fine whine

I cannot be sure of this, of course, but I think I may have been a victim of outsourced customer service today. All I have to go on are a couple of names that don't sound like typical white folk (yeah, we're treading in ethnic waters now, but I'm nothing more than a insensitive American): Govardhana Chakrapani and Savitha Kumari. I can only suspect that I'm either dealing with India or a strange place without the letter 'e'.

So what? As long as they can help me, I don't care who or where they are. But have they helped me? It's difficult to say. I'm in something of an odd position, as I am asking them for help with something to which I have no claim: somebody else's website. Admittedly I am supposed to be making some improvements to it (and I am, really) but my name in no way is connected to the account. So that's a minor hurdle. Might I also mention that this is the third migration these people (the actual site owners) have had since signing up with Dell hosting oh so long ago? Moreover might I mention that this time around the new hosts didn't have copies from even the previous week to start from?

Oh, and that they changed the passwords, perhaps? I'd like to know, in general, why they can't use something less esoteric for the logins for these "professional" hosting services. Why must it be what seems to be a random smattering of letters and numbers? That's what passwords should be made of, not usernames. I get to use plain English for my login on my three-bucks-a-month box, so why not one that costs seven or seventy times that? Where's the user friendliness here? Or is it over on the other side of the planet? This frustrates me, even when I know that I could probably bill the hours spent sitting on the 24x7 customer support line (it's one guy in Bangalore, I'd wager). I just don't want the hassle.

I may just be giving up too soon, but I cannot seem to find to find the origin of the phrase "on the up and up" anywhere on the known web (by which I mean several Google searches came up with nothing). Anybody have some obscure knowledge I don't? I need no definitions, just origins.

I had this whole rant planned out about what I liked and didn't like. It had something to do with my reading of Richard Roeper's book (of lists) 10 sure signs a movie character is doomed, probably about my disagreements with his opinions. Also, Jessica picked out How to lose a guy in 10 days from the library, it being one movie I wasn't really in line to see.

Either way, I forgot. I did, however, read and enjoy Eric Garcia's Hot and sweaty Rex, both for the gleeful way it upends the detective genre and its Miami pretense without all the usual, well, pretense. It didn't read like the usual south Florida book potboiler, and I think that's a good thing.

Wait, I may have remembered. Since this site is first a memory dump for me and only second a source of entertainment for you, I will jot this down for posterity. I really do not care for Open Pit brand barbecue sauce, particularly the "Thick & Tangy" brown sugar & spice variant. I suspect it's one of the spices that doesn't strike my palate the way it should, but which one? The red pepper? The soy sauce? The corn syrup solids? Sulfiting agents? Tamarind? Mustard flour? oleoresin paprika? Oddly enough, that last one, oleoresin paprika, is the only spice (unless hickory smoke flavoring and caramel color count) that is in a lesser quantity than light brown sugar. Which, I might add, is among the less than 2% ingredients list. Moreover, there are so many brackets inside parentheses and duplicated ingredients (like the unnecessary caramel color) as to indicate some sinister math problem, not a sweet and tangy BBQ sauce. And can they really get away with the plainly named "spice" and "flavoring"? Both are there.

Anyway, as long as I can remember to do so, I'm not buying it again. KC Masterpiece all the way for me.

Evidently in getting my previous heads-up about termites fourth-hand (as it was) meant that some of the information got a little scrambled. As it turns out, we have not to worry about termites, but in fact the house we are pursuing has been infested with the carcasses of carpenter ants. At least, that's how the buyer's agent described it from the report. I suppose some sort of weight has been lifted.

When it comes to free web services and sites, I am an utterly hopeless compulsive joiner. Behind me in my years of web use I have left a wide swath of forgotten accounts and un-revisited pages. Some I would use for months and others I would forget almost immediately after joining. At one time I collected email addresses (both for forwarding and actual mailboxes) and had so many that I needed to use a full sheet of paper to map out which went where (but never why).

So to stumble across something like the fantastic metafilter and to be told that no new users were being accepted was something of a slap in the face. To then see that it won some prominent blog community awards for being a community site made it even more so. I wanted to join and contribute, not just leech off the links and vicariously enjoy the conversations.

Well, I guess the powers that be decided to open back the floodgates and allow us peons back in, albeit at the somewhat limiting rate of twenty a day. Naturally I was poised on the page, anxiously refreshing until the very second the signup link was to go live... and I made it. I was the seventh or eighth person today and likely not the last for a long while of people to join, and hopefully contribute something to what is one of my primary sources for new and interesting stuff on the web.

There's really no reason for me to mention any of this, other than not wanting to talk about the fact that the inspectors found some preliminary evidence of termite activity in the house we're pursuing. Oh, and I didn't hate Men with brooms, I just didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had wanted. Likewise The league of extraordinary gentlemen, which was far too slapdash and cobbled-together of a movie to be truly enjoyable, and quite frankly the CGI looked somewhat dated. So it's not good enough to be a SFX showreel nor does the movie stand on its own without the flashiness. All in all the book's much better (the graphic novel by Alan Moore), though I have to admit that the Nemomobile's a fine looking car, dual elephants on the front end and all.

On a related note, I enjoyed watching the BBC's The office's first series far more, and it didn't have any special effects at all.

Woo hoo, another April the first. I didn't get taken in by any pranks (for such an affable bunch my co-workers didn't go in for much chicanery) or anything like that, and I almost feel disappointed, except that I don't. The web jokes this year didn't impress me (unless I just didn't see the good ones) and so on and so forth, but really all that matters is that I need to know if we paid the rent on time. So it goes.

This being the first of April, though, it meant that my service call to have HTTP referrers added to my logs went through, as in fact it did, and now I have so much more information at my fingertips. Whilst looking at the results already rolling around, I stumbled across the date that I started this MovableType blogging nonsense over at postings here. And to think, in all that time I've upgraded the software some three times and the layout not once.