BaSH PR0MPT

“Operation Unmask was launched in mid-February following a series of coordinated cyber-attacks originating from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain,” said the world police body based in the French city of Lyon.

The statement cited attacks on the websites of the Colombian Ministry of Defence and the presidency, as well as on Chile’s Endesa electricity company and its National Library, among others.

The operation was carried out by police from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain, the statement said, with 250 items of computer equipment and mobile phones seized in raids on 40 premises in 15 cities.

Police also seized credit cards and cash from the suspects, aged 17 to 40.

“This operation shows that crime in the virtual world does have real consequences for those involved, and that the Internet cannot be seen as a safe haven for criminal activity,” said Interpol’s acting director of police services.

“Here the high-waisted trousers no longer know what they are!” states one sassy anti sexpresso public servant. I don’t know what’s more amusing. Women bawwing that their husbands and boyfriends are going to a cafe with a scantly clad barista or her personal fan website’s horrible translation into English.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s made the news almost globally, that women of a certain town in Italy have b& their boys from visiting a specific cafe. The barista, Laura Maggi. works in a little cafe in Bagnolo Mella, near Brescia, and decided to spruce up business by wearing slutty outfits.

From PVC (ew, thrush factory!) to lacey underwear and even down to tassle-tittied pasties, she has a keen business acumen of how stupid desperate men will do anything for a bit of T&A. But aside from her slutty photos (which can be found all over the internets) the translation of her website had me in tears.

First and foremost, here are some links to her more provocative photos. (NSFW obviously)

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Laura+Maggi&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvnsuo&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=1y9IT_uVOpCuiQeyw8SADg&ved=0CEIQsAQ&biw=1680&bih=949

And more raunchy ones at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2105339/Sexpresso-Wives-ban-husbands-visiting-Italian-cafe-busty-barmaid-serves-drinks-skimpy-outfits.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

But seriously, this part had me cacking myself. I love bad translations, it really is brilliant how batshit insane things can seem if translated, or worse, translate something from English to, say, Chinese and then back again. Go on, do it, I dare you. Either way you’ll probably get something more coherent than this (translated by Google Chrome on the fly):

PHOTOS – And Laura knows to be fair. Even more. Post all your photos on Facebook, before I hang them in his restaurant. And business is booming more than they say they are even tripled in the last year. Business is business? Do not you agree the mayoress of Bagnolo Mella. Indeed, ironically: “Here the high-waisted trousers no longer know what they are,” accuses the Mayoress Christine Almici. “Now the country is only known from the sexy bar. Here the towns furious, have even turned to the police. ” Really? “Sure. Ms. Maggi has been summoned to headquarters. It warned verbally. ” Someone has even given permission to work until late at night. “Permission has it, but I knew that would serve cocktails dressed like that? Give me time, I’m thinking of a measure. Here the public has gone to hell. “

I know a lot of you have been following this for the past month and a half, and I’ve gotten a few comments demanding an update since the install didn’t go trough yesterday so here goes.

Basically the tech was a no show, I sat around like a dick until 6, then spent the rest of the night trying to find out why.

After several hours on hold with intermittent conversations with the off shore call centre, I got absolutely no answer, and waited / spoke to them until my home phone went too flat to make it through another long hold period.

One tech was so terribad that I had to spell my username 8 times, 3 of those were phonetics (bravo alpha sierra hotel papa romeo zero mike papa tango!) to the point that I had to give her my old Telstra account details so she could copy paste my username and replace the o with a zero.

That call was the furthest I got, and once she began to realize it was a hard work call, she did what I’ve had two Telstra outsourced staff do so far, hung up on me. A well documented feature of whatever the call centre Telstra outsources to in the Phillipines.

(Check Whirlpool for hundreds of examples, although there’s no point filing official complaints because they can simply say the line died or the user hung up or some such, along with stupidly fake names, this outsourced call centre is a glorified answering service, if your problem is beyond year 7 computer science trouble shooting they’ll have an actual tech support worker from Australia (or Egypt, those guys are really good!) call you back ‘within 2-3 business days’) to address the problem!)

I was chasing it up by 8:30 this morning and pretty much spent the entire day waiting again. Thankfully a bloke named Russ chased the issue up, and after a run around himself told me that the technician ‘rang the customer on their mobile’ but ‘couldn’t get through’.

