The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Technology

Going To War With Ma Bell

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Dear Ma Bell,

You and I are old friends from way back when. We first met during a time when people were taught to let the phone ring at least six times before hanging up. Six times, can you imagine that. Sure you can, you may be a cranky old bitch but you can remember the days when no one had answering machines or voicemail. There weren’t any cellphones and our friend Al Gore hadn’t invented that crazy thing called the Internet. Back then I never conceived of writing you a letter on a computer. Letters were something that you wrote with a pen and paper.

Ah it makes me choke up, these misty water colored memories. Or maybe it is eating crackers without water that makes me choke up, not that it matters. But what does matter is that I want to back hand you write across your hairy lip you cranky old bitch. I know, it is not ever acceptable to hit a woman but since you are not really a woman I can take artistic license and say that I want to punch you in the throat.

You see the source of my frustration is your inability to service me in the way that I require. Wipe that stupid grin off of your face and look in my eyes. They aren’t smiling. If you were here I’d go Three Stooges on your incompetent ass and poke you in the eyes. I pay you good money for a high speed internet connection that keeps going out on me and no one can explain why.  The lack of explanation isn’t the sole source of my frustration either. I hate dealing with your customer service department. The last three times I called I was connected with people who don’t speak English very well.

That is not just unfair to me but to them. I called because I need help and am frustrated. When I can’t understand them I grow more frustrated and do my best not to heap abuse on them. They don’t need or deserve it, but at that moment they are the face of your company and the focus of my ire.

You are a big company that plays in the grown up pool. You aren’t some rookie in the minor leagues, this is the goddamn show and they throw serious heat up here. You put that fastball across the plate anywhere close to waist high and I am going to send it screaming past your ear towards center field. If this were the NBA you would consider yourself posterized because I just jumped over a truck, did a 360, double clutched and tomahawked the rock down your throat. So now that I have throw down the testosterone laden gauntlet I ask you to cowboy up and help me fix this.

I am so sick of the connection dying in the middle of whatever I am doing. This is serious ma. This is business. This Internet connection helps me to put food on the table. I am not pissed off because the online skin flick keeps buffering. I am upset because in the middle of video conferences things get hung up and it negatively impacts my work.

So suck it up, figure out how to get some people who can speak English and are trained to deal with the issues we have. And don’t get slick and give me some high school kid who has a script and a technical flowchart for diagnosing difficulties. I am not Grandma Gertie who decided at the ripe old age of 96 to learn how to use a computer. Fix your damn system and take care of your business.

The Verizon iPhone

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I am not what you would call a cellphone junkie. I never cared to have the latest and greatest model. It is not because I don’t like gadgets because I most certainly do. If I had deeper pockets or stopped feeding my children my home would be outfitted with a lot more electronic gear than it is today. It is kind of funny to me that my son doesn’t realize that his father is much more of a gear head than I appear to be. The television in our living room is a 26″ beast that has been servicing our needs for about 13 years now. Every now and then I think about replacing it, but there are always things that get in the way, like tuition.

The cellphone, er smartphone is a different story. I switched from a basic phone to the Palm Treo five years ago and never looked back. The Treo and I enjoyed a solid two year relationship that was marred by a few hiccups, such as its proclivity for dying every six months. Eventually I tired of its antics and moved over to a BlackBerry, the worldphone.  It was a great change and I was very happy. It was Jack, the BB and Verizon a stalwart trio if ever there was one. The iPhone was introduced somewhere around this time and many people I knew made the move.

I did not. I had a bad experience with AT&T and their network a while back and saw no reason to switch. I watched as iPhone mania took over and admit that there were times that I wanted one. I listen to music constantly and wished that my iPod could be my phone too, but still I didn’t switch. RIM made my life easier by working out a relationship with Apple. So when I upgraded my BB to the then new Curve I was able to move 500+ songs to my phone.  And life was good again. But slowly I found myself growing weary of some shortcomings with the BB.

