atourworst.org

On Tuesday I went on over to Tiger Direct and picked up the D-Link DMC-202 cable modem. It was $49.99 with a $20 MIR so I really couldn’t go wrong with that. I got home after work and decided to go right ahead in replacing the Netgear CG814WG with the D-Link. I had no problems getting it hooked up along with the router. After releasing and renewing the DHCP tables on the Linksys WRT54G, I was able to pick up my new IP address and the DNS information.

Unfortunately when I accessed the internet, every website would be forwarded to a Comcast page for new/current customers to download software to begin the installation process. Alright fine, so I downloaded some bloatware, went through the steps only to be notified that my account needed to be updated first in order to continue. So I called in to reference the bill. The current balance due was $4.12 (most likely from a movie I had ordered on demand.) Ridiculous. So I called in tech support instead, and found out that Comcast AT FIRST will tell you that you cannot use your own equipment. Once I mentioned what THEIR product was doing, she continued to the next step.

The major downfall with Comcast is that when you want to use your own equipment, you have to register the MAC ID with support, and then they will add that. You also have to make sure that they remove the internet block that’s in place from changing out the cable modem. Needless to say, I spent two hours on the phone with tech support only to find out from the second rep, that there was “some error” occurring which means that my internet would be done for “about 24 hours.” Ridiculous!

I was getting quite pissed off at that point, and you could tell how annoyed I was, so she put me on hold for the supervisor. At that point I decided to call my friend JP because I had already been on hold for about 15 minutes. We were talking for about five minutes when the supervisor came on the line, asked me my name, to which I gave it to her… Next thing I know the line is disconnected. It was already really late, so I decided to wait until the next day to resolve the issue.

Ended up getting a really sweet girl on the phone Wednesday, who ended up getting the MAC ID registered, turned off the internet block, and got me going in about 45 minutes or so.

I have had about 29 hours of uptime thus far with the new equipment. Versus a paltry 1-2 hours from the Netgear. I’ve been back on Halo 3 with no problems whatsoever and have finally ranked back up to a Sergeant, Grade 3. If I hadn’t lost 11EXP from my connection, I’d be a Gunnery Sergeant. :( Oh well!

I’ve been meeting some awesome people on xbox live. Been sticking with the same few guys when I go on there to play. Last night I ended up playing with two different teams for at least 10 games a piece. Probably more since I ranked up a lot last night. Regardless, Halo 3 is on my mind too much. It’s kind of ridiculous.

Saturday my friend JP is coming over and we’re going to have some Halo 3 drinking games. At least that’s what I think is going to be going down, but I haven’t finalized anything. All I know is that my room is a fucking mess, and it needs to be picked up, stat.

EDIT (1/25/07) - I’ve received a lot of comments and emails with questions about what I did to get my Comcast internet to work properly. I actually wrote a follow-up entry, Follow-up On Comcast’s Netgear CG814WG. If you read that entry, I list two products I currently use in lieu of the Netgear piece of crap. My internet has been flawless since I posted that entry (the end of October) and I haven’t had any issues at all (other than someone unplugging the router on me or something.) If you still are having problems or need advice, leave a comment on either entry and I’ll be more than happy to try to help you out.

In August we finally made the switch to Comcast for our internet, tv , and phone. And unfortunately we’ve been having horrible problems with Comcast’s internet service then I care to think about. The problem was originally both tv cable and internet cable. The cable on the TV would skip, scramble, lose audio, and just time out when trying to open up on-demand. The internet would lag, die off, then connect again. Turns out we had a bad line coming to the house. No problem, Comcast came out to fix the issue with a brand new line, and things were back to working properly.

For the past two months, the new problem has been this piece of crap cable modem gateway (cable modem + router). According to their support page, Netgear doesn’t even support the model, CG814WG, because the vendors have flashed their own firmware onto the hardware. I knew that before hand though, because I went to log into the router and was greeted with a GUI for dummies. Essentially the only options I could change was the WPA/WEP key, port forwarding, parental controls, and DMZ. I couldn’t even change the IP of the unit itself, which was conflicting with another computer on my network. Ridiculous!