Now I don’t know about you, but if you book me as a plumber to install a hot water heater, and I know you don’t have one and have taken 1.5-2 months of fuck ups to finally book me that on the day when you lose a day of work sitting there, if I can’t get you on your mobile, it doesn’t mean you suddenly changed your mind and don’t want a hot water heated installed.

Fuck, calling is a courtesy, but I would rock up and do the fucking job, because that’s what the customer and every sane person would expect.

What’s more, the idiot didn’t even ring THE PRIMARY CONTACT NUMBER FOR THE ACCOUNT, he rang a secondary / emergency / technical contact not the primary.

WHO DOES THAT?

Either way, I pointed out yesterday that if the wait is another month, or even a week, it may be more prudent not to go ahead with the service transfer of all things to Telstra.

I pointed out to Russ that on completion I’ll be publishing my Optus logs, revealing how terribad they are, and giving a solid well documented consumer point of view like lots of bloggers do these days (hell, half the way I decide on purchases of goods and services is based on contemporaneous consumer notations of customer experience.

However at present my Telstra logs are now bigger than my Optus log and I’m not even officially a customer of theirs yet at the new house! So if this is what goes on when they haven’t got you yet and should be doing anything they can to court your business, what happens when I’m locked in a contract for two years?

This afternoon Russ emailed me and told me that I’m rebooked in for the 27th, which is one week after its due date and thus falls into my ‘if it’s another two months or hell even if it’s another week’ deal breaker term. I pointed out the time is a bit much and asked if there’s anything sooner. So we’ll see if Telstra can redeem itself.

I have, however, also tweeted @ InterNode and iiNet letting them know I’m open to courting if their VIP management teams want to grab another high profile gamer and blogger. I’ve since received contact from iiNet yet nothing from InterNode, yet.

I’ll wait for Telstra’s next response before getting into too much conversation. But while I’m theoretically locked in contract, I have at all times stressed expediency is the most integral element of this deal, and have had provision made to me that they understand and will act accordingly.

This is enough, in a consumer situation where you’re being fucked around, to be able to exit from the contract with no breaking fees, even AFTER installations take place, etc. So thanks to the fact Australia has good consumer protection, unlike our poor chaps over in the US who pretty much have no rights, there is still course for resolution.

Anyway, there you have it, now stop asking! :)

I’ve tried to humor the OptusNet connection at my new place, but it’s become absolutely intolerable. After several technician call outs, I found their tech support department more often than not didn’t give a shit, and were a glorified outsourced answering service who’d then send a real technician or organise a call back from one, after asking you stupid questions about your home computer (which if you have four laptops and three PC’s plus two tablets and three iPhone’s running in the house, both cabled and uncabled, all manifesting the same problem, is moot, but DON’T TELL THEM THAT, you confuse them and they go into a loop of death).

After a day trying to talk to their social media team to no avail, I rang their outsourced answering machine and spoke with ‘Snita’ (pronounced saneetsa), explained the problem and was told that it’s the $300 NetGear 3000 they sold me three weeks ago after claiming it was the NetGear 2000 they’d sold me several months prior. I wasn’t going to humor another modem purchase and politely called bullshit and explained that the waveform of speed tests run indicate a fluctuation in line quality dB and nothing to do with the modem (all diagnostics showed it was fine) but she didn’t understand.

She told me that ‘NetGear and Optus are aware of this problem and are working together to fix it as soon as possible, so if the problem is still happening in a few weeks’ I should call back. Again, politely called her out on it. She ran through a bunch of pointless diagnostics, which I humored (I actually did, to my chagrin, I even rebooted my modem and PC and hard wired up) only to have her say ‘I’ll connect you to a NetGear technician.’ and I was like no no no dude, I don’t want NetGear, I want a linesman. Again I broke another Optus outsourcer by asking them to think outside the square, she fell into circular reasoning and speech and again went on about ‘I asked earlier if you had another modem (she didn’t actually) because we could get you to use that for a few weeks until the problem is fixed, but if you don’t we will have to call NetGear’.

I again stated that the modem is absolutely fine, the line quality is so terrible and slipping out of band from the infrastructure outside that even the cable television is affected (both use the ‘black sausage’ coax that SingTel Optus services run through in Australia) and there was dead silence for about ten seconds, maybe more, then a click and the busy signal.

Yes. An Optus tech supporter did what the Whirlpool forum is full of statements of Optus tech supporters doing. Fucker hung up because the problem was too hard and she couldn’t be fucked dealing with it.

