Anyway, here’s the link to her deviantART, and one directly to her gallery.

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1991 Nissan Sentra - my old car

Hey look, I am still alive been a while since I’ve made a post here.  Been real busy, between work, play, and buying a car.

That’s the first thing I’m here to post – I bought a car got rid of the old Nissan (to the right) and bought an 02 Acura RSX Type-S (down a bit and to the left). Thing fucking rips. I wanted a Z28/Trans Am, but I fell in love with this thing when I got in the driver’s seat. It’s only a 4cylinder, but with Honda’s i-VTEC technology, the motor’s rated at 198horsepower/142lbft. And then there’s the gearing – 4.77 final drive ratio, it’s geared like a hotrod. The top end F-bodies I was looking at only had 3.73 gearing. Ironically enough the EPA rates both vehicles for the same highway fuel economy – 28mpg with 91 octane fuel. One of these days I’m going to see how well it runs with 93, since 91 is so ridiculously hard to find.

2002 Acura RSX - my new car~

Thing fucking flies too. With its redline at 8000, and the VTEC kicking in around 5800, even with the real low gearing it maxes out at a normal speed in each gear. In 4th I can exceed 100, and I’ve still got two gears to go after that. I’m considering having the transmission modified come springtime, see if I can’t have the ratio lowered on 6th a bit. As it stands I’m revving ~3700 at 80mph, if I get that down to 3300 or so I’ll see a pretty sizable improvement in fuel economy, which is important for me. Besides, I can always just use 5th when I want to accelerate moar.

That aside, there isn’t much to tell – that’s why I haven’t posted much. I got smashed and went trick or treating on Halloween, dressed as a pirate. Thanksgiving has been and gone without anything that eventful that I’m at liberty to discuss.

I have found that I really hate fixing laptops though. My buddy Chris has been subbing out work to me, and aside from all the driving (which I really don’t mind), the job mostly entails fixing laptops and printers. Printers I don’t mind so much – I hate printers in and of themselves, but fixing them really isn’t bad. Laptops are a pain in the dick though. Especially motherboard replacements. Looking at at least an hour for these, compared to 15-25 minutes for most printer repairs.

Spore got a bit boring. The space phase was fun for a while, but I just lost interest in it after a while. Which is rather depressing, because as far as galactic conquest games though it was actually a lot of fun – which says a lot for galactic conquest games. I thought I’d love it, unfortunately it seems I was mistaken.

As a result I’ve mostly been playing a lot of WoW, especially since Wrath of the Lich King came out. At this point I’m about halfway to 76 – I went strong for the first week or so but I just haven’t been playing much since around Thanksgiving. After everything that went on that weekend, I just haven’t been that interested in playing WoW. As a result I’ve been very bored.

I got Rock Band, which is a lot of fun when there are people around – the problem is people aren’t generally around that much during the week. Which is where the problem lies anyway.

Wow, this really seems to have turned into a depressed-sounding rant…not really sure how that happened. Anyway, I’ll cut it short – I saw Role Models with Anthony and Brianna on Sunday, which was very funny. I’m not going to review it, but I advise seeing it, it was very funny

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Holy shit, fuck Comcast’s customer service. In a study done, they were rated lower than the IRS’s service, and now I can see why. The reps are (mostly) nice people, and are generally pretty good about providing you with at least semi-correct answers in a somewhat timely manner, but the overall service is just appalling – take a look at “Service’s Sorry State” to see what I mean. How, you ask? Well, let me tell you.

Let’s see, three Saturdays ago (May 31 as it were) I stopped receiving E-mail, for some reason. I wasn’t really sure why, at first I just talked it up to a slow Saturday evening, but then I realized I wasn’t even getting any spam. And, while my spam filters are good, they’re not perfect. Then, pretty soon, I realized I was only getting my Logwatch, crontab, and other locally-supplied E-mails (such as notifications of pingbacks on this blog).