It was exacerbated by the happiness that many people found with their Driod phones. I was very impressed with the Droid X that @blindreviews showed me. That sucker is pretty cool and for a while I thought about picking one up. The main thing that kept me from switching is the price. Verizon simply charged far more than I wanted to pay for it.  One of these days I have to share my thoughts on how we are gouged by the cellphone providers, but that is a story for a different day. Anyhoo, the Droid X and I merely shared some flirtatious glances across a crowded room and I thought that would be it. I would wait a bit longer for the price to drop and then pick one up.

Except, I find myself intrigued with the idea of the iPhone. Now that it has made it over to Verizon I see myself eyeing that sucker and thinking about its sweet siren song. I am not a Mac person. Aside from the iPods there are no Apple products here, but I admit that there is something attractive about it. So I was intrigued to read what David Pogue thinks about the Verizon iPhone.

And to answer everyone’s question, the Verizon iPhone is nearly the same asAT&T’s iPhone 4 — but it doesn’t drop calls. For several million Americans, that makes it the holy grail.

That certainly catches my eye as does this:

In general, the Verizon and AT&T iPhones are identical. Same sleek, thin, satisfying, plastic-free body — all glass and metal. Same gorgeous, high-resolution screen — 960 by 640 pixels. Same battery life — you’ll need a recharge every night. Same camera on the back, which can take 5-megapixel stills or excellent hi-def video — the flash doubles as a video light. Same low-resolution camera on the front, suitable for Wi-Fi videochats, using Apple’s FaceTime software for iPhone or Mac.

Even the prices are about the same. The 16-gigabyte phone costs $200 with two-year contract. The monthly service costs, for example, $70 for unlimited voice calls, plus $20 for 5,000 text messages, plus $30 a month for unlimited Internet use. (Verizon says that it will soon eliminate that unlimited plan, just as AT&T recently did. Instead, you’ll pay something like $25 a month for 2 gigabytes of Internet data. Good luck figuring out how much that is.)

The single new feature in Verizon’s iPhone is Personal Hotspot, where the iPhone becomes a Wi-Fi base station. Up to five laptops, iPod Touches or other gadgets can get online, using the phone as a glorified Internet antenna.

Although, I have to concede that the price is still far above what I want to pay. The monthly service charges are significant, even though for me they are business related I never forget that I still have make the payment each month. Nor have I forgotten Apple’s proclivity for introducing new phones three days after the old one comes out. So I think for the time being I may sit and wait a bit longer. There really isn’t  a rush and I still haven’t decided about the touchscreen. I have big hands and there is something nice about having actual keys to press.

Decisions, decisions.

The Challenger

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I remember that day. I remember January 28, 1986 because it was one of those moments in time that you can’t forget. I was a junior at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, California. I was sitting in my AP History class when a student burst in and said that the Challenger had exploded. We thought that he was kidding but soon learned that he was not.

The networks ran the video footage of the explosion all day long. It was a moment that showed glimpses of a future when instant information would flood all sources of news and information with endless amounts of noise. That is one of the challenges of today, finding an effective way to sift through the noise so that we can determine what is significant and what is not.

Past posts:
The Challenger- Astronauts May have Lived Longer Than We Thought

The Gmail Second Thought Feature

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CNN has a nice write-up on what to do when you send an ill-advised email via Gmail. It is not a perfect solution, but…

The ability to “undo” an e-mail has been a little known feature of Google’s e-mail service since last year. But in the past few days, it appears to have been improved

Google Operating System, an unofficial blog that shares Google news and tips, noted this weekend that a user now has up to 30 seconds to take back an unfortunate message.
In reality, the feature doesn’t actually pull back an e-mail that’s already gone, it simply holds your message for 30 seconds before sending it out — just in case you change your mind.

An iPod is Not Ancient Technology

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They say that age is a state of mind, whomever they is anyway. Those same nameless, faceless people also say that you are only as old as you feel. I suppose that it is a good thing as I feel very young and know that I am far younger than The Shmata Queen.

