Spending way too long this evening twiddling around with NetStumbler and my wifi antenna trying to (re-)pick up a signal from a neighbor’s house, maybe because it rained this evening, or maybe because the people who actually own those signals are walking around in their houses and inadvertently interfering with them, or…wait, it’s because our ongoing internet saga is still ongoing, because Comcast can’t simply change the name on the bill. All we wanted was to change the name the bills are addressed to so that they actually get delivered to us, not our landlord, but apparently this involves cancelling the old account, (disconnecting the cable?), shipping back the modem, creating a new account, (reconnecting the cable?), getting the modem sent back to us. With luck they’ll realize they’re sending out a disconnect-guy and a reconnect-guy, get smart and collapse these into a “don’t send a guy out” guy (knowing my luck though, they’ll get out of sequence such that the reconnect-guy gets there first, sees our cable is already live and goes home, then the disconnect-guy comes…) Anyway, they’re sending a self-install guy out on Tues. to hand us the self-install kit and, presumably, go home. It would be funny to just leave the old modem connected and blinking on the nice live cable and point self-install guy to it when he asks to see where I’ll be self-installing the modem he hands me, pointing out the idiocy of this whole scenario, but (again, the my-luck thing) he’ll probably just not give us the modem for the new account and we’ll get socked with two ridiculous not-returned-equipment charges (for this one, not returned because duh, you need a cable modem to use cable internet, and ultimately for the one self-install guy didn’t give us because he saw we already had one). (Either I’m being overly cynical here, or I know the bureaucratic idiocy of companies all too well; you are free to take your pick.)
Today after the aforementioned lab-trekking and before the aforementioned car-dropping (see previous entry), I was at No*’s house and we watched The Net…I forgot how bad that movie was, in the amusing sense of bad (since we actually know stuff about computers, movies involving “hackers” kind of just end up being all comedies). Or mostly I paid too much attention to the redgreenblueredgreenblueredgreenblue of the DLP projector painting each frame one color at a time, and the rainbow frames happened to integrate into The Net as long as my eyes and/or the scene didn’t move too quickly. One of those little blessings/curses of being me is that I notice everything; my attention is kind of everywhere all at once, at seemingly hundreds of samples each second. Usually it just ends up being more “stuff” than I can process, but a side effect is that I think I pick up subtleties, those little touches (or lack thereof) that a lot of people wouldn’t. Figuring out what they mean (if anything), though, that’s another matter.
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