Category Archives: Sunday’s Rant

Not This Shit Again…

OK, so basically I’m without a wired internet connection again. Spectrum is the only option here, and they just kept pissing me off. The intermittent problem grew exponentially worse, and they wanted to charge me to come out and fix it.

You have to understand that there is a 15′ length of coax cord from the box on the side of my house to the internet modem. I purchased a very high quality RG-6 cable and installed it myself. That coax cord is firmly attached, and doesn’t sway or move. The idea that it could be this line is laughable.

Then there is the modem itself. I guess in a world where anything is possible, it could be the modem, but the spectrum customer support rep says that from their end, the modem seems to be working normally. They insist that there’s a problem with the line.

OK… So where is the problem? Well, it’s on the line outside my house. You can even see the cable swaying down a bit lower than it used to. But spectrum wouldn’t send anyone out to fix it until I agreed to let them into my house. I said no, because there’s no reason to come into my house… unless I’m missing something.

Turns out, once they get inside your house they will touch your equipment to check for other issues. At that moment, you just got charged for the service call. Even if all they did was unscrew the coax, blow on it, and screw it back into your modem, they just serviced your stuff, and you will get screwed with the truck roll charges. You won’t even realize you got charged until the next bill, and then you waste hours of your life calling them in an attempt to get those charges removed. Good luck with that while you enjoy being put on indefinite hold. It’s a scam, and they’re good at it.

But I’ve got my own scam. I cancel them, wait a few weeks, call them back and sign up for their “everything but the kitchen sink” package with free installation and a 30 day satisfaction guarantee. Even though I DO NOT WATCH TV, or need another phone line, I have to order the whole enchilada to get that free installation. Now they have to make sure that everything is working for FREE, and after 28 days or so, I’ll cancel again because I’m not going to be satisfied with a TV service and phone line that I do not use. Now I just have to wait another few weeks, call up and order their internet with the special $44.99 “new customer” rates.

So it’s come to this. Maybe if Spectrum wasn’t a fucking monopoly, they might try a little harder to not be a bunch of scammy scumbags. All they had to do was send out a fucking truck to fix the cable coming off the telephone poll, and I wouldn’t be forced into fucking with them like this.

Fuck Spectrum.

Wait a minute… How are you still getting on the internet?

Oh, that’s easy. I have a wireless hotspot device. I unplug the cable modem from the back of my router and plug in a bridge device that turns my wireless hotspot’s WiFi signal back into ethernet. The router just thinks it’s a plain ol’ internet connection, and my whole house has reliable internet again. Even the phone calls over magicJack still work/sound great!

But aren’t wireless data plans more expensive than cable?

Absolutely! Wireless doesn’t come cheap. That’s why I have to keep trying to get Spectrum to work for me. In the long run, Spectrum is cheaper… even if they are assholes.

Addendum:

OK, so the hotspot is through T-Mobile. This time I opted for their 2GB plan, and after you use up the 2GB, they drop your speed down to “2G” speeds. Turns out, they drop it down to that of a dialup 14.4 modem. It’s been about 5 days, and I’ve already gone through the 2GB of “high speed” data. So you may be wondering, “Just how bad is the 2G speed?” Well, it’s a surprisingly mixed bag.

Using T-Mobile’s “unlimited” 2G speed is good enough to listen to Pandora. The magicJack is still doing fine with no noticeable drop in call quality. Alexa (AKA echo dot) easily plays music, streams iHeartradio, and otherwise functions normally. I can shop Amazon, read Wikipedia, Google things, and even manage this website. I’m kind of amazed at how well a lot of things are working.

What I can’t do is video. YouTube is basically unwatchable, and Netflix is pretty infuriating. Even animated GIFs are considerably painful.

Now this is with T-Mobile’s cheapest monthly plan of $20 a month. Sure, I could throw money at them and get more high speed data, but I want to try this “slow speed” internet for a while. I mean, just think about it: $20 a month, I can read websites, listen to music, and make phone calls. It’s actually not a bad deal, and once a month I get 2GB worth of high speed data that I can use for whatever.

Then again… I do like watching YouTube videos and Netflix, so I may be coughing up the extra cash for more of the LTE network before the 30 days is up.

Pax,

-f2x

Holy Shit! Is it Sunday again?

Well, I just renewed the hosting plan with IX Webhosting for another 12 months. I was kind of hoping to set up a server and host everything from home, but there’s been an intermittent problem with my home internet connection, so that’s probably not the best idea at this time. Also, I don’t trust “Spectrum” and would like to preserve the option to cancel them for being a such a shitty ISP.

