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Status unchanged

Well, folks, I’m still offline at home. I may have opportunities to get online here and there over the next few days, but it’s starting to look like “New ISP shopping” time at Casa Jaquandor. EarthLink told me day before yesterday that a tech would be out “tomorrow” (yesterday, in real time) to check our phone lines. I have no way of knowing if that happened (they said he wouldn’t need access to our apartment at all, which is good because The Wife and I both worked yesterday), but when I got home, our DSL modem wasn’t even picking up the DSL line. At least before it would pick up the line but not connect to the Internet; now it wasn’t picking up the line at all.

So I called yet again, to be greeted by a recorded message that said, “According to our records, your issue has been resolved successfully. Would you still like to speak to a representative?” I said yes, and then proceeded to rip into the poor guy who answered. Oh well. The long-and-short of it is that another tech will be dispatched, yada yada yada. I’m not optimistic. I told the guy, this is EarthLink’s last chance, and believe me, it is: if we’re not reliably connected to the Internet by the time I get home from work tomorrow, I will cancel my EarthLink subscription and begin looking for a new ISP. The guy assured me that it would be resolved, but at this point, I have less than zero confidence in EarthLink’s ability to provide the bare minimum of technical support to a customer who has been giving them forty bucks a month for seven years.

So, I may have new posts up at times over the next indeterminate period. I hope to, anyway. Keep checking back, and thanks for checking in anyway!

(Oh, and for my Buffalo region readers, what’s a good ISP in these parts if all I want is Internet — no phone and no cable teevee?)

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Holding Pattern Omega

Well, a tech should be coming out this morning to look at the phone lines here at Casa Jaquandor, in an effort to determine why our Internet service from EarthLink has been so calamitously bad this last week. So I suppose by this time tomorrow I’ll know if we will still be EarthLink customers or not. Their options are: fix our DSL, or wish us well as we take our money to FIOS. Ugh!

And there’s lots of stuff I want to blog, but for now, it all has to wait.

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Irony is lost upon his soul….

Just seen on Facebook, in comments to someone’s post:

I’m sorry, but this is what you get for picking a Dem nominee who was a Senator for about 3 min before running for President. Obama is a lot of ideas and absolutely no clue how to DO anything.

What’s funny about it is that the person offering this view was, in the last New York gubernatorial election, a vocal supporter of Carl Paladino.

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Sentential Links #230

Sorry this is late, folks, but EarthLink is not allowing me to do many of the things I like to do online. Fewer links than usual, but onward with the linkage!

:: In one of those memes I do sometimes, there was a question about the movie that I found most scary. The problem was that I saw it when I was nine, give or take a year, couldn’t remember the title, and I didn’t even know how well I remembered the details. (Wow, that does sound like a scary movie!)

:: Watch Family Guy for a week. I think we can take it for granted that you’re going to see an incredible amount of misogyny, but what does Seth McFarlane have against Asians? (I keep trying to figure out of McFarlane is that bigoted, or if he is trying for shock value with a lot of the jokes on that show.)

:: I have a weird fascination with X-ray photos that show the path of some object into a person’s head. (Well, I didn’t until I read this…and now I do!)

:: I lost interest in football years ago when I realized that the quarterbacks weren’t calling the plays. These days, neither are the coaches, at least not on the spot. The reason video games like Madden can be so realistic is that real football games are as programmed as software. Games are simultaneous runnings of competing algorithms and the coaches who write the code days ahead of time are on hand in case bugs develop.

:: The first day I was there we stopped at a tractor supply store and I bought a pair of bib overalls for myself and a John Deer bandana for Yoda. (A new convert, huzzah! She was visiting Beth of The World Needs More Pie, one of my favorite new blogs and people behind the words.)

Well, that’s about all I could manage to find when I was able to access the Internet for two minutes here, three minutes there. Still, good stuff! More next week. I hope.

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Holding Pattern Eta

AAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

OK, now that’s out of my system. For now, anyway. Yes, the Saga of the Awful Internet Connection here at Casa Jaquandor continues, with my connectivity woes now reaching Day Five. Oh it makes me mad.

Now, there’s the whole “blessing in disguise” thing, yada yada yada, I’ve been reading a bit more the last few days and I’ve been writing a bit more too, but still: I like the Internet and I expect it to work, which since last Wednesday it has not. Which annoys me greatly.

Today I finally knuckled under when I got home from work and got EarthLink on the phone. What’s happened for days is that the connection is only available for a few minutes at a time (at most), with long periods of connectionlessness in between. Today the “no connection” period lasted, as far as I can tell, overnight and through just about all of today. This sort of thing has happened before, but not in quite a long time, and it’s finally become annoying to the point where I’m genuinely considering switching to Verizon FIOS if it’s not fixed.