So, come Tuesday or so, I realized there was in fact a major issue. I called up Comcast, and they told me they had blocked port 25, incoming and outgoing – which I had surmised on my own using some fancy (or, rather, very basic) nmap work. The first (and, of course, most obvious) proposal was that there is spam being sent out of my network by some spyware/adware. This is, of course, impossible, due to my lack of Microshaft and even Apple products, but they told me I could switch my outgoing port to 587 on the relay and the system would pick up on my lack of attempts to send out spam within a couple days and unblock me. I was fine with this, I figured a couple days wasn’t bad, and I could still send an E-mail to all my customers, telling them I couldn’t receive and to call me with any issues they had.

Well, a couple days went by. And it wasn’t fixing itself. So I called them up again and got a much more helpful tech – he said that I was receiving too high a volume of E-mail for residential service, so port 25 was blocked. I naturally requested a manual unblock, which they said was impossible. Long story short here, they roped me into upgrading to business class – actually a pretty good deal, $12 more per month for 24/7 priority tech support, free house calls, no blocks, and doubled upstream bandwidth. Yes, doubled upstream.

So they told me I’d have to upgrade to a business-class modem, which had a built-in router. I was alright with this, I figured I’d just put it in front of my normal WRT54G (v8, yay dd-wrt) and either do a global TCP/UDP port forward or just throw it in the DMZ. Seems simple, right? Well, let’s see, first they came out and didn’t knock loud enough, then (when I called back a few days later) claimed to have left a message on the landline telling me to reschedule. They did not, however, leave that message – apparently I was just supposed to pull this information out of the ether using my necromantic divining powers.

Anyway, I rescheduled, and figured all was well. They set me up with an emergency appointment and whatnot the next morning, since I hadn’t gotten E-mail in about two and a half weeks. Nobody shows up. They had specific instructions to call my cell phone number when in the area, but I didn’t get a call, nobody showed up, nothing. So I call them up again that afternoon, even more pissed off than before, and as it turns out they never assigned the job to a field agent. Hey, that’s cool, how about you give me one now asshole. They were real swamped and “couldn’t get anyone out till the next morning”, so he gave me an appointment for 0700-0900.

Well, he (a little old Asian dude who’s been here before – very cool guy) finally shows up at like 1530. I don’t need him to install it, of course, just to drop it off and call in to activate it. All goes well, the guy drops off an SMC8014, and I get it up and running one I make a call to activate it (had to do it myself, no big deal), so I decide to do a little poking and prodding to find out the default admin username/password (cusadmin/highspeed in case you’re looking for it) so I can do the port forwarding/DMZ deal.

Well, I find it, and try to take care of it, but it won’t do the forwarding properly. Or the DMZ. And for some reason, my internal router (the WRT54G) won’t show up in the “list of connected computers”. WTF, right? Well, I find out that the box you want to forward to has to have a static IP – and that for it to show up in the list, I’d have to set the thing to stop ignoring ICMP – forgot I’d had it set to, and it makes sense, so I did both of those. The SMC8014 defaults to a class C 10.1.10.0/255.255.255.0 network (lolwut? 10.* is supposed to be class A personal address space), with a DHCP range of .10-.199. So, I gave the router .200, figuring that would be fine, the extra space was reserved for static IPs or VPNs or something.

It didn’t work. I tried going below the DHCP range, expanding the DHCP range (which returned an error saying I was overlapping the VPN range, which was completely hidden, more on this later), and going at the top and bottom (inclusive) of the DHCP range. None of it worked. No matter what I did, this damn thing just wouldn’t do double NAT forwarding – and the DMZ was just completely nonfunctional. So I called up the 24/7 number. Again. And after running some tests, he figures the SMC8014 is probably malfunctioning. So they arrange to send out another one. Set me up with an appointment and everything.

Mind you, now my server is completely down. Websites aren’t available. DNS isn’t available. FTP isn’t even available. And, in addition, during this process they log into my new router. Yes, they have a higher-level administrative password for it. No, you don’t have complete control over the router running in your own home or office. And no, you can’t find the superuser login. Period. If you can find it, I commend you. This secret is better-guarded than the fucking holy grail, I swear.