Speaking of internet

All this could be moot next week as the FCC intends to kill net neutrality on Thursday. While I’m pretty sure you’ll still be able to get to Facebook and Instagram, I’m a bit leery as to the shape the internet will take by this time next year.

This may even be the end of Flush Twice. Once ISP’s get to pick and choose which websites you get to access, it’s highly unlikely that anyone is going to go searching for that plan with “Unlimited access to FlushTwice.com!” When the number of visitors drops to nil, there’s really no reason for me to continue the site, and no reason for me to pay for a webhost or registrar.

Of course you may be thinking, “Well, we didn’t even have net neutrality before 2014, what makes you think killing net neutrality will be any different now?”

The difference is the reason net neutrality was instituted in the first place. ISP’s and other network owners didn’t have practical tools to do the deep packet inspection across the entire internet as they do now. They had “dumb pipes” as it were, and once the realized they could use new technology to bring forth a really fucked up dystopia, people from all walks of life stepped in and demanded the net be covered under the FCC’s Title II.

And while that slowed down those tax-pocketing telecoms a little, we’re soon going to see just how infuriating ISP’s can be.

Of course the way I see it, if the FCC doesn’t want to regulate things anymore, then maybe it’s time to dissolve the agency. And while we’re in the spirit of deregulating, how about removing the regulatory capture that prevents upstart internet providers from bringing new services to communities?

I’m just saying that if this administration is such a champion of free markets and competition, how about they open the internet to some actual fucking competition?

Pax,

-f2x

We’re Almost there!

I just want to thank everyone again for visiting Flush Twice. We’ve got four more weekends left in 2017, and it looks like we’re going to make it!

“Make it?”

I know I shouldn’t count my chickens before they hatch, but it looks like 2017 will be the first year for me to have a post for every single day. 52 COMICS, 53 RANTS, and 260 JOKES equals 365 DAYS for 2017! Woohoo!

Yeah, other sites do this year after year. Heck, even mBlip posts several new things every day without my lifting a finger. But I personally have to craft every single post on Flush Twice. Oh sure, the joke contributors do most of the heavy lifting by sending me jokes, but who do you think does all the editing? Those forwards don’t paragraph, spellcheck, and punctuate themselves!

“Contributors?”

You didn’t think I wrote these jokes did you? Oh no. There are two, sometimes three, contributors to the joke queue every week. I select the “best” jokes, fix grammar, and clean up the formatting from the anonymous contributors who send me these emails with subject lines like “FWD: Fwd: Fwd: fw: Very Funny Stuff! LOLOL!”

And you can help too! If you have jokes being sent to you, FWD: Fwd: Fwd: them to me! The email address is flush2x@gmail.com. Contributors are kept 100% anonymous, and believe me when I tell you I’m waaay too lazy to use your email address for spammy purposes! I just scrape out the jokey goodness and toss the empty husk of your email in the trash. No purchase necessary, enter as often as you like. Void where prohibited, taxed, or restricted by law. Odds of winning are based on number of entrants.

OK, so once again, thanks to viewers, raters, and contributors for making me make the best Flush Twice that the world has ever scene. Just imagine what Flush Twice is going to look like 10 years down the road!

Pax,

-f2x

My Current Style

So there are rules that I must follow when I make a comic. Naturally because they’re my rules, I can change them on a whim, but the rules are about consistency, and that consistency becomes the style. So for today’s rant, I thought I’d just pontificate on the style of my comic.

Since late 2005 my panels had consisted of a thick black border that the speech bubbles could overlap. Sometimes, like in yesterday’s panel, The border becomes just a background. Usually I only do this for holiday promotions, but it’s not a hard and fast rule.

The speech bubble tail has to point to the speaker’s mouth. I read somewhere once that it only has to point to their head. Oh no. That tail needs to point to the mouth or it just looks really sloppy.

The text is my own font. I hope you like it. I’ve only been working on it for the past 13 years. For some reason, I never thought the comic looked right using all capital letters. I’m usually quite fastidious about spelling and grammar.

The character shading is something that evolved from a tutorial on how to create a mercury puddle effect in Paint Shop Pro. It’s the same concept but handled in a different way because the original method wouldn’t scale to higher resolutions. This stylistic shading has become my signature technique, and it’s even fooled some people into believing 3D software was involved.

Speaking of 3d software, a few years ago I started fooling around with the editor in the Cube 2 engine, aka “Sauerbraten“. By the end of 2011, I switched to using screenshots of my designs.

