Category Archives: Technology

We’re from AT&T, We Don’t Know The Word, “Stop”

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote this letter as a reply to the fifth or sixth sales representative with AT&T. They are attempting to sell us fiber optic data services. I directed them to our Telecom MSP as a professional courtesy, as I do to all sales folk who directly appeal to us. It’s just good business practice, the MSP exists to handle the complexities of telecommunications for us.

Hello,

You’ll be the fifth AT&T sales associate that I have written this to, so here goes… Please direct all sales inquiries for the COMPANY domain to MSP. Person 1 and Person 2 have been CC’ed to this email. Please feel free to share this detail with any other AT&T sales associates who might want to contact us, or not, as we are just forwarding all of this to our Tcom MSP. 

We are now considering AT&T to be harassing us, but since your company doesn’t seem to understand cease and desist, we’ll just keep on sending all of you to our MSP. I would ask to be taken off the list and to “Please Stop”, but AT&T isn’t interested in stop. Perhaps AT&T doesn’t have a clear definition of the word stop.

Here… here’s the definition of stop:

stop |stäp| 

verb (stops, stopping, stopped) 

1 [ no obj. ] (of an event, action, or process) come to an end; cease to happen:his laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun | the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared.

• [ with present participle ] cease to perform a specified action or have a specified experience: she stopped giggling | [ with obj. ] :  he stopped work for tea.

• [ with present participle ] abandon a specified practice or habit: I’ve stopped eating meat.

• stop moving or operating: he stopped to look at the view | my watch has stopped.

• (of a bus or train) call at a designated place to pick up or let off passengers: main-line trains stop at platform 7.

• Brit. informal stay somewhere for a short time: you’ll have to stop the night.

2 [ with obj. ] cause (an action, process, or event) to come to an end: this harassment has got to be stopped.

• prevent (an action or event) from happening: a security guard was killed trying to stop a raid.

• prevent or dissuade (someone) from continuing in an activity or achieving an aim: a campaign is under way to stop the bombers.

• prevent (someone or something) from performing a specified action or undergoing a specified experience: you can’t stopme fromgetting what I want.

• cause or order to cease moving or operating: he stopped his car by the house |police were given powers to stop and search suspects.

• informal be hit by (a bullet).

• instruct a bank to withhold payment on (a check).

• refuse to supply as usual; withhold or deduct: the union has threatened to stop the supply of minerals.

• Boxing defeat (an opponent) by a knockout: he was stopped in the sixth by Tyson

ORIGIN Old English (for)stoppian‘block up (an aperture)’; related to German stopfen, from late Latin stuppare ‘to stuff.’

Please Stop. 

Please Go Away.

No, We do not want any. Even if we did, we don’t anymore.

Thanks

We’ll keep getting helpful AT&T sales reps until I create a spam filter for the att.net domain and route everything to the trash, which really, I should do out of professional courtesy to AT&T. If it wasn’t for the fact that they at some point could email me about repairs, that would be something I could seriously consider. Alas, I may have to just start ignoring them with my delete key.

Unless they … stop… HA! HA! HA! They don’t know the word, “Stop.”

Puff Datty

Aside

2

What a windy day today has turned out to be! Took care of cleaning the CX-5, then going to the gym, and then with Scott’s help picking up around the house and running the vacuum. Next, laundry going apace. After that a trip to Menards for a fluorescent light bulb and a starter. It’s a F14T12CW. Yay for codes. And I’ll have the bummy starter on me, so that should be a simple thing to replace. Of course, now that I’m looking for anything, it’s all gone. The entire county. Sold out. Never heard of it. Never stocked it.

I know this game. It’s called “Might as well just fucking buy it on God Damned Amazon.”

But I love disappointment. So, that’ll keep my Sunday busy.

The Dark Side of USPS Informed Delivery

Posted on by
2

Early this morning I got my daily alert from the USPS Informed Delivery site. Pictures of incoming mail.

