UngsungBlog: A (Fantasy) Sports Blog

Quick-hitters:

- I just noticed that my blog lists blog categories under “Tags:” at the end of each blog entry, rather than the tags themselves.

I’ve since fixed this, but knowing me, I probably screwed up somewhere.  If anyone sees a problem with the “Tags:” entry in the future, please let me know!

- Current rebate-o-meter:  $1,550 (not counting the two orders I placed in the last hour or so and, obviously, have yet to even consider filing :P).

No changes to my toothpaste-o-meter, but I did pick up six additional bottles of mouthwash.

- Lamar Odom just earned his entire year’s salary tonight.  Too bad it was all for naught.  The Lakers’ bigs finally started running hard in that first quarter.  Where was this during the first three games of the series?  And did someone inject something into Trevor Ariza?

(Random thought:  That crossover that Luke Walton pulled off early in the second quarter might have been the whitest crossover ever :P)

Naturally, Boston was going to make their run in the second quarter, but that three-point play by Fisher was absolutely huge.  And did I read that wrong, or did Kobe really not have a FG in the first half?

Then the third quarter happened, and with that, the series is now over.

(David Stern probably is not a happy camper.  Certainly he wanted this series to go seven.  Well, perhaps he could still do something about it… :P)

There’s just something about the third quarter that just absolutely energizes the Celtics.  21-3 to end the quarter?  +16 for the entire quarter?  That might have been even more impressive than the Lakers winning the first quarter by a record-setting 21 points!  Most importantly, Pierce got rolling, and that’s when I knew the Lakers were in huge trouble.

Championship teams play through adversity.  Boston clutched up.  The Lakers wilted.  Ray Allen gets to the basket untouched?  And why the hell did the Lakers inbound the ball???  And those are the reasons why Boston is going to win the NBA Championship in five or six games.

Worst of all, now I’m going to have to hear how the Lakers choked away a 24-point lead for years to come, especially from the Boston myopians.

(Thanks, Jeff Van Gundy, for the hex, when you declared the series tied 2-2 early in the game :P)

Congrats, Celtics!  You deserved it!

One parting thought:  this series reminds me a bunch of the 2004 Finals, minus the team bickering.  I argued that Detroit actually won that series 5-0, and one could argue that Boston is up 4-0 in this series right now.

Let’s hope the aftermath of the Finals does not include another Kobe Bryant meltdown.

Tags: Blog, boston celtics, categories, lamar odom, los angeles lakers, tags, trevor ariza, wordpress by Peter
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So I just got around to updating WordPress to version 2.5. Let’s hope I didn’t foul things up.

(I agree with Krunk…there needs to be an easier way to update WP. It didn’t help that WSFTP kept throwing up left and right. I had to create folders remotely first, before I could upload the new WP files. And don’t tell me that there is a setting in WSFTP that allows a user to transfer non-empty folders; I am fully aware of that, and never had a problem with the transfer of non-empty folders until today.)

Anyway…

Quick-hitters:

- Oh no! Between my sister and me, we have over $30 in ECBs expiring on the 17th, and there is absolutely nothing worth buying t his week or next! What to do???

- Somebody help me. I have Hunter’s song (from The Office) stuck in my head!

You took me by the hand

Made me a man

That one night

You made everything alright!

Argh!

Again, a one topic blog!

- So I’ve been a Vonage customer for about eight months now, and how can I put this nicely? The service stinks!

Well, at least I figured the service was garbage. I was able to make outgoing calls at a 20% success rate—one in five!—and incoming calls were a crapshoot at best (so much so that I started forwarding calls from my Vonage line to my cell phone.) I figured the problem had to lie either with Vonage, or perhaps Time Warner was messing up my phone connection. All I knew was that I was paying $24.99, and then $14.99, a month for a virtually useless phone line.

(Remember: I had a one year commitment, which was necessary to claim the $300 Circuit City card, as well as the $175 rebate on the Linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter.)

Recently, the Vonage line got so bad that I would get nothing but a busy signal, no matter what number I called. I decided that enough was enough, and began troubleshooting. I logged in to my Vonage account, and under Features…Bandwidth Saver, I lowered the sound quality to the lowest setting. That didn’t seem to do a damn thing.

I decided to log in to the PAP2 to see if there was some setting that I could fiddle with to fix things. I had to log in to my WRT54G router to pull the PAP2’s IP, and that’s when I decided that I would assign a static IP to the PAP2.

(Tangent: For some reason, I’ve never had luck with port forwarding and DHCP. For example, my secondary computer would always pull an IP of 192.168.1.110, but uTorrent would often report that the ports I left open for that computer were not so. it was only when I manually assigned the IP of 192.168.1.110 did port forwarding work properly.)

I logged in to the router, and saw only a couple of pages, one of which was asking for WAN info. Thinking that it wanted my IP info, I didn’t bother with that page, and looked through the other pages for anything to tweak. I found nothing, and that’s when I decided to read the manual (!!!).

(Manuals? What do we do with manuals? We throw them out the window! After all, I have techno-joy! ;-).)

I found that the DHCP could be disabled via the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu, which could be accessed by dialing **** on a phone connected to the PAP2. I dialed ****, entered the command to disable DHCP, and heard a broken “Invalid Command.” I tried again, and got the same broken message.

I hung up the phone, and noticed the “Phone 1″ light on my PAP2 shut off. I turned the phone back on, and heard something along the lines of “This line is not set up for Vonage use.” ARGH!