I don’t always use the screenshot sets though. Occasionally I use a shaded cube background for when the setting isn’t really all that important or I’m just being lazy. It’s also a thing where I’ll just leave it black for that borderless look.

And now that leaves me with the last thing I’ll mention: The follow up text below the comic. Honestly I should know better. The comic should stand on its own, but for some reason I feel compelled to elaborate. It’s gotten to the point that sometimes the comic doesn’t make sense unless you read the exposition. I really need to work harder on avoiding that.

So that’s about all I’m going to write about for today. What other stylistic characteristics do you think exemplifies “Pathos in the Plumbing”? I’d love to hear what any of you have to say.

Pax,

-f2x

Staycation

If you’re in the service industry, you probably have to work most holidays, but I work in manufacturing, so I get Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving off every year. So it occurred to me that I could use three vacation days and take that whole week off! Bare in mind that there are also the weekends on either side of said week, so it stretches my time off to nine days.

“Are you going anywhere?” my coworkers would ask.

“Yeah. Home,” came my terse reply.

Of course that doesn’t mean that I won’t be doing anything. I have a lot of work around the house, things to do on this site, chores to do for my father, and let us not forget that Thanksgiving doesn’t happen all by itself. I’ll be making deviled eggs and peeling potatoes for my aunt, so I’ll be busy, busy, busy.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Pax,

-f2x

I’m Not Sure We’re Reaching Our Target Audience

I don’t visit this site like the rest of you. I open a hidden page where I can log on to add more jokes and comics. While I’m there, I can look at the stats to see how many people are visiting the site. Lately, there’s been an increase in the number of times that this site has been unreachable. There’s also been a correlational decrease in the visitor stats.

I can’t tell for sure because I’m not testing the site every ten minutes, but I’m starting to suspect server downtime is having a bad influence on my numbers. People can’t get through, so they stop coming.

This makes me sad for a couple of reasons. #1) I’m paying out good money to my webhost and getting spotty service. #2) If no one is visiting, then why bother? I could just as easily run a tumblr page.

You know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to go back to running my own webserver right here at the house. The biggest problem with that is the fact that I haven’t done it since 2005, and I’m not really sure how to do it anymore. There’s also the potential for even more down time since there aren’t any highly reliable low cost to free dynamic DNS services.

Anyway, I’ll have to get busy and weigh my options. Renewal is coming up right after Christmas, so if I’m going to do this, it has to be before then.

Pax,

-f2x

That Generation

I hope you don’t mind… I’m going to take a moment to vent a little. To give context, I work for a company where the overwhelming majority is in their late 50’s to late 60’s. While some of them are generally wonderful people, there’s more than a handful that say and do things that a Christian couldn’t fathom, yet these people staunchly identify themselves as Christians.

“We was raised to show respect.”

It’s with palpable irony that this phrase is frequently uttered without a hint of any respect for the person it’s directed at. Their platitudes and other thought terminating clichés have stirred up the violent and the stupid. They polarize then politicize nearly every concept, then make it a contest to see how absurdly far that they can take their assertions. It usually reaches its peak when someone suggests “They ought to take those people out back and have’em shot!” The rest of the clique nods in satisfied agreement as an air of smugness fills the room. The lack of compassion is nauseating.

I guess I can take solace in the fact that in about a decade or two, their influence and numbers will be drastically reduced, and in three decades they’ll pretty much all be dead and forgotten. The “Me generation” and all their narcism will serve only as a cautionary tale about the shameful deed of killing your own soul.

May God have mercy on them, because history will not be kind.

Pax,

-f2x

Car Care Conundrums

Back in 2009, as the world was crumbling around me, my late grandfather’s Chevy Cavalier had crossed a threshold I could no longer abide. I forget what the quoted repair cost was going to be, but there were enough things wrong with the vehicle that I basically signed over the title to have it scrapped. Shortly thereafter, I found a late ’90s Plymouth Breeze for $3000. Sporting power windows, power mirrors, and cruise control, it was a very modest step up from the Cavalier.

Three and a half years later, that Breeze was running rough. Rather than hassle with car repairs, I enlisted the help of my father, a former car salesman, to help me find another $3000 sedan. Never in my wildest dreams would I have guessed that I would consider a GMC Envoy that had an asking price of around $8000, but my father encouraged me to try it out. After the test drive in which the “Service Engine Soon” light came on, I offered them $4150 and they took the offer.