I called back and escalated to a L3 TL or floor manager and explained everything again in painful detail, he ordered a lines man to come around on Friday, and wanted to chase Snita up, but I pointed out all she has to say is ‘The line died.’ or ‘The user hung up.’ and there’s no way to prove the contrary so it’s pointless.

I asked if there’s a feedback email for Optus I could have, nope. I asked if there’s a complaints department, sadly it’s only open 9-5 because it’s like the only department Optus haven’t outsourced yet. I’ll give them a call tomorrow and link to this.

But in the meantime, I want to stress as much as I can, if you use Optus, Optus anything, don’t. Just @Telstra and link to this article and they’ll do you a good deal to swap over to them. Replacing two Optus TV hook ups, an Optus phone and OptusNet cable has me saving about $30 per month AND I’m getting full proper HD (no laggy fucking press a button and six seconds later the channel changes too!) along with a 100 mbit down 1 mbit up (I’ll admit the 1 mbit up is utterly moronic and restrictive, bringing the 100 mbit down to around 70 mbit down usable) along with a ping that is realistic, Optus the best I got was just under 100 ms. I got that on an ISDN in 1996.

Another problem you’ll find with OptusNet internet is that they cache all big sites like YouTube, etc. So you’ll be pulling 10mbit+ on a speed test, yet you can’t stream a 240p YouTube video without letting it butter for three times the duration of the video. One way to prove they cache YouTube specifically is, download the same video or movie you’re watching on YouTube from a torrent site, if you’re getting 25 k/s down on BitTorrent or higher, that’s about 1 second of footage every 0.75 seconds of download, thus enough to stream. Then go to YouTube and grab the same content, at the same resolution, and watch it have to buffer over and over again.

Mind you if you ask them about this they plead ignorant, or if you call them out on it they duck and run.

Worst part is, they always insist you use some shitty in house speed test (speedtest.syd.optusnet.com.au) which is a total scam. If you don’t believe me, disconnect your modem completely after loading the page, then run a speed test. You’ll get a 10ms – 20ms ping from the Optus server. A server that it cannot possibly communicate with because the coax is removed. You’ll also find it’s speed measures usually 10mbit down higher than ANY other industry standard speed testing medium and 2-3mbit up higher than the same.

Anyway, I’m fucking done. I tried to be patient, I tried to work with them. I’m going to demand a refund for the past months we’ve been having problems, demand a refund for this stupid fucking useless modem they forced us to buy, and if they don’t pay the fuck up I’m going to go to the TIO and Department of Fair Trading and make them hurt. Just filing with those two companies forces the investigated party to have to pay a high administration fee for the pleasure of having their arses investigated for being douchebags.

After waiting ten minutes to connect to a Battlefield 3 server only to get maybe 20 seconds game time before a drop out hit, all fucking day, wasting my only real me-day this week, I’m fuming.

Anyway, enough ranting for one post. Don’t use Optus. They’re ALMOST as bad as TPG. Almost.

As of October, 2011, Bryan Singer got the green light to take the much loved science fiction franchise under his wing, including a MOVIE. Although finalized with Universal with John Orloff as writer, it appears Singer plans to ‘reboot’ the series best known for it’s ‘reboot’ in 2004 which made a dated 70′s classic something close to the nearest Gen X and Y will have to a non-drug assisted religious experience.

I for one spent one night a week since 2004 eagerly waiting for a torrent to be available to download it. The series Caprica bombed, as have … well, every science fiction show produced in the last decade almost, few last one or two seasons. The reason is NOT a lack of success, Caprica was a smash hit. Star Gate Universe, another example, was another huge hit. The problem is the delivery system.

Syfy and producers like Universal don’t get the paradigm shift that occured a few decades ago with Napster and MP3 sharing. They still struggle to understand simple things like supply and demand and in their vacuous 80′s power suit toting marketing addled minds don’t understand their target demographic.

We will not wait a year for hand me downs packed so full of ads they’re redundant. We will not wait for ‘off season’ breaks just because ratings are down doesn’t mean we don’t want entertainment. We won’t take that bullshit.

And we have a plan.

We torrent things. So, hard wired small unobtrusive adverts would be one easy way along with product placement; you KNOW that producers will fuck this up and you’ll get half your screen as a strobing disruptive banner ad the entire show along with fucking huge time outs mid conversation to talk about HTC, or Jeep, or any other right-up-in-your-fucking-grill offensive advertisers like that.

