Cooking and other observations

Return of the Phone Company

OK, so, a couple of years ago, AT&T Wireless, which I think was actually called that and may still exist, sort of, merged with what used to be Cellular One to become Cingular. Not to be confused with Singulair, an asthma/allergy drug that I'm pretty sure you all want to ask your doctors about, because if those teevee ads are right, it's going to make your life that much better!

Today, news broke that AT&T is purchasing BellSouth, for some amount of money that almost certainly starts with a b. (I don't know; I'm blogging on the basis of a headline because I'm too lazy to read the whole story.) This purchase will give AT&T full control of... Cingular, which it basically sold like two years ago because it didn't feel like competing in the wireless market.

Apparently a behemoth can change its mind. Who knew?

This hurts my head. I don't remember when AT&T was the phone company. All I remember is Magnum P.I. voicing "You Will" at us in the 90s. That was just plain freaky; and it was back in the Golden Age of Irony, back when anybody of job-having age was pretty sure that he or she would be found out as a complete phony and thrown out on his or her ear, so we all just sat around and listened to Pearl Jam and ate ice cream, but it was before the dawn of the Shut Up era. Seriously, now we've all stopped listening to anything.

It just goes to show you that they never should have woke up the 1918 flu virus. I'm just saying.

Hey Steve Ballmer: Shut Your Fat White Face!

Now, it's time for one of my increasingly rare personal rants.

You know what would drive me away from the 'net? Advertising.

Here's a quote from Steve Ballmer. He's the guy who's really running Microsoft these days. He's in town trying to seduce AOL, and the WaPo covered the visit.

"We're asking: 'How will advertising fit in the context not only of MSN, but does it fit in the context of Windows Live, does it fit in the context of Office Live? How do we let third-party developers use our engine to support their own advertising-funded sites?' "

So here's my problem. I have no idea what Office Live is, but I use Microsoft Office. I know there are viable alternatives, but I have office. I paid for Office, and I'm going to use it. However, if it develops into something that traffics over my internet connection and sends advertising to me every time I open a Word file, that's it. Because, you know what? That's stealing. Microsoft wants to steal my bandwidth to send me ads that people pay it for, and I get nothing in return.

I give the Washington Post, for example, free reign to cram as many ads as it wants onto a page, because they're essentially giving away part of the product, but you know as well as I do that when a page has to complete a separate transaction for every bit of the page to load, it's going to slow down somewhere.

That somewhere is at the ad server more often than not.

So if the trade-off is that they'll give away their bloated and overpriced Office package in exchange for some ads, that's a bad deal. I can tune out the ads in Gmail, and more often than not, the context-based listings are funny because they don't relate to anything that's in the message. I do that for 2.5 gigs of offline storage. I get something out of that equation.

I guarantee that MSFT will not do ads in the same, unobtrusive and occasionally amusing manner.

My problem is that telecom services are regulated as utilities. I pay good money for a fast connection, and I'm not about to let Steve Ballmer and his goons use my bandwidth to increase the bottom line. Microsoft already pays for new buildings in cold, hard cash. The company is admirably liquid. In terms of finance, it is shockingly well run.

Honestly, I would rather pay for services than be forced to deal with ads just so I can use software that I have purchased. If their ad scheme works as "well" as the Office auto updater, we're all in for a long, annoying wait.

Basic question

Why does my celluar provider's web site suck so bad? (I'm paraphrasing Moby here, so don't hrangue me on the grammatical error, ok?)

Seriously, I use Sprint because Sprint gets service just about everywhere, except Wheeling, WV, and there are times when I travel a lot. This is not one of those times, but if I switched, I'd have to switch to Verizon, and I hate Verizon, so that's out.

Verizon's web site sucks in its own way, I'm sure.

The Sprint PCS web site is nearly unusable. For one thing, even if you remember your account password, you're going to forget that it translates to all caps no matter how you keyed the thing in when you set it up. That's just wrong on so many levels. It's not case insensitive, it's case sensitive, but without telling the user, the server translates lower case letters to caps.

So after I called and got that little bit of information (remember that I've been a Sprint subscriber for a long damned time, and I ought to have known that, except that I didn't) I tried to go online to buy a new phone. I need a new phone, you see.

