Tech Generation

My husband has a much nicer phone than I do. This has caused some tension in our household. One of the things his phone does is retrieve his email for him. Then it beeps. And he reads his email. And I bitch and moan because
a) My phone can't do it &
b) He's always reading his damn phone.

My daughter has a little green toy phone that beeps and plays noises. Yesterday she brought it to me looking grumpy. Looking at me soulfully, she wails

"Zeb's phone doesn't have email, and you want email!"

I'm pretty sure she doesn't really have a handle on what email is, but it was pretty funny nonetheless :).

..and a Happy New Year

to all those recovering from Christmas and floating around until New Year. My Christmas was wonderful - my daughter had an absolute ball, and every now and again looks around the wrapping-strewn lounge (I'm not really an efficient tidyer), and says hopefully "I don't know where all those presents have gone!". She had so many presents that we were still opening them yesterday - so she can be forgiven for thinking that some may still be lurking.

The Giant Duck went down a treat and is now regularly snuggled. It is bigger than she is by quite a margin, and probably will be for a couple of year.

I miss Cape Town dreadfully - I miss the Great Boxing Day Braai, and I desparately want to be able to just hang out with friends. We don't know anyone up here with kids anywhere near Zeb's age, and pretty much have only hung out with family since we got here. Hopefully, now that we own a house and know that we are fairly settled in the area, we can start finding social things to do around here. Also, we might meet families next year when Zeb goes to nursery school. (In 11 days - 11 DAYS - my baby starts school in 11 Days - I don't think I'm ready. )

I got the 2-disc version of Pirates of the Carribean, Dead Man's Chest for christmas, and I must admit to some disappointment. Aside from being unmistakeable as an "inbetween" film (like the Two Towers was), I wasn't as taken with Jack Sparrow's character - I didn't get the feeling that he was as redeemable as he was in the first one, he was much more selfish and far less swashbuckling. I don't know... it just didn't grab me as much, which was sad. Maybe version 3 will be better again.

Yesterday I decided to switch on my laptop from work to finish updating the system - I had fetched all the sources and simply (ha-ha) had to emerge world to compile them all. Somehow, I have lost my windows manager completely. I could get to a terminal login, but no startx. Anyway, merrily I continued my emerge quest, and subsequently could not boot at all. So it looks like I have, yet again, screwed my gentoo disto horribly - and will once again have to face the disaproval of my boss, who will once again tell me how wonderful Ubuntu is and how I now have to switch - because he has absolutely no understanding of how long it actually takes me to set up everything I want to on a pc, and how long it takes to install everything. I reckon, if it takes me a week to sort out my gentoo, but then it works, then I have everything set up as I want it, but if I "just install Ubuntu" - then I have to first back up gigabytes of data, try to somehow store / export all my settings on all the apps I use (probably a day's work in and of itself) and then try to reproduce said settings in a new distribution that I don't know from a bar of soap. I'm a bit bummed by the whole thing.

Anyway, I think I will abandon the bastard for the rest of the year, and see if anyone is around to help me when I go back to work next week. I'll take a few good books in with me in case no-one's around. Now I need to try and get some sleep. A has put up new curtains in our bedroom that actually reach all the way to the bottom of the window, so sunrise might not wake me up tomorrow :).

iBleugh

So, I use iBurst. I've mentioned this politely. They still have not managed to solve their open relay problem, or even give me feedback on how its going. Tonight I'm emailing their customer support manager this:
------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mr Hall,

I have repeatedly reported this particular issue to your iburst technical help desk - with no luck. It seems they either don't understand the problem, are completely incapable of fixing the problem, or simply don't care.

Many of my friends use Livejournal (www.livejournal.com), a blogging site. Much of my personal online activity revolves around reading and commenting on these blogs. Unfortunately, Livejournal does not allow me to comment, when I am connecting via iBurst. This is NOT a setting on my pc. I am NOT running any kind of mailserver. I can post comments quite happily from the same unit through my work link, just not through iBurst.

I have reported this error at least three times, most recently around November the 14th. A customer service consultant did phone me after that, to tell me that they were working on the problem, and then.....nothing.

The problem is still occuring - it seems at least one of your relays is an open relay, so anyone accessing the internet via that relay is banned from commenting in an attempt to reduce spam. This has to be affecting more people than just me.

This is the error message I get while trying to upload comments to the livejournal site:

One or more errors occurred processing your request. Please go back, correct the necessary information, and submit your data again.

* Your IP address (196.2.124.251) is detected as an open proxy (a common source of spam) so comment access is denied. If you do not believe you're accessing the net through an open proxy, please contact your ISP or this site's tech support to help resolve the problem.

This ip address resolves as:
Server: ns-cache-01.jhb.wbs.co.za
Address: 196.30.31.193

Name: wbs-196-2-124-251.wbs.co.za
Address: 196.2.124.251

Definately your problem.

Sincerely,

Why I don't comment

Most of my friends have livejournal accounts. This appears to be an
accident of history. Anyway, I use iBurst to access the 'net. (Because Telkom, don't-get-me-started, took over 5 MONTHS to install just a normal phone line in
our house, and an adsl line would have taken some months more). But iBurst apparently,
at least from my location, accesses the 'net via some dodgy relays. Sooo, if I try to post to a livejournal account, I get the following message:


Your IP address (196.2.124.251) is detected as an open proxy (a common source of spam) so comment access is denied. If you do not believe you're accessing the net through an open proxy, please contact your ISP or this site's tech support to help resolve the problem.


Now I have asked them to fix this, repeatedly - but it seems that they don't understand the problem. *sigh*. So I'm going to keep this site updated with my progress. That way, eventually, when I have a real category of the ills of iburst, I will mail just the URL of the latest, scathing blog-post to their tech-support, and possibly to some of their marketing people too.

Anyway, as of today, I have mailed them at least twice - and have spoken directly to their sysadmin once, in the past few months. No progress.