Category: FWIW

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Part 3 of . . .n in the Continuing Saga of Westinghouse Digital’s Perfidy

The suboptimal (non)replacement TV sent us by Westinghouse Digital evidenced yet another deficiency yesterday. *sigh* Of course. Absolutely nothing the company has done to this point has evidenced any reasonable actions toward making us whole.

OK, sure, they FINALLY sent this TV that lacks features the TV we returned under warranty had, but only after I informed representatives of the company, very honestly, that my next step was legal action. So what? They send a substandard non-replacement.

Yesterday? A brief power outage wiped the TV setup. All scanned channels and other info, wiped. Not only that, but it took THREE channel scans to find the channels available to us and make tuning them possible at all. THREE, each taking THIRTY MINUTES (the TV this is supposedly a “replacement” for took no more than 10 minutes, max, to do this, and this has consistently taken multiple attempts lasting 30 minutes. . . or longer). Now, power outages are not that uncommon in America’s Third World County™ so I suppose we’ll have this to go through every time, now. (Well, maybe not every time. Additional expense to avoid it, though: add a UPS.)

Westinghouse Digital’s solution? Send THIS TV back for “replacement”. After the previous experience getting ANY kind of response from Westinghouse Digital, that’s a non-starter.

Fortunately, next month our extended service plan with a SEPARATE company takes effect. . .

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Kudos. . . tempered

OK, so “city” workers here in third world county central deserve kudos for fast response. “City” planners, notsomuch.

So, spent last night vacc-ing and pumping and santitizing. The vacc-ing and pumping was at least 300 gallons of. . . sewage backup. Yeh, the sanitizing was a . . . gas. (Chlorine bleach–what I had on hand–combining with organic compounds: fun.) *sigh*

Things had slowed down a bit to the rate of about 15 gallons every half hour to 45 minutes by 8:00 this morning (cleanout to recepticle with pump). Called the “city” (yes, “emergency” number was worthless, as was number for water/sanitation department) after one such session. “City” clerk said he’d relay the message. Checked 30 minutes later. No effluent. Blockage down line had been cleared. Son&Heir told me he’d seen a “city” work truck a few minutes before heading toward a down line sewer access.

Quick response. Fast work. I wonder, though, just what someone dumped down their toilet. . . this time. (Yeh, this has happened two other times over the past 18.5 years here.)

Bad rap to “city” planners, though. The eight-inch sewer line is far, far smaller than it needs to be to serve all the households that have been added since it was initially installed. They KNOW it’s undersized, but a sports park etc. has priority over infrastructure improvements (and this isn’t the only one going begging).

But the repair crews are not too shabby (when the work order actually gets put on their list).

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“It’s going to be fun!”

Bill Whittle on “President Social Proof’s” new clothes and the fun we can have running the naked socialistas into the river. . .

I’m going to operate this year focusing on saying to every Loony Left Moonbat I can, in effect or in fact *heh*, “Although I disagree with you, I will defend your right to say what you believe. . . and my right to mock you for being an idiot. But when you try to COMPEL me to agree with you, you’re in for a fight, mmmK?”

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Yólly Yöker

Sometimes I ponder God’s nature and think his nature as Love includes a lot that some folks don’t normally consider to be “love”–primarily, I think, because of their own poor concept of love. Consider God’s “tough love” as but one example (and yes, examples of really tough love abound in scripture). But his nature as Love is often made manifest, to me at least, in my perception (I certainly hope it’s not a sort of eisegesis) of His sense of humor. I mean, really–look around you at nature, at people. If this is a created order, it could only have been created by the Ultimate Jolly Joker.

Just consider how this might affect science. IF God had desired to do so, He could certainly, since He’s Omnipotent, have created all the evidence geologists, astrophysicists and biologists rely on for their various theories about the age of the Earth and the universe, and the various theories of evolution of life and intelligence.

*meh* It’s an amusing possibility. Oh, it doesn’t make any difference to me in determining my own views of various theories of real science, but I do grin a bit and even sometimes throw this monkey wrench in the works when I run into folks who treat theories of evolution, the age and nature of the universe, etc. as dogma in their Cult of Scientism-y Pseudo-Thinking. And maybe that’s one of God’s best jokes: giving people like me monkey wrenches to throw into the works of neo-paganistic cultic dogma.