This mornings haul included a letter from Hettinger & Hettinger Law Firm. Seeing this created instant dread. What could it be? It wasn’t a summons or a subpoena, it wasn’t even certified or return receipt requested. But what could it be?

Oh the dread. My mind worked overtime on this. Sure that someone who had a gauzy level of butthurt decided to take me to task for some unknown transgression and hired a lawyer firm to strongarm me into some sort of seedy compliance with some imagined transgression that was best executed in the most passive aggressive way possible. Because why else would lawyers be sending me mail?

What have I done! I couldn’t think of anything but I’m sure there are enemies galore just beyond the extent of the street lamp, angling for their pound of flesh. Something to make this Retrograde in Pisces really hurt. Something from TPTMNBN, I was almost certain of it. Come back from the darkness with one gnarly tentacle shooting out of the inky blackness of their malevolence.

Turns out it was simply an advertisement of the legal services they offer. That’s it.

Why! What do you know! How did you get my address! So, an entire day of worry and panic, expecting every Sherrif’s cruiser to stop, turn on its lights and pursue me. Because Retrograde is built from fuckery and shenanigans.

I can’t take these scares. Law firms sending me mail! It shaves years off my life expectancy just in stress hormones alone!

So the letter sits on my cutting board in the kitchen. I had to walk away from it. I’ve had a whole day to create exciting vistas of suffering and now all of that must be purged. This is going to take a while.

AT&T Is A Pox

Posted on by
Reply

AT&T Sales Associates are a ripe bunch. They reach out at random and contact people who have nothing at all to do with telecom around here. I tell them that we aren’t interested and they keep on going. Keep on flogging their products to people who don’t understand what they do nor can they approve anything about it. So I told them all to just stop it. To take all their sales pitches and go to our Telecom MSP.

To which, their response was remarkably shady! Shocker!

If you no longer wish to receive email information from AT&T, please click here https://www.e-access.att.com/abgmas_n/imail/dispatcher?action=sm.unsub&ct_id=########### Or send notice to: AT&T Business, 55 Corporate Drive, Room 24C27, Bridgewater, NJ 08807.If you are an existing AT&T customer, you may still receive transactional e-mail messages concerning your current products or services.

My last message to them was:

Hello,

And this right here is why we only do business with AT&T through our Telecommunications Managed Service Provider.

No reply needed.

Goodbye.

No love lost. It was a rather surprising turn, you’d think that salespeople would treat the primary decision-maker with something less than shade. Perhaps something more like “Sorry for the trouble, we will update our records!”

Ah well, it’s AT&T. The lesson here is, the statement “it’s AT&T” pretty much explains all you need to know.

And with every waking breath I wish that Alexander Graham Bell continues to burn in hell for what he did, strapped right up there with Thomas Edison, jammed as clear up Satan’s anus as both can fit.

Mercury Retrograde!

Posted on by
Reply

If you work in IT, have anything at all to do with technology, you should be aware of these two dates and times:

Mercury goes Retrograde in Pisces (29o 39″) on March 5, 2019, at 6:19 pm Universal Time, 2:19 pm EDT and 11:19 am PDT.

The Direct Station occurs in Pisces  (16o 06″) on March 28, 2019, at 1:59 pm Universal Time, 10:59 am EDT and 7:59 am PDT.

It is coming up for us on the Eastern Time Zone, in just a few minutes. After that, everything will be impossible, bonkers, or unbearably loopy for about four weeks.

You have been warned!

Bundt Buddy

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve noticed for a long while that no matter how long you microwave a dish, the center of the thing you are reheating is always colder than the ring around whatever you are cooking. Even if you use a flat plate and put it off-center on a rotating micowave tray inside the device.

I have taken to putting whatever I want to cook on a plate and then move it around so there is an empty spot in the middle, and that maneuver started me thinking about the general shape of what I was doing. I’m making a form similar to a bundt pan.

