Times of minor unpleasantness

[Grath]

[09/14/15 10:43:08] <dasterin> HMMMM
[09/14/15 10:43:15] <dasterin> I might be buying a house sooner than I had thought
[09/14/15 10:43:35] <dasterin> People at work are informing me of some USDA loan things for like rural development or whatever
[09/14/15 10:43:50] <dasterin> there's some areas around here that aren't too far out of town that you can get SUPER awesome loans for through that
[09/14/15 10:44:00] <dasterin> like no down payment and no closing costs and still good interest rates

Looks like this is the thing being talked about including a map of eligible areas. Denver and like, suburbs of Denver/nearby populated areas look to be excluded but there's like, Erie, Genesee, Bennett, etc outside of Denver that would be eligible.

[Thad]

So last week, after I finished my antibiotics, I was feeling better; still coughing, but not as badly. So on Thursday I went in and got my allergy shot for the first time in a few weeks.

Could be a coincidence that my symptoms got worse again the next day; I don't know. But my cough got worse (especially at night) and my sore throat came back.

So on Tuesday I went back in to the doc. She gave me a prescription for Prednisone, switched me to a new inhaler (actually one I used to use a few years back; as it happens I had an unopened, unexpired one already in my cabinet), and sent me in for a chest X-ray at my request because the last time I had these symptoms for this long I had fucking valley fever and pneumonia and I would very much like to eliminate those as possibilities.

She also told me I need to start exercising again, which I've been avoiding because I was worried it would set off my asthma. But I've put on a lot of weight, and even though I knew I hadn't been exercising I didn't realize how much I'd put on. (About five or six years ago -- during the aforementioned bout with valley fever and pneumonia -- I lost a lot of weight and went down two pants sizes to a 32" waist. I've gained most of the weight back, but wherever that weight's going it's not my waist; my pants are a little tighter the 32's still fit, and in fact most of them need a belt.)

So I hit the elliptical the past two days; I kept it short and slow and it hasn't set off my asthma like I was concerned it would. My cough is worse today (bad enough that I took my first breathing treatment in a week and a half), but it didn't get worse until hours after I exercised so I don't think they're related.

Still coughing; ups and downs. Amped up from the steroids. But I think I'm improving, at least. And it's good to be able to work out a little.

[François]

"Son, come with me on a two day trip to see your grandmother. I know she's a turbo-powered megabitch but I suffer from Catholic guilt and so should you."
"Absolutely not. I'd rather go to jail for two days, at least I wouldn't have to pretend I'm having a good time."
"Think of it as a vacation! I'll pay for your meals and for the hotel!"
"Being deprived of my own delicious home-cooked food and comfortable bed in exchange for overpriced unhealthy garbage, a bed that's either too hard or too soft and that dozens of strangers have fucked in, and a ticket for the bedbug lottery? What a delightful prospect."
"She's gonna die soon, you know."

every
fucking
year

[Mongrel]

Is your answer to the third line "Good."?

[François]

Ehhh, almost. But as much as I want to stay away from that woman and the horrifying cavalcade of inheritance squabbles that will follow her passing, I generally don't feel strongly enough about the situation to tell my mother I'll be happy when her mother kicks the bucket.

And though I am rather annoyed, I suspect part of the reason she bugs me about it so much is to make sure she has an excuse not to go (she doesn't want to go alone), and I suppose I can give her that much, at least.

[Thad]

...so about four years ago, when I got my first smartphone, Cox didn't have working IMAP service.

Since I still use my Cox E-Mail address as my primary, I set up a workaround, having it forward to a dedicated inbox on my own mailserver.

This worked fine until today, when my server got migrated. (It actually got migrated a week ago -- more on that in a minute -- but the nameserver just got updated today.)

The new server has a cap on my mailbox size. It's a pretty reasonable one, if a bit small for this day and age; it's 500MB.

So. First of all, I was suddenly missing the last ten days' worth of E-Mail. And second, nothing new was coming in.

Now, I'm sure I could have asked for an increase in my cap and gotten it with no trouble, but I decided that, since Cox has long since fixed IMAP support (what with the number of people carrying around mobile devices I'm surprised they hadn't already done it four years ago when this started), it would make more sense to stop forwarding my Cox E-Mail to another server entirely. (Among other reasons this seemed like a good idea: I don't lose a week's worth of E-Mails, as they're still in the inbox on my Cox account.)

The first thing I'm concerned about is that the E-Mails in my Cox account look like this:

First a smattering of old ones (4 from a two-day period in 2014, 3 from a single day in January), then a gap, then they pick up on August 20.

What worries me about the "August 20" date is that -- aside from the 7 old E-Mails -- my E-Mails in my Cox account go back exactly two months.

Did I set up a filter to delete any E-Mails older than two months? That seems like it would have been a reasonable thing to do so that (1) my Cox inbox wouldn't max out its storage and start bouncing but (2) just in case something didn't forward correctly I'd still have plenty of time to go back and check.

BUT. If this IS a filter that I set up, I can't find it, or any documentation on how I would have done such a thing.