That said, I really fucking hope distributors catch the fuck up with the new reality they’re dealing with, and even more so hope that Singer doesn’t fuck things up and understands he has some BIG shoes to fill and if he plans to go back to the 70′s roots he sure as fuck is going to hump the bunk on this one and should hold true to his promise, that he ‘will rather hand the project to someone else than frak it up’ (his words, precisely) and hand it to someone else.

Blood and Chrome seem to be a pipe dream now. If they do happen, they’ll be a webisodal non event like Woke Up Dead or some shit.

But the bottom line is, there’s been a BSG project green lit, we, the fans, need to publicize this and put pressure on Singer, Universal, and SyFy to do it right, to bring it back as it was, and to give us more of that sweet metaphysical mumbo jumbo to pulsing Bear Grylls–oh wait, McCreary, the non-urine drinking Bear–primal beats and funk.

So, SyFy, Universal, Singer, Orloff … PLEASE don’t fuck this up. This is possibly the franchises last chance, if you do, you’ll have Gen X and Y hating your guts for the next forty years.

It’s not often I learn things, and as a child who grew up with what most people these days tout as retro products, I vividly remember my first Walkman, later replaced with the state of the art cutting edge Discman when CD’s had barely become big. Needless to say, up until researching portable technology today, I was under the incorrect belief that Sony had invented the device. It’s even less often you’ll see me say this.

I was wrong.

The real credit for the portable tape player is to Andreas Pavel, a Brazillian national, making his first portable personal stereo player in the late 1960′s.

With irony, he was unable to enthral people with the device. He recounts the confusion he raised in Milan in 1976 with massive earmuff headphones (the kind scumbag hipsters wear today, but larger, affectionately called ‘cans’), “people would look at me sometimes on a bus, and you could see they were asking themselves, ‘Why is this crazy man running around with headphones?”‘

Pavel filed patents in five countries, and Sony agreed to license his technology in 1986 — although they refused to acknowledge him as the technology’s inventor. He fought long and hard, and it wasn’t until 2003 that he reached an agreement with Sony that saw him credited for his idea, along with a sizable cash settlement rumored to be over $10 million. To his credit, he never let his legal battle consume him or define his life, even when faced with financial ruin.

Below is the earliest article I can find on the subject, from 2005.

Portable Stereo’s Creator got his Due, Eventually
By: Larry Rohter
Published: New York Times, Friday, December 16, 2005

In the late 1960s, Andreas Pavel and his friends gathered regularly at his house here to listen to records, from Bach to Janis Joplin, and talk politics and philosophy. In their flights of fancy, they wondered why it should not be possible to take their music with them wherever they went.

Inspired by those discussions, Pavel invented the device known today as the Walkman. But it took more than 25 years of battling the Sony Corporation and others in courts and patent offices around the world before he finally won the right to say it: Andreas Pavel invented the portable personal stereo player.

“I filed my first patent a complete innocent, thinking it would be a simple matter, 12 months or so, to establish my ownership and begin production,” he said at the house where he first conceived of the device. “I never imagined that it would end up consuming so much time and taking me away from my real interests in life.”

In person, Pavel seems an unlikely protagonist in such an epic struggle. He is an intellectual with a gentle, enthusiastic, earnest demeanor, more interested in ideas and the arts than in commerce, cosmopolitan by nature and upbringing.

Born in Germany, Pavel came to Brazil at the age of 6, when his father was recruited to work for the Matarazzo industrial group, at the time the most important one here. His mother, an artist named Ninca Bordano, had a home built for the family that included a studio for her and an open-air salon with high-end audio equipment, meant for literary and musical gatherings.

Except for a period in the mid-1960s when he studied philosophy at a German university, Pavel, now 59, spent the remainder of his childhood and early adulthood here in South America’s largest city, “to my great advantage,” he said. São Paulo was experiencing a period of unusual creative and intellectual ferment then, culminating in the Tropicalist movement, and he was delighted to be a part of it.

When a station called TV Cultura was licensed to go on the air, Pavel was hired to be its director of educational programming. After he was forced to leave because of what he thinks was political pressure, he edited a “Great Thinkers” book series for Brazil’s leading publishing house in another effort to “counterbalance the censorship and lack of information” then prevailing.

In the end, what drove Pavel back to Europe was his discontent with the military dictatorship then in power in Brazil. By that time, though, he had already invented the device he initially called the “stereobelt,” which he saw more as a means to “add a sound track to real life” than an item to be mass marketed.

