Tralfaz

Author: geoffand

  • That existential question – do I need a cell phone?

    Well, my contract is up with AT&T Mobile, and not surprisingly it coincides with an Apple product launch. New iPhones are in the air, and I am due for an upgrade from my 4s.

    But instead of diving in and getting the new 5s, I have been thinking a different way. Do I really need a cell phone?

    Since I haven’t been traveling much I haven’t really used many minutes on my plan.  I currently have over 5000 rollover minutes (which I think is the most that AT&T will let you accrue), so I certainly could trim back my plan to fewer minutes per month. (I think in the last two months I have used about 180 minutes total out of 1800 allocated (900 per month)) I do not get a phone through work, so I can conceivably just not be “available” when I am on the road – an attractive thought indeed.

    Yes, I like having my email, facebook and other apps at my fingertips throughout the day, but do I really need it?

    About 6 months ago, I was looking to reduce monthly outlays, and decided to not make any changes in my wireless communications. Mainly because I rely on the text messaging for my Google gmail two factor authentication. If I go back to standard security, then I no longer “need” a cell phone. (that was the determining factor at the time).

    Or, I could just give up the smartphone, and go with a feature phone. But AT&T has a whopping selection of only 7 models, and 3 are refurbs.

    I even thought of going to an Android phone a while back, and looked at the AT&T store. There is a wide range of quality and “goodness” of those devices. None of them really rocked my world.

    So, now that I can cancel my phone without penalty, I am considering going cell phone free. It might be liberating.

    $1,200 a year extra cash is appealing. But will I regret coughing up my digital leash?

  • PC Repair Theatre

    You might recall my bitching a few weeks ago about my work laptop. I foolishly dropped it and it landed on my iphone charger and broke the screen. That was in May. Mid August they figured pout what I needed to do to order a new panel to replace the broken one.

    The local, on site tech got the panel, but then the backlight didn’t work, so he called the HP support team in.

    Oh boy, what a fun story that is.  The original repair took three days, and went through two logic boards, and a second display. But they got it back together, and handed it to me on Aug 30th.

    Immediately I noticed that the USB ports on the left side were dead. Recommendation, install the drivers. I did. No joy.

    Our local tech was gone for a week on vacation, so I lived with bad USB ports. Not too much of a hardship.

    Today, the HP support person came back out. Didn’t believe that I had installed the drivers and tried that first. No joy. Replaced the system board. No joy. Thought it was the 16G ram in the system, replaced that, no joy, tried a new HD, no joy.

    So, tomorrow she will be back with yet another logic board, and we try again. I am back up on a loaner PC, and I had a very non-productive day.

    I hate windows laptops. I especially hate HP hardware (their printers, once the gold standard, now suck donkey balls, and their PC’s are all the bad things that was Compaq).

     

     

  • Must be Monday – 2 bluescreens by 8:00 AM

    Sigh. This is getting tiresome. I have not had such issues with computer crashes since I first went to Windows Vista in 2007. 

    I come in this morning and pop my computer on the docking station. It was sleeping happily, then I pressed the power button to “wake it up”. I get the familiar password screen, then BAM – blue screen.

    Fuck.

    Wait for it to finish the memory dump. Hmmm, IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_0, and a search of the internet tells me not much.

    Power it off and on again. It gets about 1/3 the way through booting, and BAM, another blue screen.

    Fuck.

    Third time is a charm. It is up, and I only took an hour to get to a ready state of working.

    Last week, the service people replaced my screen, several cables, and the logic board. Now I am getting lots of bluescreens. And my left side USB ports are dead. While they supply power, they do not recognize any devices attached.

    I hate this PC.

    Now to recover all the in progress documents.

  • Grocery Shopping Theatre – The beer selection

    The local Fry’s Foods is a smorgasbord of people watching. A few days ago, I was in the mood for beer, so I maundered in the alcohol aisle. In front of the cooler with the microbrews and imports was a gentleman (and that is a loose interpretation) who was idling in front of the good US micros.  I watched him hem and haw for a few minutes.

    One of my favorites, not as good now that it is owned by a major though
    One of my favorites, not as good now that it is owned by a major though

    I could almost see him thinking out loud: “I have $12, I can get a six pack of really good micro brew.  Or, I could get a 12 pack of a reasonable import.  What shall I buy?”

    Of course after wavering and standing in front of where I wanted to look for a few minutes, he walked over and bought a 30 pack of Miller Lite.  Obviously quantity won out over quality.