(Another possibility is that I had the Cox account set to forward and then automatically delete all E-Mails, but changed the setting in August. But neither explanation accounts for why there were seven E-Mails from before August in there.)

SO. I guess I'll keep an eye on it and see if all the messages from August 20 disappear tomorrow. In which case I've got plenty of time (more than six weeks) to figure out where the filter setting is before I start losing messages that aren't on the other server.

But aside from that, it took me about an hour to re-sort and re-filter two months' worth of E-Mails I'd already sorted and filtered. What a pain in the ass.

And I've got an interview bright and early in the morning, and would rather have been brushing up on interview things, but "primary E-Mail address is not working" is kind of one of those things you've gotta take care of right away.

Anyway, time to brush my teeth and get to bed. Have to be up at 5 AM because my wife needs a ride to work before I drive out to my interview 30 miles north of here.

Could be worse, though. The other day I stayed home all day with a miserable headache, and there was a storm, and my dog got scared and pissed all over the floor of my office, and then sat in it. "Give the dog a shower" was pretty low on my list of things I felt like doing at that moment, but obviously it had just become something that had to get done.

So, y'know. Staying up late (for "9 PM" values of late, which I am counting because I have to get up at 5 AM) sorting E-Mails is not the least pleasant thing I've had to deal with in the past few days.

[Mongrel]

What's that old gag? "Why do you keep punching yourself in the head?" "Because it feels so good when I stop."

That's a dirty lie.

[Romosome]

I have a fever and people are stupid assholes

[Mothra]

Are you sick as a DOG???? ROMO

[MarsDragon]

Looks like it's my turn on the carpel tunnel train.

The good news is I recognized it and went to the doctor the day after I noticed symptoms, so all I have to do is wear a brace for a couple weeks and try to make my desk more ergonomic. I'm pretty sure I know exactly why this happened, and avoiding it shouldn't be too hard in the future. I'll probably want to get one of those gel mouse pads or something and rearrange my desk a bit, but that's a lot easier than surgery.

Still. I keep having to be careful to avoid hurting my wrist and it's annoying. Playing on the PS2 is probably the least-bad thing I can do to my wrist and the doctor specifically said to avoid playing games. What the hell am I going to do for a week?

[Thad]

Got a letter from the utility company saying my power's going to be out for 8 hours tomorrow. I guess they're replacing a pole or something.

From what I understand, the temperature's low enough this time of year that my fridge and freezer should be able to stay cold for 8 hours without juice, as long as I don't open the door and let the cold air out. I've cranked my freezer down to its coldest setting overnight just in case. (Think I might make my fridge a level or two colder, but I don't want to freeze my lettuce or anything.)

Got the alarm set for 7:30, which should give me an hour before the power goes out. That should be plenty of time to power down all the desktop computers, make oatmeal and coffee while I've still got a microwave, and grab a shower. (The master bathroom gets enough daylight that I could shower and shave in there with no power; however, while my water is gas-heated, the controls for the gas heater are electric, so when the power's out there's no hot water.)

Also poured myself a 5-liter pitcher of water, since I drink filtered water from a dispenser in my fridge. (Tap water 'round these parts is safe to drink, but it does not taste pleasant.)

If I don't feel like leaving the house, I've got plenty of battery-operated devices (and, y'know, books and stuff) to keep me entertained, but I probably will leave the house. I'm thinking I'll probably go grab takeout or something for lunch rather than grab something out of the pantry, but I'll play it by ear. Tomorrow's Wednesday, so I'll probably run buy comics, too.

Provided the codeine cough syrup doesn't hit me too hard to drive. I took the first dose tonight and it made me pretty wobbly for about an hour but I was okay after that.

[nosimpleway]

I got a notification that this thread had been updated.

I never bookmarked this thread.

The forums just knew.

[Thad]

Aaaand they're 20 minutes ahead of schedule.

The good news is I'd JUST finished shutting down all the electronics and gotten everything I needed out of and back into the fridge.

Bad news is, guess I'll be waiting on that shower.

Also, it's really cloudy today, so the house is pretty dark even with windows open.

Also I remembered my stove has no pilot light and uses an electric starter, but fortunately I had some lighters around. It's too dark to do anything more complicated than boil water, but fortunately that's all I need right now.

[François]

Welp, a couple police officers just practically broke down my front door. There was some pretty aggressive knocking at first, and I checked outside to make sure it wasn't some unfortunate with either too many or too few pills again; in the time it took me to spot the cruiser, they were pretty clearly ready to kick the door down. I rushed downstairs to open up, made sure I had my hands up and demanded as politely as I could manage what the everliving fuck was going on.

Turns out they were looking for someone else, who had given my address and phone number! They believed me right away when I said my name wasn't Sarah and that I lived alone, and they left.

What an amusing snafu.

Hmm.

[Thad]

Cox SMTP decided to quit sending E-Mail last night.

An error occurred while sending mail: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: fed1rmimpo109.cox.net cox connection refused from [my IP].

