Hello once again, everybody. This post going to be about my new job. I'm working for T-Mobile at an outsourcer. I'm actually still in training (starting my 3rd week), which is in a classroom environment. At the beginning of next week, I'm going to get on the phones for the first time. I'll actually be in a department called GMA, which is where people go right after training to receive additional help for a few weeks before being put on the real production floor.

I've actually been doing very well there. I'm among the top of the class because of the speed at which I can find the policies and procedures, and with my computer background, their database is very easy to navigate. I would say that there are things I would change to make the call flow and support much easier and faster, but I'm still new, so nobody would actually listen to me.

I get this same runaround at any job that I'm at. I can enhance and secure their networks, but apparently they don't want it. For example, their network is so unsecure now that I am running a telnet server at my home and telnetting into it from work. From there, I can go outbound to ANYTHING. My class loves me for it, because we chat to each other through this server while in class, which includes getting the answers for tests. I also have outbound FTP access and the ability to browse their internal Windows network (with write access, nonetheless).

Honestly, it just makes you feel like nobody appreciates your abilities. Regardless, I know that my skills could be put to much better use off of the phones. I won't let my ego get to my head, though; I realize I'm new and should first have to "prove" myself.

Well, beyond that, I've made several new friends there and have been invited to their house a couple of times. I've also invited a couple of people to my apartment as well. For the first time in a long time I feel like I have a social life again, at least where I don't have to drive 2 hours on the weekends to see my old friends. It's definitely a good change from staying at home alone for the past 15 months.

The pay there is good, too, along with benefits. You start at $7.50/hr for training, then you get $8.50 after training. Depending on your call scores, if you can score higher than 3 (on a 1 to 5 scale), you'll make $9.50 for the month. They also offer optional overtime at times, so if you're making $9.50/hr when you take the overtime, your next check is going to be really fat. As for the benefits, I don't really care about them because I'm already completely covered on everything through Kim's job.

Oh yes, my birthday was yesterday. I'm on a new computer now (from my Dad), and I'm loving it. It wasn't a big party or anything. In fact, my parents both came to stay the night Saturday night, so you can count getting drunk for my birthday out. It was nice to see them, though, so it was worth it.

Who'd have guessed a new post? No, this blog isn't dead, nor will it ever be. Anyway, just a few updates.

First, we've moved. What fun that was. We're in a great apartment, but I'm not too fond of the manager. For some reason, we've had problems here for upward of 3 months, yet they haven't been fixed yet (and by problem, I don't mean complex). First, our stove is screwed up, then there's the fact that all of our electrical outlets are loose. There's more problems, these are just the 2 major ones. They should have easily been fixed in the 3 months we've been here (and yes, they ARE in our work-order).

Second, Kim and I both have jobs now, and we've hired a babysitter to come to our house to babysit while we're away. I think she's done a great job so far, as does Kim. I haven't been away from Elise for 15 months now, so it feels very awkward to suddenly have only a couple of hours a day with her (if even that).

Third, we're working on owning a house, but to do this, we have to both fix our credit. We've gone to a credit counselor already, who is looking through both of our credit reports to start setting up a consolidated payment with them. Ouch, it's a tough job, because my credit is so horrible. I still owe bills from my first real girlfriend, which was years ago, for some jewelry.

Anyway, I hope you all keep revisiting my site. The 1,435 unique hits to this site kinda makes me feel good, like I'm actually giving something back to this world for once.

Oh yeah, I thought I should mention this... If you know me, then you'll understand the complete oddity of it. I found myself the organizer of a political rally for an anti-Bush thing. Believe me, President Bush is a liar on every front and has abused his power for personal gain. Just watch Loose Change for proof on this. Being "famous" isn't a good thing at all; it comes with too many responsibilities.

A new post. Surprised? Well, lately, I've been downloading a lot of music. I've got 1.59GB of songs so far, which is 346 tracks on 39 different albums. I'm shooting for a little over 4GB so that I can burn it to a DVD. My main goal is to get the complete discography of Aphex Twin (and his aliases). I'll then release everything as a torrent, so be sure to join it! So far I have:

• Afx

1. Analogue Bubblebath 1 through 5
2. Analord 1 through 11

• Aphex Twin

1. 26 Mixes for Cash
2. Caustic Window
3. Classics
4. Come to Daddy
5. Drukqs
6. Girl-Boy EP
7. Hangable Auto Bulb
8. I Care Because You Do
9. Melodies From Mars
10. Richard D. James Album
11. Selected Ambient Works 85 - 92
12. Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2
13. Surfing on Sine Waves
14. Ventolin
15. Windowlicker
16. Words & Music

I'm missing a few albums, and a couple of songs from those albums. You can view his complete discography at http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/hunaphextwin/discography.html. If you can give me any albums that I don't already have, I'll love you forever! We can trade songs by any means (FTP, Hamachi, You Send It, IRC, Soulseek, Torrents, etc.) By the way, I prefer that all my music is in 128KBps format, in the ARTIST\ALBUM\TRACK# SONGTITLE format, but if you don't know how to do that, don't worry, I can do it myself. Resampling from higher bitrates to 128KBps is pretty simple, just use Advanced MP3 Converter, located here. I then use Media Monkey to edit my ID3 tags and organize the files, then moreTunes for some final ID3 touches. The result is a nice directory structure of sorted MP3's at a decent bitrate, especially if you like to burn them to CD so that you can listen to them with your MP3 player.

