Greenlite USA: “You actually expect us to *honor* our warranty?”
Greenlite USA sells rather inexpensive compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) bulbs. In the Boston area, you can find them at Aborn Hardware on Harvard Street in Brookline.
Author Archives: jik
zombie botnet spam attack from over 3,000 IP addresses in eight hours
At around 3:21pm US/Eastern on November 4, 2007, a zombie botnet began a dictionary spam attack against one of the domains I host. zombie botnet — a group of PCs that have been broken into by a hacker and turned into “zombies,” i.e., PCs over which the hacker now has control, so that he can… Read More »
Buy.com’s customer service department is staffed by imbeciles
I just sent this letter to the contact email address for a recent buy.com press release:
Comcast lies about the speed of its high-speed internet offering
I wrote previously about how absurd it was that Comcast was selling a 6 Mbps internet connection whose upload speed was only 384 Kbps. As shown in the email exchange below, the problem was even worse than I thought — the speed of my connection was only 4 Mbps. After several rounds of arguing with… Read More »
Sign up for Comcast, kill trees
I have received no response to the letter below, which I sent to Comcast over a week ago. I can’t say that I’m terribly suprised. My opinion about Comcast continues to plummet. Names preserved to embarrass the guilty.
Comcast: The bloom is off the rose
I wrote previously about my positive experience switching from Speakeasy DSL and Verizon POTS service to Comcast High-Speed Internet and Digital Voice. I’m sorry to say that I’ve had a number of rather bad interactions with Comcast since that rosy day. I’m not sure I can remember all of them, but here are some:
Setting up a chroot environment for an ssh user
Recently, I needed to set up a chroot environment for an ssh user on one of my Linux machines. That is, when this user logged into the machine, I needed it to be trapped inside a chroot “jail”, i.e., a sub-hierarchy within the filesystem, such that it would only have access to the files within… Read More »
Where are the election results?
The Boston Herald has not bothered to publish the results of yesterday’s preliminary election. The Boston Globe published a news brief about one of the races (the Allston-Brighton City Council seat) but didn’t mention any of the others. UPDATE: The Herald published the results of the Allston-Brighton preliminary election on Thursday, two days after the… Read More »
Just how important is the Allston-Brighton City Council Preliminary Election?
I went to vote this morning in the preliminary election for the Allston-Brighton City Council seat that’s being vacated by Jimmy McDermott. The purpose of this election is to narrow the field from six candidates to two before the final election in November (a colossal waste of money which would not be necessary if we… Read More »
Another apology from British Airways
Continuing the ongoing saga of our luggage delayed by British Airways, my wife received the following letter from BA last week. I believe that this letter was independent of the exchange I had with BA, since I wrote to them under my name, not my wife’s. I suspect they’re actually determining from their databases whose… Read More »