T-Mobile Sucks (Or how I got an iPhone)

7/4/2007

On Saturday, when my Blackberry 7100t crashed three times, I was annoyed but not concerned. It crashed a few more times on Sunday, so I wiped and reinstalled it. The phone was ok all Monday, but on Tuesday, mid-conversation, the speaker went out. I rebooted it a few times, and even disassembled it to clean it out. Nothing helped. The trusty Blackberry was toast (or jam?)

This was a big problem, since I’m on-call this week, and have some precariously-balanced systems that I expect to fail very soon.

I’ve been a T-mobile customer for ten years. I’ve paid for the insurance on my phones the whole time. At about $6/month, I’ve more than paid for several phones. I called the aptly-named “Assurion” company, who, after much wrangling, said the best they could do was to send me a new phone “within five to seven business days.” No word on what I’d do before then.

I called T-mobile customer care. After arguing for half and hour, the fastest they could get me a phone would involve signing a new two-year contract and paying $230 to “upgrade” to a new Blackberry Pearl.

“Since I’ll have to sign a contract anyway, why should I not go to the Apple store and buy an iPhone?”

“… Sir, you could do that, and we’d hate to lose you as a customer, but we don’t have a loaner program for the Blackberry phones.”

“Right. Enjoy your unemployment, when AT&T or Sprint buys T-Mobile at fire sale prices.” Click.

Oh, and yes, the iPhone is worth all the hype.


Roommate Stories

6/3/2007

Roommate from Hell

When I was in college, I had the worst. roommate. ever. We’ll call him C. C was a heavy-metal redneck cowboy. This meant he only wore black, but wore cowboy boots. He was a big Pantera fan, too.

C smoked non-stop, and he drank Coke non-stop. He’d constantly hawk up snot and spit it in half-empty Coke cans that he’d also use for ash trays.

C never cleaned, because cleaning was ‘women’s work’.

The worst habit was that C never flushed the toilet, if he peed in it.

I came back to school one Sunday night after being gone all weekend, and opened the door to a terrible stink: C had peed in the toilet and left it to sit, unflushed, for a long three-day weekend.

“C, what the hell is wrong with you? Why can’t you flush the toilet like a human?”

“If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Back home we have a septic tank, and you’re supposed to let pee sit for a while before you flush it.”

“C, you idiot, we’re on city sewage lines here. Flush the damn toilet.”

I knew this wasn’t going to sink in, since nothing else did, so I waited. Until Thursday, when C went home. I ate a footlong Subway steak ‘n cheese sandwich, then waited for the demons to brew in my bowels.

I filled the dorm toilet with a roiling brown soup of stinking death, opened the bathroom door and shut all the windows. Then I turned the AC off, and left quickly.

I returned Sunday night to find the dorm room door open, the windows open, and two new box fans in the windows. The stink, though faint, was horrible.

“Dear holy Christ, what did you /do/ in there?! And why didn’t you flush the toilet?!”

“Well, C, if it’s brown, let it mellow, right?”

“NO! If it’s brown, flush it DOWN!”

“Oh, sorry, I have a bad memory for that kind of thing. Tell you what, if you can remember to flush, maybe I’ll remember to flush.”

Toothpaste

Even after I’d potty-trained C, he was still a filthy pig. He had long wispy black hair (so metal) that he’d leave everywhere, especially in the bathroom. He resolutely refused to clean up after himself, and would leave blobs of white toothpaste with black hairs encrusted in them all over the sink and counter.

I started the training with a few tales of scary bugs in the bathroom. “Man, I saw the biggest freakin’ bug in the bathroom. I think it was a roach, but it was 3″ long. Damn thing looked pregnant too.”

C just grunted, and continued smoking his cigarettes and reading his R. A. Salvatore book.

At the grocery store, I picked up a little box of raisins. Once C was gone, I grabbed his toothpaste, and shoved the boxful of raisins, one at a time, down into the tube. I mashed the tube around so the raisins were well-mixed.

A few days later, I heard a very concerned “What the hell?” coming from the bathroom. “Dude, come look at this!”

C held up his toothbrush, and on it, surrounded by white toothpaste, perched a small, blackened, wrinkled, shriveled .. thing.

