*scottstuff*

I’ve been a full-time professional computer guy now for at least 12 years, and I’ve had paying jobs doing computer support back to 1988. So, it’s not very often that I can say “I did something completely new” today. Sure, things change, I grow professionally, and I take on new responsibilities, but the old mundane stuff is still old and mundane. Except today.

We have a pile of Dell PowerEdge 350 1U servers sitting around the office that we bought for testing and demo purposes a couple years ago. I hate the things–they’re unexpandable, they boot slowly, the front panel is basically a layer of vinyl over a bare circuit board, they use a PCI video card that pops out of its slot every other time you move the system, and they use a bunch of dinky little screws that are too small for reasonable screwdrivers. We’ve had to have Dell replace hardware on about half of the ones that we’ve bought. So anyway, we had to ship one a few weeks ago in what I’ll be charitable and call an “unapproved shipping container,” and USPS returned it a bit the worse for wear. Like, the rack ears were bent back against the case, the CPU heat sink was sliding around the inside of the case, and the hard drives had popped out of their retaining clips. Amazingly enough, it still boots, but we’d be insane to ever trust the system again. So, it sat collecting dust on one end of my desk for a few weeks, until we found ourselves needing another test system.

So, a few minutes ago, I finally re-assembled the system. When I went to put the cover on it, I discovered that the cover didn’t fit–the hard drive carriers had popped out of their little retaining clips, and the back end of the carriers was popping up far enough to keep the case from closing. The clips are really just metal pegs welded to the bottom of the case, but 3 of the 4 of them were visibly crooked, and neither drive would fit.

No problem. I know how to bend sheet metal. So, today, after 16 years of working on computers, I finally got to use a hammer as a computer repair tool. It worked, too–the pins bent, the drives fit, the lid went on, and the system is up and running in the test rack, where it’ll remain far away from any mission-critical work for the rest of its life.

Healthcare companies suck. Pretty much all of them.

For the third time this year, I’ve received a huge, largely unexpected bill for some health care issue that I thought was paid for already. Today’s contender is Gabe’s speech therapist. The insurance coverage for speech therapy was maxed out, so we pulled him out for the year, because we can’t really afford to pay them $500 or so per month out of pocket. We knew that there were a couple sessions that weren’t covered by insurance, and we were expecting a bill for a few hundred. Instead, they sent us a bill for $2,300, including unpaid items going all the way back to last September that they just found, along with a pile of questionable bills from earlier in 2004.

Considering that we’ve been paying them the whole time, every time they bill us, I’m unclear on why there’d be unpaid visits from last fall. That’s just the beginning, though. They haven’t actually bothered to send us a bill since February. Since then, they’ve started adding all sorts of fun items to the bill. Things like billing us for the insurance company’s write-off amount, which is against their contract with the insurance company. Things like billing us for 5 services in a week when we only visited once. Fun stuff like that.

The thing is, I don’t think they’re being fraudulent or anything–I think they’re just completely incapable of billing us right. The bill itself obviously came out of some medical accounting software package, but the actual amounts due are written in in blue ink next to the computer-generated itemized total that they billed the insurance company. There’s no real indication why one line item is going to cost us $40.99 while the next, identical item is $105 or $31 or $75.

Even the doctors that I like keep doing this to me–they’ll outsource their billing and insurance administration, and then wait six months before sending us a bill for $500 worth of accumulated services. The smaller companies keep billing us for the insurance write-off amount, even though they have a contract with the insurance company that says that they can’t do that.

Even big hospitals, where you’d expect to find competent accounting and IT groups aren’t immune–Evergreen sent us a bill for $600 for labor and delivery charges, 14 months after our daughter was born.

I swear, from now on, I’m not going to bother doing meet-and-greets with the doctors that will be providing services–I’m going to skip straight past the docs and talk to the bookkeeping staff. They’re the ones that are going to screw me up, every time.

The weird thing about all of this is that it makes the (stereotypically) insurance company look like the good guys. They’ve been responsive to our calls and have provided piles of documentation when we’ve needed it. From watching our Explanation of Benefits notices go by, they even seem to be fairly quick at paying bills. Of course, it’s probably all an evil plot on their part.

