preparing a brief memorandum concerning the life of Correggio

I have been trying to cancel Uverse for some time now. Reason being I spend a lot of time surfing my TEN THOUSAND channels, and can’t find anything I want to watch. I like about 3 shows, the news, Jeopardy, and Boston Sports. I can Hulu the 3 shows. I built an antenna out of coat hangers with which I get HD reception (more on that later), so I can get the news and Jeopardy from that. Boston Sports is a crap shoot anyway. Even if they are playing a local sports team I have to hunt for some obscure channel that I didn’t even know existed. The superbowl and the world series will be on network TV, so the coat hangers have me covered there as well. Now Im free to work on my home dvr, and read books instead of surfing the channel listings for something that looks interesting.

Anyways, At&t’s main number is only operable during weekdays. Ive been pretty busy at work lately so I haven’t had a chance to call and cancel. I figured I would check out their website and see if they take calls on Saturdays. Well, At&t’s main site has text that reads “contact us” but it is not hyperlinked! How crazy is that. Arguably the largest communications company in the world. They allow more people to contact other people than any other organization on earth, but contacting them is asking too much. Alas, I digress. So I decide to login using my account user name and password thinking perhaps there is a way to cancel my TV service via their webpage. I’m sure people can sign-up, so maybe they can cancel too. Not the case. You can modify your plan, so I figured i would check that out. Here’s a screenshot of the page that I was given when I chose to modify my TV service:

Check out yellow oval area I highlighted. See the cut off text there? Apparently the largest communications company on earth can’t hire a half decent AJAX developer (this menu was poped-up via an AJAX lightbox). When I looked closer I noticed that the cut off text seemed to be the tops of numbers. This is promising! When I hovered over that text I could just barely get my pointer to change to the I bar. So I highlighted these half numbers and copy and pasted them. 1-877-252-1717. WOW! I thought, A hidden phone number easter-egg on the website of the largest communications company on Earth. What could it be? A direct link to the President? Telephone access to the NSA’s databases? Being the adventurous person I am I gave it a call. I was shocked and somewhat frightened when I immediately got a person on the other line. Unfortunately this person didn’t know anything about the countries deepest secrets, but they were able to quickly cancel my cable TV service.

I got a text message from a friend of mine today. It details his most recent experience with Windows 7.

Log onto windows 7. Open outlook. Outlook freezes. Close outlook. Now outlook won’t open. Reset VPN. VPN loses connection. Windows has error. Close all programs. Retry VPN. VPN connects. Open outlook. Outlook fails to open folder. Error persists. Close outlook. Reopen. Same error. Restart windows 7. Log in. Reconnect VPN. Open outlook. Fails to connect. Reset VPN. Connection successful. Exchange server error. Restart outlook. Windows 7 update manager suggests updates. Open outlook. Finally can see emails.

I took a great video today with my iPhone, and wanted to post it on the site. Unfortunately 4 minutes of video is too much for Apple to transfer via email. So I did this instead,

The video needs some editing, so stay tuned.

When I was younger I used to watch my mother clean mirrors and windows. She would spray the Windex on the glass then use one paper towel to spread it around and scrub the dirty spots, then quickly grab another paper towel and dry off the entire surface. I asked her why she used two paper towels, and she informed me that if the glass wasn’t dried quickly that the Windex would leave streaks. Upon further inspection I noticed streaky areas where she didnt wipe well.

So I was cleaning the mirror today, and I thought about my childhood, and the two step process my mother used to use. Now, ever since I have had my own glass to clean I have never had the need for more than one paper towel. One step was all it took for clean streak free glass.

After cleaning the mirror today with my standard one step process I couldn’t find a single streak. So I thought to myself, “What groundbreaking advances have we, the human race, made in window cleaning in the past 15 years that have eliminated the possibility of streaked glass?”

I mean seriously, we figured out how to land on the moon before we figured out how to prevent streaks from forming on glass? We discovered dark matter in 1956. It took us another 40 or so years to clean glass properly.

What’s even more fascinating is that your average person could care less about dark matter, but… dirty glass? That’s gotta stop!

Linux Device Drivers 3rd ed: http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/

Linux Kernel in a Nutshell: http://www.kroah.com/lkn/

I am torn between watching competitive eating and Wimbledon.

To celebrate Pac-Man’s 30th birthday Google decided to put a playable version of the game on their home page. All I could think all day was, “I wonder how many hours mankind wasted playing Pac-Man today?” We are now that much further away from curing cancer, and traveling to Mars.

I admit, I knocked out a few games myself.