You can contact me many ways. On IRC, I'm on with the nick BlkFury. My AIM name is BlkFury80, my MSN account name is jfox1980@gmail.com, and I also use Google Talk, under jfox1980@gmail.com. By the way, if you need a gmail account of your own (with over 2,713MB and growing), just leave a comment here or contact me with the other ways I mentioned and I'll set you up.

Otherwise, the music I also have is:

• Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
• Daft Punk - Homework
• DHT - Listen to Your Heart
• Halo_Gen - Halo_Gen
• Kindzadza - Waves From Outer Space
• Massive Attack - Mezzanine

Not a bad collection, huh? I've also found a new P2P file sharing program that you may be interested in. It's not near as good as the current torrent system, and it does put you in a queue, but it's worth a try, since it can find hard-to-get songs. It is located at http://www.slsknet.org/. The current version is 157 test 8, and can quickly be downloaded here. If you want to have a look at my music, just browse the user BlkFury.

Other than that, not much is new. My ISP, Communicomm, is still as worthless as ever. The BBB case that I filed against them is finally over, and they've received a bad ranking. You can view the results here. It basically says that they have an "unsatisfactory record" because "Company failed to respond to the BBB or to the consumer to resolve the issues." If you've been following my blog, you'll find that that isn't all too surprising. I've been trying to get ahold of the manager over the billing department by phone, but all I ever get is voicemail. I've sent her numerous e-mails about the downtime that I've been having, but she hasn't responded once. What else can I do?

Here's a link featuring a great shockwave flash video of Albert Hoffman. I hope you enjoy it!
http://www.nata2.info/humor/flash/flashback.swf. The music playing the the background is DMT by Shpongle. That's some more music I need to get.

Oh yes, a picture of me. Here's the best one I can find:

Later, folks!

Here's a picture showing a test that I'm running to show how badly our internet connection is with Communicomm.


As you can see (you may need to click on the image to show the full size), there are a lot of failed packets. The test has been running for almost 3 hours, and almost half of that time, the internet was unaccessible. Also, you can note that the average response time for the data that does actually get through is high.

So, take my advice. If you have the choice between Communicomm and another ISP, choose the other. With Communicomm, we've had nothing but bad customer support, high prices, excessive downtime, low bandwidth, and filtered packets (see the post several days ago). Cox Communications is an excellent cable internet provider. If you have them in your area, go with them. I've used them for twice as long as I've used Communicomm when I lived in TX, and I can't remember more than 5 minutes of downtime. I can't say that their customer service is better though, because I've never actually had to use it. That's a good thing, though, heh.

Well, time for some pictures. First, my new pickup. It's nothing special, but we finally have that second vehicle, yay!



Next is a picture of our newest addition to the family, Elise Hannah Fox. In this picture, she is almost 7 months old, and, can you believe it, smiling!



Next is a picture of my cousin, Jamie. This picture is inside Anna's house in Detroit, TX. I believe this picture was taken the day after his father, James, passed away.



Finally, a picture of my other cousin, Amber, holding Elise. She is pregnant in this picture, although you can't really tell it, with her second baby. Her first baby, like ours, passed away.



Alright, well, that wraps it up for this session.

Ugh, my ISP hires such morons. I've been talking a bit with this person [edit: name removed] via email about peer-to-peer filesharing software, and his stance on why it is so important to filter it. By filtering, I mean removing the packets that I should be receiving, which basically slows my download speeds to a crawl. Here is how our emails look:

We have filters in place that reduce the amount of peer to peer programs that can be used on our system. These programs often allow the distribution of copyrighted material as well as little or no virus protection for customer’s networks. All of the legal means of retrieving music off the interent have no limitations on our networks. Examples of such sites are musicmatch rapshody and itunes. Please let us know if we can be of any more help.

Alright, I can understand why they would want to reduce the amount of peer to peer programs that allow the distribution of copyrighted material, but virus protection is something that should be done client-side, not server-side. Here's my response:

Torrents are also the fastest way to transfer legitimate software, such as various distributions of multiple CD/DVD software, like Linux. The other method of transferring this monstrosity (FTP) won't get near the speed and reliability that a torrent would. Many other services also provide for the distribution of copyrighted material (Gnutella, Kazaa, FTP, IRC, etc.). Why do you not filter these?

As for virus protection, the only likely thing you can filter would be data that is stored on the server (POP3 for instance). You're simply unable to process all the data that moves through your server, and even if you did, many viruses will be compressed using methods that your server wouldn't even recognize.

His reply?

We do filter gnutella and kazza. IRC is used for more than simply file transfers.

Peer to Peer software opens up for the spread of viruses due to the unknown nature of the remote computer sharing out the files. The pop3 references you make have no bearing on peer to peer programs. Our virus appliance strips out all attachments regardless of the files being compressed or not.

