I attempted to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 last Thursday night. The upgrade using synaptic seemed like it was going fine. Then it said it must remove about 288 packages that are obsolete and then it removed them. It then installed 4 packages to upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 and asked for a reboot. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t boot. That shit pretty much pissed me off and ruined my night. I started downloading the 8.10 iso on another machine and brewed a pot of coffee. I re-installed from CD and all was good. I keep /home on a separate partition so I didn’t lose anything except all my apps. I re-installed my apps and all my preferences and settings were still there so I was happy. I have a feeling that because the Ubuntu servers were being hammered my install was fucked. Oh well, all is good and make sure you keep /home on a different partition. This is still not an excuse to not backup your data often.
As you might remember I ordered a Magicjack a few weeks ago and reviewed it decently. Well I have come to the conclusion that Magicjack sucks, after a few weeks use. It works great from my end, but everyone I call hates talking to me when I am using it. They get choppy audio and sometimes can’t hear me at all. I would say it would be alright for traveling and using every now and then. I WOULD NOT REPLACE MY PHONE WITH THIS LITTLE PIECE OF PLASTIC SHIT. I was actually thinking of disconnecting Vonage when I recieved this. I’m glad I didn’t Vonage’s quality is a bajillion times better than this. Both of them have shitty customer service, but atleast the people I am calling can hear what the hell I am saying. The up side of the magicjack is that it is very small, portable, and cheap. Otherwise, all other aspects you would expect in phone service suck. I will probably just leave this in my laptop bag and just use it when I’m traveling or something. I guess you get what you pay for.
If anyone knows of a really good SIP provider let me know. I am wanting to start playing around with asterisk.
I’m starting to get tired of talking about DHL. They fucked me over earlier this week and the fuckers got me again today. We were expecting to receive a fax/printer from Dell. We payed for overnight shipping and the shit never showed up. It shipped on Monday night. This is fucking bullshit 50 god damned dollars and here we are on the 3rd day. Our Dell rep gave us a bullshit excuse that they have until the end of the day to deliver it. Well, guess what, fuck head? It’s still not here at the end of Wednesday. He said he was going to get with customer service to get the package tracked down. I said fuck him and called customer service myself. Customer service called DHL and said that the package got lost. How the fuck do you lose a package when it only needs to be delivered 2 fucking miles down the damn road? I argued and got our 50 dollars back and got another printer shipped. Can’t these retards get anything right?
On another note, I had to do something about this ASAP as we had been without a fax since Monday. I was tempted to take the saved $50 and buy a rinky dink piece of shit fax to hold it down, while we waited on the dicks I mentioned above. I ended putting an old computer in place of the fax and configured the Windows XP fax console to receive the incoming calls. Management was pissed because we still didn’t have our printer from Dell, but I still came out on top with some mad mcguyver skills.
Fuck DHL and Dell. Although, I am still very pleased with the Vostro.
Finally, I have received my new laptop. Here is what was fucking stupid about the whole deal. DHL is the sorriest piece of shit delivery courier available and Dell uses them. Dell’s facility is a mere 4.5 miles from my fucking house and the DHL sorting facility is about 5 miles away. DHL received my package in fucking Nashville and then it went to Memphis! What the fuck? After it was received in Memphis they sent the shit back to Nashville to be delivered. On top of it all they wouldn’t let me pick the shit up because it required a signature! What is the damn problem? Don’t they have pens at their office? Fuck DHL. Dell, I hope you decide to stop using DHL in the future because they are fucking morons. They waste their own fucking money just to make your package late. DHL’s business model must have been written by a retard.
Anyways, DHL bashing aside, I am pretty impressed with the Vostro 1400. It was cheap and actually has everything I wanted plus some extra shit I didn’t need. I read complaints in reviews about the battery shaking around in it’s compartment. My battery actually fits snug. They laptop is very solid. I really like the mag-alloy case. Feels really good compared to the plastic pieces of shit I have owned in the past. I tested everything out and it works great. Now I just need to get Windows XP wiped off of this hoe. Planning on installing Debian. Anyways, I am pretty pleased and would recommend the Vostro line of laptops. They’re nothing special, but what you get for the price is crazy.
I kept seeing stuff about Magicjack whenever I was searching for VOIP solutions. I bit the bullet and ordered one. They have a 1 month free trial going on, which I do believe expired last night. I read the quality is really good compared to some other big VOIP providers and some POTS providers. If it’s better than Vonage’s 2 cups and string quality they have a customer for life. At $20 a year for unlimited service, If I can make out what the distant end is saying then I will be pleased. I actually opted for the Platinum Plan for $50 for 5 years. If it isn’t that great I will find something else and use the Magicjack when I travel. I will be canceling my Vonage account this month. By the way, for the record Vonage sucks ass. They have great features, but they want extra money for everything and I really do believe they are overselling their resources. I’m tired of talking on the phone while hearing machine guns and whistles in the background. I also hate picking up the phone and dialing a number and hearing dead air after the ringing stops.
Conclusion, get a Vostro! and a Magicjack!
I just bit the bullet and ordered a new laptop. I figured I would order something fairly cheap since I buy a new one every 1-2 years. This time I went with a Dell Vostro 1400. Core 2 Duo 2.1ghz, 3gb ram, nvidia graphics, 160gb hardrive, webcam, bluetooth, and some other bullshit. The total came out to $780 before taxes. I got it so cheap because of a $500 deal. My old laptop is a Toshiba Satellite a105, which is still pretty decent minus the audio jack and dead pixel. I figured I would go with a business machine this time around. I take my laptop everywhere so the alloy-mag chassis should be better than my toshiba plastic piece of shit. I really wanted a Thinkpad, but couldn’t get one near the same price and specs as the dell.
Earlier this week I decided to do a little packet sniffing because we’ve been having some bandwidth issues. I spliced into the network with an old hub, between our router and gateway. I fired up ethereal on my laptop and started capturing packets. As I suspected, there were quite a few people streaming audio and video. There was also someone going buck wicked on some porn action too. Kinda funny, I started capturing at around 2pm and at 3pm is the companies designated break time. At 3pm they took a break and then picked up with their porn action when break was over. I let my manager know what the deal is and we put out a memo to all the users restating that that shit ain’t cool. I didn’t single out anyone but they know who they are. Someone from management came to me and admitted that they had been to said sites in the past. I told them it wasn’t them that I logged. Good thing about it is now I have a 1up on management.
I plan on doing some more packet sniffing from time to time as this is the only warning they will get.
Moral of the story is plead the fizifth.