Anytime!

I found out an amusing fact today. A certain evil corporate entity does not know the definition of the word "anytime." I'll give you a split second to guess who that could possibly be.
Did you guess Verizon? If you didn't, you haven't been paying attention. It appeared as if there was a possibility that I was going to be late getting my phone bill paid if I mailed it, so I decided to take Verizon up on their offer to handle it online. On every bill, there's a paragraph to the right of the account summary as follows:

Convenience! Manage Your Verizon Account Online, Anytime!
Order services, view & pay your bill, request repairs, anytime day or night! At verizon.com click "Sign In" under "My Account." New user? Start with:
User ID: [Phone Number]$
Password: [Password]
and customize your ID as you register.

Boy, that sounds like a good idea. As a new user, just log in with that information and then set up the account. So, I followed their directions to the letter, and I recieved:

Wonderful. Never trust Verizon. Apparently "this time" is not part of "Anytime!" Apparently the "inconvenience" they are apologizing for is part of the "Convenience!"
Anyway, I went in and registered for an account on their site using a method that completely differs from the instructions on their billing statements, and was prepared to pay my bill. I had my Visa check card in hand, ready to debit my way to victory. What could possibly waste my time now?
Verizon does not accept credit or debit cards. Yes, it is 2006, and they have a website where one can make payments, but they don't accept credit, debit, or Paypal. They only accept the routing number for your checking or savings account. Way to keep up with the times, Verizon! Perhaps in the future you can accept payment in the form of shiny rocks and livestock. So, now I have to go dig up my checkbook to get the routing number. I knew you'd find a way to waste more of my time, Verizon! To avoid another last minute payment like this, I'm going to pay next month's bill early. The chicken is in the mail.
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute

Cray's Tech Journal: PeoplePC

Today I thought I'd talk about my experience with PeoplePC's dial-up internet service. I happened to have had a customer back at the beginning of the year who bought PeoplePC service. He was a first time internet user. He had just paid around $1500 for a Dell XPS as his first computer, and asked a friend what internet service he should get. His friend led him wrong, and told him to go with PeoplePC because it was cheap. Like a true wide-eyed and naive internet newbie, he signed on for a full year contract right away, and a few weeks in, he called me out there to figure out some of his computer issues, namely his getting kicked offline constantly.
At the time, my only contact with PeoplePC was seeing their odd commercials. When I saw the kind of setup they had, my first instinct was to ditch their proprietary dialing software and use DUN, but it turns out he was paying extra for the "accelerated" (glorified proxy server that decreases image quality to decrease load time), so I didn't have the heart to tell him it was bunk.
In addition to the frequent disconnects, I noticed a serious lack of performance for a two week old dual-core performance beast. After playing with the processes a bit, sure enough, it was PeoplePC's dialer that was hosing his performance. If you're not familiar with their dialer, or as they call it, the "Smart Dialer", it has a hacked Internet Explorer window that you must keep open the entire duration of your connection. If you close it, it disconnects from the internet. Well, isn't that completely useless?
As I was fiddling with the settings on the "Smart Dialer" trying to find a setting that would stop it from disconnecting so often, I came across his list of phone numbers in the "Smart Dialer". One was local, one was EAS, and the other three were local toll! As it turns out, these are the numbers PeoplePC had given him to use in the "Smart Dialer" when he called their support number... their 1-900 support number. No, I did not stutter. Their support is via a 1-900 number. Anyway, they had primed the "Smart Dialer" with these numbers, and wouldn't you know it, the dialer liked to dial one of the local toll numbers best. Therefore, every time he connected to the internet, he was getting charged about $0.10 per minute by the phone company. As you can see, this is no "Smart" dialer. It is simply a method by which PeoplePC controls their bandwidth, and it has nothing to do with optimizing anything for the user. They couldn't care less if you end up dialing long distance to connect to the internet. I was quick to disable all the numbers but the local one, and it connected just fine. It disconnected about 45 seconds later, but it did successfully connect. Then it crashed. Actually, it had crashed a few other times before, but I didn't feel like writing "It crashed" every other line, so from now on, just assume it crashes often. I gave him a heads up on the awful phone bill he was going to receive, and then continued with my exploration.
I failed to find any setting that seemed to improve connection stability, so I had to reach into the tech toolbag for a few tricks. In my pursuit of underhanded "stay alive" methods, I took a minute to read their terms of service to see what exactly was legal. It turns out that, as part of the terms, you agree that you will only connect to their service using the proprietary dialer provided, and not with DUN. I was becoming more and more impressed with how it seemed they were actually trying to be the worst ISP ever. I'm gonna have to give them the award. They've done so much to do so little.
Eventually I got everything to a workable state, but it was only designed for the short term. My customer, already conceding the money he'd paid to PeoplePC, had decided to choose a local ISP that actually works. So, in this particular case, PeoplePC makes out like a bandit because of their subpar service and shady business practices. They get paid without actually having to provide any service. Wow, that's a pretty effective business model.
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute

DVD, Verizon, and uhhh

First off, I'd like to apologize for the lapse in new material here. I wrote a Lucha article for Andyville on the sixth, but even that was six days ago, so I've really been slacking on the internet publishing front.
I've been incredibly busy wrapping up a Dimbee Multimedia DVD project. The last week has been spent building every component, and perfecting every aspect of the overly complex (yes, everything I do is overly complex) DVD menu structure. It's now finally satisfactory in my eyes, and the customer has given me all the last minute additions to the extras menu, so it's time to release this bad boy.
This was actually my first delve into the world of a large commercial release. I had previously done shorts ranging up to about ten minutes, but nothing too spectacular. This project was also my first experience with a real video editing solution: Sony Vegas. It is expensive, but this software is worth every penny. I experimented with too many software packages to count, but out of all of them, two stood out. One, of course, was Vegas, which was excellent. The other was Avid's FreeDV. I understand that it is a cut down, free version. However, it was beyond useless. I had my movie source split into three large avi files, and FreeDV churned away trying to import them for two days. Even then, it had not completed importing the final one. As I said, I understand this is free software, but I also understand that performance like that isn't going to get people to buy the expensive pay versions. Vegas did the import in near no time (seeing as it worked off the originals instead of making its own files), and once the main feature was complete, it rendered fifty minutes in DVD ready 720x480, 8Mbit MPEG2 in a little under five hours on a 2GHz Celeron. Considering the amount of effects I implemented, I think that's pretty respectable.
For the DVD authoring, I used Sony DVD Architect, another expensive application that proved its worth. It has a very straightforward, but highly effective interface. I like that combination.
Of course, in addition to the use of those two applications, there were hours of painstaking frame by frame work on certain hand made animated graphics, but I'm not going into that. I've rambled about this long enough, so I'm going to move on.
In breaking news, Verizon came out and buried my phone line on the seventh (yes, they did it in less than two weeks, and I didn't have to call them to remind them), so I really have nothing to complain about regarding them right now... other than their complete lack of broadband solutions, but that's been covered.
Now that I've covered all that... I've completely forgotten what I was going to write about. Oh well, perhaps next time.
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute