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Category: Technology

RIP, MyTouch 4G.

I woke up late for work today, which doesn’t happen often. I woke up to the sound of my dog barking at the window instead of my standard alarm, because for some reason my phone was off. That was really odd, because it had been on an hour earlier when I woke up before the alarm was set to go off. So I tried to turn my phone back on and got no response.

Like any good techie, I removed the battery for a few minutes and put it back in. Huzzah, the phone turned back on! But, 20 minutes later when I went to check something on it, it was off again. Rinse and repeat about 4 times (once in the middle of trying to factory reset it), and I found myself at T-Mobile being all like, “WTF mates”.

They were able to successfully reset the phone, and it stayed on for a whole hour, yay! But then it started doing the same thing again, booo. Took it back, got a new battery, didn’t even make it out of the parking lot before the phone shut off.

So now I’m waiting for a replacement. Chances are it’ll be a refurbished phone, which sucks cause mine is still pretty new. But if it works, whatever. The problem is that the new phone probably won’t be here until Thursday at best, possibly Friday, but with my luck, more likely not until Monday. Until then, I don’t really have a phone.

Karmimi… we need to have words. They start with, “I hate you so much” and end with “die in a fire”.

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Where Did WWW Go?

I installed the Broken Link Checker plug-in today, because I know I broke a lot of links when I moved my Kat Scratch Fever off of ExpressionEngine and onto WordPress, and I wanted to get them all cleaned up.

The first thing I noticed is that wow, I broke more links than I thought. They’ve all been fixed now, rest assured.

The second thing that I noticed is that WWW seems to be disappearing.

I don’t know if it’s just that I’m old skool, and was born into the computer era where URLs were pretty much required to start with “www.” or what, but I always put www before a web address, unless it’s a subdomain. All my domains are formatted so that if you don’t put www before the domain, the server will add it for you. I like the way it looks a ton better.

But as I was sorting through the Redirect tab of my link checker, I found that most of the sites I was linking to are set to remove www from the URL.

So it got me thinking.. why is everybody removing it en mass? Am I missing some vital piece of information? Is it considered redundant now? Is it to conserve print space? Curious minds want to know!

Do you leave the www or do you remove it, and why? I don’t mean when you type it, I mean it on the core level. This can be done as a domain option on some hosts, and in the .htaccess file on others.

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RIP, Font Thing

Have you ever found a program that does everything you need it to, and in a way that you love, and you become blind to any other software that does what this program that you love so dearly does? And then, have you updated your operating system only to find that your beloved piece of software no longer works?

I’m there, right now.

The Font Thing was such a great font management tool, and followed me from XP to Vista, and then attempted to follow me from Vista to Windows 7. Now, it shouldn’t come as a shock to me, but I can’t even install it; Windows says “nope! Not gonna happen!” I hadn’t realized that development on The Font Thing stopped 10 years ago. Holy cow.

So, I seem to be in the market for a new font management program. I’ve got over 1000 fonts that I need to organize and selectively install.  Does anybody have a good recommendation for a new font manager? I prefer free (ideally open source) where possible, but I’ll consider commercial options.

I’ll miss you, Font Thing!

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Verizon FiOS Outages FTL

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.

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Repartitioning Adventures!

So, I decided that I wanted to play with the Windows 7 beta, but that I didn’t want to overwrite my operating system on either computer.

I started with Bob 1.0, my poor sweet 5 year old computer with Windows XP on it. I used GParted off of a CD-Boot of Ubuntu to shrink the partition on my main drive and then partition the new, un-partitioned space left by the shrink process. Windows 7 took ages to install, and ran a little slow on Bob 1, but certainly ran much faster than I expected it to run in the first place. I half-way didn’t expect it to install at all.

So last night I decided to shrink the partition on my storage drive in Bob 2.0 (my much newer computer) and poke around on that. I have no idea why, but the process didn’t go NEARLY as smoothly on this computer. Some of you may have seen my panicked Tweets about it. Oh, then then to make it worse, I discovered that Vista has tools to do this built in, well after the fact :|

So anyway, I guess when Windows Vista first partitioned the drive, it left blank space at the very beginning of the drive. When I went to shrink the partition, it decided that it wanted to move the partition to the left. So it took 2 hours to read my partition (why?!) and another 2 and a half to move it and create the new partition.

So I cleaned my bathroom while I waited, since I’m moving in a couple of weeks and have to clean it at some point anyway. I kid you not, that bathroom is positively SPOTLESS. Even the crazy muddy parts of the bathtub where Xoie puts her paws. I had a lot of time to kill.

Anyway, 4.5 hours later when I could use my computer again, I went to get some pictures of my camera (The bathroom only killed about an hour) and Lightroom started freaking out at me. “ZOMG I can’t find your catalog!” … well, said catalog is stored on my storage drive that I just manipulated the partitions on. So I go to My Computer, and while I could see the new G: partition.. the original partition was nowhere to be found. I just about died. I panicked and mourned my lost data, then started wondering “well.. if the data is gone… where the heck is the 350 gigs of space?!”

So i went into the drive manager, and found my data partition! Yay! Windows had arbitrarily reassigned drive letters and changed it from Z: to F: which made it get lost, because F belongs to one of my removable devices (I think it’s my Rebel, iirc). So I changed the drive letter back to Z and I could access all my data and Lightroom stopped spazzing out.

So I did my photo stuff and set Windows 7 installing and went to bed, cause it was about 1 in the morning at that point.

So yet again, I haven’t gotten a chance to really poke around with Windows 7 but it looks pretty sweet from what I’ve done so far. I’ll be playing with it and will likely write a post about it in the near-ish future.

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