My TV and internet service went dark tonight. I was watching TV at the time so I knew right when it went out, luckily this did not happen during the Superbowl. At least I got through fairly quickly on the phone (which is luckily not VoIP or I would have had to send a letter). I was either the first customer to call or the lucky benefactor of a localized complete outage. BrightHouse can’t see either my cable box or modem. The customer service rep said that if more customers called it will be categorized as an outage and techs will be scrambled no matter what time. If it’s just me I’ll have to wait until the morning.
She then noted that, “So the best case scenario is that someone hit a utility pole or something…” Awkward pause. “Well I mean that wouldn’t be good if someone died, but that would mean it’s an outage and that we’ll fix it tonight.” If I want my internet fixed tonight does that mean I want someone to die?
FYI: This was posted over EV-DO which serves as a great backup for these things. Especially when you’re like me and have thrown out your phone books and need to find the number to report an outage.
Are call volumes at big call centers ever normal? It seems every time I call, no matter the time, certain companies talk about an unusually high call volume. One day I’d love to hear a recording of the truth about how they are understaffed because of budgeting and poor management.
Phishing is a major problem on MySpace because of the ability to style pages with CSS. Spammers set up account pages disguised to look like the standard MySpace login page and then capture login info for users. Shortly after they capture your info, a bunch of spam bulletins get posted under your name and all your friends realize you’re not very smart. It doesn’t seem to be happening as much now, probably because users are looking out for it, but it still happens. Sometimes to people that should reallllly know better.
Yesterday Tom Anderson got phished. Tom’s the co-founder of MySpace and is the default friend for new sign ups. With 148 million friends, posting a bulletin on Tom’s account can generate a LOT of traffic. While the bulletin was still live (it was deleted pretty quickly) I couldn’t get to the attacker’s website. I got to it later on and it’s disguised to look like a MySpace sign-in page. I’m guessing they got info on a lot of user accounts. The page has now been deleted and I can’t find much anywhere on the site. It’s hosted out of Singapore and registered to Marc Olano. For his sake I hope his site was hacked. Most likely that’s the case, that is how these people operate. If you want to check out the empty apache listing, be my guest: http://www.marcolano.com/login/.
Screenshot:
Note: Though the link in the screenshot appears to be a link to a MySpace profile (which doesn’t actually exist), it’s HTML and actually links to the aforementioned website. The funny part was whoever was smart enough to be able to post a bulletin on the most popular MySpace profile was not smart enough to actually make it look legit, KTHX!
The history of AT&T’s brand name just got a little more complicated. After spending $5 billion to make AT&T Wireless Cingular, the new AT&T will start to spend billions to make Cingular AT&T.
What I’ve wanted lately is a reverse tracking service of sort. View all of the incoming packages from a given carrier coming to me (based on the address the carrier has on record for me). This is more complicated than the simple tracking options today because there would need to be address authentication, but it would be such a time saver. You could subscribe to one feed and see everything that’s coming. Right now I have like 4-5 different packages somewhere in the queue and it’s a pain to find the number and track any of them individually.
I’m going to Albuquerque next week and no matter how many times I have looked it up I have never spelled it right. Only thanks to Google can I actually find the real place. It’s bringing back flashbacks of being a terrible speller growing up.
I can’t believe ESPN.com is still putting auto-play video on their homepage. You might as well start using the blink tag or use a really lame animated GIF. Apple has some video ads out there, but you have to hit play first. Same with Google’s video ads. I just want to check a few scores ESPN, not here some video start playing over the music I am already listening to.
Will It Blend? is one of the best viral marketing campaigns ever. It’s a more exciting version of David Letterman’s extremely bland Will It Float? gag. An old man with a lab coat puts crazy things in a blender and watches the results.Crazy things like golf balls and a whole can of coke (aluminum and all!). The videos are produced by BlendTec, which sells high-end blenders for both home and commercial use. They are not average blenders, a quick look at any of the videos or a price tag (starting at $399!) makes that clear. Despite the price, I’m guessing they are going to sell a ton of them. The best part is there is almost no cost to the campaign, the videos are cheap to host and the host Tom Dickson is BlendTec’s CEO. Over at YouTube they are tearing it up.
I got a visit from FedEx this morning and finally got to play with this. It runs like a champ. There are only a couple case changes from the 1st gen MBP, namely FireWire 800 and a hidden status light for the built-in iSight (you can only see the light when it’s on, in the off state you just see the silver bezel). Windows Vista RC1 installed like a champ with Parallels Desktop, it can even run full screen while I use OS X on my desktop screen. So far so good, but I’m still busy copying stuff over and making it my own.
