fwaggle.org

I really do – I have been faithful to AT&T for the longest time – in fact if you add up the concurrent times we’ve been AT&T customers, they’ve more or less gotten well over a decade of service out of us. I became pretty good friends with one of the higher level techs after helping to track down a nasty routing issue, but I don’t particularly want to bug him with the lame, inane bullshit that goes wrong.

… but unfortunately it’s been happening a lot. Even as I write this, our internet’s failing and causing WordPress to hang up. Their PPPoE server is routinely kicking us off, again, and I’m sure when I call them up to bitch about it tomorrow they’ll insist I go through the “reboot router and call back” crap they made me do the last time this happened.

I even overlooked the fact that they yanked my Yahoo! Photos pro, then offered 3 months Flickr Pro… then decided that was too insulting, and gave us all permanent Flickr Pro – only to remove that a while later (Yahoo! insists it’s AT&T’s fault, AT&T passes the buck right back).

I was reading about how due to the success of the iPhone and iPhone 3Gs, AT&T’s network is overpopulated in a few cities and they’re trying to “incentivize” (their word, apparently) users to not burn up so much bandwidth. As another blog so eloquently puts it, they’re penalizing people for liking the product.

It’s like all their half-sane executives are down chilling in puerto morelos hotels hitting on college students that got lost during spring break. I wish they’d start looking after their customers instead of just concentrating on their bottom lines.

I – someone who’s kneejerk reaction when we needed broadband was just to call AT&T – actually called Comcast today. And Insight. And what really sucks even more than our crappy ADSL is that neither of those companies service this town.

The laziness of comment spammers is really starting to piss me off – I’m sure most of us are guilty at spamming every once in a while, under the most liberal of definitions of “spam”. Why, a while back I went through and found every single blog post I could find that mentioned Mumble and drummed up awareness for the up and coming 1.2.0 version – because it addressed most of the complaints people were griping about.

Was I necro-posting? Absolutely. Was it maybe spam? Sure, you could see it that way. But at least I made an effort to be on-topic about it and posted something remotely relevant.

However – and god bless akismet – I’ve been bombarded with just complete and utter crap. If you leave an on-topic comment I’ll probably leave your link up regardless of how garbage your site is (because mine’s not the greatest) – but when you write a comment that’s littered with a bunch of different names for slimming pills and your comment says something like “this is very interesting to me and I have bookmarked your site and will become a regular reader” on quite possibly the most boring post on my site… no it’s pretty obvious all you want is the link.

… and you can’t have it.