Author: Chris Barrus

So I got home last night and a noticed that the sync light on my DSL bridge was no longer flashing and was on solid indicating that the connection was back on. Reset the Airport hub and presto: I’m back on the net. I no longer feel lobotomized.

Verizon passive-aggressively sent me a new DSL bridge anyway. Go figure.

I channel surfed across the Weather Channel and just now they were using “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” as the background music for their bottom of the hour local forecast.

Attention whichever freak is programming this: Way to go! Keep at it!

While waiting for today’s Verizon tech, I scanned a pile of photos I took the day after the big Laguna Beach fire in October 1993.

Today’s Verizon tech discovered that the Tuesday tech never bothered to hook up the new phone jack. At least today’s guy seemed to know what he was doing. So now I have a phone, but the DSL is still out.

So the Verizon tech came out today to fix my phone line, and after a hour of so of playing around with the NI box on the outside of my building and replacing the phone jack in my apartment, still no go. Of course since the tech was here in the late afternoon it was already too late to reschedule a return visit for tomorrow, so I have to wait until Thursday afternoon.

Blogging will return when I’m not so peeved off.

Do you work for Verizon?

Do you know anyone that works for Verizon?

If yes, please kill yourself now. Don’t think about it, just take a running start and throw yourself out the office window.

The SF Weekly looks at Jonathan Abrams, the guy who started Friendster to get a date and can’t stand it when the freaks, the absurd, and the creative types take over.

In the final analysis, Friendster is Jonathan Abrams’ beach party, and he gets to decide who is acceptable and who isn’t. He built his site as a way of getting himself dates, not to chat with a Jesus impersonator.

As we talk, Abrams admits that Friendster’s success has killed his social life; it’s more than a little ironic that he has his very own dating site, but no time to date. He asks me if I have any cute single friends. I do, and one’s even a Friendster member. But I have to point out that her online picture is of a funny little schmoo-like shark head. Abrams rolls his eyes and opens up my profile page to look at my collection of friends, many of whom present distinctly nonhuman miens.

“Oh, I get it. Your friends are all smartass types,” he says in exasperation. He types a message to my shark-faced friend. “Hi Kerry,” he writes. “Your profile looks interesting. Too bad you have such a silly picture.”

I predict that Friendster will crash and burn into a broke ghost town the second he completes the purge.

MediaTinker has an incredibly useful set of pages and PDFs that break apart the CSS and HTML template code in MovableType.