I have been a loyal Bellsouth/AT&T DSL subscriber. While I don’t particularly care or AT&T’s wireless service, their DSL high-speed Internet service hasn’t been bad at all. It’s been operating continuously in Casa de Corsair for going on three years now. I’ve only got one problem with the service:

It’s slow.

In truth, it’s not that slow; I get around 6Mbps of download speed, which is more than plenty. However, I only get a paltry 256-512kbps upload. Yes, that’s right. About half a megabit per second data transfer up.

That sucks. Especially when I have to transfer a bunch of large files from home to my office, which I do with some frequency.

Now, being that when I find a service that works, I at least try to stick with it, I  called AT&T Broadband Customer Service and asked if there was any way possible to increase my upload speed.

“Nope,” they said.

Next call: Comcast. I already had a disused Motorola Surfboard SB5101 Cable Modem from a previous stint with Comcast. Their fastest high-speed Internet package: a whopping 12Mbpsdown, plus 2-3Mbps up. And it’s the same price as the DSL I’m currently subscribing to. And that isn’t even their fastest package. Wow.

One problem, though: I’ve had Comcast before at Casa de Pius, and it’s reliability rating always sucked. It’d stay up for a few hours, then go down. Then up again for a day, then go down.

Once again, though, I took the plunge: I ordered their middle-tier package (12 down/2-3 up). $42.95 per month, and $20 for the first six months. Plus, since I already have one of their cable modems, I don’t need a modem rental.

I wired it up. Same $#@^&*! problem. It’d stay up for an hour, then go down for two. Very frustrating. However, I figured it out: the system was miswired. Once I rewired the QnQ cabinet the right way, I’ve had no further difficulty.

So I’m going to try out Comcast High-Speed Internet for a week or two and see what happens.

Butterfly has turned me onto watching The Biggest Loser with her on Tuesday nights; the season finalé of which was on last Tuesday.

For this season, what made the show for me was Abby.

If you follow The Biggest Loser, then you already know the heartbreaking story of Abby Rike. For those who don’t, Abby’s husband, young daughter, and infant son–her entire family–were killed in car crash. Worse, Abby was supposed to be in the van with them.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has thought what I’m about to write; but every time I see Abby, my heart breaks for her. America, collectively, has asked the same question of Abby: How do you recover from a personal tragedy of such staggering proportion?

For Abby, the answer now is simple: “You choose to.”

Abby uttered the most beautiful, inspirational words in an interview, granted during early filming of The Biggest Loser:

“[Throughout my grieving process,] there are times–where I felt I was walking in molasses.

I took 26,000 steps yesterday. Every one of them was a choice.”

I’m reading back the words I just wrote and they look ridiculous. I wish that I had the eloquence to truly relate how powerful those words are, how foundation-shaking. Abby Rike has endured a tragedy so horrifying and heartbreaking that it completely defies my meager ability to articulate the profound sadness I feel when I hear her talk about it.

Yet Abby Rike chooses to get up, every morning, and face another day without the beautiful family she loved. How on God’s earth she finds the strength every day to choose to do so is a complete mystery to me.

Abby Rike is an inspiration.

I remember why I don’t like commuting via public transit:

It takes forever.

I left my house this morning at 6:45. I got to work at 10:00. Now, granted, had I not gotten on the wrong bus and had to double back, I would have gotten there by 9:00. That’s still two full hours on public transit.

I’ll tell you, though, it’s far better than the way I was doing public transit before. Palm Tran Route 40 to the West Palm Beach Intramodal Transit Station (whew!) is not even a quarter full–unlike Route 62, which is always jam-packed. It also doesn’t do that whole stop-every-200-feet thing to let more people on and off.

I got a whole bunch of e-books for my Storm and enjoyed reading a book (such as it is), for a change during my commute. Heck, I have two hours to fill, after all… I can’t work during all of them…

Wow. Two hours each way. That’s four hours a day, 20 hours a week, roughly 86.5 hours a month, or 1,040 hours a year. Or, 43.3 days.

Just commuting to and from work.

Wow.

Of course, if I drove, my commute is about an 45 minutes. That’s about 390 hours a year, or 16 days.

I decided to start taking Tri-Rail to work again. After crunching the numbers, I still can’t beat Tri-Rail to ease the financial pain of my 80-mile-a-day commute, even though I know that Tri-Rail doesn’t run on time most of the time.

