As hard as it may be for you to believe, I’m without internet service again. This time, the New AT&T claims that there is some power outage and that my service won’t be restored until tomorrow at 2:30pm.

You know you’ve had bad service when the tech support guy calls up your account, and, upon reading recent notes, says, “Wow, you HAVE been through a lot lately.”

I could hardly dispute such wisdom.

Fortunately, this is the 21st century, and one can blog, when necessary, from laptops and cell phones when one finds his home high-speed Internet service to be inexcusably sub-par.  And I can’t ignore the marvelous irony that I can pick up my iPhone — an AT&T Wireless product, or go to Barnes & Noble and sign on to its AT&T Wifi Hotspot for free (since I pay for home internet service) and update it as well.

I’ll be calling the billing department on Monday once again, this time to demand a credit for the time that I am without service.

And if they’re less than cooperative, I’ll point out that Comcast also offers high-speed Internet.

I’ve had nightmarish problems with Comcast in Richmond, but not here in Charleston. In any case, Comcast can’t possibly be worse than the New AT&T.

I’m not sure exactly how you can have a meme to determine whether one surfs the internet like a man or a woman without asking something about porn, but I gave this little quiz a shot and here’s what I got.

Your Surfing Habits are 80% Male, 20% Female

If we had to guess, we would guess that you are a man. You use the internet to make your life more efficient - and to make you smarter. For you, the internet is like a vast encyclopedia. You search and surf extensively. You look up everything online.

Good guess.

What’s your favorite social networking site?  Do you Myspace?  Do you Facebook?

I think my first foray into social networking sites was on Friendster, which seemed to be harmless enough.  One or two people I know were actually on that site.

Then I joined Myspace.  More people I know are there, but there are a lot of people I don’t know who sent me friend requests because they saw that I worked in television or that I like to write.  I had lots of “friends” there but few real friends.  (Such is life, right?)

Not so long ago, I joined Facebook, too.  Most of the people I actually know from Myspace are also on Facebook.  There seems to be a lot less of the blind networking based solely on common interests, but that seems to cause less distraction when it comes to finding people you actually know.  And unlike Myspace and Friendster, the amount of spam seems to be next to nil.

I’ve thought about deleting my Myspace account, but there are one or two people I know who don’t use Facebook at all.  (I didn’t for a long time when it appeared that you had to have a valid college email address to register; my college days were behind me.)  I’m definitely going to delete my Friendster account, because the only messages I get there are from Russian women looking for a husband:  I know immediately that I’m dealing with spam when someone sends me a note with the subject, “Hey, cutie.”  Only a spambot.

Cast your vote in the sidebar poll.  Which site works the best for you?  And if you use one not listed, select “Other” and feel free to leave a comment here and let me know which one is your favorite.

Yesterday afternoon, I suddenly found myself without internet service here at home.  I’d been online a good bit of the day, writing and reading without any difficulty.  Then, at about 5:16pm, pages stopped loading.  Email stopped coming in.  Errors began popping up, advising that this page or that page was not responding.

I checked the little modem supplied to me by the New AT&T, which took over Bellsouth, and noticed that the internet light was red instead of green.

I unplugged the modem, waited about ten seconds, and plugged it back in, knowing that if I call them, this is one of the first pieces of advice their tech support people would offer.  (In TV, we call the act of turning something off and then back on again the “primary engineering solution” because that’s generally the first thing that’s tried, no matter what the problem actually is.)  In this case, the internet was still out.

So I called the tech support line and after entering my telephone number, I received a recorded message that my account had been “referred to billing which was closed for the day.”  I soon learned that billing on Saturday closes at 5:30pm, and they suspended my internet service at 5:16pm.  They’re not open on Sunday, so Monday morning would be my first opportunity to find out what was wrong.

But if you know me, then you know that I’m not the kind to sit back and wait patiently until Monday.

The other odd thing is that back in July, I signed up for the New AT&T’s convenient auto-draft service, which means that each month, when my bill is due, they just automatically deduct it from my checking account.  That way there’s never a late payment and it’s one less thing I have to worry about.

Except for last month, when they suddenly suspended my telephone service — that time it was just the phone, the internet worked fine — for “non-payment.”  I called, pointed out that I had already signed up for the auto-draft service, and was told that the auto-draft service takes more than a month to begin, so that my payment that should have been auto-drafted wasn’t.  “It would have been nice,” I suggested, “if somewhere on the confirmation email that welcomed me to the auto-draft program, it pointed out this little delay.”  The operator agreed and apologized.  She then assured me that the September payment, which she said was due on September 10th, would be auto-drafted and there would be no problem.

