The Word of the Day is: frustration.

More on that tomorrow, when I don't want to pummel my couch for an hour.

For her birthday last year, I got Jen a Ricoh Caplio R7, a great little camera that fulfilled Jen's wishes of being sleek and easy-to-use and my requirement of being a good camera for the money.

And that's exactly what it was - until it broke when Jen and I took a day to go wander around Rowan's campus last month. That was OK; it was still under warranty, and it wasn't like we'd bounced the thing off the pavement. All I had to do was get in touch with the people at Ricoh, and it'd be a snap to get it fixed.

Ha.

See, it turns out that the good folks at Ricoh are good at making cameras, but wretched at support. The 800 number listed in the back of the camera manual might theoretically get you to an actual human being at some point (and for the low cost of $10/call for you out-of-warranty folks), but it will suck at least ten minutes out of your life navigating the menus, and there's a good chance it'll shunt you to an extension that doesn't exist any more, ending your call.

The website isn't much better. There are multiple email address, web contact forms, you name it, but I have no friggin' clue if any of them get anything to anyone. For all I know, none of them do anything but fire electrons into the ether, given the success I had.

The good news is that, despite not being labeled as Ricoh's warranty service guys (they're just the official repair people, according to Ricoh), the people at CRIS Camera Repair were quick to answer my questions by email to get the process going. I UPSed out the camera last week, they got it on Friday, and by the time I remembered to log in to their website to check the camera's status on Tuesday, it had been repaired, checked over and shipped out.

So, lesson learned: if you actually need to get in touch with the company that made your camera, Ricoh probably isn't the best choice. Just getting something fixed, though, isn't so horrible, after all.

That's it, I'm out, I'm not dealing with election coverage any more.

I actually punched my car radio yesterday. I was listening to NPR.

NPR, people.

I listen to NPR so I can actually be informed and get a decent overview of national and international news, and so I can avoid the sewer of TV news entirely. I listen to NPR because I can be reasonably assured things will be presented in something at least passably resembling an intelligent way.

Today, I failed to consider that I also listen to NPR because it's honest, and this afternoon, perhaps brutally so. They were doing a segment on voters in York, Pa., talking about their experience with and perception of race and how it'll affect their vote in November, and two things set me off.

The first was this guy:
"I can't recall any privilege that I got because I was white," Getty says. "I mean, I went to city schools. But I don't know of anything that I got because I was white that the black kids couldn't have gotten the same thing."

If he actually believes that, he's terminally clueless, and if he's just spouting garbage, well... I don't know which is worse, really.

What made me punch my radio, though, was this:
"I look at Obama, and I have a question in my mind," [Moreland] says. "Years ago, was he taken into the Muslim faith?"

I cannot believe this shit is still going on. C'mon, people, seriously? Are we really a nation of idiots and children?

So, an open letter.

Dear America:

Just for reference, since most of you seem to have forgotten:

Bill of Rights

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

I'm thisclose to getting that printed on a T-shirt and wearing it straight through Nov. 4.

It's official - the new Macs arrive in a little less than two weeks, meaning the Photo Desk Brick is on the verge of being even more obsolete than it already is (and has been).

As much as I'm gonna want to Office Space it in the middle of a field somewhere, part of me is gonna want to take it home and give it a place to stay in its old age. Maybe I'll take out my pent-up rage at the system on one of the old iMacs, instead.

You know what would be awesome?

If companies who made important bits of electronics - say, for instance, wireless routers - would let their customers know that, hey, if you don't upgrade to the latest firmware, that router will, without any warning whatsoever, become an much more useful as a paperweight than as a wireless router.

I didn't think it was possible, but Yahoo Mail is being an even larger bag of uselessness than usual. Not only has it been miscounting the new messages in my inbox for a couple days - and now I've cleared the damn thing out, and it claims I have both no new messages and six new messages - it's losing random messages that get moved or delivered into different folders. ointmentfly, that's why I'm such a slack-ass in getting back to you, and getting back to you from another email address.

I'll give 'em one more shot, but moving everything to Gmail is sounding better and better.

...three hours into it, and my recovery software still hasn't found all the photos I lost when gremlins decided to take over how my camera was writing pictures to the CF card.

On the other hand, kudos to Canon for creating a digital SLR so smart that it can hide about a gig's worth of work... well, somewhere. Macs, PCs, none could figure out where the hell a couple hundred pictures got saved - not in regular folders, not in hidden folders, they just weren't there. Only they were there, because on a two-gig card, I had about 850MB free.

Freakin' maddening.

