All posts by rbowen

Telemarketers

OK, last one for tonight.

So I mentioned that the telemarketers were calling me repeatedly. And I have a policy of not answering the phone if I don’t recognize the number. If they really need to talk to me, they’ll leave a message, and maybe I’ll pick up.

But I finally answered one of the “no caller id” calls, just to see.

It was a long-distance company, calling to confirm my request to change to their service. They asked for various personal details. I said, huh? They said, please confirm your mailing address, so that we can finalize your order.

I finally got her to stop and explain to me what she was calling about, at which point I was able to persuade her that, no, I did not request that they take over my long distance service, and that, no, I was not going to provide them with all sorts of personal details, and could they please please please stop calling me.

The “no caller id” calls have stopped. It’s been very nice.

rebooting phone, again

After an initial period of hopefullness, my phone started acting worse than ever.

So this evening I went to Sprint, all ready to raise a ruckus and make a scene. I said, I’m having phone problems, and the last two people that tried to fix it made it worse. The person at the counter asked where I wanted the replacement sent to.

This was quite a surprise, and rather took the steam out of my plans to rant and demand justice.

So I guess I’ll have a new phone soon. 🙂

Ghost Rider, finalé

I finally finished reading Ghost Rider, and wrote Neil Peart a short letter thanking him for the book. I don’t expect that he even reads his “fan mail” personally, but you never know.

I found the book to be very good. Lots of good insight, but no attempt to be preachy, or even to present itself as having any answers. There were answers, but only the ones that you already had inside you, and the ones that you are ready to arrive at on your own. I think.

I found the end to be rather rushed and unsatisfying, but, at the same time, it offered the hope that there might be some deus ex machina, even in Real Life. Maybe life doesn’t suck forever. Maybe I’m allowed to be happy again some day.

And so I wrote what is, I believe, only the second fan letter I’ve ever written.

The first one was to “When In Rome”, and they sent me a handwritten response. So you never know. And a letter from Neil Peart might actually be worth something some day. 😉

Anyways, thanks, Neil, for a thoughtful, helpful book. I hope that my healing road will be as successful as yours. If somewhat less expensive.

Sept 11, 2001

I experienced the events of Sept 11, 2001, entirely via IRC. Later in the morning, when CNN.com came back up, I got the little bit of news, as it trickled in, from that site, and also from Boston.com.

So that morning was even more surreal than it might have been had I seen footage on television, or heard it on the radio. I saw digital photos from people living in Manhattan. I saw pictures from a webcam pointing at the Pentagon. I watched as people described what they were hearing and seeing on the news, and discussed various theories of what was going on.

After the second plane hit the trade towers, discussion changed pretty fast. It was clear that it was not an accident. Although, for a while, a number of people disputed the report of the second plane, saying that people were confused, and hearing the first report again.

There was the report of a car bomb at the Smithsonian. Or perhaps it was a the White House. Or at the State Department. And there was clearly something buring at the Pentagon, but nobody knew what that was about.

Then the towers fell. This was monumentally hard to believe. Surely this was not being reported accurately. But then there were photos. Loading painfully slowly, but there were the pictures. It was gone. And then the other one was gone.

Meanwhile, we had work to do. We had a deadline. Ken was sitting numbly, unable to work. I was trying to work, but could not. What could it possibly matter that this customer get their insignificant web site done?

Later in the day, the customer had the nerve to say that they believed that the events of the day would help their cause (political action bloodsuckers), and I almost hung up on them. This was the moment when I started passionately hating this customer, and the main reason that I was not sorry when they dropped their contract.

I’m currently trying to track down someone that has a transcript of #perl (rhizomatic.net) from that morning, since I appear to have lost mine.

… but I wouldn’t want to paint it.

On Saturday, we painted a HUGE map of the USA on Sarah’s school parking lot. Kentucky was about 2.5 feet across, to give you some idea of the scale.

Most folks ignored the instructions to start in the middle and work out, so by the end, I was playing twister to paint Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. And I got lots of paint on me due to certain people insisting on painting south Texas before north Texas.

So, today, I hurt all over. For some reason, I didn’t suffer much yesterday, but today my legs and back hurt, and my shoulders are so tight you could bounce a paint can off of them. But the map looks absolutely wonderful, so I suppose it was worth it.

UNKNOWN CALLER

Over the last 48 hours, I have received about 50 calls from UNKNOWN CALLER. Since I make a firm practice of not answering these calls (I *despise* talking to telemarketers, primarily because I don’t know how to say “No” to them, and because they waste huge amounts of time getting to the point, and invariably call when I’m doing something important) I let the answering machine get it. None of them have left a message, leading me to believe that the choice not to answer was the right one. Still, it’s annoying. What’s most annoying about it is how late in the evening they are calling. I kinda think that 7pm, maybe 8, is about the latest any decent marker should be calling. Many of these have been after 8, some as late as 9:30. That’s just not right.

The purpose of law

What is the purpose of law? I find myself having this little internal conversation every time I run the red light at Shillito Park and W Reynolds Road. The purpose of law, as I understand it, is to protect the freedom of citizens. Or, as John Adams put it, to secure the maximum amount of happiness for the maximum number of people. That is, certain freedoms (like the freedom to drive anywhere I want) must be curtailed in order to protect certain other freedoms (such as the freedom not to be squished like a frog in an intersection). And so, as I wait for 4 minutes at a red light while no traffic flows in the other direction, I have to wonder what freedom is being protected in exchange for my impatience and annoyance at waiting, apparently, for nothing. I have no answer to this. So I’m often likely to run the light, when it is abundantly clear to me that there is no harm done by my doing so. I expect that one of these days it will get me in trouble.

UN in the Congo

Three months later, the UN is
in the D.R. Congo with the ability to actually use force to stop the “tit-for-tat massacres” that have been going on since May. It’s good to know that we pay millions of dollars into such an efficient organization.

Maybe, one of these days, we’ll actually see the UN doing its job on a regular basis so that the US doesn’t have to.

While I’m certainly no big fan of Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the world, I do like to see folks doing what they say that they are going to do.

Is the flood of spam over?

As abruptly as it started, the flood of inbound spam seems to have stopped. The only thing that I actually did that might be related was to switch my secondary MX from sendmail to postfix and put some spam filtering stuff on there. Apparently a lot of the spam that I was getting was rejected by my primary, but accepted by my secondary and then forwarded back to the primary with the added credibility of coming from a trusted host. Or something like that.

Either that, or the sobig.f virus hit its timeout, and quit sending. Or perhaps mrtg broke and isn’t reporting stats right.

*NOT* recommended financial practices

I just spent the last 3 hours balancing my checkbook. Why did it take so long? Well, because I had not done it since May. Why not? Well, I suppose it was a combination of lack of time and terror of finding out that I was one paycheck away from being on the street.

I do not recommend this as a standard financial practice. It’s better to know. Although there were some times that I think if I knew how close I was, I’d have been under even more stress than I was.

Amazingly, everything came out just fine, and everything was balanced and accounted for.