« Thanks | Main | Better the devil you know »

Friday, December 28, 2001

Kirsty moments

The inimitable Kirsty MacColl died a year ago on my birthday.

How dare she.

A week or so late, here are some of my favorite Kirsty moments.

The bf found this extended 12" remix version of "A New England" on AudioGalaxy the other day; the guitars go all genius at about 1:16.

Soho Square; the saddest of her many sad sad songs.

He's On the Beach; one of the most perfect P!O!P! songs of the last 20 years.

They Don't Know About Us as performed by Tracey Ullman; in my mind, arguably the most perfect pop moment of all time. or at the very least Top Three.

* * * Look, here's some insane stuff I wrote late last night when my cable was out! * * *

I'm on hold with Comcast (it has been 40 minutes so far; I'm typing this post in Apple Note Pad), my cable provider and ISP. At midnight tonight, their deal with @home ended and they became their own ISP outright.

The phone message you get when you call up goes something like this: Thank you for calling Comcast. We are currently in the process of switching our servers over to our exciting new Comcast dot net service. You will experience an outage of your internet service for approximately 20 minutes. For more information, visit www.comcast.net slash something something something.

VISIT COMCAST.NET? TO FIND OUT WHEN MY INTERNET SERVICE WILL BE TURNED BACK ON? WHAT? Sigh.

Sit and spin, Comcast. Sit and spin.

By the way, I think I am listening to a muzak version of "Walking on the Sun" by Smash Mouth. It's vaguely terrifying.

* * *

I won't even comment about the bizarre little interface that Comcast shipped to me on CD in order to bring about the changeover to the new service.

OK, I will comment.

Changing ISPs on one's Mac isn't a terribly arcane process. If it's for a high-speed access account over ethernet, it really can't take much more than one trip to the TCP/IP Control Panel to enter a couple of stock settings provided by the ISP.

So why do I have to play with a rainbow colored Wizard which just tried to THROW ALL MY BOOKMARKS in the Trash FOR NO REASON and WITH NO WARNING?

The AppleScipts that are doing the grunt work were obviously written by a hack; blindly trashing files and folders with nary a care in the world, and unable to function on any disk other than the Startup Disk.

I guess it's common in PC Land for installers to just expect to do everything on the C:\ drive or whatever the fuck.

But here in Mac Land, we like a little more flexibility. And we DON'T LIKE WIZARDS.

55 minutes on hold! At least now The Fifth Wheel is on.

* * *

The Fifth Wheel is over. I am still on hold.

I have been staring at this screen. Can't get address from the DHCP server. Make sure all cables are connected, then click the "Retry" button.

Retry. Retry. Retry.

Posted at 03:36 PM

Comments

Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Enter Security Code Number:


Comments:


Remember info?