Helping to ease that pain is the fact that Palm Tran just opened a brand-new Park and Ride lot about a mile away from my house, right behind the Fresh Market at The Mall at Wellington Green. This lot serves Palm Tran Route 40,  which goes practically non-stop to the West Palm Beach Tri-Rail Station (now called the West Palm Beach Intramodal Transit Station) in about 35 minutes.

I used to take Route 62 to the Lake Worth station, but I only did that for a few months–there were a couple of very good reasons why I stopped:

• When Tri-Rail updated their schedules about a year ago, Palm Tran did not. Route 62 arrives at the Lake Worth Tri-Rail Station very close to the same time as the trains do. A few minutes little earlier or later by either mode can spell the difference of waiting at the station for up to an hour. A couple of times I’d gotten off the 62 bus at the Lake Worth station just as the Southbound train was pulling away.
• The last westbound Route 62 bus leaves the Lake Worth Tri-Rail station at 6:30pm. Because the bus and train arrive at Lake Worth so close together, If I miss P634 because I have to work a little late, I risk being stranded stranded at the Lake Worth station–Palm Tran 62 and Tri Rail won’t wait for one another.
• I had to ride 62 from its terminus at the Mall at Wellington Green to the Lake Worth Tri-Rail station, which is very close to the other end of its line. It was an obnoxious, bumpy, ride lasting a little less than an hour, and during rush hour it would stop every minute or so. Quite a number of times it was standing-room-only.

Route 40, by contrast, is practiaclly a straight shot to the West Palm Beach Tri-Rail station along Southern Boulevard, a limited-access state road, stopping for passengers only once or twice. The ride is anywhere from 35-40 minutes and arrives about fifteen minutes before the train does, leaving a nice, big buffer for both modes of transit. Plus, the last Route 40 Westbound bus leaves the station at 8:25 pm, reducing the risk of my being stranded. The latest train I’d need to catch is P642 leaving Cypress Creek at 7:14 pm.

Of course, this morning, I got on 40 Westbound and nearly ended up in Belle Glade. Whoops. However, I got off at Palms West Hospital and caught 40 going the other way still made it to work by around 10:00.

After driving to work for the majority of the rainy season, I’d forgotten how nice it was to let someone else do the driving for a change. I slept on the bus. I answered e-mails on the train (thank you, Verizon BroadbandAcces!) . It was a beautiful day, and the trains were running smoothly and on-time.

Here’s hoping it stays that way.

Bobby Bowden, iconic head coach of the Florida State University Seminoles football team, announced that will step down from his head coaching job after this season’s bowl game.

Bowden joined FSU’s football program in 1976 and turned the moribund Seminoles into a college football dynasty. He has 2 national championships, 20 bowl victories, and 315 wins under his belt, rivaling other legendary college coaches such as Bear Bryant and Joe Paterno.

The rivalry between the Seminoles and the University of Miami Hurricanes is equally legendary; while it’s not quite as intense as the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry, it is no less fierce. The rivalry currently sees Miami at the top, 31-23.

Doubtless that losses to the Hurricanes so heartbreaking that the games have received their own names–Wide Right I, Wide Right II, Wide Right III, Wide Left I, and Wide Right IV, all lost by a field goal–will haunt Bowden’s dreams until the end of his days.

Even though I rooted against the ‘Noles, Bowden was nonetheless a legend on the gridiron and worthy of great respect. I hope his retirement is a long and happy one.

Even the title makes me laugh.

I have, at this point, consumed the remainder of my bottle of Jack Daniels (after having consumed a fried fish Po’ Boy earlier), with a healthy dose of Diet Pepsi. I liken that combination to the consummation of a Pan Galactic Gargle  Blaster: about which, the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy says:

Consuming a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a piece of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

Frankly, I don’t know if I got the quote right, because I’m seriously wasted. Ergo, I don’t much care if I did or didn’t. The point of this exercise is to determine if I can even come up with a coherent journal entry (I hate the word ‘blog’) when I’m very drunk.

I’m hoping I’ll rediscover this little gem during one of those nostalgic romps through my journal that a journaleer often takes when bored or distracted; maybe I’ll be sitting in front of the PC some weekend with nothing to do and read this entry and go ‘Holy %$&*#@!, I wrote that!?’

Anyway, I should get to it.