This started me to think about a microwave accessory, a ceramic shaped dish that could you could put your food into, it is shaped to avoid this center dead-spot, so your food cooks faster and more evenly. I call it a Bundt Buddy. LOL.

Anyhow it would be silly as it just is one more thing to clean, but if you want to avoid a cold spot in your microwaved food, make it a ring with nothing in the center, like a food doughnut. Smooth it out afterwards.

Goodbye Twitter

Posted on by
Reply

Today in my email I received this from Twitter Support:

IMG_2439

So if you click on the link, the only option is to self-censor, basically a specially crafted button to blow up whatever the offensive tweet was. In my case, my heartfelt wish that our current human stain in the White House has a stroke or heart attack. I don’t want to do anything to him, I want him to simply sieze up and die all by himself. Fly into a rage, then grab his chest and drop over stone dead.

So, Twitter took it upon themselves to force me to censor myself. Right after I got this message, I most certainly did click the “Remove” button, which blew up the Tweet. Then I downloaded my Twitter archive, once that was safe, I then deactivated my Twitter account. I would much rather it all get blown up to kingdom come than self-censor myself against the pile of waste sitting behind the Resolute desk.

I don’t really care to discuss the First Amendment ramifications, as I’m absolutely positive that Twitter will hide in the tall grass of their TOS. And that’s actually quite fine. I haven’t used Twitter in years, only logging in to lob gems like this one at the pile of fecal matter with a spray tan. I deleted Facebook, I can delete Twitteriffic too.

What am I missing out on? Nah, nothing lost. Peace of mind gained. Goodbye Twitter.

A Little Tired

Posted on by
Reply

Every day brings me an endless buffeting stream of reminders about how toxic and unpleasant Facebook has become. Early last week one of the apps that I use, Social Fixer for Facebook or maybe it was FB Purity reported to me a laundry list of people who have unfriended me or otherwise disappeared from Facebook.

It might have been the straw that broke the camels back. Or at least contributed to the collapse. Even random pages that are meant to be for cooking, or are supposed to be funny post stories and the top-rated comments are so awful. Almost always there is some babble about Clinton this or that, or Snowflake or Libtard, which are all phrases that I’ve really grown tired seeing.

I once thought that the last bastion of security would be the relative anonymity, or at least the implied carelessness surrounding the emotional response signals that each Facebook story features. But this in itself has become onerous. I am no longer able to just feel like clicking on some sort of reaction on a story is something I can just toss away. Now I have to evaluate the emotional carriage of my emotional signal. If you see something unpleasant, how do you emotionally signal? What if you accidentally laugh, or if the tragedy is wrapped in comedy? What if you see something you are expected to be Sad about, but instead you end up being Angry. Or Wow. Or Thumbs Up.

What does it mean when you learn about a train derailment that killed 100 nuns? Thumbs up? Is that what you react with? And then what happens when people start to measure you for your reaction? Is Wow more appropriate, or wouldn’t Sad be more apt?

Facebook has become a consumer of emotional processing energy. I won’t say that it is an emotional vampire, but I would start to lean in that direction for the comments section on almost every story on Facebook for that. It has become an unwelcome diner at the feast, with its dead little dolls-eyes just staring off into space, with its figurative knife and fork in clenched fists on the table, demanding emotional processing energy. Always something provocative, always selected and wrapped by the pinnacle of artificially manipulative programming known as the Facebook Wall Algorithm. Stories meant to entice you to consume content, and while consuming, stab you in the side and collect the energy you were originally going to use for, well, anything else really. It’s a story designed to get you going, to entice you, to engage you. It’s powered, insidiously, by the very people you know and love, it is the darker side to social networking. We started out doing mutual grooming in a rainforest, and now we have created an entire ecosystem devoted to maximum impact and maximum response in a social context. We’ve used all the energy that we would have used to socialize with each other and channeled it into socializing on a site that manipulates us to squeeze the maximum output from us at all times. And then, monetize that very squeeze.

