Month: August 2008

When friends show they care

None of you will get this at all, but I have to share. It really means a lot when a friend spends $10 just to make fun of you. Case in point – Sony Complain Thub. It all started with a thread on our super secret private forum where we complain about our wives talk about sports. The thread was about the Patriots, and it came up that I was rooting for them in the last Super Bowl. This is because I am a Redskins fan, and I would root against the Giants if they were playing absolutely anyone except the Cowboys, and in certain situations, even then. Anyway, this came as a surprise to some. I responded thusly:

I really don’t think there’s anything the Patriots could do that would make me root for the Giants or the Cowboys. Maybe if they went two tight ends with Winslow and Shockey, changed the team name to the Sony Complain Thub, and violated the GPL a couple hundred times. I mean, I still hate the Patriots, and it was like rooting to lose an eye vs lose both eyes, but a Pats win would still have been preferable to me.

Of course, that was a small bit of hyperbole, and a large bit of inside joke, but still, relevant to the link that you may or may not have clicked above.

Blackberry research and crazy Verizon saleschatters

Since our webmail got blocked, I’ve been hoping that work would provide me an alternative internet connection. The best solution from my perspective would be if they would pay the difference between my cell phone plan now and a Blackberry that can be used as a modem for my laptop. So, I was doing some research at Verizon’s website, and a helpful salesperson popped up and offered to assist me. Here’s the transcript of the chat. My comments are in red.

Chat InformationPlease wait for a Verizon Wireless sales representative to assist you with your order. Thank you for your patience! Chat InformationA Verizon Wireless online pre-sales specialist has joined the chat. You are now chatting with Elisha Definitely picturing this Elisha Elisha: Hello. Thank you for visiting our chat service. May I help you with your order today? You: I have a couple questions You: first, is there a way to make this chat window pop up whenever I want? Elisha: How can I help you with your order? Elisha: Yes, by going to contact us. That is a dirty lie. I tried that. I wish you weren’t a liar, Elisha. You: is it only available certain hours of the day? Elisha: The sales chats are open 8 am to 11 pm. Elisha: How can I help you with your order? You: what’s the difference in the two data plans listed with the Blackberry Curve? Elisha: The $ 29.99 only give you unlimited access to the web and access to personal emails. Elisha: The $ 44.99 gives you unlimited access to the web and unlimited access to business/personal emails. Plus it comes with the tether feature where you can use the phone as a modem. Elisha: Which is best for you? You: so for 29.99 you can’t use it as a modem? What needs to be included in order for that to work? Elisha: Yes, that is correct. Elisha: You can hook the phone up to the laptop to use the phone as a modem. That doesn’t really answer my question, Elisha. Elisha: What key features in a cell phone are most important to you? I already told you I wanted the Curve (Although I really want the Bold, but it’s not out yet) You: I’m curious why I can’t use the phone as a modem on the 29.99 plan. You: it seems to me that bandwidth is bandwidth, and Verizon shouldn’t care what I do with it Elisha: You can’t , you are not paying for that feature with the $ 29.99. Elisha: I am sorry the feature alone is $ 15.00. Elisha: That is the way that the plan is set. Elisha: I am sorry. Elisha: Are you looking to order online today? You: well, I’m sure it’s not your fault You: no, I’m trying to get work to approve the upgrade Elisha: Yes, thanks for understanding. Elisha: Okay. Elisha: I understand, are you sure you don’t want to take advantage of our free shipping and instant online discounts today? You’re starting to sound like a used car salesman here, Elisha You: no, thanks. You: you’ve answered all my questions, thank very much Elisha: Thank you for visiting Verizon Wireless, I look forward to speaking with you again. Have a great day! Thanks for kicking me off the chat as soon as it became clear you weren’t getting a commission! Elisha: You are very welcome!