It’s the day before Thanksgiving, 2009. My Father-in-law, here from the other side of the country, hours earlier has told me something very upsetting (not about my beautiful Butterfly–something else entirely, which I won’t divulge here due to it being inappropriate for a public journal entry), and I’ve spent the vast majority of the day up in our bedroom moping about it. Moping like a little kid. And chastising myself for doing so.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter, to use another Douglas Adams-ism, a pair of dingo’s kidneys what anybody in the universe thinks of me, the marriage that my beautiful Butterfly and I share, or my ability to be a good husband. This is my second attempt at husbandry. It’s Butterfly’s third attempt at wife-ery. With any luck, it will be our last; we’re both pretty good at it by now, I think, having made most all of the mistakes along the way (separately, of course) that married people do. Thanks to our vast experience, we’ve worked through some pretty serious difficulties with love, caring, compassion, and understanding for one another that many copules in our position would be envious to enjoy. I’d very much like to think that, at long last, I have finally found my soul-mate, and she, hers.

I seem to have suffered the onslaught of in-laws that one is always forced to endure come holiday-time. And it is with a mighty slurp of the last of my Double Jack-and-Diet-Pepsi (heh–doubtless my second-line manager, a subscriber to my Facebook page [to which The Corsair Journal is cross-posted] is positively cringing at the mention that I have imbibed such a horrid concoction) that I share with you that I have dived, naiive and ill-prepared, into the waters that are my in-laws (I’m going to think that line is so damn corny when I’m sober).

Honestly, if one dares to put their private thoughts in a public space, then one should be thoroughly prepared to share with anyone who stumbles across those thoughts their state of mind when those thoughts were conveyed to the medium from which they were henceforth absorbed.

So let me ’splain. No, ees too much; let me sum up:

Butterfly’s previous husband, prior to me, will be convicted in the coming weeks in Federal court on charges of operating a Madoff-esque Ponzi schheme. Butterfly’s brother, cajoled by Butterfly’s ex into becoming a salesman for the “company,” is now–at the behest of the FBI and SEC–testifying against him, in exchange for a reduced sentence. Butterfly’s brother has not yet been remanded to Federal custody, but my in-laws fear he likely will be immediately following a sentencing hearing on Tuesday the 1st. Butterfly’s brother’s sentence, while not nearly as hefty as Butterfly’s ex’s (largely owing to both his reduced role in the alleged crimes as well as his cooperation with the Feds), will nonetheless be pretty substantial–in the several-years range.

Worse, Butterfly’s brother will be leaving behind a wife and very young son while he serves his time. And right now, the family has no idea where, or for exactly how long, that time will be served. The latter will be revealed at the hearing. The former, despite a request to serve sentence at FCI Miami, is really anybody’s guess.

Butterfly, naturally, is not feeling particularly wonderful about the fact that her brother’s association with her ex has had the unintended consequence of costing her brother his freedom.

It makes one’s head swim, if one were to think about it hard enough. It’s like a scene pulled from some absurd nightmare that even Danté wouldn’t buy tickets to.

So it seems that this is the last Thanksgiving (or major holiday of any kind, for that matter) that Butterfly, her brother, his wife and child, his Dad, Mom, nieces and nephews (and me, the lone in-law in this equation) will all get to spend together for who-knows how long. Butterfly’s Dad, hailing from the other side of the country, is staying here at our place until the hearing on Tuesday, and I couldn’t have been more happy to host him–that is, until today.

Naturally, there’s a little pressure associated with this situation (I do have a gift for understatement); and, due to it, Butterfly’s Dad–by his own admission, a crotchety old fart (his words, not mine)–said something to me earlier today that really, really caught me completely off guard and upset me very greatly.

Exactly what he said is not important. My job, given the circumstances, is to keep the peace. I’m fully cognizant of the gravity of this situation and I refuse to let some childish hurt feelings spoil what, as I have said earlier, could be the last family Thanksgiving dinner this family will enjoy together for G-d-only knows how long. I can’t control what he said, or how bad it stung, or how unfair I think it is that I feel I’m being punished for the transgressions of the man that Butterfly was married to before me. This is not about me.

This is about a family who is hurting because they are about to lose someone they love, for a long time. All I can do is support my Butterfly while that happens.

—

My beautiful Butterfly is lying next to me right now, deep in blissful slumber, as I write this rambling treatise. She loves me just as much as I love her–and for that love I am more grateful than one can imagine; I think she knows how proud I am of her, and she has made abundantly clear how proud she is of me. We cling to one another though the great goings-on that take place around us.

My place is clear. My duty is clear.

And maybe this entry, despite the pretenses under which it started, has turned out more lucid than I thought it would.

