Not sure I’d want one of these lying around.

If you live in Austin and keep half an eye on the news, you know that Cap Metro is contemplating a commuter-rail line linking the convention center to Leander, something that needs voter approval. Normally, I’d be in favor of this. I’d reflexively think “public transit good.”

Mike Dahmus has been blogging for some time trying to explain why, in this particular case, public transit not good. He’s convinced me. Check him out. Kudos to Mike for beating the drum and raising awareness on this.

Spotted near Quack’s:

If you haven’t checked out Craigslist (many regional sites, including one for Austin), you should. It’s a phenomenal marketplace.

A lot of people use it for casual sex hookups, and hey, if I knew about that aspect of it back when I was single, who knows? But it’s also great for getting rid of stuff that has a little too much value to donate or throw out. I’ve posted several items for prices that are probably about 1/3rd to 1/5th what the item would cost new and gotten nibbles within a few hours, and sold the item within about a day. No fuss, no muss, and a lot easier than ebay. The posting process is dead-simple.

It’s got RSS feeds for each classified section, so if you want to tune in to, say, the new listings for old computers, you can do that. And it’s even got entertainment value in the hye-larious best of craigslist section

I work at home, alone. I don’t get any water-cooler gossip. But I just translated some pretty juicy insider stuff. Too bad I can’t tell anyone about it. Directly, at least.

Setup: I have several steady clients–small translation agencies. These guys have very large household-name companies as their clients. Let’s say that one of Agency A’s regular clients is Company 1. One of Agency B’s clients is Company 2.

I just did a translation for Agency B of a document that originated with Company 2. It’s an internal memo describing the company’s dealings with Company 1, as well as Company 1’s dealings with yet a direct competitor of Company 2, which, in a creative outburst, I have decided to call Company 3. Now, Company 3 is much bigger than Company 2 (or Company 1, for that matter)–they’re really the 800-pound gorilla of their industry, and Company 2 is the “we try harder” outfit.

Story: It seems that Company 3 keeps close tabs on Company 2’s dealings with Company 1, and has successfully applied pressure to Company 2 to curtail its dealings with Company 1. Getting the inside scoop on this stuff–one executive saying “this decision was made at a higher level” and his boss saying “gee whiz, sorry about that”, or Company 3 finding inventive ways to really screw over Company 1–is riveting. Based on my limited understanding of the law, the facts here should be solid grounds for legal action. It’s also interesting to see a job that sort of crosses from one client’s “space” to another (though this has happened before).

I’m accustomed to getting various paypal scam-spams that direct me to a paypal-like page in the hopes that I will naïvely give them my login info. I just got another. This one is noteworthy for the URL:
http://v093707.dd2336.kasserver.com/zero/scampage/
Come on, guys, if you’re going to run a scam, don’t call attention to it right in the URL! There used to be a time when grifters took pride in their work and put some craftsmanship into it. I’m very disappointed.

While I was surfing around today, my DSL connection went dead. Just like that. One second I’m a downloading fool, the next second, nothing.

Often these problems, when they occur, correct themselves after a while, and usually they’re area-wide, but after 90 minutes I decided to brave the SBC voice-jail system and call in the problem.

It turned out there was no problem in Austin, and the problem was just on my connection. I had already done all the obvious restorative tricks, to no avail. After the first operator was unable to bring me back up, she kicked me to L3 support. The guy who worked with me there tried more stuff, and after quite a while, told me that he thought my modem had gone bad: he was able to “sync” with the modem, but it wasn’t carrying any IP. Something about this seemed fishy–if the modem went bad, why would it go bad in such a selective way?–but he seemed to know what he was talking about, so I took him at his word. He suggested I try buying a new modem, plug that in, and if that didn’t help, I should call back with my trouble-ticket number and request a service call. Since I have such an old modem, which requires a set-up at their end that newer modems don’t use [geek-mode=on] Specifically, my old Alcatel 1000 uses a virtual path of 8 and virtual circuit of 35; newer DSL modems use a virtual path of 0 and virtual circuit of 35 [geek-mode=off], he changed things around at the central office to accommodate a newer modem. SBC could sell me a modem, of course, but it would be more expensive.

So I went out in search of a new modem. Comp USA, Best Buy, and Fry’s didn’t have ’em; Best Buy supposedly stocks DSL modems, but had none on hand; the other places don’t even stock them. I plowed home through heavy traffic, frustrated. I called a couple other Best Buys–same story. I decide to take what SBC has to offer and call back on the trouble ticket.

The guy who worked with me earlier had gone home for the day, so I got a different guy. After reading my file, he put me on hold and immediately started trying some stuff. My connection came back up. He explained to me that someone must have “bounced” (taken down and then put back up) my ATM connection, which is apparently a common maintenance task (I didn’t realize they were using ATM), but forgotten about the “putting back up” part.

All this raises the question: what do you do when you’ve got a tech guy who is helpful and seems knowledgeable, but is overlooking an apparently obvious problem? In the past I’ve dealt with unhelpful or un-knowledgeable tech people by just calling back later, and in this case, that’s what worked, but there was no way of knowing that.