Anyway, the problem I’m having is that the router will continually drop a signal, and then pick it back up again. Talk about annoying! I know when it’s going to happen because I’m not able to open any websites–they all just time out on me. It gets worse when there are more people are on the internet, and we usually have about 3 people connected, which is a paltry number, but nonetheless.

Googling around for the CG814WG model shows that it’s a piece of crap in general. When you google for “Comcast CG814WG” the results are all about how the piece of crap isn’t working for them. They all have the same problem. It reboots itself constantly leaving problems if you’re connected to a game, say Halo 3 (which has been my problem. I’ve lost 9EXP and ranking from dropping out of ranked games because of the connection.)

Today I have finally had it with the piece of shit. I wanted to hop on the 360 before work to play a quick game of Halo 3, and things were fine at first. I got matched with a team, and just as we got the map to play on, the other players dropped out which means that my connection lagged and I got kicked from the ranked game. Bye bye EXP.

Later on I’m going out to buy the D-Link DCM202 and I’ll just hook up my old Linksys WRT54G to get going. Instead of going wirelessly for the Xbox 360, I think I’ll just go ahead and return the wifi adapter. I’ve ordered two Netgear XE102 Powerline Adapters so that I can go wired with the unit. Even though I know the wireless issue will be resolved when I replace the unit, I’d rather go wired for the Xbox 360. I can’t handle losing any more EXP points when I’m not even leaving the team.

Here’s a big Fuck you to Comcast’s shitty firmware that ruined the hardware and rendered it absofuckinglutely useless.

I normally don’t like to lurk too much on Livejournal. I’ll start off with two tabs open, and not even 30 minutes later I’ve got 10+ tabs open for different communities, posts, and comment threads. Since I was pretty bored, I decided to venture into my friend’s filter, Webdev. One of the entries I ended up coming across on the first page was made to the community webdesign.

The poster, cyclotron, had asked how he could add to <body> element, without making the content between <body></body> uneditable in Dreamweaver. The question is paraphrased as I can no longer access the original entry. I skimmed through some of the comments and essentially most of the replies were asking/making fun of him for using Dreamweaver.

I decided to go ahead and give some advice–albeit it wasn’t in relation to Dreamweaver, but seeing as I’ve got experience with this, I figured it could do him some good. I told him that instead of taking the extra time to ruin an otherwise gorgeous design, to go charge the client a predetermined amount of support hours that can be used to make changes to the coding. This way the client doesn’t have to work with material he’s unaware of, and so he wouldn’t have to turn the designs into absolute crap.

Apparently this advice just pisses this guy off.

Thank you for your input. But I didn’t mention anywhere that I want an alternate solution to using DW templates, I want a solution using
Dreamweaver’s template functions. I am not asking for an apraisal of Dreamweaver’s value or usefulness to web development. Nor do I am I asking for business advice. I am asking specifically for Dreamweaver advice. I do appreciate your input but I am baffled why so many people are trying to convince me to do things their way and completely avoid the question I asked. Adobe Contribute depends on DW templates. A web maintenance contract is not the situation here.

So of course I tell him that this is the internet; You can’t whine about people giving you advice that doesn’t pertain to the subject. If you can’t accept that it’s inevitable, then don’t post it. He’s obviously steaming over the original comment that, ZOMG doesn’t have any relation to DREAMwEaVerZ!!!, so his next response is even more bitter.

Whine? You say I am whine because you offer advice that conmtains “I honestly can’t help you with your problem, as I’ve never used DW ever in my life…” So why even both replying? You advice DOESNT APPLY. Sheeesh, you people come in with anything BUT useful comments and you say I am whining!? I bent over backward to be polite to. Thanks for the returned favor.

Apparently giving him advice on how to avoid having to “Dreamweaverize” his work for his “fool” of a client has no correlation whatsoever. Well, I’ll be damned. And here *I* was the one being polite to him, despite the fact that he bitched and moaned to everyone else that gave him advice, albeit not the solution, but advice nonetheless.

