Please Start Again

I can't help it; I want her to start smoking again.

On TV in this neck of the woods is a advertising campaign for a smoking preventative. A lozenge or gum or patch or knitting needles or something.

It is presenting in the form of a video blog of a woman's successful battle against cigarette cravings. And somehow they are the most irritating they could possibly be. Of course she is happy about cigarettes not getting the best of her. And her kids are supportive. And the story about visiting her two pack a day mother with all its mental imagery is heart warming. In the most opposite sense of the phrase.

So I want her to start smoking again. So the ads will go away. So she will stop her 2am musings on the plight she is overcoming.

But K had an extra insightful insight... There is another way to stop her - and that is if everyone stops smoking. If everyone stops smoking, then there would no need for nicotine supplements, and then no need for these ads.

For a moment I wondered if this was the intent of the ad. But it isn't being run by an anti-smoking company, it is a company that makes products for smokers to help them stop. Except of course, these companies wouldn't want people to actually stop smoking, because their market would evaporate like so much smoke in the wind.

So I can only conclude that this ad is serving two simultaneous goals. To raise awareness of their product line, and also to annoy reformed smokers to the point that they take up smoking in desperation after seeing the advert, and hence need their products again.

Zencore Takedown II

An interesting sequence of events - and the moral of the story (always best up front) is: If you use a DNS host, do not use one of the domains they host for you for the email address you register with.

I use 123-reg.co.uk, who are based in the UK. I am in Australia. My website is hosted in Florida I think. So cogent in Florida got their routing mixed up and the IP address my sites are on went dark. Cogent apparently were going to take their time fixing the problem, so my web hosts gave the servers a new address.

So all I need to do is repoint my dns at the new address and viola. So I go to log into 123-reg, and hmmm... what is the password?

No problem, I forget every time, and all that needs to happen is I go through the lost password routine and they reset it and email it to me. I probably had the old one in an old email somewhere, but it was on another machine.

I realised my blunder as I clicked submit. Because now they have changed the password from something I had recorded somewhere, to a new random password and they have emailed it to my domain. The one that is broken.

Damn. Ok, so now I have to leave them a support call. The half a quid a minute phone line is out, as it cannot be called internationally. So I use the webform.

Days pass. Nothing happens.

Damn... try the fax number! Nope. Nothing happens.

Email has been down for several days now. So time to get creative. First I try skyping the 0900 number - perhaps skype can break out to pstn locally, so it isn't an international call. But no - barred.

So 123reg is a part of pipex, so I call one of the other pipex companies. Lots of hold music later, I get a guy who cannot help, but gives me the number for "123reg" that can be dialled internationally.

Of course it isn't really, it is another pipex company that still isn't 123reg. Their tech people tell me the only support provided to international customers is via email. I explain that I have already sent an email and got no response, so actually, there isn't any email support to speak of. And then I point out I sent a fax too.

He repeatedly tells me there is nothing he can do - even though when asked said he had a number for 123reg, but couldn't give it to me.

He said try customer support. Fine. Whatever.

With customer support things got better. The woman tried to divert me a couple of times, but I stood my ground, and finally she capitulated and put an email together to 123reg. She took all my details, and I had the new password minutes later.

I am finding it amusing in hindsight that the best way to get responsive support from 123-reg is to actually phone a different company entirely.

Screen Screen

Continuing my enthusism for screen, the terminal multiplexer (on most linux dists), I found the


following post in response to another post about the wonders of screen.

Basically, some tips for using screen within screen - which comes in handy when you want to kick something off but still have a terminal session attached to it - and you already have a screen session in play.

The deal is that the "outermost" screen hears the Ctrl-a sequence and responds to it.. so detaching from inside the second screen sessions detaches the first (you'll understand when you start using it)...

For anyone that dislikes C-a as the command key (e.g. emacss or bash users) one of the two following keys may be convenient. Put one of these lines in a file called ~/.screenrc:

#to use C-] as the command key
escape ^]\
or

#to use C-\ as the command key
escape ^\\
it’s useful to use different escape sequences on different machines so that ssh’ing from one to the other and running screen within screen doesn’t cause an aneurism.

another useful customization is to show the current screens at the bottom of the page:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” ] H]{= Bw} %w %=”

notice that that has a ] as the first character; this helps me remember which escape key I’m using at the moment. On a machine with C-\ as the escape key, it should be:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” \ H]{= Bw} %w %=”