Anyway, I think it’s ridiculous that I can’t use the phone as a modem without paying the extra $15. If I pay for the bandwidth, why does it matter if I’m using the phone itself, or my laptop through the phone? I know, Verizon has a right to charge me whatever they want. I’m not arguing that they can’t charge me, I’m arguing that it makes them big fat jerks. And Elisha was pretty annoying. I went to her to find an answer to a question that I couldn’t find anywhere on the website. When I didn’t want to buy today, she blew me off. This is a bad salesperson. And I will probably buy through a Verizon brick and mortar store because of my experience. Take that, Verizon’s website!

The (unborn) baby likes me!

The wife was sitting on the couch just now, so I thought it would be a good time to go have a little chat with our unborn child. I had been reading to it now and then. It is said that a story that the baby hears over and over before it’s born will have a calming effect on the baby once it comes out. But I’ve been slacking a little in my reading. So I offered to read the baby a story tonight. I offered again, asking it to move if it wanted a story. It kicked me in the nose! The baby clearly wants a story tonight. And a story it shall get!

BMI is bunk

I’ve said many times before that we should stop computing BMI (Body Mass Index), we should stop basing any sort of judgments on it, and we should just stop even remembering that it exists. It’s a terrible measure of health, and it mistakenly classifies all sorts of people as healthy or unhealthy. Well, now I can say the same thing again. But this time with science! Chad Orzel, physicist and new father, says:

This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever put the stats for their favorite pro athlete into a BMI calculator (you want to tell Michael Strahan he’s obese?), but it’s nice to see it holds more widely.

He references a NYT article that I won’t bother to read because, frankly, the NYT gets on my nerves. But it says just what I said above – if you use BMI to judge a person’s health, you’re going to be wrong much of the time.

Not a meaningful distinction

The [Devil] Rays played the Angels last night. The Rays came into the game 75-48, tied with the Cubs for the second best record in the Majors. They were behind only the Angels at 76-46. This is a 1.5 game differential. So why on earth is the headline on the front page of ESPN.com for this article Rays top MLB-best Angels? If the Rays were their normal selves, sitting 25 games out, then sure, this is significant. But do you know what they call it when the second best team in the league beats the best team in the league? They call that baseball. Or normal. I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it, but I’m already annoyed with ESPN for their full page splash screen ads that have been popping up recently. Of course, now I’m possibly sending a little bit of traffic their way, so this is probably a pretty stupid response to my annoyance. But never mind.

Once again, I’m reminded why I hate Microsoft

I just spent about three hours this morning trying to debug something at work. It turns out the issue shows up in Excel 2003, which our customer is using, but not Excel 2007, which I have on my laptop. This just goes to show you how important it is to mimic the customer’s environment as closely as possible. Anyway, I figured that part out, so now I had to decipher the error message when I tried to open the file in Excel. XML Spreadsheet warning in Table Reason: Bad Value Okay, sounds simple enough. I just have to find the bad value, and fix it. Excel didn’t offer me any advice, so I figured I’d try MSDN, Microsoft’s developer reference. You’d think that, since I was using a Microsoft product on a Microsoft operating system, maybe Microsoft might have some idea what the error message meant. As an aside, can I tell you how frustrating it is to have Excel tell me that the error has been printed to a log file hidden deep inside some Windows hidden temporary directory? Not only does it fail to provide me with a link to the file, but because it’s hidden, I can’t navigate through Windows Explorer, and I have to actually type the file address in manually. I can’t even copy the text from the error window! It’s like someone intentionally made it as hard as possible to look at the log. Anyway, there were ZERO results on MSDN. Zero. I’m forced to conclude that I am the only person who has ever had this problem. There isn’t any other explanation. It’s inconceivable that Microsoft could possibly have just ignored this error message, never once mentioning it anywhere that their vaunted search engine was able to look. It turns out the error was reasonably simple – Excel 2003 only allows 30 values in a sum. It will handle more if you use the range (A1:A40), but you can’t list the cells individually (A1, A2, A3 . . .). Excel 2007 doesn’t have a problem. Interestingly, if you use plus signs instead of the sum function, the limit of 30 goes away. Which is probably how I’m going to work around this. But couldn’t that have been in the error message? “We’re sorry, you can only have 30 cells in a formula”. Look, that was really easy. So, I hope the next person who has trouble deciphering an Excel error message find this post and saves some time. And I hope the people responsible for the idiocy on which I wasted the last three hours are all hit by a bus. Well, not really. Not a real bus. A three hour bus of mental anguish. That sound perfect.