That's all fine and well, except that even after you log in, when you go to "shopping," the shopping server doesn't know who you are. All I want to do is buy a stupid phone through the web site, so I don't have to go to the Sprint store and wait in line behind 18 people so I can deal with the clowns that work there.

But I can't use the web site, because there's no good way to get through the screen that wants me to pick a plan and sign up.

Sprint retains me as a customer because a body at rest wants to stay there. Or at least I do. I'm the poster child for inertia. It's not that I fear change; I'm all about change, but the fact that there's no other provider that sucks any less leads me to stay where I am.

Anyway. I guess I'm off to the Sprint store again. I need a new phone. Maybe the crowd won't be as heavy, or as stupid, at 1:30 as it was at 7 last night.

iPod update

The problem was user error. This is not actually a surprise. As Ada mentioned in the comments, the instruction booklet is kind of vague. The Apple support pages didn't help, either, so I followed the first rule of technical support, which is "have you rebooted?"

What do you know? I hadn't completed the setup, which is actually Apple's fault because it couldn't find me in its user database. (I know I'm there. I set up the account when I had the iBook repaired by Apple a couple of months ago.) But when I couldn't get the iPod registered, I clicked cancel instead of done.

Anyway, iTunes is now transferring data to Gremlin. Happy day for me.  Except that I don't really want a complete mirror of my iTunes library, which the Apple support tutorial video says that I have to have. I'm pretty sure that's not true, particularly for the Mini. As a matter of fact, my entire iTunes library will just about fit on Gremlin's HD, but I have audiobooks and such that I don't really need to take with me. I'd rather be able to select by genre and load only those songs that I specify, because I'm going to run out of space pretty fast.

There's got to be a way to do this.

So I'm thinking there should be a way in iTunes to set up sub libraries, and for the user to specify that the iPod will update only those libraries. I'll have to poke around to see how to make that happen.

In the mean time, I need to spend a lot of time standardizing my track information  in iTunes.

Joining the iPod generation

After hesitating for a couple of years, I bought an iPod yesterday. I purchased a Mini in the green color, which I like quite a bit. I mean I like the color. I named it Gremlin, after a car my dad had when I was little. Honestly, I never expected to see anything manufactured in Lime Fire Green again. I feel like I ought to buy one of the bright green VW Beetles to match it. Maybe later this year.

The device itself is still under evaluation. Right now I'm pretty whatever about it, and that surprises me. I expected to love it instantly, but I don't.

I've never met a device that I couldn't figure out by reading the instructions. Hell, I even figured out programming a VCR back in the dark days before TiVo. Technically the iPod is working. I transferred about a gig of songs over, but so far the iPod isn't seeing them.

My guess is that operating an iPod is too easy. So easy that I can't figure it out.

Eyeroll v. Telecommunications

Part? I've lost count.

On Friday, I got a random text message. My phone makes a truly hideous noise when it gets a text message, so I looked at it just to shut it up. It said "please call" and there was a 703 number.

So I called, on the off chance it was actually for me, which would have been weirder than weird, since nobody I know uses text messaging, (Fedward has sent e-mail to my phone, but that's different. He has a spiffy phone that makes doing that easy.)

When the person who answered turned out to be trying to reach somebody else, I hoped beyond hope that he might be the same person who has been Leroy, formerly known as the Artist Who Possessed This Number. This hope was fed by the still of the vibrate over the next 36 hours but the pages from Verizon's system started again during Meet the Press on Sunday.

Today, it got worse. The pages came roughly every 4-6 minutes starting at 8 a.m. I wanted the thing to go ahead and give birth to whatever alien being has been gestating in the system for the last two months, but I am now convinced that's not ever going to happen.

So I decided to give in. I'll knuckle under and change my number. I called Sprint, and its automated interface, which is voiced by a woman named Carol, is broken. She seems unable to ask me to say "representative." Poor Carol.

But poor me, too. Unless I can get in touch with customer service (sorry, "customer solutions") I can't say uncle. I can't change my number. I know there's a direct number I could dial, but I don't know it off the top of my head.

The last time I spoke to a Sprint tech, he said they can't put a forwarding message on the number, and I think that sucks.

If I had a wireless phone company that I owned, users would definitely be able to leave a forwarding message, like on a land line. And the firmware on the phone would allow a user to block individual numbers. And if Carol were indisposed, callers would go into a queue for the next available agent.