I spent almost two hours on the phone with a service rep with EarthLink, who was very polite and very willing to repeat himself a lot (a necessity, given his very thick Indian accent). He did a good job, although clearly my problem did not get resolved. But it was clear that he was following scripts and decision trees, as there were several times when I tried to offer information that he hadn’t asked for, only to have him basically ignore what I had said and plow on to the next point. First we did the “usual” stuff (unplug the modem, wait ten seconds, plug it back in; describe for him my configuration of phone and data cords; et cetera), and when we seemed to have exhausted all of those alternatives, he talked me through some stuff that I didn’t know anything about, which seems to have consisted of accessing setup screens and configuration menus and other things I had never seen before.

To his credit, my rep guy at no point sounded at all frustrated as the “Internet” light on the modem refused to come on and stay on, no matter what we did. But it was interesting how obvious it was when we finally reached the final item in his particular bag of tricks, because at that moment, he said “Here’s your case reference number, someone will call you within twenty-four hours, have a nice night.” And the call ended right then and there. I’m not sure what that means – at one point it sounded as if he was arranging for a tech to pay us a visit to get things figured out, but he didn’t say that outright and as of right now I have no idea what the problem here is. I do know that it can’t be anything that we did, as we have made zero changes in our Internet setup at home, with no ill effects on the DSL until now.

So here, I am trying to write posts in OpenOffice, paste them into a Blogger window, and “publish” them in the few brief seconds of being connected that I get here and there, once in a while. Hopefully this ends soon….

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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: The Galaxy Garden is a garden whose plants are cultivated, grown, and placed in such a way as to represent the Milky Way Galaxy. This is amazing! It reminds me, in a way, of the Carl Sagan “Solar System Walk” in Ithaca, which I see part of every year when The Wife and I go there for the Apple Festival, but whose comprising monuments I can never get pictures of because they’re always crowded with people.

:: The other day I posted a video of a Star Trek: The Next Generation clip, in which Captain Picard joins a woman he’s met in playing the flute he acquired in an earlier episode, one of the more memorable episodes called “The Inner Light”. Here, then, is another video, wherein a guy plays that same melody on the Theremin.

Wondering what a Theremin is? Here’s the basic background. It’s an early electronic musical instrument, invented in the 1920s by a guy named Theremin. (Hence the name!) I’m not sure how it works, but the pitch and such are literally controlled by the position of the performer’s hands in the air around it, so it’s the only musical instrument I know of — save the voice — that can be played without touching anything. It was used a lot in movie filmscores of the mid-20th century, especially in science fiction flicks.

:: Map of Metal — as in, I think, heavy metal, that wonderfully glam music whose heyday was in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. I wasn’t a huge metal-head, relatively speaking, but I enjoyed quite a lot of it at the time. (Never went to a concert, though. In fact, to this day, the closest I’ve come to attending a rock concert is the Beatles tribute band that played with the Buffalo Philharmonic last year.) I’m actually linking this site on an “unvetted” basis, as it appears to be quite heavily graphical in nature, and with my recent connectivity issues, I haven’t been able to load the entire site to see what it’s like. Someone let me know if it’s cool, OK?

More next week!

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Been good to know you….

A long-favorite blog of mine, “Mental Multivitamin”, has gone “Read by invitation only” after being around for quite a long time. I know I’ve been reading M-MV for at least four years and probably longer. I have no idea what led “Mrs. M-MV” to take that step, but I do find it a shame. (Her blog never had comments at all, so I can only assume she’s been the recipient of nasty e-mails, or maybe she just felt it necessary to “close the door” now for some reason.)

Oh well. I wish her, and her family, well.

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Holding Pattern Epsilon

Sorry for the lack of posting, folks, but again, the DSL here at Casa Jaquandor has been in and out, all weekend long. It’s been enormously frustrating. I was willing to grant that the weather we had several days ago was behind the outages at first, but that excuse is getting harder to accept.

Now, our ISP is EarthLink, and has been since 2003. But I’ve noticed that since we switched from dial-up to DSL, when I view the blog from home, it shows up on my SiteMeter as a hit from Verizon.net. So my supposition is that EarthLink’s DSL is simply Verizon’s, rebranded in the same way that a lot of the store-brand merchandise at big stores like Target or Wal-Mart is name-brand stuff with a new label slapped on. If that’s the case, then I wonder if Verizon is purposely letting their DSL go to hell in hopes that enough people will sign up for FIOS.

If that’s the case, well…it may end up working. We have no interest in a cable teevee plan, so if we decide to ditch the DSL, our best option is to go with FIOS Internet on its own (perhaps also ditching our landline telephone). For now, I’ve been posting lots of nasty things about EarthLink on Twitter, to see if they pay attention to that. Calling their service number isn’t an appealing option; I’ve gone that route before only to end up talking to a call center employee in Mumbai who very nicely talks me through the steps in power-cycling my modem. Which I’ve already done. Multiple times. Each day.

Oh well. We’ve had this problem with our DSL before, and it’s always turned out OK after a few days. Hopefully that happens again now, but if it doesn’t, I’m prepared to pull the trigger.

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20 Questions about Star Wars

01. Who is your favorite character from the original trilogy?

Han Solo. He’s got the coolest ship, the coolest weapon that isn’t a lightsaber, and I like his character arc from outsider who doesn’t believe in anything to full-fledged member of the cause.