“It looks like an egg case,” I said. “Maybe from one of those bugs I saw in here.”

C’s face paled. “Oh.. crap..”

“Yeah, it looks like those things like toothpaste, and this bathroom’s not the cleanest place in the world. Check for more of ’em.”

He squeezed the tube into the sink, and blop! blop! squirted dozens more of the ‘egg cases’. “Oh God, I’m gonna be sick!”

I left to the happy sound of him horking his guts out.

When I came back, the bathroom had been fully sanitized and roach-sprayed.

From then on, C kept his toiletry items safely interred in airtight (and bug-proof) plastic containers.


MySpace Style Remover

5/30/2007

MySpace: where good webdesign went to die. When Tripod was still around, I thought we’d seen the worst that amateur “web designers” could inflict on the web. Boy, was I wrong.

Luckily, this Greasemonkey MySpace Style Remover script quietly cleans MySpace pages of their screeching embedded emo music, their 90 hot-linked animated photo albums, their 2MB .bmp background images, and reduces them to the boring, quiet, ugly MySpace default.


AppleTV Luvvin’

5/3/2007

Because I am a hopeless slut for Apple, I got the AppleTV a week or so ago. I figured it’d be like most toys that I get — I’d play with it for a few days, then get bored and put it away. Wii. After a few hours, no freakin’ way. This thing rocks.

First, I didn’t realize how nice it was to have something that seamlessly integrated iTunes with my component stereo system. I have my Tivo set up to do this, but the Tivo/iTunes navigation is painful and slow. Now, listening to iTunes via my stereo works great, and it works with my regular Harmony remote for my TV and stereo.

Second, I desperately needed a widget that would bridge the gap from computer to TV. I just didn’t know it. I’ve never really watched movies on my computer — the screen was too small, the sound wasn’t quite right, and there’s just something wrong with watching a movie while sitting in an office chair.

I discovered TVShows at about the same time as I got the ATV. TVShows is a fairly simple little app that lets you subscribe to TV shows, scours the RSS feeds of popular torrent sites, then auto-launches your bittorrent client to download episodes when they’re available. [Yeah, this is a legal grey area. Whatever.] TVShows + BT is arguably just as useable as cable TV + Tivo: the latest House downloaded about three hours after it aired, and the newest Family Guy episode completed just fifteen minutes after it aired.

A downside to torrented shows is that they’re usually encoded as XViD .avi, which the ATV won’t play. On the Mac, I use the free FFMPEGX app to transcode to h.264. On WinXP, I use Nero Recode, which is OK but pricey.

Having some TV shows viewable on my TV is not really new. The new thing, the concept where the ATV excels, is this: I can now rip my DVDs to h.264 and store them all in a media library.???? I’ve had the drive space, but I haven’t had the ability to watch them on my TV. Now I can.

I don’t have very many movies that I want to watch over and over, but the ones that I like, I want ready access. With these movies now safely and securely stored in my redundant media library, I can watch them whenever. I don’t have to fiddle with cases, or the DVD player’s balky eject button. As a bonus, clearing all those DVD cases off my shelves gave me lots more free space.


Classic Mac Sounds

4/4/2007

I stumbled across Sagefire’s post of a collection of Classic Mac Sounds.Yay! I now have the original “Wild Eep” sound!


Balt Seatflex Chair

3/27/2007

Yay! For Income Tax Return Day, Heather got me a Balt Seatflex office chair.
I sit in one of these most of the day at work, and they’re awesome. The bungee-cord-like seat material provides great support, and since there’s not a lot of it, the seat doesn’t get hot or uncomfortable.

Thanks, Heather!


IBM – Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 4 Update 3 – IBM System x3550

3/21/2007

Supposedly, this page will tell me how to make Red Hat work with the Adaptec SATA RAID controller on my new IBM x3550. We’ll see.

Update: well, no, not really. From what I found, the only way to get RHEL4 to see that controller was to download the single disk image, of about 30, that worked with both that particular controller and that particular version and release of RHEL.

Also, a hearty “screw you” to IBM for lumping all their drivers on a single page. Also also, an even heartier “screw you” to IBM for requiring floppy images for servers that don’t even ship with floppy drives.