It’s like being nuzzled by a giant mosquito. While it’s busy at the feast, it injects anti-coagulants and painkillers in an effort to get the host to ignore it is there doing real damage. Facebook is a vampire with a sirens song and an anaesthetic bite. Facebook is a social parasite and it’s almost a perfect one. Designed to be attractive, innocuous, apparently innocent, but manifestly toxic, virulent, and disastrous.

So what is to be done? Facebook still has quite a bit of energy in it’s identity token leverage, you can’t leave because how will you use another site that offered instant gratification because you could “Sign Up” using Facebook, so that once you were signed into Facebook, you effectively had Single Sign On enabled on all those other sites. It made joining services a snap, it makes authentication a snap, and it insidiously leverages the service into your life. You couldn’t leave if you wanted to. You are trapped.

So I won’t quit Facebook. But I have deleted it from my bookmarks and I will delete it from my iPad and my iPhone. The account will dwell, intact and unchanged. I am withdrawing my consent to be squeezed for emotional processing energy. I will no longer process the jobs presented by the emotional response flag system on the Facebook Wall. I will not like something, or be angry, or sad, or wow, or laugh.

This is a matter of self-preservation. Now that people I know are leaving the platform, this seems like a good time to seek out this snuffed campfire path in the road with Facebook. There will be charcoal in the burn ring, there will be seats arrayed around the campfire, but I won’t be sitting in them anymore. I have to see this as an expression of self-care. I have to think of my own emotional processing energy first, to be careful with how I spend it and with whom.

So the things that I write about on Facebook will be posted on this Blog. It won’t likely be long form work, like this, and it won’t be as intimate as some of the things I’ve shared on Facebook, as the blog has a very rudimentary audience control system. Either a post is password protected, or it is public. There are no levels of gray, like there is on Facebook.

I can’t anymore. I give up.

Slack vs. Jabber

Posted on by
Reply

Several years ago I started working for a new company. Their phone system was stuck in the past. The past, like Version 4 when Version 10 was being sold. So we had to upgrade, there really wasn’t any other way around it.

Enter Cisco. As VOIP hardware manufacturers go, if you stay in the silo you’ll have a pretty good life. Call Manager, Unity, and Presence are a heady combination. I decided early on to hire a local company to help me with the design and the initial layout and setup, and I will always regard that choice as one of the best I have ever made, professionally. They did an amazing job, and their staff are absolute tops in their game. They are expensive, but in the end I think worth it. So they came, helped install the Cisco Business Essentials 6000 server, and all the heavy lifting that was needed to get all three products up and running, so that people who were using the old system saw next to nothing different about how everything worked. That’s a kind of holy grail in IT.

A part of the trio of products was Cisco Presence, or to use a shorthand about what it really was, simply Jabber. Jabber is an instant messaging platform, and I had quite a bit of experience as Jabber is, at least ostensibly, an open-source system. I had lots of Jabber experience back at my previous employ and I was looking forward to seeing Jabber rolled out across the company that I now work for. The previous employ was centered on Apple technology and as an IT administrator, Apple was like waking up in the Garden of Eden. It was an earthly delight. The Apple iteration of Jabber included a CLI option switch that allowed you to instantly join everyone in the Jabber directory, nee an LDAP directory, all together. It was called “–auto_buddy” and I loved that feature. It was the killer part of Jabber from Apple. When I added someone to OpenDirectory, I could open a Terminal and throw this one command and all my work would automatically add all my coworkers together, everyone is everyone else’s buddy. It was great, I really enjoyed it.

So then, years forward, on with Cisco Presence, their implementation of Jabber. Off searching for my favorite CLI friend, “–auto_buddy”, only to find out, none of that exists. And so, that hobbled Jabber immediately. Instant Messaging’s ROI is only really salient when you have everyone engaged. You can’t really argue about ROI until that point, because when you have only a handful of people actually connected, they don’t see the point, because not everyone is connected, including the people they want to communicate with right now. If you can’t do a thing immediately, then what is the point of doing it at all? This is the core reason why a lot of tech adoption trips and falls on its face. Especially with collaboration solutions like Jabber. Until everyone joins and uses the system, convincing them that they should use it might as well be one of Hercules’s tasks, like cleaning the Augean Stables. So without my ability to link everyone up, with “–auto_buddy”, I had a piecemeal system. Without the ability for everyone to see everyone else, adoption tripped and fell flat on its figurative face.

