Just when I thought it couldn't get worse. Woke up to news that Usonia2 decided to pull the same trick as Avalon to get attention. Started poking with WebDAV stuff to see about getting stuff working. Went down to the lab to test from an OS 9 box after setting some stuff up, and discover it won't connect. Yep, Avalon rebooted again. The unencrypted WebDAV stuff did work pretty well while it was up though. Poked around a bit and the machine was sluggish so turned of Services for Macintosh. It got better again so I decided to turn them back on. Yep, sluggish again. And Microsoft has plans that I know about to fix them. About then it was lunch time, which was at Jake's. They have good burgers. After lunch was more poking with WebDAV, and routing through SSL. Seems to work OK, although loose transparency on OS X. Goliath still works fine though, so OS 9 should work. Very fast too - don't let your first WebDAV experience be on a slow server. It's too bad there isn't a really good client for Windows. The afternoon also got some fun stuff, like the stupid windows worm doing an effective DDOS on our network by sending so many queries at it from the outside. I'll be glad when those die down a bit, since it seems like there's random problems all over the net. I wonder if that's what's caused the insane delays and craziness with verizon's text messaging system and voicemail alerts the last couple days. Then there may be problems with screensaver locking again, and get to deal with quotas in a meeting tomorrow. At least I get to sleep in for the morning. After work hung out bugging the Help Desk people for a bit, and poked at some WINS settings to see about all the suddenly not logging in Win 9x machines, and then brought JoeBuck home. Got home and decided to take care of some dealings with SprintPCS. Their customer service is horrible by the way - can't even talk to anyone without a current phone number through them. Managed to get in through an order line but the guy couldn't do much other than confirm the amounts on my bills. He tried transfering me to a department that could help, but the phone system stopped me with a prompt for the phone number again. He was able to confirm that sprintpcs won't prorate a canceled account, which sucks but is sorta the norm. Anyways, decided at this point it was time to pull out the bag of tricks and think outside the box. I pulled out the old sprint phone and dialed *2. This is customer service, but on an unactivated phone promptly connects you to the activation department with pretty much no wait. For some reason the people who activate phones seem to be able to do stuff with accounts. :) Luckily the rep was able to fill out some paper request forms to get stuff done, since the department which actually needed to do stuff is only open 7-4. She needed some info though about how the payment was made which luckily I kept close enough records to have, although I could see how most people wouldn't have any idea at that point. What a mess. Wanted to pay off the balance of the account after the transfer would occur but then she informed me that if she did that the system would add on $5 for doing it through a person, so it'd be cheaper to mail a check. Of course can't use the automated phone credit card thingy without a phone number again (even tried the *3 from the phone, but it didn't seem to allow options). Talk about crazy. Decided to fix up the phone after that too - cleared out all the call and phonebook data in it, reset timers, and for the heck of it changed the provider banner to "911 Only". I'll probably keep it reasonably charged and around the house somewhere since I don't have a landline... Also I had two other companies upset me today. MBNA decided to call and try and sell me stuff. I'm cancelling them in a month or so anyways since they decided to stop giving money to the school they did before, so will have to remind them at that point to never call me again. Then Columbia House pulled the same thing, trying to give me DVDs if I commit to buying more. I think I confused the guy when he asked "Don't you want to save money" and I said "nope". Took care of that one on their web site. Managed to crash a few web access sessions pretty good, but they now have all zeros in their system for my phone number. I somehow have a mangled address too (different depending on how you look at it), but oh well. If they insist on not letting me opt out of all marketing calls... Between that and getting other things together I think I'm done with bills for a while too (at least once this stack of envelopes gets in the mail). Hopefully tomorrow will go better.