So here I was, on September 6th, (which most of us would likely agree occurs before September 10th has a chance to roll around), with no internet service and the accusation that I was somehow a deliquent.

I called the tech support number back and when it asked for my phone number, I said, “Agent.”  This eventually got me to a human being, albeit a human being with a thick foreign accent that made the conversation more difficult.  This person, after suggesting several tricks to try to get the internet service back up, finally looked up my account and told me it was a billing issue.  I explained the whole auto-draft thing and she said that there was no way she could access that information with my account since she was tech support only.

I then asked the big question, one that they’re probably sorry I asked:  “If I drive myself to my office, go online there, and pay whatever amount the New AT&T seems to think is past due, will that get my service restored automatically?”

She told me she couldn’t promise that, but that it was a possibility.

So I drove to work, signed on to the New AT&T’s convenient online account management system, and was met with the following piece of information:

BILL SUMMARY:

Due Date:  September 10

Current Balance:  $0.00

I actually printed out that page before I left work, and went back home to get back on the phone with tech support.  Needless to say, I was livid.  Livid because I knew I didn’t have a past-due balance, livid because I had taken the step two months ago of signing up for auto-pay so that there was no way a past-due balance was even possible, and livid because they cut my service while accusing me of not paying a zero balance that isn’t even due for another four days!

And the irony that since they now have my checking account number, and can now auto-draft my payment when it is due, and could therefore have automatically drafted whatever they thought was past due without cutting my service, was not lost on me, either.

I immediately asked for a supervisor this time around, explained the problem, read off the information from the printout, and said that waiting until Monday for the correction of a screw-up that was clearly not my fault was thorougly unacceptable.  The supervisor promised to send an emergency email dispatch to a billing manager, and that I should expect a courtesy call back between now and Monday morning.

Within the hour, my internet service suddenly, magically, inexplicably came back on.  The little red light became green again, like the dawn of a new day.  And as for the couresty call, it has yet to occur.

No explanation.  No apology.  Nothing.

I’m sure they’ll blame some random computer glitch.  I’m sure it won’t be anyone’s fault.  But I think they owe me the courtesy of that much at the very least.  And I’m sure they’re going to like it if I have to be the one to make the first contact on Monday morning.

No, this isn’t some lame attempt just to get some comments:  actually, I just want to make sure that the latest spam-catcher that I installed in the background isn’t blocking anyone.  So please say hello.  Comment moderation is still on, so your comment won’t necessarily appear immediately, but you should get a notice that your comment is in the moderation queue.

By the way, ever notice how strange the word queue looks spelled out?  I had to do a double-take just to make sure I hadn’t spelled it wrong.

Strange language, English.

I now have a third layer of spam protection up and running.  This newest layer is supposed to determine whether a “spambot” is attempting to imitate a real live human being.  I’ve run a few test comments to make sure that “normal” comments are getting through, and I haven’t encountered any problems, yet.

The second layer of spam protection has a growing list of buzzwords that will prompt a Captcha test — one of those annoying “Type these letters” tests that forces you to transcribe words from a graphic — to make sure you’re really you.  I apologize if you get hit with one of those, but I am trying to hit as many of the spambots’ keywords as I can while still trying to make it easy for you to get through without any problem.

Yesterday’s Saturday Six didn’t seem to be affected, but if you post a comment and it won’t let you through, please click the Contact tab at the top of the header and send me a quick private message to let me know.

I’ve been quietly battling a surge in spam behind the scenes here at Patrick’s Place.  Many of the spam comments (that you never see because of two layers of comment moderation) come from the same email address, which I am working on blocking completely.

The target URL of about half of them lately has been a dating site for Christians.  I’m not going to say which one, of course, because that’s what the spammers want.  No dice.

Ironically, one of the spam comments said something about gay dating, and the link was to the same site.  That’s going a long way to make a point.

The actual site, in case you were suddenly wondering, in no way deals with anything gay…which is a little odd when you think about it:  there are gay Christians in the world.

If I may borrow that all-too-familiar phrase, what would Jesus do when it comes to spam?  I don’t think he’d be a spammer:  he’d be a commenter who’d say who he was and what he wanted without wasting time sending thousands of little messages that point to someone else’s site.  And I suspect if Christ had his own blog, he’d have a spam filter like you couldn’t imagine.

By coincidence, after I posted the piece about the error-filled email this morning, my dad forwarded me a different email “alert.” This one begins with the typical, “sorry to do this but this time it’s really justified” line, then moves right on to the alert.

