Entry 08/11/2008 11:00:15 PM – Mentat 427

     I’m so glad that it’s my three days off.  Yesterday was just one of those sort of days where by 4 PM even though I was rested and relaxed I found myself wanting out after the mini-rush of calls that came in.  Between the two fiber issues on the West Coast, I had my fill of cranky people that had just enough knowledge to make them dangerous to PCs, Modems, Routers and Networking equipment, and the threat of someone wanting to speak to a supervisor because they were just the wrong sort of impatient, and the wrong sort of ignorant.  In fact, at one point around that time, even though I had coffee as a precaution and the fact that I was going to be up in the morning for a lot longer than I wanted, I had an ADD moment where my temper flared up more than it should have.  But I got through it, didn’t have too much of a problem with some of the people that had called in afterward, and handed off to first shift some of the problems from the night before involving the two fiber issues, and how one of them was pushy as hell, and wasn’t remotely in the same part of the world for the problem that they were experiencing. 
     Getting home after getting out with my aunt to pick up a couple of things (of which I still forgot other things that I should have picked up), I find the happy little icon for my Anti-Virus changing right before my eyes from Green to what should have been a dark yellow, but in fact looked like a sickly orange, and notifying me through passive-aggressive threat that my license is going to expire in 13 days and I should work on getting it renewed.  Yeah, yeah…  *sighs*  I’ve already got the e-mail for it two and a half weeks ago already and it’s on my list, but I wanted to wait until my paycheck at the end of the week to buy it.  But with the wording on the warning — even though it was protecting like I expected it to — I didn’t take the risk and renewed my license shortly after the icon had changed color. 
     That’s when the annoying nightmare of it began…  They e-mailed that the payment had been processed and in 20 minutes from that got the e-mail from them with the username and password; which happened to be the same one that I had when I first made the purchase.  Following the instructions, I swapped out the one already in place with that one.
     I still had the 13 day warning.
     I reinstalled the program from the link to download the software.  It was green until the next update and then it went back to the 13 day warning. 
     I went to bed to get some sleep, theorizing that when it does the updates and the statistical upload, it would update the license information. 
     Getting up, I saw that it hadn’t changed anything, and the 13 days warning was still there.  I popped off an e-mail to support asking them what gives, and will probably get the e-mail from them sometime tomorrow. 
     Trying out another theory, I changed out the username and password for the temporary one that they mailed with the original processed order.  That had changed the license date to 09/08/2008.  Somewhat satisfied that the support would last a couple of weeks, for giggles I changed it out to the username and password that I originally had, and saw that the license expiration date extended to 08/25/2009.  Satisfied, I’m going to leave my support message out there to see what the hell they say in order to correct the problem.  Should be interesting, particularly given the way I think the license information authenticates with the program. 
     In the last week I’ve been trying out the OpenDNS project to see how effective they are when it comes to phishing and fraud sites.  So far, I haven’t hit any worth mentioning; however it’s only a matter of time before I do.  I have noticed a little more hesitation than I’m used to, to a couple of places, but I’m not sure whether it’s because of the reconfigurations to the system and network, or the traffic to OpenDNS’ services.  One of the reasons why I’ve decided on trying out OpenDNS is because I’ve noticed that while Firefox is really good about catching phishing sites and putting up this bright red message up on my screen, swapping out to IE, I see it doing checks to their "phishing network" only to pass the traffic along and whisking me to the site in question.  I want to see if it’s an effective addition to the protection (and common sense) I’ve already got going. 
     There’s another program that they were foisting at work to help personal and business users called "Threatfire" (http://www.threatfire.com), but seeing that it’s another TSR that’s supposed to work in conjunction with one’s Anti-Virus program.  Given that I don’t want to risk the programs not playing nicely, not to mention loading up yet another TSR that I’m only going to remove, I’ve pushed it off.  Further, checking the support site for it, I noticed that once again there seems to be some conflict between ZoneAlarm and another program.  Heh, not surprised to hear that believe me.  There doesn’t seem to be anything about the program vs. ESET’s NOD32, but I’m not going to risk it.  Maybe the next time ’round I’ll reconsider it — at the moment though, things are running all right for me. 

     Sometime in the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten used to the long hours of the work week, as I find I’m no longer nodding off around 5 – 7 like I used to.  I’m also getting more sleep during the week than I did prior, and the kids that I work with Thursday – Saturday aren’t bothering me quite as much as they did when I first started the transition to nights.  Although Manny seems to go through this period in the night someplace between 4:30 and 7:30 where he’s like an ADHD 9 year old that needs a serious dosage of Ritalin.  I made a joke of it the other night when I got in saying to Ken, "I know that guns are illegal and can get you fired if you carry them onto company property, but can I bring in a taser instead?  I won’t kill him I promise; I’ll just knock his ass out when he starts to rile up at 4 in the morning."
     Ken laughed and told me that when Manny used to work second shift, he was like that then too.  At least most of the time I’m able to ignore him, but Saturday night he just started to get to me.

     Well, I’m going to go for a bit.  It’s midnight, and I’m going to give D a call.  Be back after I put him to bed. 

[Last Edited: 08/12/2008 02:09:03 AM]

     Back, and things went better than I thought, although I didn’t cover quite enough of what I felt needed to be covered.  I might talk about it another night once everything’s been covered.  At the moment though I’m feel pretty satisfied with what I did talk about.  I think I’m going to meditate on it a little before I go blurting it out.  Which means that I’ll pretty much take a break from this until I’m ready to talk about it. 

     Until then though, that’s it for the time being.  I’m going to go watch a couple of movies, the rest of Babylon 5’s first season, and perhaps play a game or three.  Until the next time.