Infinite goods want to be DRM-free!

I’ve gotten into a little discussion on DRM and ebooks over at Feedbooks. If you’re interested in potential business models for authors in a world of infinite goods, hop on over there and join the discussion. Especially if you can contribute more than me (That is, if you can do more than parrot what you read on Techdirt).

Would you like to know more?

It’s not often you can bring up Starship Troopers (The movie more than the book in this case) while talking about television and the internet and how they interact (or don’t). I was reading Ethan Kaplan talking about the tv in his house goes beyond just displaying channels coming through his cable box or movies from his DVD player.

Like it or not, television has become an interactive experience, but not because the broadcasters did anything to curate that. If anything, broadcasters have been sitting on their hands in terms of the possibilities of the bandwidth and platforms they helped put in our homes!

He grabbed my intention by bashing Internet Explorer 6, a plague on web developers that refuses to die, but then he talks about how he watches tv with one eye on the internet. And that’s where Starship Troopers comes in. The movie handles background information by showing little news clips, as if you’re watching tv in the movie’s universe. At the end, the narrator asks, “Would you like to know more?”. I always took that to mean that viewers could somehow interact with the tv and direct it to provide more on whatever they were just watching. And that was 1997. The tv stations still haven’t figured this out. For example, when I watch sports, I usually have my laptop out. Not that I ever put my laptop away, but whatever. If I’m watching the Orioles, I usually have the box score open at ESPN.com on the autorefresh. That way I have instant access to the starter’s pitch count, what this batter did in his last at bat, and all sorts of other relevant stuff. I probably have a browser tab on Baseball Reference to look up more unusual stats, or maybe check something the announcer just mentioned. There’s no reason this has to be separate from my tv-watching. We have a big tv in the living room. It might annoy the wife, but there’s no reason I couldn’t have extra stat feeds running along with the baseball game, or or maybe something else of interest. The issue is probably one of money – the cable providers are afraid of new revenue streams.

Display advertising, temporal advertising (commercials), usage based charges and other economic systems aren’t in tune with nascent usage and thus we have not only an uncapitalized usage system, but also a rather anarchic one.

Not that they’re afraid of new ways of making money, but that they’re afraid of losing control. The old ways of making money with tv are broken. That’s why there have been so many efforts to keep DVRs from skipping commercials and things like that. You don’t have a captive audience anymore. If you bore people, they’re going to do something else. So you have to embrace what people want.

Finally made it to Commonwealth


Originally uploaded by thetejon

A friend and I met our wives at Commonwealth last night. It had been girls night – they met up in Arlington and had dinner. So the guys went to the Nationals game to watch the Rockies pummel the Nationals, I still haven’t seen a Nationals win in the new stadium. Anyway, since the wife is 37 weeks pregnant now, she got to choose the location, and she chose one near us. It was a beautiful night, so we sat outside. This means I didn’t really get a feel for the inside, but maybe we can do that next time. They were serving from their pub menu since it was late. We got an order of fries, which I didn’t actually try, but the table consensus was positive. They are large chunks of potato, so if that’s the way you like your fries, you’re in luck. And we tried the Scotch eggs, which were very good. And the service was good. I think my only complaint was the lack of any sort of description on the menu. We thought at first it was just the pub menu that didn’t have descriptions, but they brought us what I assumed was the regular menu, as well, because it had the drinks, and it didn’t have descriptions, either. Since there is a ton of stuff on the menu that’s a bit out of the ordinary, at least for this side of the pond, it seems that maybe descriptions on the menu would be nice. But if that’s the biggest complaint from a self-proclaimed complainer, I think the trip was a resounding success. I’m sure we’ll be back – my father-in-law has already been informed that there is a bar with outdoor seating and bubble and squeak on the menu, so it would take the intervention of the health department or some equally powerful entity to keep us from revisiting Commonwealth next time he comes down to visit.