Engadget is reporting that the wireless carrier war is really heating up, with AT&T firing right back at Verizon (after their legal request for an injunction on Verizon’s commercials was denied!):

C’mon, really, AT&T? Really? You have roughly 1/4 the 3G coverage of Verizon and all you can say is your 3G coverage is faster? Really? That’s like saying your car can totally smoke any other car out there–but only runs on a quarter of the roads. And here’s a little news flash for you: UMTS and HSDPA may be faster than EV-DO rev. A, but it ain’t that much faster–and besides, the way you’ve implemented it, it’s actually slower. Munch on that. Oh–and did I mention EV-DO rev. A is available across ALL of Verizon’s network–not just in “select markets?”

So you have the iPhone–big deal. What good is a smartphone if it keeps dropping from 3G to EDGE to No Data right in the middle of Downtown Chicago and New York, as a number of iPhone users are reporting?

At least you’re answering back Verizon issue-for-issue. But I still can’t imagine what good it is having the fastest 3G network when I can’t make or receive a voice call while standing in my living room, I drop a call halfway through, or when every piece of electronics in a ten-foot radius goes nuts from interference when my phone actually does decide to ring a call through.

Pretty weak, guys. Pretty weak.

Again, instead of hiring camera crews, washed-up actors, and renting abandoned warehouse space to film nanny-nanny-boo-boo commercials, perhaps that money would be better-spent upgrading your ancient network.

…but my feed, with richer content (such as the YouTube videos I embed) is also available on the web:

http://www.thecorsairjournal.com

…as well as an RSS feed:

http://www.thecorsairjournal.com/feed/

I just read another infuriating article in the Wall Street Journal singing the same old tune: Some corporate IT user is bitching against e-mail quotas, blocked websites, the inability to install his own apps, and the aging workhorse that is Windows XP.

And as an IT manager, you know what I have to say to that?

Tough shit, jocko.

We IT types get reamed from both sides of the house. It’s an argument as old as commerce itself: Management wants to spend as little on IT as humanly possible. The user community wants shiny new toys every week. The two are not compatible with one another. And the most fun happens when the user community goes to management with their laundry-list of grievances: “Waaah! The network is too slow! Waaah! We want unlimited e-mail server space to store every piece of SPAM we’ve ever received since 1994! Waaah!  We want unfettered access to the whole open Internet! Waaah! We want a 9,000GHz Octouple-Core laptop with a 90″ screen and 500gb of RAM and a 60tb drive so we can write letters faster in Word!” Then Management comes down on the IT department asking why all the users are so damn unhappy.

I happen to be pretty lucky at my job: while we get don’t always get new technology at brisk pace, it’s not a snail’s pace. And I’m lucky enough to be working with really, really smart people who are intelligent enough to know that you’re not supposed to be surfing Porn at work and that there ain’t no such thing as a “free” app on the Internet, so I don’t have to spend all my time being a mommy to an office full of recalcitrant children.

For the rest of you: Here’s a simple FAQ as to why the waaaaambulance hasn’t showed up at your desk with every little stupid IT request you asked for:

Q: Waaaah! Why can’t I have more e-mail storage space?
A: Because while disk is cheap, the boxes that the disk goes into is not. And because we don’t have a SAN (storage area network), we can’t just throw more disk in it on the fly. We have to plan disk upgrades into e-mail’s maintenance cycle and that means taking down the mail server for a few hours. Oh, did I mention that despite our repeated requests, management didn’t spring for a redundanr cluster that would keep one mail server up at all times while we worked on another to actually do these kinds of upgrades without disruption? So here’s my advice to you, bucko: Clean out your damn inbox and archive your mail locally. Trust me, it ain’t that hard, especially if you use Outlook.

Q: Waaah! There’s a laptop at Office Depot that has eleventy million times the specs that mine has! Faster processor! More disk! More memory! Bigger screen! Why can’t I have it!?
A: Because we’re a [insert manufacturer here] shop, and all of our technology purchases have to o through our corporate account so we can get corporate pricing. That laptop at Office Depot costs 10-25% more at Office Depot than what we can get it for. That’s why the purchase has to go through channels. And I asked your manager if you could have one like it the last ten times you submitted the request. He said no this time too, because it’s too expensive–and yelling at me ain’t gonna change that. Better luck asking Santa Claus. And besides–you’re making PowerPoint slides and Word documents–not curing cancer or decoding the human genome. Your current laptop is just fine. Deal with it.

