BAMF

Anna Nicole Smith, former Playboy model and reality star.

Holy shit, Anna Nicole Smith has died this afternoon.

Reality TV star and former model Anna Nicole Smith was pronounced dead Thursday after being taken to a Florida hospital after being found unconscious in her hotel room, a law enforcement source with knowledge of the case told CNN.

Smith, 39, collapsed at a south Florida hotel and was taken to a local hospital, according to news reports.

According to reports, Smith was found unresponsive in her hotel room.

Yeesh. Rough year.

….is it bad that she was in my dead pool? Same thing with Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez from TLC a few years back. I didn’t think Lopez would die (I thought Anna was an easier bet) but I kind of wanted the TLC shenanigans to stop. They stopped alright.

*Update* Couple of stations have reported that some schools are letting kids out early. We didn’t get out early when Chris Farley died, why the Hell would kids give a crap about a trainwreck of a former Playboy Playmate dying? Lazy children, flaccid society.

We just got back from dinner, and turned on the TV to wind down a bit. That “Lost” special was recording on the DVR, which I left on while I hit the can. When I came back, Carlton Cuse (I had to Google his name to figure out which one was which) was on, describing some shit about Kate. When it pulled back to the two of them in the studio, it looked like Cuse had some sort of deranged herpes breakout all over his face. I don’t know if it’s the same in standard def, but he is a hideous vision in high definition. Every time they cut back to him in that little talking head box, I want to keep my eyes on the computer screen, but tragically I cannot. It’s like we’re midway between normal vision and the view from the sunglasses in They Live.

…is he wearing lipstick?

After 6 support calls, including calls to the vendor who no longer deals with Symantec because their support sucks, I was transferred back to the guy from the previous post.

…Good one God.

Maybe it was my diminished spirit, or maybe it was a “wait until they call you twice before helping” policy that I am unaware of, but he actually had a helpful suggestion. Apparently if you take out your license information, the software goes into full-fledged evaluation mode for sixty days. I don’t know how eight fucking representatives (including the genius who needed to hear it twice) could listen to me explain that I needed a backup today, and that their solutions took many days to accomplish, could not realize that taking out the Goddamned license keys would solve my problem and get me off of the phone.

By the way… the vendor told me that they no longer dealt with Backup Exec products after Veritas was bought out by Symantec because they had too many complaints about Symantec’s support. I’ll have to sit patiently until tomorrow to hear from their “sister” company who likes to deal with this shit. I can’t wait.

Customer asks me if I’ll check out why their backups aren’t working anymore. Sure, why not. They recently upgraded to the latest version of Backup Exec, and the whole thing has been failing ever since. I take a quick look, seems that it gives an error message every time it tries to back up a database. After a quick support search, it turns out that the license for the SQL extension wasn’t included with the upgrade, so that little addition was never installed.

No problem, right? Let’s just log into their online system and figure this out. Yeah, after 20 minutes of searching around, I could find no way to get this damned update like the others. So I send off a support ticket and then try the last bastion of hope… the support number from the license manager inside the Backup Exec software. Here now is a transcript of the ensuing hatred, for posterity:

*Standard Support Welcome*

*Presses Appropriate Department Keys*

*Waits 41 FUCKING MINUTES*

Woman: “Symantec Support, how may I help you?”
Me: “I have a problem. We upgraded to 11d on Backup Exec, and now the SQL Agent isn’t running anymore.”
Woman: “Oh… well that’s for our legacy license support products. See, that’s a Veritas product and we’re strictly Symantec support.”
Me: “Then why is this phone number listed inside of your software?”
Woman: “Must be outdated.”
Me: “You mean the software that was just installed, and no longer works the way it did before the update screwed everything up? The one that I ran Liveupdate on this morning?”
Woman: “Why don’t I forward you over to the other department. They’ll be able to help you out.
Me: “Not unless you can guarantee me that I won’t wait 40 minutes for an answer just like I did while waiting for you.”
Woman: “Oh no… they’re far less busy. Here’s the direct line number just in case we get disconnected.”

*Scribbles down number*

*Waits 10 minutes, gets curious, calls “direct line” from another phone. Direct line is a direct line to the exact same wait*

*Waits 20 minutes*

Guy: “Symantec Licensing, how can I help you?”
Me: “Tell me you have an actual answer to my problem, instead of another hour long wait.”
Guy: “Oh geez, I’m sorry. How can I assist you?”
Me: *explains story*
Guy: “Well I’m sorry, but based on the customer number here, it doesnt look like you have the license for the SQL Agent.”
Me: “I have the box in my hands right here.” *Tells Guy the number*
Guy: “OK… that’s a boxed product it says.”
Me: “It is in a box, which I am holding. Nothing has changed.”
Guy: “Well you purchased all of your software, other than that, through our digital distribution service.”
Me: “And?”
Guy: “Well we don’t offer upgrades for anything from a box. You’d need to buy that license from us. Unfortunately that serial number won’t carry over, so you’d need to buy a whole new license from scratch.”
Me: “So… I can’t import this serial number along with the digital products we bought, so you won’t allow us to upgrade. So we’d have to buy the full, much more expensive install?”
Guy: “Yep. Or you could call the vendor you went through to purchase that, and have them buy you the upgrade.”
Me: “….. call the vendor, get them to buy an upgrade through you… that for some reason I can’t?”
Guy: “Well we don’t offer support for boxed…”
Me: “Yeah, I got that. What are my other options?”
Guy: “Install 10d, and run that instead.”
Me: “You mean downgrade. That’s what you mean.”
Guy: “Well we don’t really support downgrading. You can install, then delete your 11d installation.”
Me: “Well I can’t access my 10d download for some reason right now.”
Guy: “Right. You upgraded your license to 11d, so we don’t offer you 10d anymore.”
Me: “So… what am I supposed to do to install 10d?”
Guy: “You don’t have it?”
Me: “You mean a copy on CD? No. They don’t. Too bad they didn’t buy the boxed version, right?”
Guy: “Well if they had the boxed version sir, they wouldn’t be running the 11d upgrade.”
Me: “Right… and there’d be no problems.”
Guy: “….”
Me: “So you guys probably have this sort of thing happen a lot, right?”
Guy: “It does happen quite a bit, yes.”
Me: “So maybe it’d be a good idea when you send those upgrade notices to small companies who don’t have an in-house tech… maybe there should be something along the way that says that you might lose some of your critical extensions when you install it?”
Guy: *like im an idiot* “Sir, how would we know that you have those installed?”
Me: “I don’t mean you, you argumentative prick. But the software knows what extensions are installed, yes?”
Guy: “M-hmm.”
Me: “Maybe along the way it should say ‘You have these extensions installed… the upgrade will eradicate these extensions’. Just a thought.”
Guy: “Do you want me to forward you to sales, or our customer feedback department?”
Me: “No smartass, I want you to actually help me. How about this: what is my best option for getting a SQL backup off of this network today?”
Guy: “Install 10d.”
Me: *click*

I found the old digital distrbution download of 10d on the network (thank God) and installed it.

Guess what didn’t work.