This is absolutely hilarious … Bill O’Reilly has a great future in comedy (if only he were actually joking):
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Bill O’Reilly Proves God’s Existence – Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||||
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Bill O’Reilly proves God exists, but Neil deGrasse Tyson knows what causes the changing tides.
Thanks to the Friendly Atheist for the link.
I recently signed up with a new VOIP service for my home phone.
I’m using VOIPo … so far I’m really impressed.
The call quality is great, it’s got a lot of nice features, and the rates can’t be beat. For a 2 year contract, the price is only $7.50 / month with free hardware & setup.
I’m going to give it a few more days before I start the process of porting my 2nd phone number from Vonage to VOIPo.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Chase Bank gave me some good customer service.
Of course it was in the branch, face to face, so it’s harder to be lackadaisical about customer service when the customer is right there.
Recently Chase announced they were implementing higher fees at lower thresholds for their basic banking products.
I have a number of checking accounts at Chase … and want to avoid fees entirely.
So I went to the Hoffman Estates branch to talk to someone about my accounts and what I could do to avoid fees or close accounts.
I’m in the process of updating the help text for my RCP and have found that some of the dialogs that I’m invoking don’t have the ability to directly add help context id’s.
After a bit of digging, I found it’s not that difficult to add help to an object that extends Dialog.
For this example, I’m going to add a help id to the InputDialog class.
OK, I’m jumping in with both feet.
This post starts my test of server virtualization.
This blog is now running on a virtualized instance of CentOS 5.5 … running inside a CentOS 5.5 managed XEN hypervisor.
It has 4gb of RAM and two processors allocated.
Keep your fingers crossed. 🙂
Lots of people are clamoring about the fact that Verizon is going to offer the iPhone.
There are a lot of good reasons to get an iPhone from Verizon … better network, better packages, tethering, etc.
One significant reason NOT to get the Verizon iPhone is: It doesn’t work in the UK and Europe.
The UK and Europe use the GSM system for cell phones … and the Verizon iPhone doesn’t support that. It uses CDMA.
I know from personal experience that the AT&T iPhone does work fine in the UK (although it’s pricey).
I’ve also seen comments mentioning that the CDMA can’t handle data connections at the same time as voice connections.
So if you travel to the UK or Europe much, think twice about getting the Verizon iPhone.
I did see a rumor that Apple is going to offer a “World phone” that will, theoretically, have CDMA and GSM capabilities.
We still have a number of months left on our AT&T contract … so I’m going to hold off on jumping over to Verizon. Ginny & I travel a fair amount and really like the UK & Europe.
Yes, it happens occasionally.
Once again it was with Comcast.
Well, at least partially. This was a good recovery from a potentially bad experience.
Two weeks ago the picture on our cable was getting very pixelated … my first thought was that the TiVo was going bad, so I tried connecting the TV directly to the cable (using the digital tuner) and still saw the problem.
So I called Comcast customer service and scheduled a service call. This was on Monday and the earliest service appointment they had was on Wednesday. OK, we could live with crummy TV for a few days.
Tuesday we got an automated call from Comcast telling us that they had found a problem in our service and corrected it … and our service call had been canceled. If we were still experiencing the problem, we should press “1” to be connected to customer service.
I checked the TV and, what do you know, it was working fine. No pixelation. Cool. I didn’t have to leave work early on Wednesday to be here for the service call.
I had a very frustrating experience with Chase bank yesterday.
I wanted to pay down the balance of our home equity line of credit to zero. I did not want to close the account.
The pay down amount isn’t obvious on their web site, so I called their customer service.
The woman I talked to was clearly a script reading drone, as she could not give me JUST the information I wanted. She had to give me ALL the information that showed up on her screen.
The balance on the account was about $60 plus some variable interest.
The first amount she told me was to close the account entirely (which I explicitly told her I did not need) was around $500. This included the early termination fee.
The next amount she gave me was (supposed to be) the amount to bring the balance to zero. She quoted me $400!
I explained that the amount she gave me could not be right because my current balance was only $60.
So she had to log back into the account to get the breakdown. Since the call had already gone on for 25 minutes, I just told her to forget it and I would calculate the amount myself.
Back on their website I finally found the variable interest that was due: $0.46.
Unfortunately the website would not let me pay the full amount … I had to pay the current balance first, then pay the variable interest.
The last time I wanted to do this I was unable to make a payment less than $1 … So I had to make a $1 withdrawal so I could pay a little more than $1.
This time it let me pay the .46 without jumping through hoops.
I like many of the services Chase offers, but their phone customer service leaves a lot to be desired.
One of the goals I have for the new system is to replace the two existing servers.
My current plan is to do this via virtualization.
There are a number of virtualization options available … each with advantages & disadvantages.
The virtualization products I’m currently consider are:
(Read this entire post, as there is a very weird problem described later)
It’s been quite a while since I upgraded the hardware that runs this (and others) web site.
The warranty on the systems either will be expiring soon or has already expired.
So I bit the bullet and ordered a new Dell PowerEdge T310 server. The pertinent specs are:
The system arrived last week and I got it set up immediately.
I actually ordered the system with only one 250gb hard drive and 4gb of RAM … and upgraded it myself.
A few things annoyed me out of the gate …
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