The good news is the BDBO Word Press platform has the menu buttons back. They disappeared in the cascade last week, and showed up tonight. The other good news news is the DSL stayed on after the private contractor was here, the bad news is the phone works intermittently. The good news is I can call him tomorrow and book him to have the line replaced.

The bad news is I spend 8 hours on tech boards today, which was a humbling reminder of how much I do not know and never will; I do know the computer is still really broke.

The other bad news is I think the tech guy I trust is away, I was not able to leave a message, but a friend called and has not heard back.
I found a run command fix for system restore, tried it, nada. That is when I discovered other computer apps are not working either; hotmail, media player, help menu, search feature. I am not inclined to romp around the OS to find out what else is not working right now. Stuff is broke.

The good news is I have decided on another ISP, I plan to get hold of them tomorrow and see how busy they are with others in the region bailing out of Bell services – if this ISP uses Bell as their infrastructure I might be in the same boat I have been in too long.

Hope springs eternal, perhaps there will be a person on the other end who answers direct questions.
I finally got a Canadian billing person from Bell after long holds and transfers last week who was authorized to answer a question I have been asking for a year. I was put back to the feedback loop and gave the company the lowest ratings I could while trying not to fall into the marketing repetitive question trap which would have knocked the employees who have tried to do their job.

Bell has priced themselves right out of my ability to pay for their service which has been sucks in my neck of the woods. It has reached the point I struggle to be decent to their staff, and that is not where I want to be or will be. It is not their employees fault they work for a corporation which requires them to stick to a script not helpful to individual customer needs, and regardless of how dedicated an employee is, their hands are tied. That ties customers hands while we still pay our bill.

Enough of the corporate attitude that leaves me feeling like a frog in increasingly warm water, dummies down and wears down basic expectations; life is way too short to allow myself to be densensitized to poor quality and service at an increasingly high price. Two other customers I know have had enough, one guy who lost his service this past weekend was told he would have to wait 19 days to get his DSL restored. He manages a business- bad move by Bell, he will not play warm frog.

The good news is I can read blogs now, and post without cringing at my mess of not being able to code in the hyperlinks or liberally use the spell check.
I see Facebook was targeted by a phishing worm as was Twitter. YouTube got hit, blogger tagged a lot of blogs as splogs the end of July because of a coding-bot error, and the Black Hat and Defcon 08 conference caught journalists covering the conference using hacking tools to help themselves to other journalists info.