Spooky ass books

I was splitting my time between struggling to stay awake and studying a handbook for writing this afternoon and decided to heed a piece of advice I gleaned from a paragraph in the section on improving your writing skills. Specifically that you should attempt to write anything, no matter how pointless every day. So here it goes. I failed my resolve to head to the pool today so I might as well get this done.

Yesterday was a strange day all around. I worked all day, proceeded to head to the library to finish a project for my writing course. It wasn't exactly one of my most lucid pieces of prose but i got it done. One of the consequences of my 12 hour work marathon was that the idea of sitting in front of a video device made me feel an aneurysm coming on. The risk of bursting an artery in my brain seemed very real and frightening at the time so I went to my bookshelf and grabbed whatever was buried way in the back. It happened to be a book my sister left with me before she left for Japan, "House of Leaves".

The reputation of this book has not escaped me and I've seen people praise it's ability to truly inspire fear in readers and how the level of detail given to minutiae is unprecedented. Thinking about it now, it seems like it has something in common with the "alternate reality games" that Nine Inch Nails, Lost and AI have all come up with to appeal to the obsessive fact finders and internet detectives among the fanbase. Case in point: the hard cover version of House of Leaves contains a huge string of hexadecimal code on the inside covers. If you transcribe this code into a text document you get an AIFF file for clip of a song from Poe. NIN had a puzzle in the lead up to Year Zero that involved taking a piece of a leaked song and running a spectrum analysis of a certain part to reveal a phone number. I've always been fascinated with the design of these kind of "games" and it seems already from the little i've read that this was a collaborative process.

But yeah. All I wanted to say was that the book has hooked me so far but I'll be extremely depressed if it loses me with the hard stuff before I'm fully invested in it. It's already got this meta "story of a story of a story" structure set up and I worry that it's going to leave me frustrated when I see people quoting parts like:

"Forgive me please for including this. An old man's mind is just as likely to wander as a young man's, but where a young man will forgive the stray, and old man will cut it out. Youth always tries to fill the void, and old man learns to live with it. It took me twenty years to unlearn the fortunes found in a swerve. Perhaps this is no news to you but then I have killed many men and I have both legs and I don't think I ever quite equaled the bald gnome Error who comes from his cave with featherless ankles to feast on the mighty dead."

That's the problem with experimental art. You're never sure if it's more on the side of genius or pretentious.

Tech support circus

Fuck modems and routers and tech support...hell, fuck telecommunications in general.

So for a few weeks now I've been having issues with my internet connection. It's brought into striking clarity just how critical it is to have access to the internet at all times, even (especially) when trying to fix your internet.

I'm sore and cranky and want to bury all my electronics in the desert but ultimately I feel a sense of superiority against my ISP for thwarting their attempts to control my internet usage.

So here's the crux of the problem. My ISP is Bell/Aliant. I imagine this isn't an uncommon practice but when they send you the modem (Siemens Speedstream 4200) it's loaded with a gimped, safety-scissors version of the firmware. You can put in your password and that's pretty much it. No port forwarding or any of the things that you'll want to be messing with if you use any program or service outside of web-browsing. I've never attempted to connect to the router directly, always through the router and it's worked well. Then last month I had to troubleshoot some technical issue that required me to use the pinhole on the back to reset it to default settings.



This is apparently not as straightforward as it sounds. From what I can conclude from looking back on all of this it all comes back to when my 12 month internet subscription (you get a better rate if you buy the 12 month deal) expired. When my contract was up they switched me over to another channel which caused the modem to flake out and go into an error state. When I reset it it switched from "bridge mode" to "router mode", the difference being that bridge mode lets my other SMC router deal with all the port forwarding and PPPoE stuff. The difference between setting the modem to one of these or the other is the length of time you hold down the reset button.

This is so far out of what the average technical capabilities of any tech support person I've had to deal with is I am astounded that anyone ever gets their internet straightened out if this kind of a problem occurs. It really is ludicrous how far some ISPs go to keep their customers from having any control over the product they're selling.

Links:
Factory Firmware for Speedstream 4200
DSLReports thread that helped me solve my problem
I feel bad for this guy. Hope he figured it out on his own.