So back to the Breeze. About six months later the Breeze was still rusting behind my house. I decided to take it down to “AAMCO Total Car Care” because they were only two miles away and I could easily walk home after dropping off the car. Basically I wanted to know if it was worth fixing. A few days later I got a call from the manager. It was the way he said it, “For what it is, it’s not in bad shape.” He gave me the rundown of everything thing that needed to be done. The total cost was around $700.

I got my Breeze back a couple weeks later, and it was running as good as when I bought it. That’s when the Breeze became my beater.

Months and years passed by. With a certain degree of regularity, I had to limp the Breeze back to the AAMCO for repairs, but this time was different… The price tag was a daunting $1250 for the repairs. There comes a point that you have to walk away, and this was borderline. Reluctantly I approved the repairs and the Breeze seemed like everything was OK again.

Four days later, I had barely driven the car a hundred miles when I heard a knocking sound. Then there was the sound of demons emerging from the bowls of hell coming from under my hood. I’m not a mechanic but right then I knew: “Water pump.”

The next day I took the vehicle back to AAMCO dripping coolant along the way. I couldn’t believe that after all that money spent on the previous repairs, it immediately broke down again. My emotions were swirling as I left the Breeze at the AAMCO. If I walk away now, that $1250 would have been for nothing.

So the water pump actually comes as part of a “kit” that replaces a bunch of stuff. All the belts, including the timing belt, the tensioner, labor, and a few other things came to $730. I nearly cried.

It was late Thursday, and the Breeze was finally ready to come home. I climbed into the car, adjusted the driver’s seat, and started the engine. It sounded pretty much like it always does… but different. More confident. As I pulled off the lot, the engine really had a new lease on life. It felt like a much newer car. The ride was amazing.

The real question on my mind is, “Was it worth it?” I mean, if I had originally been given a figure of $1980, I would have walked away and scrapped the Breeze, but splitting it up like that… Oh, and it’s not like the mechanics planned it that way. There’s no way anyone could have predicted the moment water pump would fail even though the car has 170,000 miles on it. It ran fine up until it didn’t.

But since the timing belt is new, the engine seems so much smoother. Also, the original repairs included an alignment and new drum brakes, so it handles like a champ… But that’s still an awful lot of money to put into a 20 year old car. What I’d like to know is at what point do I actually say enough is enough, and sell the car for scrap?

Pax,

-f2x

Learning from Limits

So I mentioned in one of my earlier comics that I cancelled my home internet service. I’m actually a heavy internet user, so this left me with a serious problem. From an economic point of view, wireless data plans are not viable for long term, and Spectrum is the only landline option currently available in my area. So I figured I’d cancel Spectrum, “up” the wireless data plan, use the phone as a hotspot, and after a few months, crawl back to spectrum as a new customer.

It had only been 15 days, and I thought I’d check. Spectrum was already willing to take me back as a NEW customer! That means my internet cost dropped from $60 per month down to just $45. Since I’m still using my old modem I’m limited to 40mbps down and 11 up. That’s actually far better than before, and as far as I’m concerned, that will do quite nicely.

And in the nick of time too! I had used up all my LTE data. I was facing the next 14 days of 2G (128kbps) speeds. Even on it’s lowest setting, I don’t think you could watch Netflix.

So in about 12 months, remind me to cancel my service with Spectrum. My $45 a month deal only lasts for a year before it jumps to $65. Maybe by then wireless carriers will be more viable, but I doubt it. Still they’re a great “go to” to get your land line provider to drop their price back to a respectable figure.

Pax,

-f2x

Back to the Menial Surfdom

Do you remember when I mentioned that promotion? Well, now I’m demoted back to my old position. It was actually per my request. Here’s the scoop:

When I applied for the position, I thought I’d get along great with my new coworkers… Well I was half right. I got along great with my new boss… but the other guy… Let’s just call him “Martin” (not his real name)… While we seemed to get along on the surface, I really couldn’t stand working with “Martin”.

Of course when I asked for my old job back, I gave the supervisor a different reason because even though I didn’t like working with “Martin”, he’s not a bad guy, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. After all, it wasn’t his fault that I didn’t like working with him, and the guy who was “next in line” likes working with “Martin”. It seems everything worked out for the best after all.

Look, I already don’t like to work. I’ve said it many times that if I didn’t have to work for a living, I wouldn’t. Since I have to work for a living 5 to 6 days a week, it better not be something that makes me miserable. Working with Martin made me feel miserable, so it wasn’t worth the extra money.

Oh, and there’s a silver lining… The guy in charge of my department will be retiring in the next 3 to 6 years, and guess who’s the company’s #1 pick to replace him?

That would be me, sweetheart.

Pax,

-f2x