Yesterday, I rolled out of bed all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (read: exhausted and just wanting to go back to sleep) and plopped down in front of my Mac to start working, just like every other business day. Except, I couldn’t connect to AIM, my work email address, or my work support tool. Everything else seemed to be working though, which was kind of odd. Called my coworker; he said he wasn’t having any trouble, so it had to be on my end.

So I power-cycled my router.. and then couldn’t get to anything on the interwebs. Ok… pick up the phone and call Verizon. Half an hour later, somebody finally picks up the phone and informs me that they’re having outages and that it’ll be working again by the end of the day, get off my phone. Swell. So I packed up and went to a coffee show to hijack some wifi so I can, you know, do my job.

Over 24 hours later, my internet is still not working. I am not a happy camper, at all. I tried calling again this morning and got a busy signal. a;sldkfjgh.

So I’m at the coffee shop again. You know, being here just isn’t fun when I *have* to be. I want to go home!

The most annoying parts are: 1, there is NO INFORMATION ANYWHERE about what the hell is going on and why they haven’t fixed it yet, and 2, this is the second time in less than a month that my internet has been down for an extended period of time. Last time, they had a maintenance guy working on the hubs out on the street, and he unplugged my connection and plugged it back into the wrong slot. I called within 10 minutes of my internet dropping (and we know about the hub maintenance because my boyfriend saw the guy outside and asked what was going on) and it took them 7 hours to send somebody to fix it. It took him 2 minutes. You know, I’m pretty sure the guy that broke it in the first place was still there when I called, and yet I had no internet for my entire work day.

Verizon.. seriously? I kind of hate you. I expect to be prorated for these internet-less days.

Don’t even get me started on what I think of the cell phone they sold me and the issues I’ve had with my mobile services; then I’ll never stop.
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Update: 3:30pm 07/09/09

After spending an hour on the phone troubleshooting stuff, my ticket got escalated and all they figured out was that there was some weird DNS issue going on (which is what Vista’s network diagnostic has been saying all along) and they have no idea why. Somebody will call me “eventually”.

So I cheated and manually set my DNS configurations to “somewhere else” after I got off the phone, and now I have internet. No thanks to Verizon.

In what has been dubbed “the dumbest move Twitter has ever made”, Twitter made a “small settings update” that turns out to not be so small after all, and has the Twitter community up in arms.

Their blog post doesn’t even hint at the gravity of the change. They took away people’s ability to choose what they saw. So really, they made things worse for everybody.

One of their reasons was that only 2% of their users were opting to view @replies to people that they weren’t following. I admit- most of the time I had the feature turned off. But I’m still mad that they took it, and here’s a few reasons why.

1: I did occasionally go in and turn on @replies to people I didn’t follow, because it was a good way to find new, interesting people. This is why the 2% that had it on did so, I assume. It was nice to be able to pick and choose when I saw those replies.

2: So, when the ability to choose was turned off, people started mangling their replies by starting them with other symbols before the @reply, which forced it on my FL. Ok.. so, by taking away my ability to turn off @replies to people I didn’t follow, I’m actually now BEING FORCED to see them because everybody is dodging the filter. Thanks, Twitter.

3: I hate being given the ability to choose, then have it taken away because “big brother knows what’s best for you.” Yeah. Bite me.

So Twitter has now “reversed the settings change”, except for the part where they only show up if they’re not actually replies. O…k… question! How many of those @replies are not replies? Doesn’t that take away the whole “reply” part of it? Isn’t it then a “mention” which Twitter just recently added that confuses a lot of people? Oh wait. That’s the best part about this whole thing. Apparently Twitter took it off because “it was confusing”.

The whole thing is dumb. Every day I find myself wishing more and more that Google had bought Twitter instead of Jaiku. Twitter shot themselves in the foot with this one- could this be the beginning of the end?

Here are some other articles on the issue:
Goodbye People I Never Knew
Is This Why Twitter Changed It’s Reply Policy?
Only A Little Reversed
Twitter Decides We’re Not Smart Enough for @Replies

The message board I’ve been posting on since I was in high school shut down recently. I’m very sad about it. But, some of the members got together and made a new forum. While it’s not going to be able to replace Cockadoodledoo, it’s pretty awesome anyway. It’s still growing, but I think it’d be neat to have some new members on there! If you want to come check it out, it’s called Gazoonies. Tell them Katili sent you.

There’s usually a lot of hoax virus warnings going around, but since this one is actually posted on the UPS website, I’d say this one is probably pretty legit. So, if you get an email from UPS saying that your package could not be delivered, and comes with an attachment for an invoice, you should probably delete it.

Attention Virus Warning
Service Update

We have become aware there is a fraudulent email being sent that says it is coming from UPS and leads the reader to believe that a UPS shipment could not be delivered.  The reader is advised to open an attachment reportedly containing a waybill for the shipment to be picked up.

This email attachment contains a virus.  We recommend that you do not open the attachment, but delete the email immediately.

UPS may send official notification messages on occasion, but they rarely include attachments.  If you receive a notification message that includes an attachment and are in doubt about its authenticity, please contact customerservice@ups.com.

Please note that UPS takes its customer relationships very seriously, but cannot take responsibility for the unauthorized actions of third parties.

Thank you for your attention.