02.How would you rank the original trilogy, in order from favorite to least favorite?

A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi

03. What are two of your favorite action scenes from the original trilogy?

The rescue of Luke and the escape from Vader at the end of TESB, and you know what? I’m gonna stick up for the Ewok battle, which I’ve never disliked (although it could have used a bit less broad comedy).

04. What do you consider the most emotional scene from the original trilogy?

Darth Vader’s rejection of the Dark Side. In fact, I think that scene is even more powerful in light of the Prequel trilogy, because now we have some idea of what must be going through his head as he watches his son there, writhing on the ground from the same Dark Side lightning that the Emperor used to kill Mace Windu at the time that he first rejected the Good Side. The scene is edited together so brilliantly — Vader stands there, watching; Luke screams “Father, please!”; Vader watches some more; the Emperor starts to get caught up in his own glee; Vader glimpses at the Emperor and sees the joy in Palpatine’s eyes; Vader looks back at his son; Vader looks back at the Emperor…and then decides that he can’t do this Dark Side thing any longer. That scene packs an amazing wallop for me.

05. Do you have any favorite toys or collectibles based off the original trilogy?

Mostly ships. (I should probably do a post of my Star Wars toys one of these days. It wouldn’t be a terribly long post, really.)

06. Which character had the most unsatisfying death in the original trilogy?

None of them are particularly “unsatisfying”, really — I’m not even bothered by Boba Fett’s demise, although a little more of a bad-ass exit wouldn’t have been unwarranted. Maybe a bit of a fight with Han before Han manages to set off the jet-pack, or something like that.

07. What’s your favorite ship or vehicle from the original trilogy?

The Millennium Falcon.

08. Who is your favorite character from the prequel trilogy?

Obi Wan Kenobi.

09. How would you rank the prequel trilogy, in order from favorite to least favorite?

Revenge of the Sith
Attack of the Clones
The Phantom Menace

10. What are two of your favorite action scenes from the prequel trilogy?

Obi Wan’s fight with Jango Fett on Kamino and his subsequent pursuit of him through the asteroid belt of Geonosis; Obi Wan versus Darth Vader on Mustafar.

11. What do you consider the most emotional scene from the prequel trilogy?

I found Revenge of the Sith almost emotionally overwhelming, starting with Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side. His subsequent acts of betrayal were terribly sad. One moment stands out: when Plo Koon is leading a contingent of clone troopers into battle, and they receive the go-ahead for Order 66. He turns to them, yells “Come on!”, and then looks on in shock and bewilderment as they aim their weapons at him. John Williams’s music for this sequence is some of the best of the entire Saga.

12. Do you have any favorite toys or collectibles based off the prequel trilogy?

Again, mostly ships. I never did much with action figures, although I do have a couple.

13. Which character had the most unsatisfying death in the prequel trilogy?

We’re straying into Fixing the Prequels territory here, aren’t we? I don’t have a problem with Padme dying essentially of a broken heart, since she hasn’t just lost Anakin but her beloved Republic — she has lost the very world in which she wanted to raise her children. I think Lucas was striving for something very operatic here, and deaths from broken hearts aren’t unheard-of in opera. But it should have been drawn a bit more clearly, I think.

14. What’s your favorite ship or vehicle from the prequel trilogy?

There are wonderful ships all through the Prequel Trilogy; I love just about all of them. Picking just one…oh geez, I don’t know. Maybe the Jedi starfighters in Revenge of the Sith, the ones that are on the way to being TIE Fighters.

15. If you could get a personalized Star Wars themed license plate for your car, what would it say?

E CHU TA. (Points to whomever can identify that!)

16. Do you have a favorite Star Wars based video game?

I really need to start playing some Star Wars games. I haven’t played any of ’em. Yeesh!

17. Have you read any of the Star Wars books (expanded universe), and if so, what are your favorites?

I haven’t read any in a long time. I started following them eagerly when they started coming out in the early 90s, but too many were coming out too quickly and the quality tended to be very uneven, so I eventually stopped. I wouldn’t mind reading a few now, but I’m not sure which are the “good” ones.

I loved Timothy Zahn’s novels, though.

18. Are you a fan of the “Clone Wars” cartoon series?

I don’t have Cartoon Network, so I haven’t seen any of it. I need to.

19. What (or who) do you hope to see in upcoming Star Wars TV series?

I’d like to see stories that take place well outside the scope of the “Big Story”. Maybe follow some Corellian pirate around, or something like that. I’d like to see tales that follow characters who aren’t Sith or Jedi or tied somehow to the fate of the Republic. Small-scale stories, perhaps. It’s a big galaxy!

20. If you were stranded on a desert island with one Star Wars character, who would you want it to be and why?

R2-D2. Seriously, he’s an intergalactic Swiss army knife. He can start fires, cut firewood, stun game so I can kill it, scan for passing ships, and so on.

Of course, if my choice was between R2 and Princess Leia, then….

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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