ProfessorTomoe

Waiting for some sort of resolution to the screw-ups perpetrated by the siding contractor. One of the higher-ups in the company is parked outside our house, waiting for the site foreman to arrive. He's been given a tour. Here's hoping he calls the foreman on the carpet for the mistakes, then orders said foreman to fix them.

Leftover cheesesteak sandwich, although you'd be hard-pressed to find any cheese in it. Topped with Heinz Salad Cream.

My particular hardware is a little higher-end than this. I have a pair of Adam A3X studio monitors and an Adam Sub7 subwoofer. They won't get in the way. Granted, the particular target audience would probably have the hardware you describe. However, I am glad to report that the VBR quality is no longer an issue. I can't explain why—it's solved, that's all.

Garland, TX 7:50 p.m. CDT 2016-04-12 Partly Cloudy and 64°F Humidity 68% Wind Speed N 5 mph Barometer 30.10 in Dewpoint 54°F Visibility 10.00 mi Tonight: A chance of showers and thunderstorms, then showers likely and possibly a thunderstorm after 1am. Cloudy, with a low around 54°F. East northeast wind around 5 mph becoming calm after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 60%. Wednesday: A chance of showers and thunderstorms before 1pm, then a slight chance of showers. Cloudy, with a high near 69°F. Light northeast wind becoming east northeast 5 to 10 mph in the morning. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Wednesday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 55°F. East wind around 5 mph.

Only managed to get five hours of sleep last night after logging off from the chat. At least that much was consecutive. I tried staying up, but wound up crashing again shortly before my wife went to work at 8:30 this morning. Another couple of hours of horizontality and I feel a bit better. In an unrelated medical note, I'm nursing a second-degree burn on my right index finger. Mrs. Prof asked me to try and solder something for her last night. I grasped the soldering iron a bit too close to the metal portion and blistered a line on my finger. Thank goodness for cool water soaks and Tramadol. BTW, today is Brintellix refill day. Another $140+ to be spent at CVS. Not fun, but at least it seems to be working better than the Cymbalta and Fetzima did.

Make that yesterday evening's storms. We were high and dry here in south Garland after the new gutters were installed in the afternoon.

We got lucky. Yesterday's rains turned out to be serious storms. Hail the size of grapefruit was reported north and northeast of Garland. One town's police department had its patrol cruiser fleet devastated by large hail. That town has closed their schools for today due to widespread major damage. Glass companies are in for a busy few months.

I lost a stepfather due to metastasized brain cancer many years ago, so I have some feeling of what the two of you may be going through. Both of you have my sympathies.

I think it's a tie. We had rain this morning. The gutter guys are here now, doing their installation. We're supposed to have more rain after they leave.

Basic coffee. Not my special "WTFU" blend. Don't think my body could handle that while it waits for my brain to catch up today. Anyone else experience "turbo lag" when it comes to coffee? Your body gets the extra horsepower, but you feel weird because your brain doesn't know what to do with it yet.

Cruel irony: rain is in our forecast for tomorrow. Also on schedule for tomorrow is a crew that is supposed to install new gutters on our house. Who will win?

MotoGP from Circuit of the Americas in Austin. A couple of spectacular crashes so far.

Garland, TX 9:13 a.m. CDT 2016-04-10 Overcast and 63°F Humidity 94% Wind Speed S 14 mph Barometer 29.97 in Dewpoint 61°F Visibility 10.00 mi Today: Partly sunny, with a high near 78°F. Windy, with a south wind 20 to 25 mph, with gusts as high as 30 mph. Tonight: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 1am. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 67°F. South wind 15 to 20 mph, with gusts as high as 30 mph. Monday: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly before 1pm. Partly sunny, with a high near 81°F. South wind around 15 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph.

