Technology Sucks

I've had a few issues with technology lately and I'm annoyed

1. I signed up for FIOS from Verizon, this is their new broadband technology which is fiber optics to your home. They offer internet, phone and TV services. While they were very nice and offered me tons incentives (including a $200 AmEx gift card) one was signing up for referrals to friends (which I've done already) for more gift cards. While I signed up at fiosreferral.com with my verizon email address, but didn't receive the activation email. I changed it to my gmail email and did. But now my account is set back to the verizon email and is not activated. If I try to change it to gmail it says that's already used. I sent email to the address listed but nothing happened. A few days later I received email asking if I wanted to activate (so the address is entered correctly), I clicked on the link and still nothing. Meh.

2. I'm doing some contract work and I needed to OpenVPN into a site. I found the TunnelBlick mac-client which is typical mac zero install, trivial to use. Well it kinda worked but it didn't't set the nameserver correctly. The problem is while I tried to figure out how to fix this I was immediately dropped off the cliff of arcane config files. Now I'm pretty comfortable with arcane config files, but these were about topics I had to learn about. What were tap and tun and where did openvpn end and TunnelBlick begin and how OS X Tiger doesn't just use /etc/resolv.conf but has a new service that needs to be updated. Ugh. I never did get it working. I moved to XP, found a client, and it just worked. That made it all a little worse.

3. I registered this blog at Ttechnorati. I've followed their instructions to have blogspot automatically ping it when I post and I've hit the manual ping button, but Technorati still says my last post was 145 days ago. I spent an hour surfing through forums and out-of-date FAQs and got no further. I don't know if it's Blogger's problem or Technorati's, or even how or who to report it to. Meh.

You get what you pay for.