I suspect there are a lot of people in the world who are disappointed by the disappearance of cell phone subsidizing. “WHAT, I HAVE TO PAY FOR MY PHONE NOW?” At the end of the day it kind of all comes out in the wash for me, I never did contracts anyway because I simply don’t like being tied to a phone company, on principle, and dating back to the days of being in Alaska Communication’s noose.
For the people who miss those subsidies, I have great news. Not only are they back, but they’re back with a vengeance.
Let’s rewind to the beginning-ish of March. I’ve been with Verizon ever since I moved to MN. I still maintain my AT&T line and number, but just for aesthetic reasons. The only phone I use is my Verizon phone. I also recently got into the smart watch market, albeit the cheap way with a secondhand Moto 360. I won’t say I’m elated with the smart watch, but now that I’ve had it for awhile I definitely feel naked without it. The problem has been that the constant jabber between smart watch and smart phone has caused my aging Motorola phone to have less than acceptable battery life. That’s fine, the Samsung Galaxy S7 was just announced and it’s almost an adequate flagship handset, so I’ll just spend a few bucks and we’ll fix our battery problem and take an upgrade at the same time.
I go into the Verizon store at MOA. Overall the service was satisfactory (personable that is), although it definitely took longer than I wanted to achieve the goal I was seeking. I was not necessarily planning on walking out of there with anything new, the phone was still a pre-order and I just didn’t have the watch in mind. The deal is though – buy yourself a Galaxy S7 and get this sweet deal on the Samsung Gear S2. The sales guy went into adequate detail regarding Tizen, but he was also wearing one and was able to show me the benefits of having a 3g watch. I figured what the F, I’ll try it. What the Verizon salesman was not particularly clear on was that in order to get this sweet deal I was going back to good ol’ subsidized price modeling. So here’s what the *deal* looks like:
The points to take away:
1) The device “only costs me $5.00/mo” according to Verizon staff.
2) The great deal is $150 (43%) off of full retail cost of $350.
Regarding point 1, only $5.00 a month sounds great, but the reality is that it’s over twice that. If you look at surcharges that are in their control combined with governmental charges outside of their control, it’s actually more than double of the “only $5.00 a month.” I called today to talk about canceling it – the early cancellation fee is $175. Less than paying the $11.37 for the term of the contract, but not by a lot.
Regarding point 2, you used to be able to get iPhones valued at $500+ free right? Or is that me imagining things? Either way, it was way better than paying 57% of full retail.
I don’t like being under contract, I don’t like sneaky sales practices, and I don’t like being taken to the cleaners. When the math is done I will be paying (at best) $404.19 to own this thing for a month. The best I can hope for in the resale market is about $300. This month Verizon not only took their normal $150 out of my pocket for the services they provide, but they’re also hosing me for $100 additional that I’ll see no benefit from.
So thanks assholes at Verizon. I was recently shopping around because T-Mobile claims their network is fixed. The only reason I didn’t jump ship is because I honestly had very few complaints about Verizon besides the cost. Fact is they’re all too expensive though, and T-Mobile doesn’t give me any corporate discount on service, so continuing with big red just made sense. I have a new complaint, and after tomorrow my contract with you will be terminated.
As an aside – if you’re considering going from a proper Android Wear device to a Tizen based device, save your money and your frustration. Tizen is garbage, and because I see no looming Wear support coming for the device you’ll find mine on eBay as soon as I’m clear of the bounty on the device, in case you don’t trust my advice…
Have you ever encountered a problem, one that is clearly prolific in the digital world but you just can’t find the solution on the Internet? MUM on QuickBooks has always been that way for me. If I had a nickel for every time one of my mom’s staff members called me complaining of H202 or some other error when trying to flip over to multi user mode, well I’d have a lot of nickels.
To be clear, QuickBooks is utter trash. There is no excuse for them to not to support some sort of proper database configuration instead of using their garbage Sybase with their garbage .net connector… they can if they want, but after 15 years+ they should also give us the option after storing data in a proper database using proper communication tools.
That said, if you’ve found yourself here let me just self-proclaim to be the smartest person in the world when it comes to configuring servers for MUM. I must be because I’ve had to discover the solutions to all the hurdles myself – it’s just not CLEARLY documented on the Internet.
If you call Intuit support with the H202 problem they will happily direct you to this page. If this doesn’t solve it then your environment is the most exotic environment on the planet and there is no escalated support to help you troubleshoot, you’re on your own. If you disable the firewall entirely and still have issues, this isn’t your problem anyway.
2) Use hostnames, not fqdns.
This is clearly why none of the Quickbooks client software doesn’t and never will work on non Windows OSs. By default all Linuxes I know of will lookup a hostname in DNS first, of course attaching the domain suffix. If you try to connect to a company file using \\fqdn\share\file.qbw it will H202 every time. So… if your users have shortcuts on their desktops or if you’re mapping a drive with GPO etc, make sure that the UNC path does NOT have the fqdn. That was a fun one to try to solve. Now to be brutally honest I don’t really know what the difference is to Windows since WINS is disabled in all of my environments. It’s either related to Netbios over TCP or something muddy they actually did in the database server code. It absolutely should be fixed, I habitually type FQDNs and it’s just a matter of fact that this bug goes against all the rules in the DNS RFCs.
3) Don’t disable IPv6 – Prefer IPv4
Often times you’ll find in your ND file an IPv6 address. I’d like to think that IPv6 should work just fine, but often times it doesn’t – namely if you have a routed IPv4 network in your environment, but haven’t accommodated connectivity for IPv6. In this case disabling IPv6 won’t help you, it will harm you. Instead follow this guide and use 0x20 to prefer IPv4.
Those are the big issues that haunted me. Using what I know today I can successfully host MUM on any Windows server dating back to 2008. If you run into any issues that you’re unable to surmount or have anything to add feel free to drop me a line.
Awhile back Google threatened to make 3rd party applications unable to login to Google Voice over XMPP. I don’t rely heavily on the service, however I do have a few desk phones for convenience sake that rely on these connections, one in particular for my wife’s grandma who happens to live with us and is definitely beyond hope for using an iPhone. I don’t care to have a dialtone run to my home because of both the cost and the simple humility of thinking about such a barbaric technology invading my home.
I recently added another Google Voice “trunk” to my FreePBX box to add some additional simplicity to life, but found that it wasn’t working well I thought maybe my newly created account was subject to the threats formerly made. I read a lot about how the problems can be worked around by recompiling Asterisk and using oAuth (don’t sign up for an acct at PBXIAF, just read on) – all of which sounded way more complicated that I was prepared to go through and maintain for this particular nearly unused application.
A bit of additional digging, Googling and investigation based upon some of the E-mails I was getting reading :
Hi JR,
Someone just tried to sign in to your Google Account ****@gmail.com from an app that doesn’t meet modern security standards.
led me to find that this can be easily remedied. Google has created a page https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps to allow you to let your Asterisk based PBX to login using the code as shipped, 1 simple radio button and life is back to normal.
Incidentally the reason that my other account hadn’t broken is because I’ve implemented 2 factor in which case you just use an app specific password.
I thought maybe my newly created account was subject to the threats formerly made. I read a lot about