Well, once again, no call, no show. So I call in…again. And set up an appointment…again. The guy comes and swaps it out, tells me the new one is a tech support one – another SMC8014, but they use it for diagnosis, so it should work fine, and it’s already activated. I get an IP address, and all goes well, so I try the port forwarding again. No luck. So now I figure I’ll just try putting the server behind the SMC rather than both routers. I didn’t want to do this – I wanted guests’ boxen to connect to the SMC and have myself still protected by the Linksys in case of spyware/etc. But I figured I had no choice now.

It still doesn’t forward. Port forwarding, DMZ, static routing, you name it – none of it works. So now I call them up and tell them I want a standalone modem. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it doesn’t protect me. I’m a fucking technician, I have other firewalls and security in place. So they arrange to come out today. This morning, in fact, another 0700-0900 dropoff. Well, they show up, and they tried to call the landline again. Even though I can clearly see on the receipt they left on the door, it said to call my cell phone, and included the number. So I call up again and tell them I want a fucking dropoff. Today. This is ridiculous.

They give me a 1300-1700 dropoff. The techs arrived around 1630, within the bounds, and recommended that I not do a self-install because the time I’ll spend on the phone activating it could potentially be quite horrendous. They said having them stay and activate it wouldn’t be any charge to me, so I was fine with it. Ironic, though, that they suggested activating it themselves – and you’ll see why in a minute.

They come upstairs, I give them the standard “watch your head, it’s a midget house, hey watch your head again” spiel, and as soon as they walk in my bedroom they’re moderately awed – one of them said “hey, this is my kind of room”, and the other said “hey, this looks like my room”. I lulz’d. So I hooked up the new modem, which supports both the phone service and the 16Mbps service, so my Comcast-supplied hardware won’t have to change any time in the foreseeable future. And then they call in to activate it.

For 45 minutes we sat there and shot the shit about hardware, games, you name it – again, very cool techs – while the one guy was on hold. It was, in fact, horrendous. Finally, he had the other guy call in through the front end (the same number I’d call) and 10 minutes later it was registered to my account and all I had to do was call in to do some MAC authentication so they could leave. I can’t blame them for wanting to leave, Christ, a simple dropoff turned into an hour-long ordeal.

So I called in and activated it, all went smoothly, and now I’m finally back up and running. Finally. Twenty-four fucking days without E-mail. About a week without any server capabilities at all. And that, my friends, is why I say, fuck Comcast’s customer service.

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Let me start off the body of this by saying that, since Disturbed’s Indestructible came out on June 3, I still have yet to listen to any other music. Like, at all…when I gave my only hard copy to my dad, I listened to an older mix in the car on the way home, then promptly burned another Indestructible when I got here. There’s also been a little radio here and there, but I just can’t put these new 14 songs down. Oh yeah, 14 – it’s worth noting that they released Parasite on the Japanese import special edition. That only leaves one more B-side to finally complete my collection – Midlife Crisis.

As for Munchkin – it’s been fun, but I’m starting to get tired of it. Now that everybody knows painfully well how to play, it’s nothing but rules lawyering – and that’s the reason I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering, it stopped being a game and turned into a clusterfuck of technicalities. Well, that’s what’s happening with Munchkin, and it’s the same problem. If I wanted to deal with technicalities all day long, I would’ve gone to law school and become a lawyer.

On the WoW side, I’m almost 70. A little bit past halfway. Been questing in Shadowmoon, and a lot of that’s pretty tough at 69. Also, Arena Season 4 comes out in five days, and when it does I’m buying both my season two swords. I’ll totally have better weapons than Tristan and it’s going to be funny as shit~

I also finally managed to get ahold of Kristen yesterday (actually, the other way around, she got ahold of me). Turns out, she thought I was pissed off because she didn’t want a relationship with me…which, although it’s upsetting, I can’t be pissed off at someone because of the way they feel. No, I was infuriated because she’s been leading me on for the past year. And she didn’t think she had been…so we cleared the air, and I came to grips with just being “the best friend” (god story of my fucking life, fuck you friend zone) and helped her deal with the bullshit that fuckwit’s putting her through. Looks like her eyes are opening though, here’s hoping they don’t snap shut again. For her sake.

