I can't get cable. The cable company stops running the line about a mile from my house. They refuse to turn the corner and come down our road. They claim not enough people live on said road that would want cable. From that corner to my house on my side of the road there are 6 houses. There are 2 more I can hit with a thrown rock past me. The other side of the road has 8 or 9 until my house. Maybe 17 isn't enough to justify the expense, but everyone of those houses have a satellite dish in the yard or on the house. I had no tv for the first year I lived there except the local pbs station and an occasional network if the wind was right. I later installed Primestar and had it for a couple of years. I then went to Dish Network until about a year ago. Financial issues caused me to ask them to turn off my service. I requested them to turn it off, they said okay and I disconnected my 2 boxes. I kept getting bills and they kept going up. I kept calling. Basically it took me 3 months to get them to turn off my service and they insisted I owed them for it. I never had the service for that time period, I didn't even have the boxes plugged in. So, until last week I had no television and watched everything streamed off the internet.
I missed a lot of stupid stuff like my history channel and military channel though, so I finally got TV back. I went to my telephone company to get it. They now offer digital cable. I got the 2 room package. Basically, they hook a faster modem up for my dsl and hook the 2 boxes into a dsl modem/router. Unfortunately this has caused problems. I had recently switched my 4 port router for a 4 port wireless "n" router. This let me keep all 4 computers hooked up and use my laptop. The router they brought was a 4 port with wireless g. They hooked my main computer and the 2 tv's in. Then they hooked my router to their router. I took some time off work to be there and I left when they did. I had some issues with my laptop, it was seeing the wireless network and connecting, but could not reach the internet.
After some research I tried several things. I reset my winsock, my tcip, ect. Then finally wiped my laptop and started reinstalling. After redoing windows and my drivers, it was still not working. Then it hit me, that I hadn't tried to use the internet, other than on my main computer since the switch. I tried, it failed. So more research. As of this date, I have an email in to their tech support. I cannot access their modem/router, they won't "for security reasons" give me a log in and password. So I cannot do anything with it. I have disconnected my wireless router completely. My laptop does not see a wireless network with my router turned off. I hooked my router to the laptop, accessed it and turned off the dhcp server. I changed its lan ip from 198.162.1.1 to 198.162.1.99. I then run a cat 5 from the last open lan port to a lan port on the linksys. Still no internet and now it won't assign an ip to my laptop. My second computer, hardwired to my router, but it also can't get onto the internet. My head hurts. I have reset the whole network so many times. Why the hell can't they put on/off switches on routers, whats with this unplug to turn off crap? Anybody got a suggestion?
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Stupid Stuff
Attention: the following items are crimes in the state of Tennessee, you have been warned:
1. Unlawful importing of skunks (2 things, first why would you? second, is there lawful importing?)
2. Crime against nature (don't know, don't want to even guess)
3. Glue--unlawful use of (see above)
4. Purchase of hides from unknown person without ID (how about from a known person with no ID or an unknown person with an ID?)
5. Selling children (they have market value?)
6. Teaching sex education unless approved (let them learn it from naughty magazines and television like God intended, besides that's why Al Gore invented the internet).
1. Unlawful importing of skunks (2 things, first why would you? second, is there lawful importing?)
2. Crime against nature (don't know, don't want to even guess)
3. Glue--unlawful use of (see above)
4. Purchase of hides from unknown person without ID (how about from a known person with no ID or an unknown person with an ID?)
5. Selling children (they have market value?)
6. Teaching sex education unless approved (let them learn it from naughty magazines and television like God intended, besides that's why Al Gore invented the internet).
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Rambling Thoughts
What ever happened to the metric system. Back when dinosaurs roamed the land and I was in elementary school, there was a big push for the US to convert to the metric system. What the heck happened? We like convert part way then quit. Distances are still in inches, feet, yards, miles. I still buy milk in Pints, quarts and gallons, but I buy soda in liters, unless it's a smaller container when it becomes ounces again. Most food stuff has both measurements on it. Medicine tends to be measured in metric units for injections or pill form, but back to ounces for liquids taken orally. Weights are usually measured in ounces and pounds. What happened? Why did we quit? The rest of the world uses the metric system, why are we still stuck on the old one? I was just wondering this the other night. It worries me.
