He tells me that since we can connect the Powerbook straight to the cable modem and it can get an IP address, that there’s something wrong with the Linksys router and that I will have to call Linksys for help. He says that Charter does not support any of its customers using routers at home. That’s cute. Like, you know… everyone just has one computer at home nowadays… ya dork! Now, I’ve not touched a thing on the cable modem or router in the 2 years that it’s been in my basement working fine with Charter, so I know for certain that I’ve not done anything to change things and that it must be something in Charter’s network that’s changed. The rude little Charter guy insisted that he was as high I could go for technical support and that customers weren’t allowed to talk to the network technicians. I didn’t but should have told him to bite me.

Oh, and the beauty of this is that I have Vonage for our phone provider, which means that the above conversation and the next one happened via cell phone. And the beauty of having a conversation from my house on a cell phone is that I live in the middle of a stinking forest and I get one bar of reception, if I’m lucky. So that makes for a nice, easy to understand phone call, especially when you’re talking… oh, I don’t know… to a very heavily-accented outsourced Indian support person.

So I hang up from the stupid Charter guy (I really hate Charter… did I mention that?) and call Linksys’s technical support number and start talking with a very heavily-accented outsourced Indian support person over my 1-bar cell phone connection in the middle of a stinking forest. She has a nice chat with me for a good half hour and asks me all kinds of questions about my home network and how many computers I have and how many of them are Windows (0), Mac (1), and Linux (5). Then she tells me that because my router is so old, she’s going to have to charge me $33 for helping me with it because it’s no longer covered under free technical support. So… just to clarify… because I paid $80 for a WRT54GS router 5 years ago and it’s still kicking strong, instead of… oh, I don’t know… a note of thanks or congratulations, I get a bill for $33 for her to help me get it working with Charter again. I told her that there’s no way in hell that I’m going to pay $33 for her help, which quickly led to the conclusion of that waste of a phone call. Unfortunately, seeing such amazingly awesome customer service by the likes of Moleskine and even Apple makes such patently horrific customer service as this really stand out. =:( Nice work, Linksys. I’ll be thinking more than twice about purchasing one of your products in the future.

Meanwhile, it’s like noon now and I’ve not yet been able to start work. That’s nice.

So after showering, eating, etc. I run up to the nearest Circuit City and plop down $49 for a new Linksys WRT54G2 wireless-G router, get it home, and connect it–foolishly thinking that it’ll work. Nope, same thing. About 10 minutes into my “Serenity now!!!” mental breakdown, I tried using the “MAC address clone” trick on the router. Sure enough, I entered in my Powerbook’s en0 MAC address and like magic, the new router is able to get an IP address from Charter’s DHCP servers. I run downstairs, pull the new router out, put the old WRT54GS back in, spend the next 10 minutes reconfiguring it and tell it to use the Powerbook’s MAC address, and sure enough, now it is able to get an IP address too. Needless to say, I’m taking the new router back and sticking with my old WRT54GS, thank you very much.

Gee, isn’t that a coincidence. Yep, there just must be a lot of people whose Linksys routers have died on them in the same day, ya moron.

What I think happened is that Charter rolled something out 2 nights ago so that their DHCP servers would stop handing out IP addresses to Linksys routers. Of course, Charter won’t admit to that.

So, now that I’ve officially been told by Linksys that they’re not going to lift a finger to help me if I have any problems with their router, I find this little lifehacker page that talks about upgrading your $60 router to a $600 router. I’d looked at the DD-WRT project before, but I was always a little nervous about bricking my router and having to go buy another one. With that fear now nicely removed, I figured that now’s a good time to see what DD-WRT can do. And DANG, I’m glad I did. There is so much more that I can configure with the DD-WRT interface than I ever could with the old Linksys interface. And the Web UI is so much more responsive! I’m totally impressed with it.

