I've found a new personal hero:
"My Homemade PBX"
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bit/4613/pbx.html

Another reason I love my ISP…

My bill's late. Yea, no surprise, seems to be SOP for me lately. This bill is actually paid indirectly by my office, so have somewhat of an excuse that if they dont pay me, I can't pay the bill. 🙂

Anyway, I guess my account lapsed, and rather than just drop loop on the DSL and let me figure out what happened, they did something clever:
Redirect all port 80 http requests to their billing server, with a message saying that my bill is past due, and letting me pay it online with my credit card.
Which would be cool if I had the cash.

I called the 800 number listed right there on the page, told them that my work would be paying me the expense check next monday, and tappity tap tap on their end and my internet was working again. He's like "ok, anything else?" I said: "Wait, that's all the explaination you need?" "Sure, we trust our customers here."
wow. What an awesome company. Between their contests, their understanding tech support, and their reliable service, I'd go without internet rather than choose any other provider. I've never been treated this way by an ISP before.

If you're looking for a DSL ISP for professionals, speakeasy is it. They're a bit more pricey than you could find elsewhere, but with that price comes some of the best customer service I've ever seen, anywhere. (Well, other than the mexican restaraunt across the street, but ya know.)

If you end up signing up, tell them noweb4u sent you. The referral bonus doesn't come into play in my recommendation, but it would be appreciated. 🙂

I found what I'm spending my gift certificate on. I preordered this:

Back to the Future – The Complete Trilogy (Widescreen Edition)

see larger picture
List Price: $56.98
Our Price: $42.74
You Save: $14.24 (25%)

Availability: This item will be released on December 17, 2002. You may order it now and we will ship it to you when it arrives

w00000t!!!!!!!!!!!

I've decided I'm going to use my $50 at amazon to enhance my DVD collection.
Since I can't write polls:

Cheapbastard Poll #9488

	I've got a $50 amazon.com Gift Certificate. What DVDs should I buy with it?

Reply to answer.

From: "Tami Bernstein"
Subject: You're a Speakeasy Customer Survey Winner!

Thank you for participating in Speakeasy's Customer Survey. Your feedback
has been extremely valuable.

We are pleased to announce that your name has been selected to receive a $50
gift certificate to Amazon.com. Congratulations!

You will receive your prize via email directly from Amazon within the next
48 hours. The email will contain instructions on how to redeem your $50 gift
certificate. It may be used to purchase products from Amazon's online
catalog found here: http://www.amazon.com.

Please reply to this email with any questions or concerns. Thanks again for
sharing your thoughts!

Sincerely,

Tami Bernstein
Marketing Program Administrator
SPEAKEASY.NET
phone: XXX-XXX-xxxx
fax: xxx-xxx-xxxx

Just to let everyone know, effective Monday my work hours change from 3am-11am to 6am-around 2pm. I'll be sleeping at night.

Not that it will matter much to most people, since I usually only hang out during the day anyway, but for those who are interested, I figure it'd be nice to know.

No polls or embedding LJ into my webpage for a while. My paid account just fully expired. I totally forgot about that, and now I don't have the free cash to blow on a paid account until next pay period. 🙁

(If you're curious, this person peformed a dictionary search on my
database for each and every letter in the dictionary 😉 )

From: Ward Mundy (ward_mundy@ca11.uscourts.gov)
To: noweb4u@telcodata.us
Subject: Thanks
Date: 18 Sep 2002 10:58:30 -0400

Paul,
Before you read your log and have a heart attack that someone has ripped off all your data, I wanted to explain what I was doing. I work for the federal courts and I'm building an emergency SMS notification system so that judges and staff could be alerted in the event of a serious emergency (such as 9/11). In order to build something like this, I obviously needed to know not only the cell phone number of everyone (which we have) but also the cell phone provider. As you probably know, the hi-tech United States doesn't yet have transparent SMS services that most Europeans take for granted. In any case, I needed area codes, prefixes, and cell phone provider names to build my data base. Then all that's missing is email domains for each provider using SMS , e.g. Nextel uses messaging.nextel.com. When I get this finished, I'll be glad to shoot you a copy of the domains of all the providers I can find. It might be a piece of data you would want to consider adding to your already formidable data base down the road. Thanks for your wonderful web site!
–wm