Category: Reviews

Sexism In The Age Of Cholera… or is it Covid?

Anytime I’m going to be within 10 feet of people other than my wife, I wear a 3m 8210 N95 mask. It has two real straps that go around my head, holding it tightly to my face all the way around. Does it mess up my hair? Sure. I don’t fucking care. I need to not get Covid-19, so STFU.

I opened a ticket with their help system 6/15/23 8:02 AM with the following:

Xfinity internet had been dropping 2-4x/day briefly the past couple weeks. Then yesterday morning, it was out first thing, and this time the outage really was on their outage map. Outage ended on time, and everything came back online except my Cisco SPA525G with three lines (voip.ms, hamsoverip, hamshackhotline).

I have had to MANUALLY edit some things in the web UI for each of voip.ms and hamsoverip, and they both came back to working.

I need to MANUALLY edit whatever’s wrong with hamshackhotline, but because you guys do this auto-magical provisioning script thing, I’m unable to find plain instructions/screenshots of what fields need to say what. I don’t even know what my SIP account’s password is. If I’d ever been told, it’d be in my 1Password – it is not. Was only ever known by someone on your crew who did stuff remotely.

Where can I get the details necessary to MANUALLY re-configure SPA525G for HsH 11079?

This was their response…

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Bill Lewis posted 6/15/23 8:32 AM 

Hello Kelvin D. Olson,

As requested, here is your password: a3869(obfuscatedBitsForReasons)5903b728

Please be advised that because you will now be modifying settings in your endpoint, you are now transitioning from “Full Service Support” to “Self Service Support”. This basically means that it might be possible for you to accidentally change a setting in your phone and disrupt your service with us.

Because we won’t know what you changed, there will be no way for us to effectively help you.

If you find your phone in a condition where it does not operate as it should anymore, you will be required to perform a full factory reset on your phone, and then perform a re-provision to restore your phone to the settings we recommend for optimal performance.

Regards,

 Closed by Bill Lewis with status of Closed 6/15/23 8:32 AM

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Kelvin D. Olson posted 6/15/23 8:44 AM 

Well… aren’t you just awful?

Please close my account.

So… these guys work from the assumption that if you’re getting a VOIP phone, you’re getting it to do one and only one thing. They have you point your VOIP phone at an automated provisioning script which wipes out anything ELSE you’ve got going on that phone. When you instead sign up with HamsOverIP.com, you get access to a Wiki wherein the left menu contains…
Configuration Guides
..Endpoints
….Hard Phones
……Cisco
……..Cisco 525g
…and there you find step-by-step instructions, and screenshots of all the settings on the web UI for the phone.

NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENT from giving me the password (one of MANY things I needed to know), closing the issue, telling me there’s “no way for us to effectively help you.” Uhm, fuck you, I can show you a great example of a way to effectively help me. You’re just an Alpha Hotel and a LID, Bill.

It often happens that something I wish to talk about on mastodon.hams.social requires more than 500 characters. Were it my limit to control, given the technical nature of the discussions in our odd community, I would set that character limit in the thousands – the lowest value I’d consider reasonable is 2000. But it’s not up to me, so I just complain about it on the regular, and needle the admins almost as frequently.

My wife stated a desire to chuck overboard the stuff she’d recently been doing with a commerce site hosted on GoDaddy and instead return to more traditional blogging. But she’s also wanted to transition to doing more Mastodon/Fediverse Social Media, and distance herself from the predictable platform enshittification that comes with being part of the product that Fark Muckerberg and Melon Husk try to sell to advertisers. So I suggested that I’d find an affordable and easy enough way to dovetail these two things.

Signed up with BlueHost. Eventually bought a new domain name, ‘cuz I sure as heck wasn’t going to give control of my decades-old kelvind.com domain over to some yutzes who might easily get chucked overboard at any time that they piss me off somehow. Then spun up WordPress there, and added the “Share-on-Mastodon” plugin.

It’s been a little bumpy, but I believe I now have it squared away such that I can make a post that is far longer than 500 characters, with a picture, on my WordPress blog, and it instantly cross-posts it to Mastodon. This is how I will break free from the toot-limit shackles.

The trickiest bit has been figuring out how exactly to make sure that alt text that’s applied to a picture in the blog post also survives through to the toot on mastodon.hams.social – but I believe I’ve got that licked with a not-too-terrible workaround.