In the Hizzy: Off-Topic Postings

People (of which I am one) are still pissed, mostly about the nonexistent customer service during the outage. There was no way to find out if it was on their end or yours. I practically took apart my computer trying to fix it. Heh. I had a similar problem when my Earthlink DSL went out a couple weeks ago. Call customer support. Routing system tells me all about how to go online to solve my problems. Um, if you have a problem with your DSL service, how are you supposed to go online? Eventually get routed to a support tech with a heavy accent. Ask if there's an outage in my area. "Oh, I can help you with that." And then she proceeds to go through the normal troubleshooting script, asking about software on my machine, checking cables and eliminating splitters. When that doesn't find the problem, all she can do is create a trouble ticket and route it to the escalation engineers. She even had to transfer me to a different support tech so I could get a dialup number. A couple days later, the service started back up. I figured they had done something to fix it. That's when I started getting emails from the escalation engineer asking me if I still needed help. I'm still not sure if they actually did anything, or if the next time it's cold and/or windy the connection will go out until the weather improves again :) Several years ago I worked for Microsoft Developer Support, and for a while my team's cubicles were next to regular Office Support. This was just before outsourcing support took off. So I kinda know the structure the support techs are stuck with and why it's such a pain to get support, but it sure doesn't help relieve the frustration of not being able to get an answer!

It is a whole different kind of frustration when they do manage to answer the phone, in India, with what you can practically see as a little flip book of troubleshooting solutions right in front of them. People calling ATT on Monday either got a busy signal, or got disconnected after an automaton gave out the right numbers to push for tech support. ATT was all alarmed by that and said they didn't know that was happening. It must have been weird when they had such an extensive outage that took out the entire southeast, from D.C. down and not one single person called.

:) It's not like they manage the phone switches or anything... :roll: To be honest, I'm surprised techy stuff works as well as it does as often as it does. There are so many pieces of hardware and software between, say, me typing into my computer and you reading this message on yours that it is pretty remarkable it works at all.

I just lost all of my digital art. Pretty much everything I've been working on since July - which was when I last backed up my hard drive, because I'm a fucking moron - is gone. I managed to recover one file, but it was corrupted as shit. I don't even know how fucked I am yet. It hasn't sunk in. I was working on about four different jobs - three of them were pretty much done. They're all gone now. The high resolution versions of all of my art - gone. Plus, my fanfic for the House BigBang challenge, that just happened to be in that folder - also gone. Fuck! Sorry for the cursing :cry:

Holy crap, blue. Any idea how it happened?

I just lost all of my digital art. Pretty much everything I've been working on since July - which was when I last backed up my hard drive, because I'm a fucking moron - is gone. I managed to recover one file, but it was corrupted as shit. I don't even know how fucked I am yet. It hasn't sunk in. I was working on about four different jobs - three of them were pretty much done. They're all gone now. The high resolution versions of all of my art - gone. Plus, my fanfic for the House BigBang challenge, that just happened to be in that folder - also gone. Fuck! Sorry for the cursing :cry: Whoa, that sucks. But don't completely dispair. Did you have a harddrive crash? Are you a Mac user? Those folks at the genius bar are amazing about retrieving files you think are gone forever. But otherwise....man, I do sympathize. I've lost so much stuff before, pretty much for being a moron. (Not implying you're a moron, btw.) Just that no matter how many times I learn the message about backing up, I always seem to not back up enough. Sigh.

Holy crap, blue. Any idea how it happened? I don't really know. I think when I went to delete a few items off my desktop, the folder with all of my art was also somehow selected. I was using Ctrl+click to pick up multiple items. My computer is pretty shitty - sometimes the last folder I've used stays selected for no good reason. And I apparently didn't realize the folder was in the recycle bin when I purged everything. Whoa, that sucks. But don't completely dispair. Did you have a harddrive crash? Are you a Mac user? Those folks at the genius bar are amazing about retrieving files you think are gone forever. But otherwise....man, I do sympathize. I've lost so much stuff before, pretty much for being a moron. (Not implying you're a moron, btw.) Just that no matter how many times I learn the message about backing up, I always seem to not back up enough. Sigh. No, you're right - I am a moron. I also have a PC, so... I downloaded one of those file recovery programs to try to undo my dumbness, but it only found one file and it wasn't workable. So, I'm pretty much screwed. God, I'm so pissed off at myself! Also, sorry about the whining. I'm kind of in shock still :(

That sucks, blue. Makes having Winter Wonderland stuck in my head seem pretty insignificant :) (damned grocery store musak!) One of the best investments I've made (following a similar tale of woe...) is an external hard drive. There's an automatic task set up to archive my documents folder to that drive once a week. Of course the external drive can fail too, but I don't have to worry about sitting at the computer with a stack of RW DVDs while it backs things up. And if 2 hard drives go bad at the same time, the rest of the computer will probably be fried too... Some of the computer protection services, like Norton, offer automatic backup to an online service as well. I haven't tried any of those as 90% of my files are already online. But if you've got a fast internet connection, it might be worth looking into for the future. Funny (well not really) story about backups: a company I worked at several years ago made instruments used to analyze food and drugs, and so we had to deal with FDA documentation requirements. As part of that, we had a documented disaster plan to follow, which involved everyone backing up their computers to tape drive (ok, it was a long time ago :)) once a week, with a 3 tape rotation and the tapes sent to an off-site location. So we had a disaster. I think flooding may have been involved. And... the tapes we had so carefully generated week after week couldn't be read on the replacement computers. IIRC, I ended up restoring the software and documentation I was working on from floppy disks (yeah, a really long time ago...) that I used to take stuff home to work on in the evening.

Oh blue I'm so sorry! You have just made me save a copy of my own bigbang fic elsewhere, if that's any comfort whatsoever. No?...

It does make me feel better :D I look forward to reading it. At least my dumb mistake can serve as an example. Marykir, the worst thing is we've got a server we can upload to, but I was just too lazy to do it.

Marykir, the worst thing is we've got a server we can upload to, but I was just too lazy to do it. That's why I finally set up the automated backup (part of my McAfee antivirus/antispam/etc. suite). I would never do it otherwise...

Oh, God. The wankiest wank that ever wanked just occurred in the House fandom on LJ. I could not have laughed harder tonight. The internet rules all. Also, is anyone else ridiculously excited for There Will Be Blood? Daniel-Day Lewis gracing the silver screen again has me all atitter.

I also have a PC, so... I downloaded one of those file recovery programs to try to undo my dumbness, but it only found one file and it wasn't workable. So, I'm pretty much screwed. If you search around the internet, I believe you can find the Dos commands for recovering the file via MS-Dos/Command Prompt. I did it once or twice before on an old computer, but it was ages ago.

Oh, God. The wankiest wank that ever wanked just occurred in the House fandom on LJ. I could not have laughed harder tonight. The internet rules all. That was fairly amusing. The art in question is obviously traced - not photoshopped, but traced - which is generally frowned upon among art types. I was actually kind of curious about it and did my own 'investigation' a couple of months ago. No doubt about it. Only my opinion, of course, as a professional artist who works with other professional artists. Anyway, it brought up an interesting point that I hadn't considered before. I had just kind of assumed that everyone knew it was traced and enjoyed it for what it was.

Hey, dumb question ahoy. How does one hypothetically unclog a bathtub? First time apartment owner here and I'd rather do it myself than get someone to help even though service would be free (awkward non-language skills). I took a shower last night and there's still an inch of water in there. /TMI

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