I have tv again. I said I wouldn't, but I did. I still can't get traditional cable, I hate dish network almost to the mob with flaming torches level, and I have heard Direct TV is no better. Fortunately the telephone company is now offering digital cable, so I signed up for their 2 room set up. I got the expanded basic cable package with an additional family tier. No premium channels but I get the networks, basic cable plus stuff like the discovery channels, history, the various channels that used to show educational and music programming but now mostly show crappy unreality programming. I had to get the faily tier though, must have my BBC America, dicovery military, and history international channels. Yeah I'm weird, deal with it. I would rather watch Dr. Who or a documentary about the P-51 Mustang than Lost or Survivor or American Idol. Anyway, I get all this for about $20 less than the most comparable of Dish's packages. But I am a bit out of touch with TV. Those Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World commercials are a hoot. But there is some ad I heard about 5000 times last night about a website where you can go to get rid of viruses and spyware. Can't remember the name, but it was pretty annoying. They kept giving symptoms which meant you might have a virus. One of them was if it took more than 3 seconds to load an email. Dude? My lap top at work was made in 1937 and has .000000008 gigs of memory and a gasoline powered intel processor and vacuum tubes. It's old and crappy. It couldn't load an email in 3 seconds if you gave it a half hour head start. Not to mention what do you mean load an email? Do you mean off a web based service like hotmail or yahoo, or do you mean in an email program? If in a program, which program, Outlook, outlook express, Thunderbird. Also, what if they have dial up and the email has 2 huge jpegs and a video clip attached? I mean obviously this is aimed at computer novices, because there are a lot of sites out there where you can do free scans, why pay to download an unknown anti anything program. If you are going to pay, go to a well established company like Symantec or Mcafee. Or better yet, download malwarebytes and/or spybot and donate so you can activate the real time protections.
Yes, strange things do keep me awake at night, but at least now I can go back to falling asleep to cable tv.
I have tv again. I said I wouldn't, but I did. I still can't get traditional cable, I hate dish network almost to the mob with flaming torches level, and I have heard Direct TV is no better. Fortunately the telephone company is now offering digital cable, so I signed up for their 2 room set up. I got the expanded basic cable package with an additional family tier. No premium channels but I get the networks, basic cable plus stuff like the discovery channels, history, the various channels that used to show educational and music programming but now mostly show crappy unreality programming. I had to get the faily tier though, must have my BBC America, dicovery military, and history international channels. Yeah I'm weird, deal with it. I would rather watch Dr. Who or a documentary about the P-51 Mustang than Lost or Survivor or American Idol. Anyway, I get all this for about $20 less than the most comparable of Dish's packages. But I am a bit out of touch with TV. Those Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World commercials are a hoot. But there is some ad I heard about 5000 times last night about a website where you can go to get rid of viruses and spyware. Can't remember the name, but it was pretty annoying. They kept giving symptoms which meant you might have a virus. One of them was if it took more than 3 seconds to load an email. Dude? My lap top at work was made in 1937 and has .000000008 gigs of memory and a gasoline powered intel processor and vacuum tubes. It's old and crappy. It couldn't load an email in 3 seconds if you gave it a half hour head start. Not to mention what do you mean load an email? Do you mean off a web based service like hotmail or yahoo, or do you mean in an email program? If in a program, which program, Outlook, outlook express, Thunderbird. Also, what if they have dial up and the email has 2 huge jpegs and a video clip attached? I mean obviously this is aimed at computer novices, because there are a lot of sites out there where you can do free scans, why pay to download an unknown anti anything program. If you are going to pay, go to a well established company like Symantec or Mcafee. Or better yet, download malwarebytes and/or spybot and donate so you can activate the real time protections.
