to a dead page. See http://www2.verizon.net/contact/techsup_form.asp for the dead form. It’s been dead for two weeks.
(2) Apparently there is no way to get support by email which just dumbfounds me. The only options are by phone (and I’ve always hung up after being on hold for five minutes) or by the lame-ass “Verizon Online Support Center” which is a Flash-interfaced support app. I don’t have time to waste on hold waiting to ask a question about a a non-critical support issues. Why can’t they let me submit a real ticket via email?
(3) The Verizon Online Support Center installs some stuff that is arguably spyware (Motive SmartBridge and Visual IP Insight) that I’m not exactly clear of the functionality for. Uninstalled Visual IP Insight, but haven’t been able to figure out how to get rid of Motive.
(4) The auto-diagnosis crap built into fails miserably, again telling me that my email configuration is wrong (but not telling me why). It auto-submits a ticket, but I have no way of creating, modiftyin, or viewing what information is contained in the ticket. How friggin’ ridiculous is that?!? It’s my ticket!
(5) The Verizon Online Support Center doesn’t allow you to send email either. It only allows you to initiatie a chat session, but I’ve never been able to get a support rep on the chat. Leaving “messages” there gets no response. No surprise.
(6) Trying to just send an email to “support@verizon.net” or “help@verizon.net” returns a pop-up alert that those addresses are not valid. It appears that the smtp.verizon.net (or something) is blocking those messages before they’re even set. That’s simply infuriating.
I’m about at my wit’s end. I expect so much more from an ISP support team. I will probably wind up cancelling Verizon DSL because of this.
Of course I’ll have to wait on hold for 20 minutes just for the privilege of cancelling my service. Fuckers.
From the technical side, the DSL has been wonderful, it works brilliantly, the bandwidth is great, etc. It’s a shame that enjoyment of fine technology is runied by crappy attempts at automated support.
Advice or other experiences with Verizon welcome.
[Update 6:15am 7/19/2003: Comments are closed because this entry is getting lots of traffic (apparently through Google searches for "Verizon sucks") and the lunatics are starting to come out of the woodwork. However, I'm really not interested in having a googlelock on "Verizon Sucks," so we'll let this post age gracefully.]
Personal
I finally made the switch to DSL (Verizon) and, as of tonight, I have officially ditched the old dial-up service.
There was a brief twinge of regret because I’ve had a mindspring.com email address since c. 1998. Mindspring was a fine service that I never had any problem with . . . until it was acquired by Earthlink. Once Earthlink took over, the dial-up service got progressively worse, sometimes connecting at below 33K, sometimes connecting but without any DNS so nothing resolved, sometimes not connecting at all. I would certainly not not recommend Earthlink, and I definitely didn’t consider going with Earthlink DSL for even a second.
We’ll see if service with Verizon is better. So far, I’ve been pleased — the install kit was brilliantly simple, a testament to user-friendliness, and the bandwidth has been consistent.
Of course, it also means the end to the old Ten Reasons Why. It, and my first weblog, Monkey-Mind, had been at http://gritter.home.mindspring.com since 2000. No more. Just a 404, if you go there. Ah well. Change. . .
Personal
June has been (and will probably continue to be) a slow blogging month for me. Not only am I travelling way more than usual this month, not only is work going to kick my butt this month, but I’ve been miserable sick for the last few days. Too much information? Eh, deal with it. :-)
Personal
This morning, I finally got around to importing all my old posts from my last two Blogger-powered weblogs, the original Ten Reasons Why and good ol’ Monkey-Mind.
You’ll notice a bunch of new monthly links in the Archives area to your right (and a new “Uncategorized” category with 389 entries). They don’t work yet, because I haven’t rebuilt the MT archives. I’m hoping this isn’t going to generate an RSS feed tomorrow with 389 new posts. Yikes!
All the internal links to other posts in those imported entries are going to be screwed, of course. Any recommendations on dealing with that are welcome. In retrospect, it probably would have been easier to deal with it prior to import, perhaps. Dunno.
Looking through some of those older posts, I realized how much more personal my weblog was when I first started. Nor did I realize I took almost all of 2001 off from blogging!
UPDATE 4:54 PM: Just got around to rebuilding the site, so all the archives should work now.
Personal, Weblogs
Sebastian Fiedler, in Seblogging: Paper Draft for BlogTalk 2003:
“We can observe almost in real-time how individuals use personal Webpublishing technologies to facilitate and feed their own change and learning processes. Watching this rich fabric of learning conversations unfold makes you wonder why people still believe that e-learning is all about content delivery and the production of polished instructional products. People in the personal Webpublishing realm successfully learn outside any institutionally organized system of instruction.”
Amen, brother.
I certainly don’t keep a weblog for your benefit, dear readers (although I hope at least a few of you enjoy it and get a wee bit of value from it). I keep a weblog because it provides an incentive for me to read and think about things that are of interest to me (like technology in education). It’s like a kick in the ass, except for my brain. :-)
However, I do revel in getting a comment or trackback or the unforeseen referrer in my logs. I recognize that feedback loop makes keeping a weblog more interesting than a keeping a journal that just sits on my desk (or my computer desktop). It keeps me motivated.
You may or may not know that I have an MFA in Creative Writing, although I don’t do much writing these days. I’ve often thought that I would like to experiment with writing fiction in public — not weblog-as-fiction a la Flight Risk, but just working on a novel out there in public, perhaps via a weblog. Why? To see if that feedback loop might jog my creative side as it does my intellectual side.
Harlan Ellison used to do this schtick (and may still) where he would set up a typewriter in a storefront window and crank out a short story while people stood around and watched. Fiction as a spectator sport! Except Harlan didn’t solicit feedback from the other side of the storefront window as he wrote; with the Web you could.
Sadly, though, my intellectual side is more courageous and secure than my creative side. ;-)
Books, Writing & Literature, Education, Personal, Weblogs
You re-design the site’s style. But you still stress over the color scheme and wind up using your alma mater’s for no good reason other than orange is a good color and you realized blue and orange are the colors of that other school.
Personal