In an attempt to bypass the suckitude that is IE 5.whatever for the Mac, I started combing through all the other browsers out there. Since it turns out Mozilla runs like crap in OS9, I dove into Netscape and discovered you can actually run Netscape 7 in OS9.

And, better yet, it doesn't completely suck. It's not great, but it also doesn't hang every five minutes as IE likes to do. I started copying the installer around the newsroom, got it on to a couple of the iBooks and two pagination computers, and then hit a small snag.

Half the computers in the newsroom are running OS8.6. Eight-point-fucking-six.

Man, I just can't win.

Someone needs to let me play with a new MacBook or one of the Mac Pros, because I'm on the verge of battling OS9 in Thunderdome. One man and one OS enter, one man leaves with code all over his hands.

It's beyond ridiculous now. Every time I hear someone say that Macs are great, don't crash, run programs so much better than a Windows machine - God, I want to believe them, but I'm stuck using crappy, buggy software that seems to be a crap port from Windows code, all because I'm stuck in OS9 hell at work.

I have to use two browsers, one to check my email, one to do pretty much anything else. They'll still hang regularly, and sometimes crash the whole machine just for kicks. Photoshop 7, which is allegedly native on OS9, behaves like I'm trying to run it on a George Foreman grill (and not one of the fancy ones, either). USB 2.0? Ha! I'm lucky if the speeds average USB Brick.0.

And man, to add insult to injury, my copy of Photoshop at home completely blew up - so screw it, I'm gonna find a slightly newer version on Ebay, use it for a couple months as-is, and then pay the $150 for the CS2 upgrade.

Man, now do I not only have to go back and severely beat the previous owners of this house, but I have to find out who ( installed the old living room air conditioner and severely beat them, too. )

My message to Yahoo:
Some of the computers I use to access Yahoo are older Macs, running OS9.x (various 9 versions, half of which I can't remember). Over the last couple of days, when I try to either load my inbox or another folder, or try to open a message, the entire browser freezes, and I have to crash out of it to regain control of the computer. I figure you guys have already heard about this problem from the six other people trying to use IE on OS9, but I wanted to know: any chance this is going to get fixed, or should I just yell at my workplace for using such obselete technology?

I post their responses, assuming they're hilarious and assuming I get any.

UPDATE: Useless corporate motherfuckers. Upgrade your browser or try a different one, or dump the cache? Thanks for the specificity, dickwads.

I imagine Yahoo's new design is wrecking things, too, but damn it, I hate running a craptastic version of IE on OS9. Sure, I was kinda getting used to the constant Flash errors and random failures of all sorts. I could even deal with the browser's tendency to lose cookies left and right, and sometimes shut itself down because it really, really needed that martini.

But now that some tiny bit of code has changed in the Yahoo mail, if I try to load my inbox, forget it. The damn thing might as well have tetanus, it locks up so hard - so I crash it, restart it, sacrifice some obsolete hardware and pray it'll work tomorrow.

Thanks to an incessant fax telemarketer, and with some help from Google, I've now filed my first complaints with the national Do Not Call registry - congratulations, Global Premier Services! You're a bunch of assholes!

Jen and I have randomly gotten mysterious fax calls in the past couple of months, but when they dialed us five times in the last half-hour, I was ready to go on a Duke Nukem-style quest to destroy these idiots. Fortunately, popping their fax number (732-542-3503) into a quick search lead me to a forum post where a bunch of other folks had been having the same problems. These guys are a bunch of junk fax telemarketers, and apparently don't have enough sense to figure out if they're faxing their garbage to actual fax machines.

Now, I could've been nice. I could've called the company first (their number's 732-389-3900, if they're harassing you, too) and asked them nicely to get me the hell off their calling list.

But they already got cited by the FCC in 2002 for DNC violations, so I figured the best option was to go scorched earth on these motherfuckers. A quick trip over to donotcall.gov later, I'd filed a pair of complaints, one with the autodialer number and one with their actual number, all in about thirty seconds.

With that done, I called their real number, got to their customer service rep and blasted them, got transfered over to another department, yelled at them and demanded they immediately get my number off their calling list. They promised it'd get taken off right away - and so far, no calls. I'm not gonna bet money on it, though.

Updates/Additions:
In addition to filing a complaint with the DNC list (which I've been told is overseen by the FTC), you can also file a complaint with the FCC, using their online form 475.

The company goes by several names:
-Xpedite Systems, LLC
-Global Premier Services
-Premier Global Services

The main line for the company is 732-389-3900, as noted above, but they claim to have a toll-free line, 877-771-8283. Either way, the direct contact for their Do Not Call list is 732-389-3900, x7005.