“Oh, it was purely aesthetic,” he said when asked his motivation in creating a portable personal stereo player. “It took years to discover that I had made a discovery and that I could file a patent.”

Pavel still remembers when and where he was the first time he tested his invention and which piece of music he chose for his experiment. It was February 1972, he was in Switzerland with his girlfriend and the cassette they heard playing on their headphones was “Push Push,” a collaboration between the jazz flutist Herbie Mann and the blues-rock guitarist Duane Allman.

“I was in the woods in St. Moritz, in the mountains, the snow was falling down, I pressed the button and suddenly we were floating,” he recalled. “It was an incredible feeling, to realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation.”

Over the next few years, he took his invention to one audio company after another – Grundig, Philips, Yamaha and ITT among them – to see if there was interest in manufacturing his device. But everywhere he went, he said, he met with rejection or ridicule.

“They all said they didn’t think people would be so crazy as to run around with headphones, that this is just a gadget, a useless gadget of a crazy nut,” he said. In New York, where he moved in 1974, and then in Milan, where he relocated in 1976, “people would look at me sometimes on a bus, and you could see they were asking themselves, ‘Why is this crazy man running around with headphones?”‘

Ignoring the doors slammed in his face, Pavel filed a patent in March of 1977 in Milan. Over the next year and a half, he took the same step in the United States, Germany, England and Japan.

Sony started selling the Walkman in 1979, and in 1980 began negotiating with Pavel, who was seeking a royalty fee. The company agreed to that in 1986, he said, but would not acknowledge him as the Walkman’s inventor, so in 1989 he began new proceedings, this time in British courts, that dragged on and on and ate up his limited financial resources.

At one point, Pavel said, he owed his lawyer hundreds of thousands of dollars and was being followed by private detectives and countersued by Sony. “They had frozen all my assets, I couldn’t use checks or credit cards,” and the outlook for him was looking grim.

In 1996, the case was dismissed, leaving Pavel with more than $3 million in court costs to pay. But he persisted, warning Sony that he would file new suits in every country where he had patented his invention, and in 2003, after another round of negotiations, the company agreed to settle out of court.

Pavel declined to say how much Sony was obliged to pay him, citing a confidentiality clause. But European press accounts said that Pavel received a cash settlement for damages in the low eight figures and is now also receiving royalties on some Walkman sales.

These days, Pavel divides his time between Italy and Brazil, and once again considers himself primarily a philosopher. But he is also using some of his money to develop an invention he calls a “dreamkit,” a personal, multimedia sense-extension device, and to indulge his unflagging interest in music.

Recently, he has been promoting the career of a somewhat overlooked flutist named Altamiro Carrilho, whom he regards as “the greatest living Brazilian musician.”

He is also financing a project that he describes as “the complete discography of every record ever released in Brazil, so that we will know every track and who is playing on it.”

In addition, some of his friends have suggested he might have a case against the manufacturers of MP3 players, reasoning that those devices are a direct descendant of the Walkman. Pavel said that while he sees a kinship, he is not eager to take on another long legal battle.

“I have known other inventors in similar predicaments and most of them become that story, which is the most tragic, sad and melancholic thing that can happen,” he said.

“Somebody becomes a lawsuit, he loses all interest in other things and deals only with the lawsuit. Nobody ever said I was obsessed. I kept my other interests alive, in philosophy and music and literature.

“I didn’t have time to pursue them, but now I have reconquered my time,” he continued.

“So no, I’m not interested anymore in patents or legal fights or anything like that. I don’t want to be reduced to the label of being the inventor of the Walkman.”

Ok, you know I hate being a cynical arsehole who points out blatently obvious things in an intellectually arrogant way and rubs a companies face into it to humilitate them for your pleasure and amusement, dear reader, but I must.

I’ve noticed how easy it would be if I use bit.ly as my main shortening site, and then anyone who gets a random combination of six or so random letters and numbers can just add in the rest in their browser, especially given how much content I put out in peak periods.

I realised however that the more I did that, the more I’s and l’s, or O’s and 0′s, and other such things can become confusing with various fonts of various phone operating systems through SMS (text messaging, for my mentally handicapped friends) and that if they were removed, and say, a seventh slot added, it would expand the variability of URL’s to allow more traffic from their end, along with eliminating you sending your mother to a lolcat only for her to accidentally be URL hijacked to goatse.

So, I have blogged, and I shall email this blog post to them, and update you all with the reply I get.