Being knocked offline for five days by a ham-fisted construction worker who removed our (now Frontier (grrrr)) FiOS ONT box from a wall of our house so his crew could install new siding. He unscrewed the box, handled it less than gingerly, and managed to break the MOCA connector (a vital part—don't ask me to translate, please). Mrs. Prof says she caught him dangling the box by its cable at one point before he tried to reconnect it. Hold on, day one's not over yet. We called Frontier Communications (now owner and customer service provider of FiOS in Texas and California) to report the problem. They try and walk us through rebooting our router (an idiocy that will be repeated with almost every subsequent call). I take over her cell phone (our land line having been knocked out with the ONT box), explain the problem, and manage to wrangle a trouble ticket number and a technician appearance about 30 minutes later. The technician—who worked for a company contracted by Frontier—diagnoses the actual problem, gets our land line temporarily working, and calls to get a replacement ONT box. He finds that they're out of stock and won't be restocked until the next day. He leaves his cell number and says we should call him to see when he'll come out. My wife turns a shade more livid than she already is and calls the siding company to demand a credit for damage to our premises. End of day one. Day two is a cat-and-mouse game with the technician. Mrs. Prof manages to get through to him once, only to be told "I'm on the phone with my supervisor, can I call you back in five minutes?", or words to that effect. She waits. An hour later she calls again. Then again. And again. Only to get the technician's voice mail each time. I try calling via a number that he won't recognize. The call gets answered, but apparently without the knowledge of the technician (who is carrying on some kind of shady conversation with a group of people). I hang up and try again. And again. No joy. Mrs. Prof decides to start making late-night calls to Frontier, trying to get the status of the trouble ticket. She fails miserably and angrily. End of day two. Day three starts with more phone calls, each including at least one "reboot your 'modem' (i.e., router)" instruction by the representative. I refuse to use the words "customer support," since they seemed hell-bent to avoid providing any support whatsoever. Mrs. Prof has had to return to her office since she can't work from home without internet access, so I'm the one making the calls. I find out that the previous technician closed the trouble ticket. I then push the rep to send out a new technician, this time an actual Frontier employee, who arrives within the hour with a new ONT box. He replaces the old one, only to find that he can't activate the new one. To make matters worse, our land line service goes out again. He gives me his cell phone number (heh) and promises to keep the trouble ticket open. Quick note: giving a trouble ticket number to a Frontier rep apparently does little good, since they take at least 30 minutes to find it and then misread the entries on it. We had five such tickets issued during our ordeal. Surprisingly enough, the second tech calls back and tells me that we are "in the queue" to be activated, and that it's a problem that is affecting Texas and California customers where they cannot activate new boxes. This fails to satisfy Mrs. Prof, who makes even more fruitless calls to tech support as day three ends. Day four, Friday. My wife starts early with a 6:30 a.m. call to Frontier. We spend two hours on the line in an attempt to find out the status of our problem. In the end, I am handed the phone and am given yet another trouble ticket. I'm told a technician won't be able to show up until the next day (Saturday, Day Five, i.e. today). I read them the Riot Act and demand a credit for their apparent incompetence. I'm told I have to call "customer service" to request the credit once our box is working again. Later in the day, I try to call the second technician. He actually returns my call, asking if I've been contacted by his supervisor. I say no. He says he'll get the guy to call, which he does. This is the first time that I speak to someone who actually knows what's going on. He explains the details about the "in the queue" remark, saying that technicians have been working overnight to solve the system problem. He also tells me that the technician scheduled to come out on Saturday (today) won't be able to do anything, since the affected ONT boxes are literally being activated one box at a time. I can do nothing but wait until our particular button is hit. I call Mrs. Prof at work and try to explain what I've been told. She responds as if I'm a "customer service" rep for Frontier. I tell her to stop it and to instead call the supervisor, who has given me his number and invited me to give it to her. She makes the call, then resigns herself to yet another night of waiting—this time, without calling Frontier every 90 minutes. Day five. Saturday. Today. I'm in the middle of trying to remix a song when our phone actually rings. No one is on the other end when I answer. I hang up and check for a dial tone. I finally hear one for the first time since our box was replaced. A minute or two later, technician number two calls yet again (on the land line this time), asking if we're online. I tell him yes as far as phone and TV are concerned, but I'm waiting for the modem I've just power-cycled to reinitialize. He tells me to call when I have results. Said results come a couple of minutes later, when I am able to connect Firefox to my home page for the first time since Tuesday. In the end, I talk to the second technician again a few minutes later and give him my profound thanks, which I ask him to share with his supervisor. They turned out to be the only Frontier people who seemed to give a damn about our problem. The story is not over yet. My wife has the address and phone number of Frontier's corporate office. She intends to relay our story to them in painful detail, the more painful the better. Meanwhile, I have managed to finally catch up with what I've missed since I've been gone and am now about to watch the Dallas Stars' final regular season game, hoping that they'll win and take the Conference crown in the process. Whatever the outcome, it can't be worse than our experiences of the last five days.

I am back online after five days of a complete FiOS outage! (See other thread for the story.)

Garland, TX 6:20 a.m. CDT 2016-04-05 Fair and 52°F Humidity 90% Wind Speed Calm Barometer 30.16 in Dewpoint 49°F Visibility 10.00 mi Today: Sunny, with a high near 83°F. South wind 5 to 10 mph increasing to 15 to 20 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 30 mph. Tonight: Isolated showers after 1am. Partly cloudy, with a low around 58°F. South wind 15 to 20 mph, with gusts as high as 25 mph. Chance of precipitation is 10%. Wednesday: Isolated showers. Mostly sunny, with a high near 77°F. Southwest wind 10 to 15 mph becoming north northwest 15 to 20 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 30 mph. Chance of precipitation is 10%. Please don't rain until after our new siding is all installed.

That's the beauty of modern endoscopic surgery. One small slit, camera goes in, appendix comes out.

3:49 a.m. CDT. I'm up again. I went to bed around midnight, but now I'm up and awake. I had extremely vivid dreams, to the point where I feel like I slept for at least six hours. I'm awake, but somewhat off balance, thanks to the Brintellix and lack of melatonin. This is the last night of the one-week break I have to take between two months of nightly melatonin doses. I go back on 10mg nightly when bedtime comes tonight (Tuesday). God, please let the melatonin help, even if only for a short while. I'm going to take a Benadryl again, but I fear it'll only work for a few hours (if the cat will ever shut up and let me go back to sleep). The house repair workers are bound to get here early and wake me up with the ripping of old siding and the banging of putting up more Hardie board.

The Hardie board is going up. They started with the soffit and fascia today. According to Mrs. Prof, they also angered several nests worth of wasps. I have an extreme phobia to wasps. I will limit my outside time over the next few days.

Chin up, old boy. Skip the coffee and ask them for cranberry or apple juice. They've always got plenty of those hanging around at the nurses' station.

Tea mixed with apple juice, lemon juice, and sassafras.

"When the price of pumpernickel hits a dollar a pound, head for the hills." — Groucho Marx

Highlights of the West Indies' win over England in the Finals of the World Twenty20 tournament.

Update: I had to create a brand-new profile under Firefox in order to fix the problem. Granted, I'd been running the same copy of Firefox since I first installed it on my laptop in 2009. Almost seven years worth of configuration/plugin cruft apparently took its toll. At least I didn't lose my bookmarks. New question: is there anyone here who can tell the difference between an Ogg Vorbis file encoded at 100% VBR quality versus one encoded at 70% VBR quality? My hearing loss is mainly in the higher frequencies, where one would expect artifacts to be most noticeable. That, and I don't trust my hearing aids enough to make a valid comparison. Input would be appreciated. Thank you!

Boston Market leftovers. Squash casserole plus mac & cheese.