Via Lawrence Lessig’s blog: a DRM-protected US Consitution on Amazon for $2.99. It’ll generously allow you to print two copies per year.

On a similar theme, Dan Gillmor had a pointer to the Constitution, as interpreted by Bush.

A few months back, MSN’s search engine decided that this blog was a great source of information on Paris Hilton videos, and decided to feed me tons of traffic.

Today was Google’s turn. One of my SpaceShip One entries is showing up on the first page of search results for “spaceship one” on at least a couple of Google’s servers. Surprisingly, this is only generating a couple dozen hits per hour this afternoon.

The Verizon DSL saga came to the end of a chapter today. I spent way too much time sitting on hold (although at least I can get work done that way), and concluded that:

1. Verizon is way too big, and provisioning, billing, and tech support don’t talk to each other.
2. They don’t care about making customers happy.
3. They can’t upgrade my DSL without 2-3 weeks of downtime.

Ugh. As suggested last night, I have a “legacy” frame-relay DSL setup. They’re deploying ATM-based DSL now. In order to upgrade, I need to switch services.

Technically, this is easy–ship me a new modem, swing my line from the old DSLAM to the new one, and update a couple database entries. Unfortunately, they don’t work that way. They don’t have a button for “rebuild link” in their order-entry system. Just “delete” and “add.” And there’s at least a 2-week gap in between the two.

You know, if they had competition, then they wouldn’t act like this. Oh, wait–they *do* have competition–I could go with Covad or Comcast. Except, Verizon seems to be lying to Covad about my wiring or something, either that or routing my wires in weird ways. I’m wired into the BOTHWAXB CO, apparently. According to Verizon, I’m 7800 feet from the CO. According to the database that they give to Covad, I’m over 30,000 feet from SWLLKWAXA. Uh, yeah, guys. Whatever. If the numbers that Washington’s PUC puts out are valid, I’m wired into the single largest CO in the state, and I’d really expect Covad to have a presence there.

So, at this point, I have three things to try. First, I have a friend who was, until recently, one of the DSL installers for Verizon in my area. He’s now working at a desk for them, but he can probably get me in touch with someone that can make things go smoother. Second, I’m going to talk to Covad again, and see if they can explain the database issue. Third, I’m going to talk to the PUC (er, “UTC” in Washington, apparently).

You know, who’d have guessed that it’d be this hard to give people more money?

This was the buggiest weekend that I’ve had in years. I tried to do one simple thing: upgrade Asterisk to the latest CVS version to fix a Cisco-Asterisk interaction bug. Here’s what went wrong:

1. Asterisk wouldn’t install without some new sound files that didn’t exist in the CVS tree.
2. Once it was installed, it wouldn’t start. Staring at things long enough lead to an obsolete plugin that worked with the previous version (3 months old), but not the new one. Deleting it let Asterisk start again.
3. Incoming calls via POTS work fine, but incoming calls via NuFone refuse to go to voicemail. They’ll ring, but if no one answers, instead of my voicemail prompt, callers hear Allison saying that the caller is unavailable. According to my logs, I’m not playing the message, so it must be NuFone.
4. My new asterisk->cellphone email script wasn’t working, so I upgraded my MTA to the latest minor revision from Debian and discovered two bugs. Basically, the upgrade ate my entire alias file, and it failed to fix the original bug.
5. And that bug’s just great: Debian’s build of courier’s makealiases script does weird things to command aliases. Basically, it double-appends the domain name to the name of the alias in aliases.dat, but only appends it once when generating the .courier file that actually runs the command. So, email aliases that get piped to commands just don’t work.

Oh, and on top of that, Asterisk’s hold music generator ran wild yesterday and slogged down my Asterisk server, leaving me with no phone service at home for a few hours. Ugh. There’s a reason that I waited 3 months to upgrade. I swear, once 1.0 is finally released, I’m not upgrading for years.

So, I’ve been trying to upgrade my DSL at home for over two weeks now. Verizon has switched packages, and I can go from 768/128 to 1500/384 for $10/month. Since I’m currently limited by the uplink speed for a lot of things (VoIP, SSH from work, web serving), this is basically a 3x speed upgrade. My line supports it, my hardware supports it, and I’m only 7800 feet from the CO.

