Nastygram to T-Mobile

/ personal

Following is the text of a letter I’m sending to T-Mobile

I recently signed up as a customer of T-Mobile, and was annoyed to discover that every time I receive voicemail, I also receive a text message from the network notifying me that I have voicemail (that is, I was annoyed after I overcame my initial confusion). A customer-service rep told me this is just the way it works, and there’s no way to turn it off. This isn’t a feature, it’s a bug. You should turn it off.

I was doubly annoyed when I received my first bill and learned that I am being billed 5¢ for each of those messages—which I don’t want in the first place.

My annoyance all the more acute because a neighborhood I visit regularly is so poorly covered by T-Mobile that phone calls often roll over to voice mail automatically. So we have a situation where I’m often out of reach because of shortcomings in your network, and I am paying extra for poor coverage.

You guys have me on the hook for one year, but so far, I’ve been less than impressed and will eagerly explore my options when my contract is ended.

Ten years on the web

/ net stuff, personal, technology

Macworld San Francisco begins today. I am sure there will be some interesting announcements that send the Mac cognoscenti a-nattering. But for me, it’s an occasion to think back.

I attended Macworld SF in 1994, staying with a friend from my days in Japan, Robin Nakamura, who attended as well and was also a bit of a Mac geek. It was fun. The big thing was CD-based entertainment, like The Journeyman Project. The hottest Mac you could buy was a Quadra 840av, and I remember watching a demo of an amazing image-editing app called Live Picture, which looked set to beat the pants off of Photoshop at the time.

On the plane ride back, I was reading a copy of Macweek that had been handed out at the show, and got to talking with a guy in nearby seat, Greg Hiner. Turns out he worked at UT developing electronic course material; he invited me to drop by his office to check out this new thing on the Internet called the World Wide Web. I had an Internet account at that time, and was acquainted with FTP, Gopher, and WAIS, but hadn’t heard of this Web thing.

So a few days later, I stopped by his office, and we huddled around his screen as he launched Mosaic. It immediately took us to what was the default home page at the time, on a server at CERN, in Switzerland. I noticed the “.ch” address of the server in the status bar and said excitedly, “we’re going to Switzerland!” A gray page with formatted text and some pictures loaded. This was cool. This was not anonymous, monospaced text, like you get with Gopher. He clicked on some blue text that took us to Harvard, I think, and I commented “now Boston!” This was exciting. This was big, and I knew it was going to be really, really big.

I’ve still got a few of the earliest e-mails we exchanged, in which we traded links, and I am tickled to see that (at least through redirects) some of those sites are still live (see: mkzdk, John Jacobsen Artworks).

I quickly figured out how to write HTML and put up a web page to serve as a resource for my fellow Japanese-English translators, who I knew would want to latch onto this Web thing and just needed something to help them get started (ironically, the page is too old to be included at the Internet Archive).

And here we are today. I am writing this in a program that runs on my computer, and communicates over a (relatively) high-speed connection with a program that runs on my server to create and manage web pages. Many of my friends do the same, and I’ve made new friends just because of this simple activity. The boundary between one computer and another, between my hard drive and the Internet, is, if not blurry, at least somewhat arbitrary. I’m watching Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote in a window in the background as I type. Things have changed a lot. And I feel like we’ve barely gotten started.

And away we go

/ personal

For some time, I’ve needed a new phone: the one I’ve got (a Sprint Touchpoint 1100, made by LG) has gotten beaten up enough that the battery no longer has a reliable connection to the main body, the result being that it turns itself off almost every time it gets jostled.

A recent item on Gizmodo pointed out that, between various rebates, Amazon is basically paying you $150 to take a phone off their hands (with purchase of new cellular service contract, of course). While I decided against that particular option, I found another, somewhat less generous offer to relieve them of a phone. This went along with T-Mobile service; after checking with Drew that T-Mobile didn’t suck distinctly harder than anyone else, I took the plunge.

The phone, a Sony Ericsson T610, should (I think) be here in a few days. It’s got all kinds of bells and whistles: Bluetooth, a camera, a Bluetooth headset included free (another special offer). Of course, I wound up also ordering a Bluetooth dongle for my Mac, so that I’d be able to copy data between the phone and my address book, which ate up a good chunk of the money Amazon is paying me to take the phone.

Lazyweb: help me pick out some headphones

/ personal

For my girlfriend, actually, but she’s not geeky enough to use Lazyweb. She’s also, apparently, too petite for typical headphones.

I picked her up a cheapo pair of Sony h.ear headphones, which sort of hook over your ears like paperclips. No good. Turns out her ears are much, much to small to accommodate them–the ‘phones hang too low, and even if they didn’t, the speakers would be too large to fit the recesses of her ears.

Constraints: must fit her; must not cost an arm or a leg, and must tolerate getting sweaty at the gym.

O Lazyweb, I invoke thee!

Head down

/ personal

In the absence of, well, work, I’ve been trying to teach myself PHP and MySQL. Partly because it’s stuff I just want to know–ever since I gave up on Hypercard, I’ve felt a sort of phantom-limb syndrome whenever I need to algorithmically process a batch of text or something. And I’ve got some ideas for projects that I think might be fun. Partly because I might be able to turn this into an alternate revenue stream.

The book I’m working from seems to be pretty good, as far as it goes, but after doing a little poking around in the PHP documentation, I realize the book barely scratches the surface of the tip of the iceberg. I’m still at the point of getting a feel for the semantics and data types–not doing much beyond “Hello World!” tests. But I’ll get there.

Halloween

/ fire, personal

There are always a bazillion parties on Halloween, and of course the crush on Sixth Street, but I’m going to be at the Enchanted Forest. Every year for the past N years, there’s been a Halloween fire show at Cafe Mundi. This year it’s at a different location, but will still be a good show. And for the first time, I’ll be in it, doing more than holding a towel.

When: Halloween night, starts at 8:00, doors at 7:00
Where: Enchanted Forest (Oltorf near Lamar)
Outdoors, primitive site. Bring your own everything.

Fucking Ritz Camera

/ personal

I’m developing a website (don’t look yetok, you can look now) for my sister. She took some product shots, and asked how she should send them to me. I told her to get a Photo CD made from the negatives.

Now, Photo CD is a specific, high-quality format for storing photos digitally; it’s not just a CD with photos on it. She goes to Ritz Camera, gives them the film and asks for a Photo CD. Yes, by name. But apparently the Ritz halfwits knew better, and (as near as I can tell) scanned her prints on a dusty scanner that blew out all the highlights, and burned that onto a CD along with all kinds of Windows cruft. Ceçi n’est ce pas une Photo CD.

I’ve just received the Not-Photo CD. Her website is supposed to go live in two days. There’s obviously not enough time to redo it. The scans I’ve got are usable, but much lower quality than they would have been if I had gotten what I wanted.

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