donut.nu

I got my MacBook Pro about a year and a half ago. And by ‘about’ I mean I know the exact date and time the stork the UPS delivery guy dropped it off on my doorstep. His name is Steve. The UPS guy, I mean, not my MacBook Pro.

I’ve been in love ever since. As much as I defend Apple though, there is one thing I cannot defend them on and that is the shitty MagSafe adapter.

I can see where they might not have been testing it for a year before they released it and they may not have known that around that year marker they’d begin to fray. And that fraying? Would inevitably cause a lot of them to melt and burn.

There are scorch marks all over mine. It’s almost completely destroyed and, of course, right when it happened to mine? There was a three week back-order on the MacBook and MacBook Pro adapters. I have clips–like the sort they use in salons to keep your hair out of the way–pinching in just the right places otherwise it won’t work.

I think it’s a short or something because only when it’s charging does it start to heat up. I’ve small burn marks all over my fingers from the past couple weeks.

Now they aren’t back-ordered anymore online, but I still plan on taking it to my local Apple Store to see if they’ll give me a free replacement. Word is that they’re giving replacements to anyone whether or not they still have AppleCare¹.

Technology hates me this year which is sad considering how much I love it. I’d elaborate, particularly on more recent incidents, but 1) I’m sure something else will happen within the next few days, and 2) even the abridged version would be novel-length.

That said, I still love Apple, its products, and I’m dying to get Leopard. I’m just not happy with this particular product.

1. This is really good for me because of the effing disastrous milk incident which voided my warranty. ↩

So, I signed up with a Site5 reseller account a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve had to submit three help tickets and there’s another issue I need fixed, but the issue I’m currently battling them on has made me severely doubt tech support’s reading comprehension.

First issue was that in my welcome email they sent me the wrong nameservers and they took a fairly long time to give me the actual ones after I sent in a support ticket.

Second issue was that the FTP wasn’t working for any of the accounts I had set up so the faulty nameservers wouldn’t have made a bit of difference anyway since there was no way I could upload thousands of files via file manager.

Third issue: Someone I host needs domain.com/icons/ and icons.domain.com/icons/ to show what she actually has uploaded in those directories to keep her links alive versus a listing of Apache icons (which you can see demonstrated here if you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about¹). The subdomain, icons.domain.com, shows what she has uploaded to the icons directory, but domain.com/icons/ does not and neither does icons.domain.com/icons/.

I read in the Site5 Forums that they have been able to change this in a case-by-case basis. I explain very simply what is needed. I even include links. They email me to say:

Hi,

I’m able to access http://domain.com/icons/ without any problems. Are you still unable to access it? What is the error that you get?

I said nothing about errors in my original ticket. I even specifically said that when I access it it’s a directory listing of Apache icons and how that’s not what is needed.

I just ended up explaining to tech support how Apache servers work. I should be on their payroll.

I wake up this morning to this lovely message:

Hello,

What you can do is to create a symbolic link for the /icons folder. That way both icons.domain.com/icons and domain.com/icons will show the exact same content.

Please let us know if you have questions.

Dude, that’s like the exact opposite of what I want. Why would I want to do that?! I want it to display what’s actually uploaded to them, not display the exact same content².

And why would they just say ‘create a symbolic link’? How many people emailing technical support will actually know what they mean by that? Just because I understand why /icons/ displays what it does doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll know the ins and outs of .htaccess. It mostly means that I’ve been messing around with different servers for the past eight years and have seen a lot of different hosting and server situations. It also means I am a master Google-ninja extraordinaire so if I don’t understand something, I’ll just fucking Google it before I ask questions.

Does someone have good stories about Site5 and/or Site5′s support? Because right now I’m about ready to rip out my hair and I paid for an entire year in advance to save myself $100USD and because everyone says they’re so great.

Update: Partial victory! Apparently they understood enough to enable domain.com/icons/ which is good…except for the part where I said at least three times that domain.com/icons/ could be lived without and icons.domain.com/icons/ was what we were really looking for. I’m hoping it won’t be too difficult to get that enabled, but I’m not getting my hopes up. ;)

1. In that directory I actually have a file called rss.png uploaded and nothing else, but you won’t see rss.png at all, much less be able to link to it from elsewhere, like what she needs. ↩
2. Which it’s already doing, technically speaking, since both are displaying ugly Apache icons used for FancyIndexing. ↩

One of the things I’ve learnt in my pursuit of a BA in Spanish and French is that people tend to say stupid things in regards to my educational plans. Because, you know, a degree in anything besides IT or medicine or whatever is a waste of time. Clearly.

Below are examples of idiotic things said to me on a weekly basis as well as either the response I give or the response I wish I could give depending on who is doing the commenting.

“Oh. A useless degree.”

First of all, kindly fuck off.

Is there such thing as a useless degree, honestly? I don’t believe so. Least of all a degree in languages. Many people in English-speaking countries are monolingual; being multilingual is a sought-after skill in today’s job market. There are tons of things you can do with a BA in Spanish and French. Many people are unwilling to learn a second language. For some reason, this seems to be more rampant in countries where the predominant language is English.

Mostly, I’m getting a BA because I love languages and I like to learn, not because of the job I’m seeking.

“Nobody speaks French.”

I think the people of the 29 countries of which French is an official language would disagree with you. About 300 million people on the planet speak French. There is a French speaking country on every continent aside from Antarctica–as far as I know, emperor penguins don’t speak French. Or at least they didn’t in March of the Penguins which is clearly a vital source of penguin language information. It’s also an official language of both the United Nations and the European Union.

“French is useless.”

See above.

“Can you get a job with that? What are you going to do with that degree?”

I’m not getting a BA in Spanish and French to get a job; I’m getting a BA to learn more about something I love. I love to learn. I’ve always been that girl who’s constantly reading up about random things. When I was a kid, sometimes it was animals or dinosaurs or space or Sweden. Sometimes it’s still animals or dinosaurs or space or Sweden. I’m filled with tons of random bits of information about everything.

And, as I said earlier, multilingualism is a sought after skill even in non-interpretation or translation fields.