Easy upgrade, right?

Oh, wait. I said Verizon, didn’t I?

So far, nothing has happened. I’ve spent over 90 minutes on the phone with Verizon people. No one can quite explain why I haven’t been upgraded. The first one thought it should happen in 24-48 hours. Monday’s answer was 2-3 days. Today’s first offer was “5 days or so,” but after escalating and sitting on hold for most of an hour (frankly, the only thing that office speakerphones are really good for), they’re claiming that it should be up later today. Which is good, since they’ve been billing me for the higher speed since the first.

Nuke ‘em from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.

Update (June 17, 2004): Still broken. Today’s tech pulled out a page on the excuse calendar: “Need to upgrade from Frame-Relay DSL to ATM DSL.” Unfortunately, according to DSL Reports, that’s code for “you’re screwed.” They’re saying that I need to cancel my current DSL service, re-order new service on the same line, and put up with dial-up for a month or so while they straighten it out. Technically, it’s about 5 minutes worth of work, but they’re a telco. Did I mention that they’ve been billing me for the higher speed for almost 3 weeks now? It’s just about time to pull out my “Complain to PUC” card.

It’s turning into a Bad Tech Day. I lost one cheap Ethernet switch today, had weird failures with another, had my wife’s Mac crash, and now my laptop drive is failing. I just love the clicking sound it’s making. It looks like I’m running to Fry’s and playing with Carbon Copy Cloner tonight.

Update (5/5/2004 10am): It’s dead, Jim. The laptop drive died hard in the middle of running Carbon Copy Cloner. I think I got all of the important stuff ($HOME, /Applications, /Library) off of it before it croaked, but this is still really annoying. I’m probably going to have to track down my Panther install CDs to recover from this. At this point, the Powerbook won’t even boot–I just get the modern version of the sad mac face.

Update (5/5/2004 12:40pm): It’s back. I let it sit for an hour, and then it miraculously started booting again. I was able to keep it running long enough to finish copying 33 GB onto the new drive. I’m now back up and running using the new 60 GB external drive, which I’ll swap with the internal drive once I finish today’s big release at work.

This is kind of weird:

Microsoft, amid an IP spree that has won the company patent protection for everything from XML dialects to video game storage methods, received a patent on Tuesday for a new variety of apple tree.

U.S. Plant Patent 14,757, granted to Robert Burchinal of East Wenatchee, Wash., and assigned to Microsoft, covers a new type of tree discovered in the early 1990s in the Wenatchee area, a major commercial apple-growing region. Dubbed the “Burchinal Red Delicious,” the tree is notable for producing fruit that achieves a deep red color significantly earlier than other varieties. It is sold commercially as the “Adams Apple.” (CNET News.com)

It’s unclear; has Microsoft decided that it’s not enough for it to compete with every other company in the computer industry, and decided to move on to agriculture, or did the US Patent Office screw up? My money’s on a patent office screwup.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the .ly domain has been having problems. It was briefly looking like it was all simple incompetence, but now it’s getting entertaining again:

Dear Client,

Please be informed that on Tues. 20th. Apr. 2004 the official ccTLD .ly website has been criminally seized by a group claiming to be the caretakers of the .ly domain.

The seized website is an illegal replica of the original site apart from the fact that non of the dynamic features of the site work, and a different colour scheme. There are also other unauthorised changes which have been designed to mislead and confuse.

This message is to warn you to keep your user and login details secret. Should you receive an email from any address with nic.ly as the domain name then please disregard this and inform support@lydomains.com.

Lydomains.com is taking steps to ensure that your valuable intellectual property as well as your private data remains secure at all times. Meanwhile, this matter has been reported to the appropriate internet authority to investigate and resolve.

For your information the original nic.ly website can still be viewed at www.noc.ly.

Should you have any concerns about this then please write to info@lydomains.com

Lydomains.com administrator

Okay, clearly something is going on, and I’d love to know what it is.

Update: The Register has a few more details that I missed last Friday. As expected, there’s a debate over ownership of the .ly domain. It’s unclear exactly what is going on today, though.