Category: Rant

Is this a scam, or is Make Magazine a bunch of scumbags?

Today I got three identical notices saying that my “recent order/payment” for Make Magazine couldn’t be “completed because the credit card you supplied was not accepted by the credit card company”. Only one problem with that – I decided some time ago not to renew because I never read it. Well, if their business practice is to fraudulently charge credit cards, I’m pretty glad I didn’t renew. Fuckers.

Maybe it isn’t them. The customer support email is customerservice@espcomp.com, which is not an address that I immediately associate with the magazine. On the other hand, they did have a the credit card number of an old card, the one I probably did use for that subscription.

I wonder if the Attorney General’s Office is interested in fraudulent credit card charges?

Yeah, that makes sense

For years now, my employer has not allowed ssh out their firewall. But they do have a telnet relay where you telnet to a particular server in the DMZ, and then telnet from there outside. Yeah, believe it or not, they think ssh isn’t secure (or more likely, have never heard of it because it’s not part of a default Windows installation) but telnet is ok. Of course, imap, pop and nntp aren’t allowed either. Heck, even DNS isn’t allowed – you can’t resolve any external domain names from internal machines.

And because I don’t run a telnet server on my home server, I have to telnet to their relay, then telnet to a friend’s server, and then ssh from there. But that’s what I go through in order to access my home email, Usenet, check files on my home server, and do a million other things.

Today I got the word – no more telnet access unless you can make a business case for it. The smarmy email from corporate IT says “please try to find a more secure means of communication”. Well, sure, I’d happily switch to a more secure means of communication IF YOU HADN’T FUCKING BLOCKED THEM ALL AT THE FIREWALL.

And so it begins

I’ve been telling anybody who listens that now that Bush has managed to simultaneously over-stretch the US Military beyond the breaking point and put the US in debt up to our eyeballs to China, to expect China to start flexing their muscles towards either Taiwan or the Spratleys, or maybe both.

And so today I read that the Chinese have demonstrated that they can get a sub within torpedo range of a US carrier without being detected. Things like this don’t happen by accident – China is sending us a message. And that message is “we’re the major sea power in this area, not you”. If they were planning to try a political move in the area, this would be a good first move.

Paul & Vicki get HD – A Comedy of Errors, Vol II

So after the first day’s comedy of errors, we decided to go the CableCard+TiVoHD route. We ordered the CableCard installation, which was scheduled for a few days later. I figured I’d set up several TiVos in my day so that shouldn’t be any problem, so I left if for the night before the installer appointment. That was my first mistake.
Continue reading “Paul & Vicki get HD – A Comedy of Errors, Vol II”

Paul & Vicki get HD – A Comedy of Errors, Vol I

Last Friday Vicki and I were looking at the horrible picture on our downstairs TV, and at the check I just got back from Google, and said “It’s time to replace this piece of shit and buy a TV made in this century”.

Some friends had raved about the Sharp Aequos(?), and we had a look at it in the store and on the web. It was just barely within our price range. But we said “hey, we don’t watch a lot of DVDs, and we don’t have any plans to buy a new HD or BluRay DVD player anyway, so why do we need 1080p?”. We decided that the Sony Bravia looked just as good to us, and cost enough less that we could also afford a new TiVo HD. Hey, bonus! Of course, the salesman tried to talk us into the Monster Cable HDMI cable (which came in two versions, one costing $100 and one costing even more). There is only one thing I know about video cables, and that’s that Monster Cables are horribly overpriced, so we “settled” for the non-Monster one that “only” costs $50.

It was when we got everything home that I discovered that the new TiVo HD doesn’t have a way to control a cable box. I thought I’d just have to take the old cable box in and swap it with an HD one, and I’d be away to the races. But no, this one takes one or two CableCards. Fine, I thought, I wouldn’t miss the cable box. But then I looked at the Time Fucking Warner (aka TFW) web page for CableCard and discovered three things:

  • You can’t just swap your box for a CableCard, you need to wait for an installer
  • The CableCard doesn’t support some of the HD channels, notably anything they’ve added after January 2006.
  • If we ditch the cable box, we’re going to “lose our package” and pay a-la-carte for the premium channels, which would raise our monthly fees by about $30

Ok, neither of the first two are show stoppers, and we could deal with the third by moving the cable box to the upstairs TV, but I was seriously thinking of ditching the TiVo HD and getting Time Fucking Warner’s own DVR. That was, until I tried to figure out how bad their DVR’s user interface was. I’d heard from some people who had dropped their TiVos in favour of their cable company’s DVRs and had ultimately gone back to TiVo because the UI was so incredibly bad.

And then I discovered the worst Flash web site on the web, and that’s saying something. This site attempts to show you how to use a DVR, but all it does it tell you “press this button, now press this button, now press this one”, without telling you *why* you’re pressing that button. There is a depiction of the user interface screen in one corner, but it’s so small you can’t see what you’re doing, so while it’s telling you to press the up arrow, you can’t tell why you’re pressing up – are you selecting a menu, or scrolling through a list, or what? Maybe if they used some of the real estate taken up by the dancing doofus they’d have room for a readable screen depiction?

Anyway, after enduring that horrible demo, I decided not to go for the TFW DVR.