Yes, strange things do keep me awake at night, but at least now I can go back to falling asleep to cable tv.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Private Detectives
A couple of years ago, give or take a couple of years, I was sitting in my office trying to figure out a way to bring in some extra money. I was struck suddenly with a weird idea. I had access to resources of information most people didn't, so I could maybe get a PI license and take advantage of this. So I hopped on the information superhighway and did a bit of research. It took me maybe 30 minutes to track down and assimulation the information. It was a bit more money than I wanted to spend, (the individual license wasn't bad, but you could only use that if you were going to work for an existing agency. If you were going solo you had to get an agency license which was $250). I then checked and saw what would happen if I were caught using the information and resources available to me due to my possession outside of my official capacity and decided to work as a part-time janitor.
That was basically the background for this story. I was looking through a local free internet classified site shortly after the above story when I noticed an individual in an bordering county advertising himself pretty heavily as a private detective and begging for work. This guy updated his adds religiously because they were always in the top 5 posts for several days. I finally got curious and checked him out. The adds were written in a rather unprofessional way and seemed more than a tad immature or maybe fanciful. I could picture the guy seeing himself as Magnum PI. His adds stated he would find missing persons, tail people, look for thieves, ect. Something about these ads just annoyed the living hell out of me. I decided, for whatever reason, to investigate myself. I started by looking for a license. They guy had his contact information in his add, and since it required a state license it was easy to see if he had one. I didn't even have to use my official capacity. You can go onto the state website and click on the department of commerce and insurance link. They issue all of the professional licenses and anyone can use there database to see if someone is licenced. That's how you can make sure your dentist, doctor, insurance salesman, ect. is legit. This guy had no state P.I. license. So I sent him an email asking him if he was a licensed PI. He sent one back stating he had graduated from an online detective school and they had trained him and gave him all the tools he needed to be a detective.
I replied and said that was fine and dandy, but most, if not all states required Private Investigators to be licensed. I told him the requirements for this state, sent him links to the pertinent websites as proof and mentioned that if someone official noticed his ads or if he should accept money to perform professional services, and said person filed a complaint, he could find himself in a not pleasant situation. He sent back an email thanking me and stating he had wondered how to get his license but hadn't been able to find out.
This gentleman wants to hunt for thieves, trail cheating spouses and find missing persons for money, but can't do a damn Google search for "How to get a Private Investigator license in Tennessee"? Yeah, I'll send him all my business. I didn't see his ads on that site anymore after that.
That was basically the background for this story. I was looking through a local free internet classified site shortly after the above story when I noticed an individual in an bordering county advertising himself pretty heavily as a private detective and begging for work. This guy updated his adds religiously because they were always in the top 5 posts for several days. I finally got curious and checked him out. The adds were written in a rather unprofessional way and seemed more than a tad immature or maybe fanciful. I could picture the guy seeing himself as Magnum PI. His adds stated he would find missing persons, tail people, look for thieves, ect. Something about these ads just annoyed the living hell out of me. I decided, for whatever reason, to investigate myself. I started by looking for a license. They guy had his contact information in his add, and since it required a state license it was easy to see if he had one. I didn't even have to use my official capacity. You can go onto the state website and click on the department of commerce and insurance link. They issue all of the professional licenses and anyone can use there database to see if someone is licenced. That's how you can make sure your dentist, doctor, insurance salesman, ect. is legit. This guy had no state P.I. license. So I sent him an email asking him if he was a licensed PI. He sent one back stating he had graduated from an online detective school and they had trained him and gave him all the tools he needed to be a detective.
I replied and said that was fine and dandy, but most, if not all states required Private Investigators to be licensed. I told him the requirements for this state, sent him links to the pertinent websites as proof and mentioned that if someone official noticed his ads or if he should accept money to perform professional services, and said person filed a complaint, he could find himself in a not pleasant situation. He sent back an email thanking me and stating he had wondered how to get his license but hadn't been able to find out.
This gentleman wants to hunt for thieves, trail cheating spouses and find missing persons for money, but can't do a damn Google search for "How to get a Private Investigator license in Tennessee"? Yeah, I'll send him all my business. I didn't see his ads on that site anymore after that.
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