All of this is noted on their company website's privacy policy page, which comes off as a big load of crap. There's also some fine print down at the bottom that says you'll be added to their Do Not Call list for 10 years, which sounds nice, but doesn't cut it for me.

Their corporate offices contact info:
The Lenox Building
3399 Peachtree Rd. NE
Suite 700
Atlanta, GA 30326
(404) 262-8400

And judging by how their email system seems to be set up, these are guesses at email addresses at which you can try contacting their bigwigs:

Boland T. Jones, CEO: boland.jones@premiereglobal.com (not bouncing as of Dec. 13, 2006)
Jeffrey A. Allred, Pres. & COO: jeffrey.allred@premiereglobal.com (bouncing and apparently not legit)

Failing that, feel free to pop those names in your favorite search engine and see what comes up.

------------
UPDATE:

As of Dec. 2007, I have a dedicated anti-telemarketing blog at http://telemarketthis.blogspot.com/

If you have horror stories, companies violating the DNC or anything else you want to pass along, pop over and either drop a comment or an email.

For those of you out there getting constant calls from Chase at 888-858-9823, there's an easy solution: call the number back and hit 5 to go into their Do Not Call registry. Even if you're on the national DNC list, they'll still harass the crap out of their customers - so go through the prompts, enter your number, then hang around until they ramble on a little more to tell you your number's officially been added.

They claim it'll take up to 30 days to take effect; if I see that number on the caller ID again in the next couple days, I'm answering and giving these people blistering hell.

The video settings are behaving a little weirdly, but I have our machine back up and running... even though I did nothing besides break and replace the one cable after all the problems started, which means something (a card or a cable) was loose or something stupid like that to cause the original, monitor-won't-work problem.

Oh, well. Time to burn all the pictures I care about before the machine decides to blow up, yet again.

...DHL would deliver the cable I need to maybe find out what's wrong with the computer an hour after I leave for work.

...once I had a chance to sit down and go through some email (work and personal) and get a little work done, there's a widespread power outage in Bridgeton.

...I would find a reprint order from the beginning of October sitting among the papers on my desk that I thought were junk. The good part: the person who ordered it hasn't called me, freaking out about where the prints are, unlike others, who will call two days after they fill out the form. This was probably one of two or three print orders that came in while we were in Egypt and then went AWOL.

...Netflix has added compatibility with some more Mac browsers, but I couldn't get to our queue in time to shift things around... so "21 Grams" it is for our next movie.

...thestoryofpete would continue on the World's Greatest Streak o' Luck as he seems a lock to lead the fantasy league at 11-1 after this week. Bastard.

If you're living in the U.S. (and if you're reading this, you probably are) and currently breathing, you probably own a cell phone. Maybe several cell phones, depending on your job.

Jen and I also own cell phones, but they're Motorola's version of a practical joke - which is to say they're about as reliable as trying to make a cell phone call on a rubber chicken, only not as fun. In fact, if you see any cell phone labeled "Motorola T7xx," just break it in half on principle.

So here's the deal: our contract with Cingular's up shortly, so we can renew and get new phones, switch to another provider and get new phones or retreat into a cave and use smoke signals to communicate with the outside world.

Your job is to tell us about your phone(s): what phone, what brand, what service, how (un)reliable it's been, what good things you've heard about other phones (or other services) and what kind of wood you think produces the best smoke.

I got my oil changed and had a tire problem fixed this morning, and when I got my car inspected this afternoon... it failed because it had one license plate light out in the back.

Yup. My car failed inspection because of a $2.50 bulb.

Damn it.

You know, now that I've wasted maybe six or nine hours trying to render the video from our honeymoon using this one program, you would've thought I'd have to sense to see if anyone else out there has similar problems.

So I Google it, and yeah - 467 hits for the same freakin' rendering error. That's no good.

Now I have to either try one solution (don't actually burn the thing straight to DVD), or bag 40 gigs of video, re-capture everything, re-edit everything and then write a nice email to the folks of the problematic program thanking them for wasting my freakin' time. Either that, or send them a fruitcake, and that seems too cruel.

If I end up bagging the video I have, you can bet any programs I use to re-capture and edit the stuff will get a hardcore Googling ahead of time.

Whoever set up the graduation I photographed last night should be thrown into traffic.

That's all.

One of the major difficulties in going Christmas shopping with you significant other is that you can't really go out and buy stuff for each other. Next year, I will Christmas shop in March*.

I think I have everything pretty well planned out now - I just need alone shopping time, so I can actually get stuff for Jen. And everyone else. Damn you, Christmas commercialism.

*The previous delusion brought to you by 8 straight hours of battling the crowds at the mall, Target, Barnes & Noble...