Cthulu Made Me Do I

One of the neat things about hanging with the Fen is I have never needed to actually read any of the books to get the key talking points. So from what I know, Cthulu is in charge of, or perhaps has eaten, the accounting department of National Water & Power, which is not a utility company as it sounds like, but is the bill collecting agency for water, sewer & garbage for many apartments in Bay Areea, including my current and previous ones.

More than a year ago, they effed up and credited my first payment at the new apartment to the (presumably closed) account of the previous apartment, and have been billing me as past due. They refuse to accept my bank statements showing all the bills were paid, they ignored a letter from the state Attorney General's office, they ignored a letter from Bank of America. So a few months ago I set up B of A automatic bill pay to pay the bill on the 7th of each month, plenty of time to meet the due date of the 20th.

NW&P has failed to credit my account for the last two months, and a call from B of A failed to get them to waive the late fee. I think I need to sue someone.

New Phone, Scene reading update

My Razr has been dropped one time too many, and since I was planning on getting one in a couple of months anyway, I found a RAZR2 on eBay for $10 less than the employee price, which makes it $50 less when we tally up what Moto would have charged for tax & shipping. I thought about switching to Nokia, but all the reviews liked the Razr2 better, and I do too, except for a couple of nuisance things. Which are:
1. Calendar alarms don't switch to vibrate mode when the rest of the phone is switched.
2. When you plug the phone in to charge it, it changes the ring tone mode to "soft"
3. Switching the phone to vibrate mode makes a loud noise
4. It won't let me disable the internet connection. At $1 a kbyte, I don't use it, and it is too easy to hit that key by accident
5. The outer LCD screen is too small to read the time.

Number 5 is solved with the Razr2's bigger screen. I don't know about the rest.

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Last night's scene reading group got me two big compliments. One is I was offered a paid actor slot. I don't need the money, and other actors do, so I declined. The other is my ADD sitcom scenes went over very well, especially with the other playwrights.

The grant for the group has run out, but several of us said we would be happy to get together once a month regardless. I mentioned I would be in rehearsals by this time next month, but maybe I'll be lucky and they will be blocking a scene I'm not in. One of the writers last night is a regular at Saratoga Drama Group, she was in their last production, and she said the leading lady for my show is single again, so look for a surname change on the program. Interesting.

It was one of the more fun sessions, we had mostly light fare, and the one heavy one was extremely beautiful prose. Too much of it for a stage presentation, I thought, but I was the one doing the reading, two pages of monologue at a time. But I could see it done as a reader's presentation. It was bin Laden and Cheney trading monologues. Picture one in his mountain lair and the other in his bunker, unaware of each other. A pair of lecterns at opposite sides of a dark stage would work.

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Does anyone out there have Earthlink DSL? Their support folks are hopeless, and I'm trying to figure out why a friend's PC, both directly connected to the Earthlink DSL modem and connectred via a Netgear router, refuses to stay logged into Earthlink. I'll be going over there tonight with a large hammer.

Tech News

I installed the Linksys router at Janice's, and it worked with her Earthlink DSL. We'll see for how long. I am so trying to get her onto Comcast. Same price, 10x the speed, none of the connection or support problems.

Earthlink has this online chat support feature. I keep an account for my travels and my parents' dial-up, so I log in and tell them I'm moving in with a friend who has Earthlink DSL, what wireless router should I get? It takes about 5 minutes for the chat to start, and then after I send the question, I get two time-wasters along the lines of "thanks for playing" and "yes, I can help". And then they ask for the home phone number of the account with DSL. I tell them I have no idea, I just need to know what kind of router to use. They say "Linksys WRT54G" great, that's a router I used to use and sold on eBay about a year ago because it sucked with Comcast. But DSL is an application layer authorization and cable is MAC layer, so I'll go with that. I tell them thanks, and the next line from them, after a 2-minute pause is "why don't you want to switch to DSL?"

I'm pretty sure this is an AI, not a human. Yesterday it also gave me strange mis-matched responses to questions.

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