Technical Gaffe Day
Odd. My usual “cruise control” pace of living has been tripped up several times today by strange malfunctions that came out of nowhere. And I’m telling you, it’s got to stop.
First thing was when I fired up Photoshop and found my preferences file was completely wiped out. Like, gone. I had my workspace layout saved in a file, so I was able to restore it, but I had to reconfigure Photoshop’s core settings to get things back the way I like. Recent file dialog was cleared out, tools were reset to default, etc. This has happened before, always at random and for no reason. I’m not amused, Adobe.
For our next technical cock-up, I recently realized that my TiVo HD hadn’t recorded a suggestion since August 24th. At first I thought it had just run out of disk space, but there’s a damn terabyte in there — and sure enough, after deleting nearly 100 GB worth of stuff, TiVo still refused to record any suggestions. I happen to like the suggestions feature, so this pissed me off. Today I got online and discovered a whole swath of people on the TiVo Community Forums having the same problem, and learned that some engineers at TiVo are “looking into it,” but no one has any idea what’s happening. Great, so I guess I’ll just do without.
(Incidentally, I turned suggestions off, rebooted, then turned them back on, rebooted again, and forced a manual connection to the TiVo service…and this seemed to get suggestions working again. However, based on posts at the Community Forums, this “fix” may only work for a day or so. I will continue to monitor.)
Then, at dinner, my phone rings, doing the “standard ringtone” it uses when the caller isn’t in my contacts list. I ignored it. Later, I found it was my mom calling, but for some reason the phone didn’t recognize her number. I check my contacts list and discover why — it’s blank. WTF? At least I figured this one out: I installed iTunes 8.0 yesterday, and whenever you upgrade to a new version, the stupid software resets your contact sync preferences to the default, which in my system’s case is Outlook. But I don’t use Outlook to store contacts (because I don’t want personal contacts to get mixed up with my work stuff), I use Windows Vista’s built-in Contacts instead. Once I changed this preference and re-synced, everything came back. But this is why I never quite trusted the concept of “syncing” things — seems way to easy for some stupid gaffe like this to mess it all up.
Anyway, I (grudgingly) am supposed to be doing some more work here, until about 9 PM or so. Really don’t feel like it, though. Oh: I took all the hurricane shutters down off my parents’ house today. Gave me more trouble than usual…seems like they wouldn’t fit right in the garage, and there were roaches, weird spiders and lizards all hiding behind the damn things. I leave these shutters up for a week and the bugs turn them into houses. Got to love that.
Tagged as Life, Rants + Categorized as Life, Rants
Speaking of technical things…
With the server move, did the email settings get changed? I can receive email, but I can’t send it.
I realize this isn’t the best way to get this message across, but…y’know, my options are limited.
Ah…yeah, on the old server they opened a custom port for folks whose ISPs (like yours) block outbound port 25 for sending mail. In fact I think they might have even opened it at my request. Apparently they did not do that on the new server.
I’ll open a helpdesk ticket to request it.
Thanks.
I was going to simply use Yahoo’s mail settings in Thunderbird to send an email, but they’ve changed it so now that you have to register your non-Yahoo email address to do that. I didn’t really want to do that to send a single mail to you, so I figured this was the best way.
Anyway, thanks again.
Got a ticket in, will post back here once I have confirmed that the alternate port works.
Update: Helpdesk claims port 26 is now enabled, but I can’t make it work. Can you try it on your end and report back?
Also, you might want to get a free email account at Gmail as a backup. You can use POP/SMTP with it, too.
No go. I tried sending a test email and Thunderbird reported an error.
Actually, I still have the Hotmail account I set up when I joined Xbox Live, which I can probably use as a last resort…but it’s Hotmail. Is Gmail good?
Gmail rocks, I have actually thought about using them full-time for mail transport because they just never go down. Google owns so many servers all over the planet that they have some absurd level of redunancy.
The only thing some people don’t like about them is how they parse the content of your emails and use it to serve you contextual ads on the web page. Big deal.
Anyway, I’ll update the support ticket and tell the guy that something is still screwy.
Update: The alternate port is working now! Your existing mail configuration should be good to go. Let me know if you still have problems with it.