So, to sum up:

• Charter: you can totally bite me. As soon as I find another internet provider, you’re dumped like last week’s trash.
• Linksys: your products used to be totally awesome and then you outsourced your customer support, which means you might be saving money, but your customers are getting much less desirable support, at least as far as I’m concerned. You can sort of bite me.
• DD-WRT project: you guys totally rock.
• Forest that I live in: you rock except for making living with cell phones not fun.
• Not being able to start work until 4:30 pm because of all this: you TOTALLY suck. =:(

All I had to do was to create a “extensions.checkCompatibility” boolean field in the Firefox about:config and set it to false. As you can guess, this disables the compatibility check for the extensions, and all the disabled incompatible extensions are enabled (with warning messages). Of course, this does not guarantee that the extension will work.

Yay! TinyURL Creator works again!

Hm, and while I’m on the subject of browser betas, Opera’s latest beta is looking really nice and finally works with the latest Flash plugin. And is it just me or is there a horrible vacuum where there should be some nice Firefox 3 themes? The only tolerable one I’ve found is the updated Qute theme.

Dear Lazyweb,

This frustrates me and makes me all kinds of sad… For some reason, whenever I start my normal KDE3 session, plasma and KDE4 insists on starting up as well. So I get KDE3’s kicker and KDE4’s plasma stacked, which is less than fun and not quite useful. Also, I can’t get plasma/kwin4/kde4 to play nicely with twinview. I have an external monitor that runs @1280×960 and my laptop screen that runs @1280×800. I think it’s confusing plasma, and it looks like this. =:(

Anyone know why or how to make it better?

I’m seriously confused. It would seem that this incredibly awesome little multimedia gadget called the PSP can’t actually pull off having more than one playlist for a single directory of songs??? Let me get this straight… you seriously want me to copy the same song to 10 different directories if I want 10 playlists with that song in it?

You’re kidding right?

Please, Sony, please fix this?

Sincerely yours,

Callme Perplexed

I’ve never had an eye exam before today, but I am a HUGE fan of Brian Regan and absolutely LOVE his skit about going to the eye doctor. It is totally hilarious! What I was not prepared for, however, was how accurate his observations were! I thought that he must have some nutty eye doctor, but he was right on, which made it even worse for me, as I was sitting in the eye exam chair, trying way too hard not to laugh. If you’ve never seen Brian’s eye doctor skit, you totally owe it to yourself to watch it. NOW!

Oh, and as an added bonus to the thoroughly entertaining morning, I found out that I have pretty durned good eyesight for a staring-at-the-computer-screen-for-12+hours-per-day guy! 20/20 in my right eye and pretty close to that in my left.

And now for something completely different…

That’s right, folks! If yer lookin’ for a big hole to throw $300 into, just go out and buy yerself a 32″ RCA CRT TV! That’s what I did just 2 short years ago, and shore enuff, the only useful purpose this monstrous beast now serves is to beep like a Geiger counter when it’s plugged in and take up a lot of space. If it works for me, it can work for you too!

Now, seriously, this sucketh mightily. I was toying with the idea of going out and plunking down a large amount of $CURRENCY for one of them new-fangled big-screen, flat-panel dealies–especially being that the PS3’s graphics are totally wasted on the old CRTs we have had, but it just KILLS me to be looking at spending that much money for something that I don’t even watch all that often. Also, I’m totally not with it as far as what technology to go with (LCD versus rear projection versus <I don’t even know what else is out there>).

So, dear reader, what would you recommend for a good quality, not horribly expensive, something that will last a long time, television?

It started to hit me yesterday as I spent 3.5 hours in this year’s KDE Google Summer of Code mentor’s meeting (thanks again sebr!!). KDE4 just plain rocks, and it feels good to start getting excited about it again. And I don’t just mean KDE 4.0. Don’t get me wrong, KDE4.0 is a nice little release. It’s not perfect and there are some things that are irritating about it and keep me from using it as my main DE. But like Aaron has been saying over and over and over again, KDE4.0 is not KDE4. KDE4.0 is more of a preview of things to come, and what I see coming just plain kicks butt.