Q: Waaah! I wanna surf the whole Internet! Why won’t you let me surf Myspace or Facebook or girlswith[BEEEEEEEP]intheir[BEEEEEEEP].com!?
A: Because Myspace is still the 25-dollar heroin-junkie hooker of the Web, frought with malware and spyware attack redirects. You think your PC is slow now? Wait’ll it gets infected and becones a zombie attached to some botnet, participating in DDoS attacks, SPAMming, and Kiddie-Porn storage (I swear I’m NOT making that one up–want proof? Here it is). Do that shit on your PC, in your own home, on your own time–not the company’s. I’m sick of re-imaging your goddamn PC. This is the third time this week.

Q: Waaah! I wanna install all my own programs! Why won’t you make me an administrator of my own machine so I can do that!?
A: See the previous question. Who the hell knows what you’ll install if given free reign on your box? The Internet is full of bad people just itching to take over a corporate machine, steal its data, and steal the bandwidth of the company network to do bad things.

Q: Waaah! Windows XP is old! I want a new, modenr operating system like Vista!
A: Well, you’re actually in luck there. Windows 7 is out, which is actually better than Vista, and isn’t the bloated pig that Vista was. I run Windows 7 on a Dell D610 at home, with a single-core 1.7GHz P4M, 2gb of RAM, and a 60gb hard drive-pretty modest by today’s standards, and so far it has done everything I’ve asked it to do. But I don’t know whether you realize this or not, but VISTA DIDN’T WORK! It was a big, bloated, buggy, DRM-filled, horrific steaming pile of dog shit. But don’t you worry. We’re doing compatibility testing on Windows 7 right now, and we’ll have an image available for rollout in a few months. BUT: That’s only if I can get Management to spring for the licenses, to the tune of $179.99 per computer. We need Windows 7 Enterprise, you see.

In summary: I’m sick to death of reading these hyperventilating articles from frustrated users bitching about their IT department. They haven’t the foggiest ideas that we in IT are no less frustrated, caught on the one side with having no budget to work with and on the other consisting of hoardes of screaming, dissatisfied users. IT is a hard job. If you think it’s so easy, you do it.

At the end of the day, the IT policy we make is directly dependent on the company policy that comes down from the upper echelons–and my loyalty is to the people who sign my checks, NOT to you. I’ve been tasked to keep our employees productive, our IT assets safe and accounted for, and give you the tools you require to do your job–no more, no less.

If you don’t like it, well, that’s just tough.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t hate the iPhone. but I loathe AT&T, and I loathe them because their service totally stinks. Butterfly and her kids had AT&T phones when we met, and I counted down the seconds until her contract was up and I could bring them all over to Verizon with me–About half the calls between she and I were marred by interference and outright drops, and she couldn’t get a signal on her phone in our living room–she was constantly missing calls. Even text messages sometimes wouldn’t be delivered for days at a time. When she or I send texts even today to AT&T customers, that still happens, albeit less frequently. But it still happens.

Now I really hate AT&T.

I’ve been reading for days about their legal response to Verizon’s new spate of “There’s a map for that” ads:

…and the conclusion I can draw? Someone better call a waaaaaaaaambulance for AT&T. Not only does their voice network stink, but their 3G data network is seriously outdated and hasn’t nearly kept up with its ambitious smartphone offerings–iPhone included.

And now the war is getting even uglier. Verizon has fired right back at the lawsuit–not only doubling up on its “There’s a map for that” ads (including some hilarious Christmas-themed ones), but now Engadget is reporting that Verizon’s legal team has fired a response to AT&T’s legal team–one drafted from the ground up for publication.

AT&T did not file this lawsuit because Verizon’s “There’s A Map For That” advertisements are untrue; AT&T sued because Verizon’s ads are true and the truth hurts.

In the final analysis, AT&T seeks emergency relief because Verizon’s side-by-side, apples-to-apples comparison of its own 3G coverage with AT&T’s confirms what the marketplace has been saying for months: AT&T failed to invest adequately in the necessary infrastructure to expand its 3G coverage to support its growth in smartphone business, and the usefulness of its service to smartphone users has suffered accordingly.

Yup. The truth sure does hurt, AT&T.

Lastly, Engadget published this great editorial that debunks all the myths surrounding AT&T’s and Verizon’s data networks once and for all–and is required reading for anybody following this.

I’ll echo the sentiment of the above editorial–as well as many of the folks watching this fight with interest: Hey AT&T, instead of spending untold zillions on corporate lawyers, think maybe you outght to invest that money into, I dunno, improving your network? Maybe? Huh? Whaddaya say?