A Non-Awful Time With Dell Tech Support

I was having a problem with my monitor, and it seemed like I was doomed to follow in this guy's footsteps. Yet shockingly I only had to wait 10 minutes to speak to a human, he only ran me through the same questions and procedures twice, only denied that there was a problem once and only bounced me to one other person, who then actually read the case history, only asked me one repeat question and only required one item of photographic proof before deciding to ship me a replacement (with a convenient box to send my monitor back in).

... It's kind of sad that I came away from that thinking "well, that was surprisingly easy" (perhaps because I had dealt with Bank of America support the previous day, where the people at the branch tell you to go home and use their phone support system, even when the problem is that their records for you are so broken that you can't use the phone support system).

Instant Publishing

Part of the reason I post so little is that much of the stuff that I would want to communicate to my peers, I now put in my GTalk status message and let people read it there, since they're more likely to read that than this. It was easier in the days before popular link aggregation - I could just post a link to some crazy robot thing and add some useless thought and that would be enough to maintain the blogging flow. Now I assume that people have read those things elsewhere, and that's the end of that avenue of communication.

The other problem is that I spend a long time thinking and reading about the things I feel like posting, and when I'm done with that, the subject feels too obvious and trite, and so a post about it would be like saying "I am assuming that the people who read this don't know this obvious thing".

See, now I don't even feel like posting this. I mean, DUUH, WHY ELSE WOULDN'T I POST?

Dear People Using Challenge/Response Spam Prevention

Stop it, you're making the internet worse.

Getting all your "please authenticate your message" spam makes me cross. I'm going to have to start clicking on all the authentication links I'm sent.

Belizean Photos

The Belize Photos are up! Hooray!

PS I was in Belize.