Now, I'm not any kind of political person, but I'm fairly excited about the presidential elections going on this year. The past eight years of government leadership have just been Really Bad on a number of levels and I was afraid that choosing the next president was going to yet again boil down to deciding on the lesser of two evils.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the most awesome thing ever to exist in the whole entire world:

So, I'm two and a half weeks into my new job at Liquid Web. I was worried like heck that I wouldn't like it, but I'm glad I was wrong.

Pros: local drive, free beverages, awesome lounge/breakroom, real furniture, loads of geeks, challenging work, hands-off management style

Cons: odd shifts, don't know many people yet, sit in chair all day, crappy monitor

Also, I was reading the handbook [wiki article] today and just noticed that one of the many perks of working here is free server colocation. Awesome, since I was recently given a mediocre-but-capable machine that I wasn't sure what to do with. I'll probably put my website on there but I'm not sure what else to do with it besides that.

Now, I'm not any kind of music reviewing person, but I have to say I've been digging the new Underworld album, Oblivion with Bells. After A Hundred Days Off, I was pretty well certain that Underworld was dead when Darren Emerson left the group. So I wasn't even paying attention anymore until ghostlemur mentioned the new album in her journal. So far, most of it is actually kinda boring. Maybe even a bit depressing. But three tracks stand out and one of them, Ring Road, I just can't get out of my head. Hyde and Smith, you guys are on probation for now but know you'll probably never rock again until you get someone who can stand up to Hyde and say, "wait wait wait, this track needs to have SOME kind of fucking beat to it."

It took long enough, but the first episode of the second season of The I.T. Crowd finally aired a couple days ago. I took a break today from finals and learning Drupal to watch it. I'm not any kind of entertainment reviewer, but I figured I'd share my thoughts.

Sometimes, the rototiller gods demand a chain-link fence.

http://xkcd.com/c242.html

First chuckle I've had all day and it's 30 minutes to midnight... not a good sign.

(I don't think anyone even reads my liveurinal, but heck, I feel like venting.)

If I didn't already at least hate AT&T before, I now morbidly loathe them. I'm ditching AT&T for a local phone service provider and want to explain why. Usually, service providers are courteous enough to ask why you're cancelling your relationship with them, but in this case, the local provider does all the switching so AT&T probably won't get the chance to query me. Although I fully expect that they'll ring me up in the middle of dinner and try to start pitching deals at me. Anyway, if they did call me up and ask me why I switched away from them, here are the reasons that I'd tell them to fly a kite.

Super-sized bill. My monthly local-service-only AT&T (previously SBC) bill is just short of $50 per month. When I spoke to their sales representative to set up the account, she assured me that this was the cheapest option available even though I don't want/need/use half the features that are supposed to come with it. My new local provider will be charging me a mere $16 per month for roughly the same features. (The normal rate is $20, but I got a better deal since the company that I work for is a reseller.)

Anti-competitive behavior. We all know that big businesses don't like to play by the rules, but AT&T sets the modern standard for monopolistic practices. Here in Lansing, they own the telephone poles and they own the wires, but we paid for them. When a local competitor wants to use the lines, AT&T/SBC makes it extremely difficult for the competitor to operate effectively. The local provider that I talked about above has had to file lawsuit after lawsuit against AT&T/SBC just to stay in business.

Illegal telephone tapping AT&T and the NSA have been cooperatively engaged in domestic spying on U.S. citizens. Like everyone else, I have to pay the taxes the fund the NSA's law-breaking behavior, but thankfully I do have the choice not to support AT&T's (to an extent).

Illegal Internet tappingI can't find a link to this any more due to all the Google hits for the case above, but before the illegal wiretapping snafu hit public, AT&T was strongly suspected of sending bit-for-bit copies of Internet traffic straight to the government. A whistleblower stepped forward with evidence of a "secret room" that even top-level technicians had no physical access to. He also found documentation and job orders for the installation of equipment that had no other use than for spying on all Internet traffic that flowed through the backbone facility. Worse yet, you didn't need to be an AT&T customer to have your data spied upon, because the facility was supposedly a major Internet hub in the region. (California, I think.)

Disconnecting my DSL. This is more of a concrete example of the anti-competitive point above. I have two pairs of telephone lines connected to my house: one is a voice line through AT&T, the other is a DSL line through the same local provider that I've been talking about throughout this entry. One week ago, there was a lot of static on the voice line and eventually there was no dialtone at all. No problem with the DSL line at any time. I create a repair ticket through AT&T's website. A couple days later, a technician comes out. Fixes the voice line. DSL is no longer working, even though it was a completely different line.

Now here's the fun bit. I call up AT&T and basically exclaim in the most polite manner possible, "WTF?" I asked the support representative to create a ticket to reconnect my DSL. Here's a hostile re-enactment of that conversation.

Me: Please reconnect my DSL line which your blundering idiot screwed up when trying to fix my voice line.

AT&T: Our system doesn't show that you have a DSL line...

Me: Nice try. My DSL is through a local provider.

AT&T: Oh. Well in that case, you should contact the technical support department of your DSL company.

Me: Uh, no. YOU GUYS fucked it up, why should they have to fix it?

AT&T: Well, sir, legalities prohibit me from sending a technician out to an AT&T technician to repair your DSL line from another provider. Your provider has to send us the work order to fix the line.

Me: Okay, then don't legalities also prohibit your technician from disconnecting my working DSL line from another provider?

AT&T: Err, uh, ... [stuttering] ...human error... [more stuttering]

Me: So you're not going to fix your own mistake without wasting the time of my provider, huh?

AT&T: No.

Me: Okay, bye.

So I call up the local provider (oh screw it, their name is ACD.net) and they put in a trouble ticket to AT&T. Remember, AT&T owns all the lines, so they are the only ones who can futz with them. The technician comes out today and knocks on my front door:

AT&T: Hi there, my name's so-and-so with AT&T and I was sent out to check on your DSL line. Everything looks fine, so I'm just going to head out now...

Me: But my DSL is still down.

AT&T: I was only sent out to check the line itself, which seems to be okay. If you're not getting a signal, you need to talk to your provider. See ya! [Literally bolts to his minivan.]

Me: But... my DSL is still down...

So now I get to wait until Monday morning before I can tell ACD that AT&T didn't actually fix anything. I happen to know most of the support guys and can probably get one of them to take care of it right away. It's just that I was deliberately trying to avoid making an issue of it because they're always extremely busy.

I've dealt with a lot of relatively crap companies over the years, but AT&T has far exceeded any other company by managing to acquire a monopoly not only on the nation's telecommunications infrastructure, but also on the nation's total available quantity of both evil and stupid. Good riddance to you, AT&T.