Archive for December, 2006

So it’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m home alone with a cold. Sarah and Sophie are out with family to celebrate. I’ll just take it easy, watch a little TV, and go to bed. Probably before midnight even. I’m pretty tired.

It’s Christmas morning, my daughter is trying to take a nap after an exciting morning of checking out all the cool stuff Santa brought, and I’m exhausted and about to go take a nap myself.

It’s been a successful day so far, although there’s so much more to come!

I hope everyone out there is having (or had, or will have, depending on your time zone) as good a Christmas day as I’ve been having. For those who don’t do Christmas, have a great day anyway.

Although I’m officially working this week, I’ll be taking it easy. Feel free to drop me a line if there’s any documentation stuff that comes up that needs to be done, but I’m not going to be proactive about anything until next week.

I meant to post something about this a few days ago, then promptly forgot, because who likes admitting when they do something moronic?

Apparently when we had our cable outage a week or so ago, I accidentally pulled out the ethernet cable from the modem when I cycled power on the modem at one point trying to test to see if it just needed resetting. That would be the actual reason why it didn’t come back up until late the following day.

What a dork.

I forgot to give a salute to the newest member of Mozilla’s Developer Relations squad, Mark Finkle, when he joined us last week. Of course, I was in terrible shape at the time, so I think it can be excused.

Mark can be found in IRC as mfinkle, and his job is “Extension Evangelist,” which I think basically means tricking people into writing awesome new extensions for Firefox, although he’s done some good articles about XULRunner development, too.

He’ll be an awesome addition to our team, and I’m really happy to be working with him.

Our Developer Relations team is growing. We’ve added Mark, and we’re looking to hire one or possibly even two more people coming up very shortly. 2007 is going to see some fantastic improvements both in our documentation and our support for developers, but also I think in the Mozilla platform itself. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

I’ve been offline for about three hours now. I tried to call their customer service (ha!) but on top of their horrible support they’ve added an obnoxious automated system that insists on making you jump through the hoops you used to be able to demand they not make you jump through (admittedly with varying degrees of success).

So let’s see. Take some of the worst Internet service in the country. Mix in the stupidest support people on earth. Then take lousy infrastructure, incompetent technicians, and a new automated support system designed for the sole purpose of preventing you from speaking to a real person. Nice.

On top of that, their system insists that my modem is fine, when any idiot can look at the fact that there are two solid lights and no blinking ones and see that it’s totally not connected to jack.

Ironically, the only reason I called was because they used to have a recording that would tell you about any known outages, and I wanted to see if this was a known problem. That recording appears to be gone now. If they’d had it there, I’d have been okay with this whole mess for now.

I just now as I was typing this got a call from my mother-in-law down the road. She’s having problems with hers too, so at least it’s not just us.

Still — Charter is completely worthless, and I’d like to use someone else — except there is no alternative in this town. Argh!

After spending most of the last week sick, I’m finally getting into a position to actually get real work done again. I’m planning to devote the next week to dealing with all the relatively little things that are on my to do list. Or at least as many as I can manage.