    I hope I am never that person.

  • Web Content Management Systems

    I have used several CMS’s over the years, from my time at Cisco with their internally developed system, and again starting in 2009 or so when I started working with WordPress and later Joomla! They are wonderful tools, but they do have some drawbacks.

    First the positives. Someone who is technically minded can setup a WordPress site, add a custom template, and have a pretty decent site in an afternoon. WordPress has grown a lot since I first started using it, and it is a pretty good environment to setup a public website, not just a blog. Joomla! is a bit more complex, but it is infinitely more customizable, and flexible. You can run a pretty complex site with options like project management, multiple vehicles of managing content and contributions, and even a pretty robust e-commerce site.

    Both platforms make it easy to create and modify content with either built in WYSIWYG editors, or extended editors as a plugin. That means that your contributors can easily create and maintain pretty complex content like the were creating a document in Microsoft Word.

    But that is also a problem as content is updated, modified, and changed. These WYSIWYG editors do all the html stuff on the back end, hiding the complexity from the user. They also do not create optimal html. Little glitches add up over time, and soon, if you have content that you update frequently you will need to either blow it away and restart, or drop into raw HTML mode to clean it up. Fortunately both platforms make this easy, as long as you know how to edit HTML.

    The second positive is the amount of customization possible. Both platforms have a great ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and packages. Joomla has a slight lead here, as the quality and support of these third party bits is quite good. WordPress has a lot more, but some of the components are buggy, or are security holes. Again, the community will help guide you to the best pieces.

    But there is a downside. I have been using Joomla for a couple years now, running one of my personal sites, as well as a non-profit site (Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption). I have done lots of experimenting, and sometimes it is a bit of a struggle to undo some changes.  At first, for the SA Greys site I had a testbed, but soon the two sites structurally diverged enough, that I really just keep the main site up now. Of course, with the coming of Joomla! 3.5 stable, I will be making a new version of the website (the hassle of finding and updating plugins and components to 3.0 compatible is a task that I don’t have the patience for, or the time to do. Time for a fresh start with all that I have learned in the past two years)

    This weekend, I am beginning the process of configuring a Joomla 3 site as a testbed, and that means replication and processing a lot of data. A fun activity for a cloudy, rainy Sunday.

    (This post is a little diversion from the tedious documenting of the current site.)

  • Bad neighbors – Party goes Wild

    A little over a year ago, we moved from our “edge of civilization” house in Tucson to Chandler, a much more standard suburban setting. For the most part it has been a pretty good experience.

    But there has been a soft underbelly. We live next door to a house with a just graduated high school baseball player (presumably he is playing ball in college as well) who seems to love having loud parties. Throughout spring and early summer, the night for these parties was Tuesday, and they were not too bad, but still annoying. However as time went on, they became bigger and rowdier. A couple months ago, we started alerting the police (after midnight, we are not ogres), and that seemed to quench the growth.

    But they learned to have a lookout for the cops, and would quickly quiet up and turn off the lights. The cops would look around, see nothing and move on. 20 minutes later it was in full roar, again. Sigh.

    Last night they had a rager. When my wife took the dogs out to potty at 11PM, the yard was full, the house was full, and even the balcony on the neighbors patio was filled with people. We left it alone, but at 1:00AM it got (hard to believe it) even louder. So, a call to the police. This time, they came out in force, at least 6 cars, one k9 unit, and they processed the people on the neighbor’s lawn. The police even hunted for those inevitable “hiders” who try to become invisible.  That took well over an hour. Perhaps it was all the clear underage drinking.

    One of the annoying things about these parties besides the noise, is the fact that those who attend and smoke seem to think nothing about flicking their butts into our yard (and presumably the other yards adjacent to them). Really annoying to have to clean up after someone else’s party.

    Where are the parents you might say?  Well, I don’t know for certain, but their cars were in the driveway, so I have to assume that they either knew about the party, or helped with its execution. In any case, they can’t possibly deny that they knew what was going on.

    (Update: As I write this, two women walked out of their house, looking pretty trashed, and drove away.)

    This morning, as I was picking up the debris from the party that found its way to our yard, I peeked over the fence. Their yard looks like WWIII. I hope the son has to clean it up with a raging hangover.

    In Tucson, there was an ordinance that if a party was loud enough to require the police to come break it up, they got a lovely red sticker on their window or door, easily visible, that signifies that this house had been a subject of a noise complaint, and that sticker must remain up for 180 days. Sadly, Chandler could use a similar ordinance.

