Another Couple Days

Some of you may think that I haven't written for the last couple days because of the Thanksgiving weekend. Well, you would be wrong if you thought that.

I had at least two or three opportunities to write an entry, but I chose not to do so. One night, I picked up someone from the easiest to reach subway station for both of us, had an adventure looking for an Indian restaurant, chatted it up until midnight then drove her to the airport that following morning.

After sleeping a bit, the fiancee and I went to my parent's place for Thanksgiving dinner then met up with a friend to watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Thanksgiving went surprisingly well. Somehow, the whole family got along, including the most negative member of the family. Amazing!

Not much to say about the Goblet of Fire. I hadn't seen the first three episodes of the series, even though I saw the Chamber of Secrets the next day. The Goblet of Fire felt a bit predictable, even though my predictions came from incorrect premises. The friend who saw the movie with us said it felt a little mechanical as compared to the first three episodes. Overall, though, I had fun watching the movie, even though it ran somewhat long. It felt much better than "not a waste of time."

I enjoyed the Chamber of Secrets more. The fiancee says that it stuck a little too close to the original novel. I haven't read the novel yet, but this one provided a little more humor, charm and surprises. Even though I saw Snape in Goblet of Fire, I got misdirected throughout the whole movie and was lead into believing that one thing was happening when something else happened.

We watched the Chamber of Secrets the next day after going out to Best Buy to buy the fiancee a new laptop, which I am using now. The thing works great! I wish I had one of my own, but I already have a nice desktop that works just fine. Just fine. I would like to have the option of carrying out a computer so that I can hook into a WiFi network at a cafe or pull out the laptop on the train to do my e-mail, browse the Internet, send out some e-mail and so on and so forth. I would enjoy having that ability very much. But oh well. . .I've got a good enough computer and don't really have the funds available for a nice laptop.

I also had the job of setting up the laptop for the fiancee. The laptop, itself, hasn't given me any problems. . .AT ALL. BTW, it's a nice low-end Compaq Presario with a widescreen. I don't really know any of the other details, but it works very nice.

But for anyone who knows me even relatively well, you know that something has to go wrong with any new piece of electric equipment I buy (maybe I should just stop buying new electronic equipment until I'm convinced that this "karma" has gone away).

The router has struck back. I think it first struck before I even started this blog. Pretty much, the router and the cable modem provided to me by Comcast wouldn't play together well. The router would pretty much shut down the modem, so I had to move the router across the room. Everything worked well after I moved it. Well, mostly well, at least.

Until mid this past week or last week. Using the Internet on my desktop started giving me tons of problems. I won't get into it other than to say that the desktop pretty much couldn't hook up with my router through WiFi and ended up hooking into someone else's router in the neighborhood without me noticing.

Long story short, after figuring out the fault lied with the router, not the laptop, then fooling around with settings, upgrades to the firmware, trying anything I could think up then trying everything the livechat people at LinkSys could think up (or should I say have training to have me do) then having one of them disconnect from me without saying goodbye or giving me guidance. . .I decided the problem lied with YET ANOTHER FAULTY PRODUCT.

Settling that issue, I called the customer service people at LinkSys to set up the warranty return then they send another router to me process. I don't think of myself as prejudiced or even negative to moving customer service over to India, BUT I had such a problem understanding the woman who spoke with me! Maybe she didn't have such a strong accent as someone I know, but combine the accent with bad phone reception. . .yeah, I think you get what I'm saying. Eventually, though, we accomplished the goal of that phone call.

So I followed the woman's guidance to go to the LinkSys warranty forms on their Webpage. I move on ahead, filling out the forms then end up with a screen that just says "Tech Error." WTF?!?!?! Right?

I called customer service at LinkSys again. Another woman lists off another bunch of questions that I've essentially addressed already.

A small aside, I must say thanks to one sales guy at Best Buy who acknowledged that I know how to address these things and have already answered all the questions. It can get so dang annoying when I have to answer the same bunch of questions a million times (even after copying and pasting a transcript of a chat that shows that I've answered those questions) just to get back to the last point that I reached with the previous tech person.

It just makes me so FRUSTRATED!

So after she asks me a couple questions and getting me frustrated after I had praised myself for not getting frustrated while chatting it up with these people, I just lose it. I don't get abusive or swear or anything. I just get real firm, tell her that I've done everything she has asked me and that she will stay on the phone while I go through the process of filling out these online forms so if something goes wrong, she can tell me.

And the problem ends up just me answering a question they ask on the online form. It's the question about those three digits on the back of your credit card that disappear when the card gets photocopied. So I guess when you answer the question that authenticates that you are the person with the REAL credit card, not the photocopied one, they won't let you use the dang credit card. WTF?!?!?!

That pretty much fixed everything. So now, I get to wait a couple days until I get the new router they send me, test it out then send back the old faulty, screwed up router.

Anyway. . .after getting that all settled, I went to a good video game party. If anything, this kind of party works pretty good after getting frustrated with tech support and customer support because you don't really have to socialize, if you don't want. You can just plop down on the couch, get a controller then run all around a virtual maze shooting at people, pick weapons then blow up other worms, play silly party games, fly around as a monkey in a small plastic ball or wahtever escapist fake reality we chose. I could choose whatever level of socialization I wanted to engage in.

On top of that, I had a great conversation on the way home when I gave a couple of these other guys a ride home. We talked about creativity, our current life situations, what kind of careers we want to explore and I even got to give a small lecture about utopia and dystopia. Doesn't necessarily sound extremely exciting. . .except that one of the guys actually had a small epiphany and understood what I said.

Pretty cool, if you ask me.

Today, I slept in a bit (getting sick of the sleeping in. . .by mistake). Hopefully, I don't have a problem waking up for work tomorrow. Otherwise, I slacked off a little too much with computer Texas Holdem, installed MS Office on the fiancee's computer and did a bunch of projects, including posting my resume up on Monster.com. Nothing exciting, really.

Which leads me to think that The Lextopia may have lost a bit of a hook for the audience. Not really anything that worries me, but I wouldn't mind hearing some comments about your level of interest on this Blog.

I will end this entry with a quote that addresses my recent frustrations:

"THE PARADOX OF OUR AGE

We have bigger houses but smaller familes;
more conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgement;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness;
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet
the new neighbour.
We built more computers to hold more
information to produce more copies than ever,
but have less communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods
but short on digestion;
Tall man but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It's a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.

...His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama"

And oh yeah. . .another annoying thing that has become annoying. . .my bank seems to have turned off my debit card. I can't think of a reason why they did. Maybe it has to do with my increased spending for Christmas shopping or even the beginning of a new procedure: putting my rent money into a Money Market then paying the rent with that money. Still. . .it SUCKS!

Lovely. . ..