photo credit: stephen.hackett

I call them up and am prompted with the worst automated system second only to Bank of America. After finally getting a human turns out it’s a sales rep who cant help me with anything technical nor can he transfer me to the tech dept. How utterly useless. I call back a few minutes later and get a tech rep on the line, and immediately ask for an appointment for someone to come out and check the line, (since I have already done the standard reset procedures as well as release/renew on my IP). Of course they don’t have an appointment on the weekend, so I ask for the earliest one on Monday.

I call back this Saturday and to confirm, and they tell me that my appt is on Tuesday. Um… what the heck? So I decide to give them a chance and troubleshoot over the phone, after 30 minutes of getting nowhere, they rep on the phone found out that a slot was available today at 2. Perfect! The tech will come and fix the issue! Too bad this isn’t a perfect world.

The tech shows up on time, which was great however he turned out to be the most condescending and unhelpful person I’ve ever met. When I would ask him any sort of questions, he would reply in a sarcastic and mocking manner. He fiddled around a bit as if he didn’t care or they weren’t paying him to be here.

Finally got up and went out and brought his “test” modem in. it looked like a new model, and he plugs it in and some of the lights start blinking and gets this “WooHooo! I’m a genius” look on his face, soon to be replaced by this “crap… I look like an idiot” face.

Obviously his test modem did very little. He decides it must be the line in the backyard, he’s gone for about 10 minutes, come back and says he fixed the filter out back, so I’m thinking… uh ok sure maybe that was it. At this point the unhelpful tech hooks up my original modem to my Mac and I have an IP address, hooray! So he was good for something. I’m online. Awesome. Well what about my other PCs and my router, well turns out he cant help me with that. I plug the modem into my PC and I get an IP but I still cannot get online. I ask him about this and says well maybe its your PC or your wire. My wire? O RLY? Ok we’ll use the wire that was working for the Mac on the PC. Oh guess what… still not working.

If it’s not the wire than what is it? His response is simply… you saw it working on you’re laptop… I’m done. And in 5 seconds he is downstairs and out the door. As he is leaving he says try restarting your computer… I wanted to hurl the Comcast modem at him.

I call up Comcast again to let them hear my thoughts about the condescending tech with the 7th grade education… well they cant help me on Saturdays… are you serious? Ok fine… then at least troubleshoot my modem, 30 minutes later… they still can’t figure out what it is, and am forced to I schedule another appointment.

Something crazy was going on. For those of you that know me, I’m pretty tech savvy and know what the heck I’m talking about. However I couldn’t put my finger on it. Why would it only work on the Mac. (And don’t give me that, Mac > PC) crap because after resetting the modem, the Mac wouldn’t get online either. So I start fiddling around and I push the “reset” switch on the back of the modem and connect it straight to my brothers PC laptop. Instantly he is online. What the heck? Ok… well know let me plug it back in to the router, and see if the rest of the computers can connect. Crap. Still not working. Ok now I’m slightly confused. Each time I reset the router and plug it in… only the first machine works, and usually its my Mac that works because it’s the one I’m testing wired/wireless on.

Well after messing around and trying different things, we (my brother and I) determine that the ridiculous Comcast modem (model: DPC2100R2) is caching the MAC address of the first machine you plug in. This happened to be my MacBook Pro.

Solution:

Well this problem was only solvable by cloning the MAC address of my MBP to my router. Making the modem think that it is still talking to my MBP.

Once we cloned the MAC address the router got an IP and we were on our way.

<sarcasm>Thank you Comcast for educating your techs on how to solve this issue with your craptacular equipment. </sarcasm>

</rant>

Luckily I had backed up the files. Well I decide to just overwrite what I’ve got thinking it would be just fine. Now…. I can’t login to the back end. Horrayz! (yes with a Z…. it was pretty dramatic when it happened. It DESERVES the infamous Z)

Now I’m thinking, this might be a good time to look at version 2.3…. I mean why not… latest edition, lots of cool new features… sure I’ll upgrade. Right… upgrade.

I carefully follow the steps to upgrade and I get the page saying upgrade successful and everything. Horrayz (yes again….) Ready to make a new “posting” I rush to the login screen… only to be told I have my cookies disabled. Whisky Tango Foxtrot.

I double check everything, on two browsers… on two computers. Cookies are fine, delicious even. So I go on the hunt to figure out just what the heck is going on. Turns out, several people are having this cookies error after upgrading to version 2.3.

I start Googling for the original WP 2.2 files, find them and this time I deleted everything and reuploaded the files. Finally it worked. I go to upload my themes and plug-ins and WHAM it screws up again… so now I know its not wordpress, it cant be the theme… then its the plug-ins messing with wordpress. Ok fine.

I narrow it down to a single plug-ins and delete it, and reinstall it. And finally here I am.

All of this could have been avoided if the WP 2.3 didn’t have a problem with cookies. But all in all it was a good experience seeing the infamous white screen of death and figuring out how to fix it.

Also this hotel is a giant waste of space. Huge open areas that have nothing in then but the crappiest artwork ever. Stuff you’d see in a flee market gallery. I’ve seen the same artwork multiple times in different location… buy one get one free?

Our rooms have four lamps and no overhead lights or fans. And we’ve got the best view too… its a wall, more like the side of the building. Its awesome.

Webmaster Jam Session 2007 was held at the Adams Mark Hotel this year and next year they should just do it in Houston.

Adams Mark Hotel, featured the lovely Gracia and her incredible lack of southern hospitality.

Largest hotel in Dallas, more like Texas and it doesn’t have free WiFi…. Let alone WiFi that you’d have to pay for?

Who puts a cat-5 cable in a modern hotel room and puts a paperweight around it with an extension that doesn’t dial anywhere on a 10 year old phone

We call the hotel front desk five times only to find out they need a credit card on file in order for “incidentals” and of course this couldn’t be the same credit card we had on file when we checked in, or so we were told by the 3rd person who transferred us.

After much deliberation we’re finally able to connect to the whopping fast 300k/s connection.

As far as the rest of the room is concerned, the bathrooms are powered with high tech futuristic super toilets that if you’re not careful will flush your everything down along with your soul and any loose change you’ve got.

The sink in the bathroom seems to drain the water and make these weird demands for more as if its thirst remains to be quenched.

Oh how can I forget…. The sink and the bathtub with the beautiful clear brown water pouring…. I guess the whole idea is, “if its brown drink it down, if its black send it back.”

Now lets move on to the fact that Dallas sleeps, fast. Seems to us that everything in and around the hotel decided to close at about 7ish on a Friday night. Now that’s a business plan. So we drive out of downtown in to the most ghetto of places to get food and some dude offered us bootleg DVDs…. Guess he didn’t catch the geek vibe. …. and this is only day one.

What really grinds my gears, is why people just cant say something when something like this happens. If we were in a completely public setting, she would have hit the car, and I would have never known. Thankfully this happened at someones house and we could trace it back to her.

More on this once I get the estimate and we see what happens.