  • Another plus for Apple Support

    A while back, while we were on a trip, my wife dropped her 13″ MacBook pro. It was not the first time she dropped it, but it was enough to kill it. (it was a short distance on to a carpeted floor in the hotel).

    She got home and I did some diagnosis. The hard drive wasn’t recognized. I used all my tools, and assumed that it was just a bad HD, and that we could replace it easily enough. But to be sure, I dropped in a spare I knew to be good. No dice. Still not visible to the system (but it would boot from an external enclosure with the original drive I thought was bad.

    So I was stumped. My wife was crushed and sure it would cost a fortune to repair, so she suffered without it for a few weeks. Finally on Monday she scheduled a visit to the Apple store with their Genius bar. I got dragged along, and gave the helpful tech what I tried, and what I suspected next (HD cable (low probability) or logic board (most likely)).

    We were informed that it was 163 days out of warranty (the three year AppleCare plan) so the laptop is 3.5 years old.

    I got to watch their testing process, and I was impressed. They plug into an ethernet cable and start a network boot. That boots a series of tool to diagnose the system, and confirmed what I told them.  They used a few other tools, and decided to try to replace the HD cable. Told us to give them a phone number and that it would take probably 30 minutes.  Fortunately there is a kick ass Gelato shop about 100 yards away, and a Total Wines so we had Ice Cream and bought some tequila.

    Turned out that replacing the cable did the trick and it booted right up. Parts were $17, and a $39 charge for the labor, $56 + tax and we were out on our way home.

    Compare that with the broken display on my work HP laptop. It took 3 months to figure out how to order it, then 2 weeks to get it, and when the tech put it in, it didn’t work, so it became a warranty issue. I ended up with a new logic board, new display and new RAM after 3 days of their “next day service” dicking around (to be fair, their tech was helpful and friendly, much better than the shitheads that work for Dell.)

    (Another benefit, with their CRM system when I go in with a dead iPhone, even long out of warranty, they look me up, and all the products I have bought from them, and they have always fixed/replaced my iPhones without charge. I went through 3 iPhone 3GS’s in the 6 months before I upgraded to my current iPhone 4s. They do take care of loyal customers.)

  • Glad and Sad

    While I am not a religious watcher of The Daily Show, I do take in 2 or 3 episodes a week captured on the Tivo, and I have long enjoyed it. Jon Stewart does a phenomenal job of entertaining, while actually achieving some semblance of journalistic integrity (mixed in with a healthy dollop of humor, there are many insightful perspectives).

    Jon had been out on a sabbatical to direct a film in Egypt and Jordan for most of the summer. Now, he’s back, so yay! Of course the first episode back was epic, and of all the major media outlets, Jon Stewart’s take on the Syria crisis makes the most sense.

    But I am sad in a way. While Jon was on hiatus, John Oliver stepped in and did a brilliant job hosting the show. I always thought he was a good asset to the show, but his performance at the helm almost made me forget that Jon Stewart was ever there. Yes, he was that good. He deserves a show (beyond his stand up gig), but it is hard to see where he can fit with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central.

    Hopefully, he finds a happy home and we can then have three outstanding comedian shows to watch.

  • Woo hoo! I am a security Risk!

    A post I entered earlier got flagged by a friend’s work internet filter.

    I have been blocked! How awesome is that.

    He gets this when he tries to surf to this site:

    Clicked the link to read your post… while here at KT. Here’s what I got:

    Your requested URL has been blocked by the Global Threat Intelligence Reputation System. The URL is listed with a reputation that is not allowed by your administrator at this time.

    I guess you’re a security threat, Geoff.

     

    How awesome is that!

  • Making my job bearable – The Bose headphones

    A while back I commented on the disappointment I experienced with my Bose QuietComfort 2’s broke (plastic fatigue) and the AWESOME support that got me a new set of better headphones for << 1/2 price.

    I work in a cubicle farm. My cube is about 10′ from my boss, who is also in a cube, and I am up against an engineer’s cube who like to hum. Fortunately the Bose headphones are a godsend. Add in Spotify, and I have kick ass jams to keep my day rolling.

    The one thing I like about my new headphones is that the battery (single AAA) lasts about twice as long as in my original QuietComfort 2’s. Not only that, I get about 12 hours when it starts flashing at me that it is getting low, and I can tell when the sound becomes distorted enough to hear, I have to change the battery.

    Win – Win – Win.