This will be my final reply on this subject. If you need any more help, please let us know.

Now, if you've been reading carefully, you'd note that my POP3 comment referred to virus protection, not peer-to-peer software. Also, as I haven't tested this, I'm almost certain that their "virus appliance" does not strip out attachments, as many attachments are legit, even so far as to say necessary, especially for businesses that might be transferring things like spreadsheets via e-mail.

Either way, wouldn't you agree that, for one, his attitude is abrassive toward me, and two, he acts as if I do not know what I'm talking about. "Gee, IRC is used for more than file transfers? I'm such a doofus for not knowing that... With an acronym that translates to Internet Relay Chat, I would never have known that it was only for file transfers!" In my opinion, I'm almost certain I've used IRC before he even had internet access. I can remember running through a shell on my BBS to connect to IRC.

I've also looked a bit into our technological wizkid here. Here's a link where he talks about banning a Communicomm user for sharing copyrighted data. Now, do you think he has absolutely no copyrighted data on his home PC? I would like to think that he does, as anybody who knows a thing about computers has some kind of illegal software on their computers. After more digging, I've found a few other tidbits about him, although I can't say this is fact.

1. He met his wife from IRC.
   
2. He's an avid gamer. Hooray!
   
3. He's older than 26, but I'd like to say 28.

Peace out, [edit: name removed]!

Income tax time! Yay! This year, we've decided to use Jackson Hewitt for a faster refund. So far, we've bought a new TV (since the old one was kinda dying), a printer, a futon, which I am assembling as we speak. I would like a couch, but I don't want to pay $1,400 and up for one, bleh. The TV supports S-Video, so I'm thinking of purchasing a S-Video adapter to connect the PS2 to the TV. Eh, oh well...

All news isn't good news, however. My Uncle, James, is dying of cancer. How I have heard is that at the most, 6 months is as far along as he'll live, but that's at a 30% chance. I feel so terrible for Anna, but there is nothing I can do. I can't imagine the pain of losing your lifelong partner, because it's simply indescribeable.

So anyway, keep the comments going, and keep clicking for the advertisers. I can't wait to see a $50.00 check in my mailbox for doing nothing, heh. Later.

Aren't dreams funny? I had a dream last night where, in my dream, I was telling someone about a dream I had inside my dream. It was some kind of joke in my dream, and I wish I could remember what the joke was, but I can't. It probably wasn't funny, anyway, as some things that happen in dreams only seem to invoke emotions that don't necessarily apply to the situation. This is most likely the case in my dream.

Bleh. The Fog sucked, don't watch it unless you have nothing better to do. Anyway, don't you hate it when you see a movie, and would love to see it again, but you have no idea what it was called? I saw one the other day, and I believe it was a comedy, about these unlikely people going through what I guess was apartments. I remember one part, where this guy was afraid of heights, and then had to ride the back of the other guy to get across buildings or something. Anyway, he ends up falling over, hanging over the rails, and his pants fall to the ground. It was crazy! If any of you have an idea what this movie was, PLEASE let me know! Welp, have fun guys!

I've been watching a lot of movies lately, and I have some great recommendations for you guys. The first two are sort of related: The Cave and The Descent are both dark, spooky monster-ridden cave dwellers, guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat. I personally like The Descent better, I guess because it's more bloody, heh. The next two are Flight Plan and Red Eye. They're both airplain thrillers about strange evil things that can go on while you're flying. I'll be watching The Fog later tonight. Have any good movie recommendations for me? Comment them, I'll give them a watch!

It's been a wild week. Here in Oklahoma, fires are running everywhere. You can see black spots where fires have been, especially on Hwy. 69, you can see a lot of damage. The baby is doing good, although she still spits up her milk. I need to get out of this house, heh. Anyway, I've been playing Final Fantasy IV Advance, it's quite a bit different from the original. Old, but still fun to play. I can't wait for SquareEnix to put out 5 and 6, my god I'd be up all night playing 6. It's my absolute favorite. Google seems to be doing well... I have a gmail account (which you have to be invited to) that I now use, and which I need to update in the settings when I get the time.

Final Fantasy XI is a sort of let down, not near what I would have expected from this great gaming giant. If any of you happen to have FFXI, leave a comment, so we can group up and go kill stuff together. Anyway, I'm out.

Oh, by the way, on your way out, click the link on the top of the screen. Some new ad program that lets you earn money. Heh. Have fun!

Link of the day: Shoutwire

I almost forgot about the blog, sorry about that. I'll try a little harder, eh? Well, Christmas is past, and the new year of 2006 is upon us. Elise is 5 months old now, and still babbling as usual, but we love her to death. She should soon be learning to crawl and get her teeth, I hope. I've been keeping her at home while Kim works, at least until I get a job with her. We're just waiting on the extra money to pay for the babysitting, which shouldn't be much longer than a few weeks, I hope. I look forward to being able to work again and have the money to do stuff again instead of being all cooped up in this apartment.

Anyway, that's it for now. See ya soon.