Anyhoo, I recently took part in a group in which we discussed technology and how we use it within our daily lives. As part of the discussion the moderator took time to quiz us all on what sorts of gadgets we used on a regular basis. The collection of devices was fairly uniform. We all had computers and smartphones. All of us used them on a regular basis and agreed that they had become a big part of our lives.

It was a normal conversation that didn’t contain anything particularly noteworthy until the college student said that she also had really old technology- a first generation iPod. That got my attention, in large part because of the manner in which she said it.

In her eyes it really was old- so old that it made her part of the old timer’s club. I sat there for a moment absorbing the impact of her comment. I have a first generation iPod as well as the most current iPod Touch. But I hadn’t ever realized that I looked at the iPod as new technology.

It hadn’t ever occurred to me that the generation gap would be pronounced in this manner. We weren’t talking about rotary phones, typewriters or beepers. We were talking about something that isn’t very old as if it was a phonograph. We were talking as if it was an old turntable the played 33s, 45s and 78s.

I am not old enough to be spoken to like that. Call me sir and I still look for my father because you can’t be talking to me. But perception is a funny thing. Wasn’t that long ago that someone told me that I couldn’t possibly be in my forties- they figured me for 35. I smiled and then laughed because I remember when 35 was old.

And then I remember again how quickly life experiences change your perspective and point of view. It is almost a decade since 9/11. The girl who talked about the ancient iPod said that she was 20 or 21. Subtract a decade and you have a girl who was in grade school when the towers fell. She doesn’t remember how easy business travel used to be because she wasn’t old enough to have ever done it.

She doesn’t remember the fall of The Berlin Wall or the first Gulf War. Those things are history to her and I suppose to us too. But my generation and those older lived through them- we see them differently than just something we read about in our history classses.

And that my friend is why I left that place feeling a tad older than when I went in.

Late Thursday Night/Friday Morning

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“I know some things that you don’t
I’ve done things that you won’t
There’s nothing like a trail of blood
to find your way back home”
Life is Beautiful– SIXX:A.M.

Eighteen months ago I went to Circuit City and bought a new computer. It was an unusual purchase for me. Unusual because I purchased a floor model. I never buy floor models, at least not when it comes to electronics.

Floor models tend to be higher end items that are heavily discounted because as a floor model they have been used extensively. I tend to view floor models as being very similar to rental cars. People don’t take good care of them. Since it is not theirs, they have a tendency to beat the crap out of them.

A good salesman convinced me that this model had been thoroughly checked out. He swore that it had been taken care of and that I was getting a good deal. He did a good job of convincing me and sealed the deal by providing a serious break on an extended warranty.

If you haven’t figured it you, the new computer worked beautifully for a while and then began to give me all sorts of trouble. I ran the normal diagnostics, antivirus, spyware, defragged it and more. Never did find any nasty bugs hanging out there. Managed to get it running a bit faster, but not like it was.

Eventually I came to regret the purchase. At least once a month I seem to have some sort of issues with it. It might not actually be that frequent, but I have been soured upon it. Who knows, maybe it is aware that I dislike it and is acting out.

At the moment the freaking thing and I are engaged in war. Two weeks ago I purchased a new external hard drive from the nice folks at Seagate. It is supposed to be a plug-n-play model. It all worked fine for about a week and then I ran into some mysterious problem. The dread blue screen of death flashed and I spent hours fighting to get the damn thing working again.

I bought the external so that I could back up my important files. I didn’t think that my “just-in-case” preventative measure was going to be a problem. But apparently I was wrong and I just might plug in the recovery discs and start over.

I have managed to move about 75% of my files over to the backup, but still have a big chunk to take care of. So I am begging, pleading, praying and alternately threatening that damn thing. Let me get my files off and I’ll stop bugging you computer, really, this won’t hurt a bit.

In the interim I am working off of my BlackBerry and an older computer that my kids use. So I am getting things done, but not nearly as quickly as I would like. Double arghhhhhhhhh!