One Year of Weblog Provided by Newslog

Today marks the 1st anniversary of my on-line news postings. I posted the first of these more-or-less daily news updates on May 5, 1999. That’s a lot of old news to read. Since I hacked some syndication code into newslog in early March, these news entries have been echoed to Advogato as well. I expected most of the embedded links in my old entries would have gone bad by now but a suprising number of them still work. Now, let’s see if I can keep it up for another year.

I had an interesting experience Wednesday. I got picked to be in a focus group doing some marketing research for Verio. If you’ve been following my exciting news regularly, you may remember that we’ve had T1 downtime problems, DNS support problems, dupicate billing problems, and even dial-up problems with Verio in the past. When I got called to take part in a Verio focus group, I figured it would be a great chance to tell them what I thought of them. Turned out that of 10 people in the focus group, all but one had come with a similar history of catastrophically bad service and a similar desire to tell everyone what they thought. Almost everyone there had been a customer of Onramp.net prior to the Verio buyout and without exception we all rated Onramp as one the best ISPs we’d every used and Verio as the worst. I don’t know if they found out anything useful from us be we enjoyed getting paid to sit around sharing Verio horror stories for couple of hours.

And I’m sure everyone would like to hear about my latest car repairs. ;-) As I pulled out of the driveway yesterday morning, my muffler broke loose on one side and started dragging behind the car making horrible scraping sounds. It had apparently become so rusted that the mounting hardware broke. This is the Midas lifetime warranty muffler that I got to the replace the rusted-out Acura muffler I bought sometime back to replace the rusted-out free replacement muffler installed by the Acura dealer to replace the rusted-out factory muffler. Well, I figured with my lifetime warranty and Midas just down the street, it would be no big deal. So, I drove a couple of blocks with the completely unmuffled engine sounding like an Indy race car (combined with the lovely sound of metal scraping on asphault). When I got to Midas, I learned that while the muffler itself has a lifetime warranty, I have to pay for labor, mounting hardware, a large assortment of exhaust pipes, and a variety of other stuff totaling about $200. And to make things worse, I had to wait in a room filled with nothing but Sports Illustrated magazines and a TV showing an old episode of Knight Rider. Fun.

One thought on “One Year of Weblog Provided by Newslog

  1. Pingback: Verio – Just Say No | Steevithak of the Internet

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