There are things I like about Sprint, but I'd have to say that there are also things I don't like about Sprint. I'm hooked into a contract for another six months or so. I may well change carriers after that time is up.

Insult, meet injury

My cable is out.

Ordinarily this wouldn't be a big deal, except that I'm m0re or less a prisoner of C-SPAN. But my state of mind the past few days has led me down the primrose path to the place where I sit and watch four hours of Law and Order reruns.

Four hours at a time.

Yes, that place is the saddest on this earth, where I am comforted by Jerry Orbach and whoever solving some rote crime-like story in forty minutes or less. (Note: It is a whole new kind of odd to see somebody who is currently dead talking about "What Drama Is" in TNT promos.)  Normally I'm not much of a TV watcher, unless you count the time in '98 when I had pneumonia and watched several seasons of The X Files on video tape over the course of about a week. It's OK, I wasn't capable of sleeping, so I figured I'd just watch TV instead.

But really. My network has been down for almost a month. It should be fixed on Friday when the new DSL is installed. (And I should take this opportunity to remind you that Verizon Sucks, just because I can.)  My cell phone still gets calls from an automated system roughly every 16 minutes, which makes conversation difficult. The FCC has said it can't help me, I guess because everybody down there still too busy with the repercussions from  Janet Jackson's nipples, and now, I have no TV.

I don't really want to watch it, but I want to have it. Does that make any sense?

Technology hates me, I tell you.

Back

Sort of. The network is still down because my router died, so I'm sitting here at a Windows machine, which I hate.  I'm so used to using a notebook  computer that I am nearly incompetent on a full-sized keyboard.  Plus. Windows.  I bullied Motorola into sending me a new router by escalating the call and explaining that although my router was technically enabling a connection to the 'net, which could be construed as "working" under some definition of that word, I felt like waiting 90 seconds for Google to load, when my connection was rated at such a level that the site should have loaded in roughly three seconds. I also thought the fact that I couldn't ping my modem from the router was a bit of a problem.

Anyway, after I pulled out the "Well, I can see that you're not going to help me, so I'm going to have to go out and buy a competitor's product and then blog about the whole experience" line, Denise the supervisor said that she would send me a new router.

The weirdest thing about the whole experience with my network trouble is that I think I spoke to the only smart tech support guy Verizon has in its employ.  He knew what he was talking about, and he admitted that he knew how a router works. Verizon support guys usually don't, or if they do, they don't admit it.

None of it matters. I'm still switching over to Speakeasy and their dry DSL option where I won't have to have a land line. Because even the sales guy at Speakeasy knows more about how a network operates than the smartest tech at Verizon.  And I liked that.

Google blogs up Usenet

Hey Man, remember Usenet?  Before Yahoo Groups, before web forums with whacked-out mods, before everybody and his hypersexed alter ego had a livejournal site, there was Usenet. It was a rollercoaster ride, you had to have a news server and a news reader, or you had to be able to work in a shell, but it was cool. I met some of my best friends on a Usenet group.

And then there was DejaNews, which created and maintained a Usenet archive, which was handy. Because there's a lot of good stuff on Usenet.

And then Google bought DejaNews. And nobody knew quite what would become of Usenet. Since Google's famous corporate motto is "Don't Be Evil," it turns out that what happened to Usenet is nothing bad. It is still around, despite the prevalence of other discussion formats that are more open and more controlled at the same time. (I find that a little weird, but it's true. Usenet was a lot less formal than any of the more modern formats, but getting something newgrouped meant that you had to know somebody, or you had to be somebody.)

So, Google has groups in beta. Google Groups is a lot less awful than Yahoo Groups. And it has the added advantage of including the classic Usenet groups. Just take a look-see at rec.pets.cats. It is the same vitriolic flamefest as ever, because some things never change, but in Google's gorgeously threaded presentation, it navigatges like a blog.

This is so much better than the old Usenet, and it's leagues ahead of Yahoo's whorish cesspool.

I wouldn't call it innovative, but it is better. If it can help people communicate more effectively, that's a good thing.

Hey Spammers!

You know, Eyeroll does not actually use Windows XP, or any other version of Windows. So offering to sell it to me cheap is kind of a waste of your time and my patience.

Also, fake Rolexes? Not so much. Unless the face says "FAKE ROLEX" where the name should be, and then we can talk. I could be into overt fakeness, but probably not over the 'net.