Considering the gravity of what it said, I figured that I should share it at once, lest such a terrible thing happen to you:

If someone comes to your front door saying they are checking for ticks due to the warm weather, and asks you to take your clothes off and dance around with your arms up,

DO NOT DO IT!! THIS IS A SCAM!!

They only want to see you naked.

I wish I’d gotten this yesterday - I feel so stupid.

Yeah, my dad has a twisted sense of humor.

There’s an email circulating that starts off with another of those typical “the media won’t tell you this” lines. In this particular case, the accusation is that the story “doesn’t have the shock effect.”

But as usual, there’s a little more to it than that…something that the “they” who composed this email really don’t want you to know.

The story centers on a statue of an American soldier, apparently grieving at the loss of a fellow soldier and being comforted by a young child. According to the email, the statue, which will eventually be shipped from Iraq to a military museum in Texas, was created by an Iraqi artist named Kalat.

This Kalat, the story goes, had suffered the torturous existence of being forced by Saddam Hussein to make “many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam that dotted Baghdad.” The email then reports that Kalat was so grateful for “the Americans [sic] liberation of his country” that he melted three of the busts to create this memorial to fallen American soldiers and worked on the statue for many months.

Out of the goodness of his heart.

The email then asks and answers its own question:

“Do you know why we don’t hear about this in the news? Because it is heart warming and praise worthy. The media avoids it because it does not have the shock effect.”

Or so “they” want you to believe…while they deliver this little call to action: “But we can do something about it. We can pass this along to as many people as we can in honor of all our brave military who are making a difference.”

A quick visit to myth-busting website snopes.com, which, curiously enough, is the kind of place these self-appointed media-condemning “truth” spreaders never seem to bother to go, tells a somewhat different story about this Kalat and his artistic creation.

The website declares it a case of “real photograph, inaccurate description:”

“…the accompanying text is very misleading. The Iraqi sculptor was not ‘forced by Saddam Hussein to make the many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam,’ he did not produce the memorial shown because he was ‘so grateful that the Americans liberated his country,’ and the monument was not his idea. Members of the U.S. Army paid the sculptor, who had previously worked on a few other Saddam statues, to create the work pictured according to a design of their choosing.”

And believe me, the tall tale only gets better — or worse, depending on your point of view — from there. Why did this Kalat really agree to build the statue, and how does he really feel about American soldiers? Read it for yourself…but be warned: the “they” who created this email certainly don’t want you to know!

I certainly have no problem with “supporting the troops” and honoring the men and women of our military. But there’s a big difference between paying tribute and spreading propaganda.

What’s on their agenda? What are they trying to get you to believe, despite what the apparent facts are? And why would they make false accusations while demanding the “whole” truth?

Why won’t the media really report this story? Maybe because it’s inaccurate, exaggerated and just plain false. Sometimes the media does gets it right.

I have added one additional weapon in the arsenal against spam here at Patrick’s Place.  It’s an extra plugin that will require comments it deems as “questionable” to be validated with a captcha function.

Captcha is that system that shows distorted letters or numbers and requires a user to type what they see.  But wait…it’s not as bad as you think!! 

It will only require you to do so if it sees something in your comment that it thinks might be spam.  So for those of you who normally comment, you should have no problem at all.  If it does think something is amiss, it’ll give you the additional test, and then your comment should make it to my moderation cue.  And in most cases, I’m fairly quick about moderating comments.

I’ve added this for two reasons:

First, I have discovered recently that some perfectly legitimate comments from perfectly real people were being thrown into the spam filter for reasons that didn’t seem clear to me.  Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, because I could just click over and scan through the crap and pick out the good ones.

Second, the amount of crap piling up in the spam filter has reached an unmanageable point.   I had to scan through 21 pages of spam comments — more than 1000 individual pieces of spam, with any number of “interesting” references to various body parts, just to salvage 2 legitimate comments.

Sorry, kids…that’s just no fun.

If you leave a comment and it gets flagged and you have to do the captcha thing, I apologize in advance.  I hope that the system will quickly recognize you so that you don’t have to do it a second time.  If you think you’re not getting through, click the Contact tab at the top of the blog and send me a note — that goes just to me, not as a published comment.

Hopefully, this will make sure that you get through quicker and that spambots don’t.

I was doing a Google search for a plug-in option that would further assist my spam filter so that I could weed out spambots without having literally hundreds of suspected spam comments to sift through to make sure no legitimate comments were misdirected.

I came across a website with a plug-in that wasn’t really what I was looking for, anyway, but I couldn’t help but notice the big bold message at the top of the page:

“This plugin project is on hold. Why? Because hundreds of people asked for this plugin, so we created it. However, when we asked for donations to fund further development we gathered a whopping $20. So, it seems that while people are chomping at the bit to make money with our code almost none are willing to share their revenue by making a reasonable donation. Therefore we give the existing code away only to those that deserve it. For the rest of you, write the code yourselves.”

