Brian's World

Genuine Ink

Its raining pretty hard outside, which has motivated me to follow up with some companies that I’ve been interacting with lately. Comcast, AT&T, and HP.. well not really HP yet, but I’ll get there. Let me start with Comcast, my favorite cable provider.

We got digital voice at my house not to long ago and its been working great. Of course it has extra features, like this fancy remote voicemail service. My parents are trained to use the home answering machine and really wouldn’t take well to having to dial a number or something. I also don’t like the idea of having another company record and store things for me of voice nature. I was able to get the voicemail deactived no problem so it acts like normal going to our home answering machine, but there are still 10 annoying flashes when you pickup the phone to dial. My mom and dad are conviced that you can’t dial during these clicking noises, so they wait it out and get frustrated. I’ve called and chatted with a few representatives over the past 2 weeks and everyone assures me this will get fixed. Last week I was assured it would be 48-72 hours, and today I was assured 24-48 hours [he said he would”upgrade” my priority ticket even more]. Somehow a voicemail must have gotten stuck in the voicemail count and terminating the voicemail service didn’t reset that count. I will call Comcast back in exactly 48 hours.

AT&T is being pretty darn slow at shipping stuff as well. I ordered stuff there 7 days ago and was told 3-5 days for shipping and it has been over 3-5 days. I called the store today (because the customer service rep told me she couldn’t access that information) and the store told me that its always been 7-10 businesss days, and that I should call back in half an hour when he’s less busy. I am not going to call them back. I have a strong feeling my order has not shipped, but I have hope it will ship in the next 2-3 days. If it doesn’t ship before then I won’t be able to pick it up, and it will get sold to another customer as my parents will be unavailable all of next week [They cancel your order if you don’t show up in 7 days]. That would be my luck.

Now for my HP story. Maybe its a Walmart story.. idk. I was at WalMart yesterday buying ink for my HP printer. I needed #95 & #99. WalMart is close, and they sell sprinkles which I also need, so I head there. No problem finding the ink so I get in line. The line is massive but I don’t mind. The #99 cartridge wouldn’t scan in the system so the cashier scanned the #95 again. I think they were the same price anyways. That gets me thinking about HP genuine ink, and how I guess you could make money by refilling and returning cartridges to the store, or using illegal ones. Katie opens the box, which appears intact and I notice a substancial amount of hot glue holding that side closed. We tear the other side open and find a small amount of glue, about the same as the #95 box. Hrm, now this is starting to look suspicious. The #99 cartidge isn’t in a sealed bag like the #95, but otherwise it appears fine. Today when I was installing it I noted the date on it which was 2007/05/21, where the new #95 was 2010/03/15. I’m not sure if that means anything, but my printer thinks its a genuine cartidge and it looks normal when it prints. Who knows. Somewhere the illegal ink cartel is making money, I am sure of it.

If anyone has any suggestions how to forward one port to a different IP on a SonicWall (running SonicOS 2. something) thats configured for one-to-one NAT, please let me know soon.