Work got you down? Feeling a little abused, under-used, and confused? Sing a little song with me: We R in need of a moonlight excursion. Spelunking for Dummies, a trip to the center of the server, down into the womb of the mothership, doling out a little TLC.

Moonlighting on my moonlighting, I've been helping Bryce over at Sentry Outpost. My big fat foot squashing into smithereens a nasty little piece of crashed something-or-other some hashbrowned-hacker left stewing on our machine. Finally got some juicy log files out of it, and now I'm having delicious visions of starring in the Made-for-TV movie of "How to Bust a Satanist PayPal Scambot" or "He Stopped A Terrorist DNS Controller: The Stu Ronomi Story."

Whatever is there, bubbling in the cauldron, it keeps looking more and more nasty. I honestly don't know how anyone could not love something called boil.c - it just screams "Touch-a touch-a touch me!" It's sucky to say, but I'm not entirely sure my Ginsu-sharp mind is going to be enough to get Bryce through this (he's a touch old skool). It's been like trying to explain to Grandma why I don't want any more email forwards.

Posted by StuR at 02:47 AM | Permalink

You hear about the horrors of varied phone calls into customer service departments. Idiotically scripted people on the other end of the phone line insisting that you turn your modem off even after you mention how you already have. I really don't like being on the receiving end of that pile of penguin poo. Sure, I didn't break the bank when getting the site up or anything. I didn't do any sort of premium package. Gold celebrity status platinum Gucci hosting - no thanks. I'll take the Walmart Deeluxe. So I can't say that I expected much in the way of prime service, but it's really worse than expected. Abhorrent, even. I guess it's too much to ask for continued service in exchange for your continued payments. Up. Down. Up. Down. Slow. Way. Down. Ooo! Up! Oop, never mind, back down. My website is hosted on an elevator!

So I called the dreaded 1-800 number. "Oh, yeah, uhm, that's, yeah. Bad? Can we call you back after we look into things? There's another problem on this box with another customer as well that we're looking into." When I didn't hear back from them for a while, I dug around a little on my own. Poked at what I could find. Found the other guy. He's got a nice little forum set up. I'm going to keep rooting around, maybe tap this Bryce guy for some assistance, and probably get things fixed and zipping along before customer service rings me back. My First Server Clean-Up Gig. They should have a Playskool for that.

Posted by StuR at 02:28 AM | Permalink