Wow. So somebody is surprised that in this day and age, a large number of people want something for nothing? Particularly when many of Wordpress’s users don’t pay a cent for Wordpress itself?

I wonder if they get that “asking for donations” is like asking for a favor, and that a request, or even a plea or demand, does not force someone else to hand over a donation. A donation, the last time I checked, refers to something that is given voluntarily, usually in the form of a gift. There may be a moral obligation that some people feel, but if it’s voluntary, it’s a little unfair to get bent out of shape if everyone chooses not to take part.

We do live in a lazy world, after all. And with gas prices about a dime away from the $4.00 mark, we’re beginning to live in a stingy one, too.

There’s no question in my mind that this this person made a very wise decision in limiting access to the product…especially if there’s that much anger that donations haven’t rolled in faster. But with a message like that, I can’t admit that I’d feel generous enough to make myself one of the “deserving,” either.

More power to ‘em.

If the search engine Google happens to be your internet tool of choice, then you already know that the site often makes little adjustments to its logo to commemorate significant holidays and even a few obscure historic facts.

Google’s look du jour is to turn their page background pitch black, and they’re hoping you’ll do the same thing, in a manner of speaking, with your home tonight.

It’s a tip of the hat to Earth Hour, an event being marked at the 8pm hour today regardless of your time zone.

You’re being asked to turn out all of the lights in your home for a single hour to help reduce energy consumption.

Turning off the lights is one thing.  A little candlelight is nice every now and then.

But do they really expect people to turn off the…gasp…television, too?

NBC is still reeling from the spectacularly bad ratings of the television premiere of Quarterlife, a series about sa group of twenty-somethings.  I note that it was the television premiere because the show has been running for some time online on Myspace.  I’m not sure how many people have viewed the show’s “webisodes,” but as TV shows go, last Tuesday’s 10pm premiere earned the Peacock network its lowest ratings for a premiere in 17 years!

That’s gotta smart.

NBC had originally planned to air six episodes of the series.  That plan quickly changed after its 1.6 rating debut, which translates into barely over 3 million viewers.  While most cable networks would jump for joy with numbers like that, for a major network, it’s not the news anyone would hope for.

The show’s creator didn’t seem all that surprised:

“It never should have been a network show. It’s too specific,” [Marshall Herskowitz] told a Harvard Business School conference Wednesday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “From the first three minutes” of watching the show on TV, he added, ”I knew it wasn’t right.”

Too bad he didn’t come to this realization a little sooner.  At least, I figure that NBC might have liked to hear that argument.

In the old days, the show would probably make at least one more appearance, hoping that the audience would “find” it, give it a chance, and come back.  Now, shows that place in the ratings cellar rarely get the benefit of the doubt:  in terms of NBC’s prime time schedule, Quarterlife is dead.

All in the Family was one of those shows that began with low ratings.  Part of that was by design, as the story goes.  After NBC and ABC passed on the show, a cautious CBS scheduled it in a poor time slot, hoping more than anything that their switchboard wouldn’t be flooded with calls about the social satire that comprised the series’ scripts.  It was during the summer reruns of the shows first season that viewers started noticing, and liked what they saw.  And All in the Family still ranks in the top 10 best sitcoms of all time in my book.

I missed the premiere of Quarterlife, which puts me right in line with most everyone else, apparently.  So I can’t offer much in the way of the quality of the series.  I just hope it isn’t anything nearly as entertaining as All in the Family was back in 1971.  It’d be a shame to have missed a show like that these days.

There was an email from the “new” AT&T this morning that made me a strange offer:  if I move now, I can take my AT&T service with me and they’ll waive the $40 connection fee normally charged for moving service.

The offer expires on April 1.

This is one of the most ridiculous offers I’ve ever seen:  if I were moving anywhere, it would be, at best, a great coincidence that I’ be able to take them up on their offer.  And with the housing market the way it is, I suspect that there aren’t nearly as many people jumping from home to home right now, unless you count the move of some to the “poor house.”

But since I’m not moving anywhere at the moment, and likely not before April, I’m left to wonder if they really expect me to take on the expense of finding a different place to live, either in terms of a down payment or deposit, hiring a moving van, etc., just to save their $40 connection fee.

How about a month of free service?  Or let me use this little offer like a “Get out of Jail Free” card for when I do decide to move.

Everyone could use that.  Which is probably exactly the reason it wasn’t offered.