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*head-butt*

head-butt

No, it’s not your eyes, and no, it’s not the camera, and nor is it my pathetic photog “skilz” (though pathetic is an accurate term *heh*). Caught this guy moving in for yet another head-butt. He’s the head-buttingest cat I’ve ever known.

A better pose (on the back of my Wonder Woman’s chair):

cat-chair

And another, same chair:

Cat-sit

Annnnd. . . in the bay window. No, the basket’s not really too small for him. He just seems to prefer crowding himself up into as small a ball as possible.

yet-another-nap-time

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BrokeBlog Mountain

[If this sounds just a bit queer, well it is.]

So, had a call from Bluehost saying I needed to move to a more expensive hosting service, which they very naturally had on offer, because my lil “let the voices in my head duke it out here” blog was exceeding a reasonable bandwidth usage.

WTF?

OK, now why would that be, since I have seriously scaled back on traffic by deliberately working for several years to drive idiots away (leaving the 0.01% of blog visitors as acceptable traffic *heh*)? The guy–not tech support but sales–surmised a broken plugin or some such, once I clued him in on the site’s usage.

MmmK. . . No new plugins recently, but I let him deactivate ’em all for testing.

Right. Everything except the built-in left sidebar and the blog title–*poof!*–disappeared.

Oh, joy. *sigh*

Re-enabled plugins one-by-one, checking bandwidth usage as I refreshed the site. One plugin re-enabled yielded the restoration of the right sidebar (as expected) and also–surprise, surprise!–ONE post, the most recent.

But no more.

Have now re-enabled plugins to match pre-disabled state. Still no spikes in bandwidth usage. Still only most recent post visible (we’ll see what posting this one does, eh?). I’ve tried to access the database optimization and repair tools available via cPanel at Bluehost, but no joy. Won’t let me log in with known good credentials and when the credentials are reset, still no login. :-/

I’ll cogitate on this a bit. I have my two most recent database backups (in three locations) I can use–once I can log into the database management tools–so all my head voices’ crap is still around. . . somewhere

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Hate It When This Happens. . .

. . . as it seems to be doing more and more often of late.

*sigh*

I just determined that my right mouse clicking problems on this computer aren’t entirely the fault of the mouse. *sigh* I live by the right mouse click! *heh* Dam*ed twitchy-finger. . . *grumble-grumble-gripe-complain*

Olde Pharte Body Fail.

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An Etymological Wonder

Back in the day when Britain still had an empire (and a queen with bigger balls than all but perhaps two or three living Republican politicians), some Brit, unhappy with “eggplant,” mugged a poor Frenchie for “aubergine”.

True story. No, really. Would a face like this lie to a face like that about a thing like that?

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How to Waste Your Time

A fact based, reasoned argument presented to a contemporary faux liberal (progressive, leftist, etc.) is like attempting to teach a pig to sing. All it does is waste your time and annoy the pig.

Ditto with the porker.

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Balance

I used to read EVERYTHING. No, really. Cereal boxes, soup cans, ACTUAL ASSEMBLY INSTRUCTIONS *heh* (after having assembled whatnot, more often than not :-)).

Fluff or food: it’s really all in how one reads it. I re-read my collection of Shakespeare earlier this year, but I’ve reaped as much from thoughtful, critical reading of poorly-written YA books (informally reviewing ’em for my Wonder Woman, librarian) by reading those with an eye to the Good the Bad and the Ugly–and pondering, based on internal evidence, on the causes of each.

It’s all in how one reads what one reads. I read different material and authors for different reasons. I read an Anne Rice book recently (the first such in years for me) and was caught up more in appreciating the craft of her writing than the story and characters, both of which I disliked greatly. . . and which, having read other books by her, I suspected I might. I read David Weber books, despite my irritation at some of his writing flaws–consistently using certain words in ways that move me to suggest he might do with an Inigo Montoya consultation *cough*, his sometimes excessive wordiness, etc.–not even so much for the plots and characters as for the ethic he presents. I do NOT plan on re-reading Calvin’s “Institutes”. Thank you, no. Good stuff, for the most part, but juuuuust a wee tad on the tedious side for me. 🙂

I do try to hold myself down to a book a day, with some success, but I’m not going to make that a strict rule. Sometimes, it does take me three or so days to read a book, but that’s almost always because I have three to five other books I’m reading during that time as well. Always done that, probably always will. It’s fun to dream mixes of books currently in my read pile. 🙂