I went to go to the entry to reply, only to see that he had deleted it. Well, well, looks like someone wasn’t able to handle the hotness that is teh internets. So, I decided it was time to troll a little bit, and head on over to his personal journal. I wanted to get a glimpse into this person who is to adamant upon Dreamweaver’s godliness. Boy, was I in for a real shocker! First of all his website, •Buy A Pixel, Build A House• is hosted on Geocities. I hadn’t even clicked on the link, so I had no doubt that I would be in for a real shocker. Indeedly doo! He’s begging on the internet for complete strangers to donate to him so he can buy a house. I guess his Dreamweaver coding isn’t too hot?

The best was finding that he wrote about the entry he created over at the community.

I swear.. I asked in a comm for some technical help using Dreamweaver and the only people who are replying are those stupid elite fucks who say real web developers don’t use time saving software and their features that prevent the client from fucking it up later.

One guy who replied doesn’t even know how to use DW so I replied “You don’t even know how to use the application!?” To which a third party replied “DW isn’t vital to the internet.” True, but knowledge of DW is vital for giving replies to my question. Dumbasses.

…And then one lowlife comes over here to my personal journal and reads my post from last night about a song and vibrating gonads and comments over back in the comm about. Then continues to rant about how elitist web developers don’t need Dreamweaver.
Cyclotron @ Livejournal (Copy is saved to server; Po’ Baby deleted the original entries. Sob!)

Now I can finally relax! My design woes are solved. I can use Dreamweaver to speed up the amount of time it takes to get a design pumped out. I’ll just have to sacrifice semantics, accessibility, and hell, a decent design.

But what, the juicyness doesn’t stop right there! He made a post today too!

No wonder our country is messed up. No one ever addresses the actual problem. …I just got advice for that Dreamweaver thing again. Instead of making something with Dreamweaver work, the latest advice is to sell someone web maintenance hours!? How does that even address or fix an issue of getting software to do what your want it to do???
Cyclotron @ Livejournal (Copy is saved to server; Po’ Baby deleted the original entries. Sob!)

I Dont fucking care what you have to say. You cant help me. You proved that you are some rude and arrogant fuck who would rather charge clients more money than do the job properly - and give people complete BS for advice.

Why did you bother to go out of your way to be mean and rude to me!? And then you invade m y personal journal to continue to attack me? How
fucking small are you!? Idid I mention your name here? No one knew it was you.
Cyclotron @ Livejournal [Deleted Comment] (Copy is saved to server; Po’ Baby deleted the original entries. Sob!)

Needless to say, this proved for quite entertaining. I have no doubts that he actually uses Dreamweaver on a regular basis, and only used that excuse to compensate for his lack of actual skills.

Well, I finally decided to finish up the design I had started the other day; I managed to integrate most of the coding into Wordpress. Which was less than irritating because I also had to port on over a few template pages that are being used for a few pages. The best is that I managed to *finally* use conditional tags for the sidebar so that you don’t see the same useless crap on every page (though it’s yet to be configured to have proper information on each page; I’ll get around to that.) I also found a fantastic function to help with displaying child pages when on a parent page.

I’ve never been able to find a snippet of code that would allow me to show child pages, and still show the child pages while on a child page of the parent page (did that make any sense!) Regardless, if you’re interested in ditching a plugin you might be using, here’s the snippet of coding you can use:

post->post_parent) ) { $parent = $wp_query->post->ID; } else { $parent = $wp_query->post->post_parent; } wp_list_pages(”title_li=&child_of=$parent”); ?>

Anyway, I think I have most of site working properly. I haven’t tested it for valid XHTML and CSS, but I’ll get around to it eventually. It’s mainly the posts I have to clean through because I’m quite careless when I’m blogging, just not when I’m coding. Let me know what you think, and if you’ve got any suggestions/critiques, etc. All is welcome ;op

PS - This design is not fluid, and currently is not fully function in IE6 and is somewhat dilapidated in IE7.