I am finally getting excited about our PIM space again, and that feels really, really good. KMail, KOrganizer, KPilot, and the rest of our PIM suite was what drew me to KDE in the 3.x series. (Well, that and quite honestly I find the intentional dumbing-down and lack of configurability of the other large, free DE irritating to the point of exhaustion.) But lately our PIM apps have suffered from lack of care and have started to look seriously unsexy compared with Thunderbird, Sunbird, and even *gasp* Evolution. But KDE4 gives us a chance to remedy that, in my mind, and looking at this year’s Summer of Code projects, I’m hoping we get some really nice improvements done. There’s a few really sweet ones that I’d love to see get accomplished: the Google Contacts/Calendar integration into Akonadi and thusly KDE PIM, the enhanced KMail view, and (nearest and dearest to my heart) getting KPilot fully functional, and rock solid for KDE4.

And going through the SOC-sorting meeting made me realize all over again how fantastic a community it is that we have in KDE. There’s a lot of respect and comaradarie and friendliness that I just don’t see in some other communities. Not to mention the quality of talented people that we have. PIM might have drawn me to KDE, but it’s the people and our awesome community that we have that has kept me. =:)

Anyway, I just had to say that it feels really, really good to be excited about KDE4 again. In my mind, it’s a really unique opportunity to do something fresh and new and fun and exciting again. It’s a chance to learn from past mistakes and do better. It’s a chance to take the fantastic functionality that we have and rethink how our users can best interact with it. It’s a chance to not be bound to the past and to not have to be stuck with the same old presentation layer we have just because we don’t want to make drastic changes to our applications.

As the pretty graphic says, KDE4 is truly a chance to be free. =:)

I know I need to drink more water, and after the recent health disturbances, I knew I had to get serious about it. But I also knew that unless I had something unique and stylish and cool, it would be a chore to me and I’ve no hope of being consistent on something that’s irritating. And I proved that by spending a couple of weeks just drinking out of whatever glass I grab in the morning. I could never remember how many 12 ounce glasses of water I’d taken at the end of the day and normal drinkware is just so… normal.

Enter the Sigg Lifestyle Loop Top Water Bottle that I found from a local EMS store. It has definite wow factor and fits nicely into the same category of my now must-have Moleskins as combining function with absolutely beautiful and unique form. And like the Moleskins, there’s quite a following of these Sigg Water Containing Devices. They’re made from a single piece of aluminum, have some kind of special lining that prevents leeching and keeps them taste/smell-neutral, and come in a variety of uber-cool designs and sizes. Oh… I also learned that drinking from plastic bottles is not a good idea. Here’s a blurb I found:

A safe, stylish alternative to plastic water bottles, Sigg water bottles are a great choice for transporting beverages on your daily commute or while backcountry hiking. This ultra-lightweight bottle is extruded from a single piece of aluminum and holds 1 liter of fluid (33.8 ounces). Designed to fit your on-the-go lifestyle, it comes with a loop top bottle cap, which can be secured via hook or caribiner clip to a backpack or daypack.

Sigg bottles are virtually unbreakable and are constructed with no seams, ensuring a long-lasting, leak-proof performance. They also feature Sigg’s proprietary baked-on inner liner, which is made from a non-toxic, water-based epoxy resin that exceeds FDA requirements for leaching (0.0 percent) and is independently tested to be taste- and scent-neutral. Every Sigg bottle is 100 percent recyclable at the end of its life, and is backed by a lifetime warranty.

About Sigg
It all started with a simple hiker’s bottle. Today, the SIGG bottle has acquired cult status. What happened is a success story that started in Biel, Switzerland in 1908. Küng, Sigg & Cie. manufactured leisure goods, kitchenware, and electrical appliances. The company relocated to Frauenfeld in 1916, where it helped pioneer the legendary tradition of Swiss quality. Since 1998, SIGG has concentrated on its core business: drinking bottles that deliver ultimate customer benefit.

But, most importantly for me, my Sigg bottle:

• Looks really cool. Mine is ultra-shiney blue and sexy. I’m the envy of the water-consuming crowd!
• Holds 1 Liter of water. This means that I only have to remember to fill it up twice a day and I’ve had my day’s fill of water.
• Goes anywhere! The waterproof seal makes it simple to fill up and throw in my backpack for a day out and I don’t have to worry about it spilling. It also does a really nice job of keeping my cold water cold for a long time.
• Is different. Which means I like it. Which means I keep using it. Which means I’m drinking much more water now. Which means I’m healthier, yay!

Anyone else out there in Geek land discovered these cool bottles yet?