Comcast…where do I start? How about at the beginning. A couple weeks ago, they blocked my incoming E-mail (SMTP, port 25) because I was “receiving too much for residential service”. The first CS rep I spoke to was a fucking retard, I hung up on her while she had me on hold. The second, however, was intelligent and helpful, and told me that I was blocked most likely due to spyware sending out spam. Well, that’s impossible, you need to run Microshaft’s garbage to have spyware, which I don’t.

We finally narrowed it down to a block due to incoming volume, though. I managed to get my sending capability back by connecting to the relay server on an alternate port (587 I believe), but obviously I can’t tell every fucking E-mail server in the world to connect to me on a different port just because my ISP blows cock. So, they finally roped me into upgrading to business class to have the block permanently removed by pulling the “there’s nothing we can do manually” bullshit. It’s a good deal anyway, $12 more per month and they double my upstream, give me priority tech support, etc.

So, I had to argue with them for a while to get them to not send out a tech to install the shiny new modem, charging me $99.99 in the process, because I am a god damn tech. They do, however, need to deliver the new modem (why I can’t just pick it up from the nearest Comcast office, which is like 10 minutes away, remains a mystery to me). They were supposed to be here on Monday, but apparently they fail at knocking loud enough for me to hear, so they just left me a note saying “sorry, you weren’t here, blah blah, you’re beat”.

So apparently I was supposed to call them to set up a new time, and apparently I was supposed to read their collective minds to find this out. I called today to say WTF, and they set me up for tomorrow morning. Finally, almost three fucking weeks without E-mail, wonder how much business that’s cost me. Fucking worthless assholes. If you can get FIOS or even DSL, get that and not Comcast. They fucking fail.

Anyway, it’s a short one (aside from the Comcast rant), and I just haven’t had the time to write lately. Or see/listen to/whatever anything worth reviewing. I’m planning to see The Incredible Hulk soon though, and I’ll do a review of that. Yeah I know I didn’t deliver on the Munchkin review, and I wanted to review Iron Man and Indiana Jones, but I just didn’t get the chance. I’ll be sure to do this one though.

PS: Check out the WINE 1.0 and openSuSE 11.0 releases if that’s relevant to your interests.

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Well, to start, Mike brought home this sweet card game called Munchkin – I’ll do a post all about it soon, but the best way I can describe it in a nutshell is “the most awesome card game ever”. Trust me, it’s sweet.

I’m working on two websites – for Kelli Jane, a small company who sells high-end linen products and whatnot; and Green Jobs Philly, a new nonprofit effort to help clean up Philadelphia as far as the environment is concerned. Kelli Jane isn’t a tight deadline per se, but they’d like to have it done quickly – and I’m looking to have Green Jobs Philly done before June 6…which, quite frankly, isn’t going to happen, although not for lack of trying.

But that’s enough about work. Work is boring to read about. Everybody’s in town right now except Robin, so we’ve been partying hard like any good little group of Anons. We’ve been playing a lot of Munchkin, and doing a lot of drinking. We had a Memorial Day barbeque here on Monday (and a pre-Memorial Day barbeque on Sunday) – and before that, we almost got arrested Tuesday night. Go us. And the pool and jacuzzi over at Tristan’s apartment complex have opened up – so we’ve spent some time there. Finally met Anthony’s girlfriend Brianna – who is, in fact, really fucking hot. Nice going, Jerkula.

Oh, and one of these nights we got Kristen and Julia to put my ‘doze box’s keyboard on both their heads…with shoes (sandals, but whatever) on top of that. It was, quite possibly the hottest thing ever. If only they were killing zombies at the same time.

Which brings me to another point…I finally got tired of the whole situation with Kristen. If she wants to be miserable with Cody that’s her choice. And I’ve found that the easiest way to stop getting stuck in loops of just thinking about how great she is, is to focus on the things about her that I don’t like. Such as her incessant non-conformity.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. Hope everyone else has been having a good time.

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