I have been an avid audible.com supporter for well over a year. I’ve been patient with the horrendous website. I bought numerous subscriptions for others last holiday season. But i’m bloody fed up and frustrated with them. It’s impossible to navigate the system. When i was traveling, i found that i couldn’t get audible to download. Now that time has passed, my subscription doesn’t roll over and so i lost a month worth of downloads. This has happened plenty before and i’m just tired of it. I have patience for wacky interfaces at the beginning, but not over time and not when i feel like i’m getting screwed out of money while they fuck around. Frustration.

I know that i’m good at breaking technology, but this is absolutely ridiculous and i would love some insight if anyone knows how i’m pulling this off.

My cable modem is connected to a 4-port hub which is connected to two Netgear wireless routers. I can consistently bring down the Netgear router doing the following things:
1) Safari – Open all in tabs with > 35 tabs
2) Terminal ssh to SIMS, open pine. Copy/paste > 1 page worth of text from local to pine [Using pine since Mail is still fubared]

Task 1 is a request for a large quantity of packets simultaneously. Task 2 is sending a large quantity of packets simultaneously.

Resetting the Netgear brings it right back up, but this is just weird. Is it a problem with my Netgear? With my Mac? Why on earth is this happening?

This so reminds me of when i used to bring down Brown’s primary server using print from Photoshop. I was banned from printing. I don’t like the idea of being banned from copy/pasting and open in tabs in my own household.

Now, i know that i hate email and i know that it hates me, but our standoff has reached new levels, creating absolute chaos. I know that many of you are Mac people so i could really use your help since Apple’s site is oh so not helpful.

I use Apple Mail. It’s connected to an IMAP server at school. There’s a procmail process remotely that moves various messages into various folders. That procmail process also forwards certain emails off to my Sidekick.

Apple Mail has never automatically updated those folders so, instead of “check mail,” i’ve always right clicked and selected “synchronize folders.” I read email, i move it to other folders. It stops being “new” and when i reply, it gets a little arrow next to it. This is normal.

Well, something has gone terribly wrong and normal no longer exists. Now, when i “synchronize” a random assortment of “old” messages reappear in each box. Most are marked as “new” and some are not. Some of the moved ones are in the folders i moved them to; some are not. Some of the ones i reply to have the arrow; most do not. Messages that i swore i sent are not in my sent directory (nor in my drafts or out directory).

I’m completely baffled. Help?

[Or perhaps this should be a sign that i’m never going to catch up on email and i should quit now.]

In the last episode, our heroine tried every idea presented by her kind audience, trying desperately to unlock her beloved iPod. To no avail. The telephone people said it would be $70 to answer a question. Our heroine was left in despair (well, not really, since a kind one from Apple volunteered to take a look at it if i could get to Cupertino).

On a lurch, our heroine wandered into the Apple Store, lured by the promise of an Airport Express (which won’t be in stores until July… foiled). She mozied up to the Genius Bar, drawn in by the big screens with interesting facts. After waiting as a poor man never managed to get his guitar to talk to his GarageBand on his particular machine, our heroine told the genius of her woes. He asked if she’d done this; she said yes and noted that she had done that and that and that. He was startled. He attached the iPod to his machine. No avail. It was closing time. He handed her a refurbished one and told her to be good to it. She was ecstatic.

To be noted: our heroine was also smiling because she overheard the best nugget ever from a random Apple employee:

… I had a different device from … oh, wait… err, i can’t mention them here.

::giggle:: I guess you can’t talk about competitors as an employee at the Apple Store.

::grumble:: Mac won’t help me restart my iPod without paying them $60 so i’m hoping someone here might be able to help.

My iPod’s software thinks that it is on hold (even though the slider at the top says otherwise). It fell under this magical state in the first week of April. I web-searched and someone on the web said to let the battery die to nothingness. I did this. To no avail. Whenever i plug it back in to power, it’s still on hold.

There’s no way to do the restart via the three buttons because it’s on hold. Isn’t there a manual restart somehow? Like one where i can erase the whole disk and get it to restart?

I have to admit that i’m *really* cranky with Mac about this one. You’d think that a noticeable defect in the software (documented by others on the web) would mean that they’d support you in fixing it. I’m a bit resentful by being demanded to pay $60 to fix it when i was thinking of upgrading at the end of the summer. Now i’m just questioning whether or not it’s worth upgrading because my iPod has been broken for half the time that i’ve had it.

Trying to post from Ecto to my blog. I love the idea of being able to blog offline and just upload.

Although i have a feeling that this might also encourage me to revert to writing more semi-personal entries… It reminds me so much of my LJ days. Hmm… Is that a good thing?

I could never switch webhosting services because no one but Glenn (Netspace) would tolerate my ability to break everything consistently (and hog huge amounts of their bandwidth with my Ani DiFranco lyrics site). And always through what seems to be a quiet, calm, non-intrusive tasks. It’s not like i’m writing scripts that are getting out of control, or anything.

Today, i needed to find a few emails from my 2002 mail archive. So, of course, the first thing i do is gunzip. Well, i’m too close to my quota so it barfed. I wanted to untar it to find out what i had destroyed in the process. Couldn’t untar in my directory so i moved it to /tmp (forgetting that i should move it to /var/tmp instead). tar -xvf and it pukes. I think it’s all corrupted, but really, it just used up all of /tmp. Oops. So, i sent a message to see what i had done wrong. Yet, apparently, my abuse of /tmp caused a bunch of processes elsewhere on the system to fail and eventually caused a httpd process to spiral out of control and hog everything else on the system.

::sigh:: What’s a girl to do?

Of course, last time, a small glitch in my .procmail crashed the entire box continuously. OOps.

My favorite was that at Brown, i used to be able to crash the main file server by printing. Of course, they sysadmins there responded by creating a printing script which basically said “if uid=’dmb’ { break; } else { print(); }”