I've tried all the usual troubleshooting steps, including disconnecting my modem for awhile to see if I'd get assigned a new IP; no dice, so now I'm in a chat with a Cox rep trying to get it figured out.

So far it's slightly less tedious than the phone because I didn't have to wait on hold, but it's still all the usual BS questions.

"Did you check if the outgoing server is set correctly?"

Dude, I already told you I've tried 3 different machines. Do you think I changed my SMTP settings on 3 different devices yesterday afternoon and then didn't think to change them back when they didn't work?

[Thad]

He says he'll escalate and it should be fixed within 24 hours.

Which leaves me without the ability to send E-Mail for roughly two fucking days. (I mean, I guess I can fuck around with slow, outdated webmail. Oh joy.)

On a completely unrelated note, my Cox bill went up seven bucks this month. Again.

[Thad]

Man, just one of those days where I feel like I lost the entire day.

My wife just got over a bout of strep throat. I seem to have made it through unscathed, but I've had a sore throat since last night, it got worse today, and I'm pretty highly susceptible to strep, so I did the responsible thing and went to urgent care to make sure it wasn't strep.

It wasn't. But I sat there and waited for 3 fucking hours to find that out. I will not be returning to that urgent care.

She said I might have the flu, but I might not. She wrote me a prescription for Tamiflu and said to get it if I get any more symptoms.

On the plus side, I had plenty of time to finish reading Guards! Guards! But I still feel like I lost my whole damn day.

Especially since now I'm going to go to bed early.


(ETA a last thought before bed: you know, I DID get a little bit of writing in today, which is good. I'm working on the book about my various jobs over the past seven years; it's easy to write but it often leaves me feeling grumpy. The tone I'm going for is a good-natured-but-snarky look back at a series of absurd situations, but I'm finding that I still have some pretty raw nerves about a lot of stuff, and I'm hoping that doesn't result in the whole thing coming across as whiny instead of funny. Something to think about when I get around to the revisions phase. Along with my overuse of italics and parentheses.)

[Thad]

Still feeling sick; E-Mail still not fucking working.

It used to be that when you called Cox and you already had a ticket open, it would skip over all the fucking robot-voice troubleshooting bullshit. It does not do that anymore.

Hung up phone and cursed loudly about the time it told me to try webmail and see if that worked.

Now I am back in chat.

[Cox guy]: Good afternoon, the log below shows the username can send on our servers. This may be a software, device or network issue. Please review the notes and contact the customer.

Thank you,
[Some other Cox guy]
HRD Network Security

[Cox guy]: They did a test email and it worked.

Thad Boyd: The username is not the problem. It's giving a Connection Refused error before the username is even sent.

Thad Boyd: Here's the error:

Thad Boyd: An error occurred while sending mail: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: fed1rmimpo306.cox.net cox connection refused from 24.255.7.85.

[Cox guy]: That error message was included.

Thad Boyd: Can you try resetting my IP to see if that's the problem?

[Cox guy]: Cox High Speed Internet network is based on a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) which means each computer in the network is assigned an IP address randomly which also changes every now and then depending on the duration of your IP lease. Unfortunately, Cox residential services do not offer static IP addresses.

Thad Boyd: I'm not asking for a static IP.

Thad Boyd: Can I be assigned a different random IP from the DHCP pool?

[Cox guy]: You can by resetting the modem

Thad Boyd: I've reset the modem several times. In one case I left it off for over an hour. It keeps pulling the same IP every time I turn it on.

This is not what I wanted to be doing today or ever.

I notice that nobody has said "Thank you for choosing Cox" to me. I wonder if they got tired of people doing exactly what I would do if they did say that to me: point out that I fucking-well did not choose Cox, that it is the only broadband provider available in my location, and that in fact I check a couple of times a month to see if any other competitors have become available.

My choices are (1) pay $74 a month for Cox; (2) steal wifi from neighbor who is using Cox; (3) see how far I can stretch the LTE I get on my phone.

...

[Cox guy]: Are you using webmail?

ARE YOU GODDAMN KIDDING ME

[Thad]

After an hour and fifteen minutes, I am finally being sent to a tier 2 tech.

[Thad]

This is the first time I have ever cursed out a support tech.

I'm not proud of it but she kept repeating, for twenty solid minutes, that there is no way to change my IP address unless I disconnect my modem for 24 hours, and that there is nobody in the company who has the power to revoke a DHCP lease.

And, in my defense, I was very patient for the first hour and a half I spent talking to support.

(I believe what I actually shouted was -- as she started to explain DHCP to me for the umpteenth time -- "I KNOW how DHCP works; I RAN an ISP, for FUCK'S SAKE!")

I have concluded that tier 2 is worse than tier 1, because at least tier 1 understands they don't know what the fuck they're doing. The tier 2 tech started off by telling me I was not connected to the Internet, and would not accept it when I repeatedly explained to her that I could get to websites and receive E-Mail. She then insisted I bypass my router, which I finally did just to humor her and which, as expected, did not change anything.