About 2 weeks ago, I lost all the sound drivers in my new laptop. It happened after I did several Critical Updates from microsoft. Ya see, even though I got my notebook in Thailand, it was still legit with a valid copy of XP Pro. After updates, all drivers were replaced with a single bluetooth hands-free driver. Thats not good.
I contact HP’s online customer support via chat and its obviously outsourced to a middle eastern country (theres a distinct difference in the way they form engrish grammar versus Indians or, for that matter, anyone on the planet). Anyhoo, he gives me instructions that dont work.
Endstate: my computer now has a BIOS claiming to have been factory installed with Vista when it never was. All the instructions he gave me were for Vista notebooks including a Vista capable BIOS……. after I told him 3 seperate times that it was XP Pro, not Vista the machine came with.
Now I have no laptop and am having to play internet/email tag with tech support when I can only contact them from other people computers.
Its a good thing I usually backup my contacts and important docs/emails…just to prevent a loss like this.
email: JD@homelessdiver.com (or admin) is one that I control explicitly and cant be touched without USA government intervention. I have another yahoo acct but wont list it here. The only real benefit for having Yahoo is the messenger service - except for those people too friggin stupid to remember anything else. I’m not on the messenger anymore so screw it. If a person only has non-important stuff, then a freemail acct is fine for them. Right now I’m just looking for a decent GUI to integrate my acct on this site with simple login screens rather than admin viewable links
Next will be a gallery. I have a few galleries installed but honestly, they suck. I like the album styles some have and plan on test driving a few of those in the near future…but the problem is finding one that sets viewing permissions and allows for bulk uploading.
Static entry page: not an easy thing to make with wordpress is installed outside the root directory; they claim its easy but the description only refers to another method for an entry page thats not meant as a splash page (and thus doesnt make a good portal).
file repository: I actually have an FTP client installed in here but its not like FileZilla in that its not full-featured. I cant CHMOD or rename easily.
Basically—- I’m on a quest to create an all-in-1 internet portal for myself. You goto other sites and everything you need is right there. Your email, your messenger, your server space. I could do that with Joomla but I’ve gotten so good at reading/modding/and intuiting the modular nature of WordPress style script, I just dont need the difficult GUI of Joomla.
I bought a monthly password from a friend at the resort nextdoor and it normally works nicely. My wireless here is faster than cable-modem from Kalibo Cable when I had a dedicated line. Trying to get better reception to his guests in the resort, he installed a new, outdoor, high-powered wireless router. Problem is - its not connecting anyone with the outside or sometimes has negligable output (which is the reason for its entire design). Now he seems to be back to using the smaller linksys little-blue-box which I can pick up but not his own guests.
Even though I’m a paying customer - I still respect his first obligation as being with the guests in his own resort. I wonder if they have any connection at all now. He’s a really cool guy so I’m sure he’ll hook me up for the last week.
Power outages, brownouts. Man, they’re getting really annoying and … well, they suck. It was annoying at first hearing they would be everyday, scheduled during the hot times. But still, at least we knew when to expect them and adjust our schedules. Then they were ‘close’ to the schedules but starting and stopping with more randomness. Then they would start/stop brownouts and completely odd times. Middle of the night, early morning. Sometimes off for 30 minutes a shot at 2 hour intervals. Then storms and bad weather messed a bunch of lines up and blew some transformers. Now… it goes out around 8am and comes back within 30 minutes. Then out again sometime around noon and back at completely random times.
And when the power doesnt come back on until 5:20pm, no one is around to reset the routers and switches for internet. I want to stay on Boracay, but I also like my technology and will pass on the brownouts.