I accessed the IVR again, checked the status of DHCP, and found that it was, indeed, disabled. OK…I then proceeded to manually enter the IP, subnet mask, and gateway. I hung up the phone, picked it back up, and heard another error message: something along the lines of “Your adapter cannot register with Vonage’s services”.

It turned out that the PAP2’s IVR was about as good as most companies’ IVRs; in other words, they all stink. Too bad I couldn’t scream “OH MY F***** G*D” at the PAP2 :P. It took me seven or eight tries to correctly input all my information.

While browsing through the manual, I figured out that I wasn’t forwarding my ports correctly. Apparently, there are four port ranges that need to be forwarded: More importantly, I was supposed to use UDP and not TCP:

Set up port forwarding on your router. You must specify that four port ranges be forwarded to the IP address of the Phone Adapter. These four port ranges are as follows: 5060-5061 (UDP), 53-53 (UDP), 69-69 (UDP), and 10000-20000 (UDP).

After forwarding all ranges to the new IP of the PAP2, and changing the protocol to UDP, I picked up my phone, and immediately heard a dial tone! I placed a call—FYI, I had been using WaMu’s customer service # as a test call throughout—and immediately heard the WaMu recording! Finally!

The moral of the story? Don’t throw your manuals out of the window…unless you can find PDF copies :P. Let’s just hope that the service continues to work well.

Until next time!

Tags: office, pap2, vonage, wordpress by Peter
4 Comments »

Quick-hitters:

- To all the loyal readers of the UngsungBlog, this is what I have to say to you:

We’re BROTHERS…’till the end of time!

Now excuse me while I go shoot myself in the face.

- I still have yet to play Super Mario Galaxy. It’s like I’m saving it for a special occasion or something.

- All these rants I’ve been doing lately documenting my horrible experiences with rebate processors have caused me yet another headache: tons of Google ads for work-at-home rebate processor positions

(Yeah, I know…why don’t I just Adblock Google Ads?)

Speaking of rebates…

- I’ve got an update on my ZoneAlarm rebates fiasco. I got this email from MyRebateOnline.com on Tuesday, the day after faxing in my rebate submissions to Fry’s:

Thank you for participating in the MyRebateOnline program.

Our records show that your rebate submission has been approved and your payment will be issued at the end of the pending period for the following product(s).

4000069-Buy ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 3-User Pack at Fry’s Electronics or Frys.com get $40 Check

Your rebate will be invalidated if you return your product(s) during the remaining return period.

After the return period expires, your payment will be released and processed. Please allow an additional 2-3 weeks to receive your payment.

So far so good, but no mention of the other rebate in question.

Fry’s.com emailed me shortly thereafter:

Hello Peter, we have received your faxed rebate submissions. Please
allow up to 78 hours in order to hear anything back from Fry’s.com in
regards to this rebate inquiry. Please let me know if you have any
further questions. Thank you!

Ok…

Earlier today, this email hit my inbox:

Hello Peter, in regards to your ZoneAlarm rebate in the amount of $40.00
we have since gotten in contact with the rebate manufacturer in regards
to your denial. They have stated that your rebate had been validated and
you were expected to receive your rebate by the end of February. In
regards to your other ZoneAlarm rebate in the same amount. They have
stated that the promotion has been closed with this offer and that you
were no longer able to resubmit. We will go ahead and give all of your
copies to our corporate office in regards to this rebate and they will
be issuing you a check. Please allow up to 1 month in order to receive
this check. If you have any further questions please feel free to
contact us. Thank you.

Sweet! We’ll see, though, if I actually see both checks.

- Unfortunately, these ZoneAlarm rebates aren’t the only rebates I have to fight tooth-and-nail for (yes, this is what we “rebate monkeys” have to deal with):

• AllRebates.com is currently giving me a hard time on a $25 rebate with the purchase of a Kaspersky software title. I have faxed in my resubmission twice now (as instructed by their customer service), and they have yet to validate my rebate.
• I’m still waiting on 2 $19 rebates for a supposedly FAR CPU heatsink/fan from back in May. I’ve emailed these clowns several times, and have heard nothing but “please allow x weeks for processing.” The latest reply, which came on 12/17, said to allow an extra month for processing. I’m about ready to go down the state AG/BBB route.
• I bought an American Telecom phone back in October, and have yet to get an update on the status of that rebate. I have now sent two emails to their rebate processor, and have yet to hear back from them.
• Finally, I got email notification of 2 $40 rebates submitted through CompUSA’s eRebates that were issued to me today. To my horror, I noticed that the email notification said that I would be receiving a pair of rebate debit cards, not checks. I know for a fact that I opted for checks, and yet they’re going to go ahead and give me stupid debit cards instead. Argh!

(It seems I’m not the only one that is getting a headache from CompUSA.)

That’s what I get for playing the rebate game.

- Krunk recently alerted me to (what appears to be) a huge increase in the number of “auto-post” blogs lately (basically, these scammy blogs either rip material from other blogs, or quote entire blog entries). That same night, I got five separate requests from Wordpress to moderate comments; turns out, all these “comments” were just trackbacks from these scammy blogs.

Over the last three days, Wordpress has asked me to moderate nearly twenty (!!!) such comments, and there’s no telling how many Akismet caught and didn’t notify me of. It’ll be damn funny, though, to see this post ripped by a number of scammy blogs later tonight.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

Tags: akismet, allrebates.com, american idol, american telecom, compusa, erebates, frys electronics, mge company, myrebateonline.com, ohana companies, scammy blogs, super mario galaxy, we're brothers, wordpress, xge by Peter
11 Comments »