Shortly thereafter, it exited the cultural consciousness until years later, when a new coworker had stoked interest in it all over again. But it was doomed, not this time by the lack of demonstrable ROI or the lack of “–auto_buddy”, but rather by compliance control. By the time I had installed the required pieces for compliance, the entire affair was loaded into the figurative airlock and blown out into space.

Before the end of Jabber, and running currently is another system, one that I find more engaging at least personally and that is Slack. It’s free to use, which is a huge help, and also available everywhere. I don’t have to limit it behind the walled garden of our corporate VPN. That is a huge benefit and really eases the use of it, in every case. I can immediately see the benefits of using Slack, especially in groups like mine, in Information Technology. So that’s currently the extent of it. Again, tech adoption is flat and terminal, the selling point for Slack is still tied up with the same point for Jabber. You can only demonstrate the ROI when you have full engagement, and you can only get full engagement when people see the rewards of ROI. So even Slack is just a moribund as Jabber was. But at least with Slack there is room for enticing directions it could take. I’ve been kicking around the notion of examining Slack’s position in a B2B framework. Like between MSP’s and their customers. The MSP starts a Slack and invites their customers to join. Then each customer has a channel that they are invited to. Then the company staff at the MSP hop on Slack and use it for their own benefit. Everything is segregated using Slack’s internal controls, so the MSP gets a benefit immediately and the customers can effectively chat up their reps with a single click on an app, a website, or their phones. This could enhance the collaborative power between customer and provider. Invoices posted, updates about payments, and with IFTTT looming in the background, new automated benefits could be crafted and rolled out to customers immediately.

This could also revolutionize B2C relationships as well, but that would take more corporate bravery than even the B2B solution would. I don’t actually expect anyone to seriously accept my shoot-the-moon ideas, but I would like to imagine the world where I could start my Slack app, see all my professional relationships and be able to communicate with them that way. Maybe someday if Slack succeeds and more people ask the right questions. More people actively interested in collaboration would also help.

Windows 10, QNAP, and error 0x80004005

Posted on by
1

While setting up a new Windows 10 laptop we ran into a head-scratcher problem. We store a lot of our setup data in a network attached storage system called a QNAP. The laptop was connected to our local area network over Wifi, and everything connection-wise looked to be good. We could ping both the IP address of the QNAP and the DNS name as well, so we knew for a fact that the laptop could indeed send and receive traffic with the QNAP. When we attempted to call up the QNAP using Windows Explorer on this laptop we used the UNC convention to get to our data, like this \\10.1.1.100 and when we press enter, Windows 10 would pause for a short few seconds and then throw back an error code:

Windows Cannot Access \\10.1.1.100 Error Code: 0x80004005 Unspecified Error.

We then attempted to reboot, then we escalated to a full system rebuild and nothing seemed to work for us. We fiddled with PowerShell commands, to no effect, also flipping on and off IPv6, which also had no effect. So our next step was to switch to wildcat debugging and just start taking wild potshots at the laptop trying to find a way to just make this work. And we found the solution, thanks to a user by the name of dimamed on Spiceworks, who posted the solution we needed:

Adjust Registry Value:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters\AllowInsecureGuestAuth, and set the DWORD to 1.

Then I closed the registry editor, opened up Windows Explorer again, tried the QNAP as I usually do and it worked! We don’t really need it to function for our end users, but it became a matter of professional pursuit to make sure that all our technology can work together properly. It can, with some coaxing.

We hope this solution works for other folks, if you also run into this issue. Please leave a comment if you would, so we can see just how much of an impact something like this has if you don’t mind.