novelty overload

I’m still dealing with, what I call, novelty overload — so much new stuff to setup and play with that my head is spinning wildly with the possibilities and I’m trying to absorb it all at once.  It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose.

I’ve got my Internet back again and now a phone line to, and Ive been trying to get Grand Central all hooked up and working right.  I still haven’t been able to verify that it’s actually ringing both phones at once — there might be some latency on the Comcast line or something.  My cell phone will always ring though.  Maybe I just set something up wrong, who knows.

Also, first impressions of the Comcast digital voice setup — it sucks.  I was gonna write a whole post about it, but I’ll probably not be that coherent enough anytime soon.  One thing I don’t like about it is that you can’t turn the voice mail option off at all.  That may be an odd request, but my opinion is that if you are going to add any feature, the first option should be to have it available.  In my case, I don’t care about any voice mails that go to my home phone, because I’m not giving out that number so anyone who calls there directly has either got the wrong number or is trying to sell something.

Their online interface is just really buggy.  To delete or view details about a voicemail, you have to listen to it first.  Even then, it will only delete the very last one in the list (there’s a bug), so if you want to delete all of them you have to do it from the bottom up.  Secondly, I went into the preferences menu (I forgot which one now, and this is totally anecdotal so feel free to ignore because of lack of details), changed two options which had nothing to do with each other, and got an error response.  Whoops.  One other thing that was weird was that in my account details it has my *old* address listed on the account.  Fail.  Finally, and this is the thing that I find kind of freaky, is it shows *all* incoming and outgoing calls made up to a month back.  Normally that would be cool — if I was the one making the calls.  It should have displayed the logs based on my activation date.  Plus I already got a voicemail of someone calling the old guy’s number and mentioning him by name, so if I really wanted to be evil I could go on a little identity theft digging spree based on the past call activity.  Not that I would, but being as paranoid when it comes to security as I am, the thought just naturally comes to me.

Despite all that, I’ll probably stick with it anyway — I still want to find a decent phone, and while this request may seem odd, I’d like to get one that at least has as the same basic features as my cell phone (minus playing games, of course).  I think stuff like hanging up on an incoming call but still letting it ring through, or changing call volume or simple stuff like that should be standard.  I dunno how much home phones have changed over the years, it’s been a long time since I bought one, and I just grabbed the first one that looked decent at Shop-Ko so I could have something.

As far as everything else in my life, it’s all been busy.  I’m going to be looking for a new job here in the next month, my family has been visiting recently (which is a rare occurrence which just happened to fall on the exact time I’m moving), and I’ve still got to move in and get all that crap done.

I *started* looking at Gentoo stuff finally this morning for the first time since who remembers when.  Between it being summer, skating, and getting a new PS3, it seriously cut into my time and desire to work on Gentoo stuff a lot, so I’ve been taking a bit of a long break.  What worries me though is that this is the first time that I’m getting the feeling that there’s too much to do and users are nagging on bugzilla to get their stuff done (contribute patches, people!  “me too!” comments on bugs totally suck), so I think I really need to scale back what I’ve taken on over the years and see where I really can and want to make a difference.  I’ve already stopped supporting or maintaining a lot of stuff in the tree that I used to take care of (little stuff, mostly) because of time constraints and lack of energy.  I dunno where I’m gonna refocus my efforts yet.  I dunno.  Too much going on right now to think about it anyway.

Well, that’s all the brain dump I can leak out right now.  I sure could use a week off of work right now just to get my life in order, but I’ll have to settle with doing what I can when I can.  It’s all good, I guess.  I’m just not accustomed to having so many things going on all at once.