Category: Geek

Had a mini-disaster a few nights ago and corrupted most of my email inbox (long story), slashing my “To respond to” list from ~150 to ~20. After the initial “Oh, crap” reaction, a strange feeling of peace washed over me, and lingers. Can’t tell you what a relief it is to have that much perceived obligation erased in a flash. I do feel bad about all those great unanswered threads vanishing into ether, but ultimately, it was like getting a big stinky boot off my neck. 

After witnessing newfound lightness in my step, Amy has promised to start deleting random blocks of messages from my inbox.

From time to time, raving pays off. Got SBC Maintenance on the phone this morning and they activated service in under an hour — four days before scheduled activation. Set the service up tonight. Goal was not to have to use the installer CD and all the crap that comes along with it. The last thing I wanted was a corporate monolith sticking god knows what god knows where in the bowels of the OS.

Turns out that the key to sidestepping the installer CD is knowing in advance the initial PPPoE user/pass, so you can pre-feed your router. Obviously.com to the rescue. Once the initial connection is made, SBC does this weird thing where you have just enough DNS to access their online registration page, without being able to access any other sites. And the registration page — surprise — only works in Explorer. Of course they don’t tell you this. What you get in Safari or Firefox is a full-screen form with no Submit button. Nice work, jerk-brains. Only going by hunch did I think to launch IE and complete the signup. What this means for all new Tiger users with no legacy copy of Explorer sitting around is anybody’s guess.

And it’s fast. Ran a speed test at dslreports.com, and we’re getting 1.12 Mbps downstream — reasonably close to our 1.5Mbps cap. Not lightning by today’s standards, but almost 100% faster than we were getting with Speakeasy, and at 1/3 the cost.

Short story: As much as yesterday’s experience put a bad taste in my mouth, as much I was prepared to regret our decision to switch, you just can’t touch the speed and price anywhere else in the broadband market. I’ll really miss Speakeasy, but for a measly $11/month extra, we just got cable TV and doubled our DSL speed. I’ll stop complaining now.

Come home to find DSL offline. Speakeasy has been incredibly reliable for us over the past couple of years, so I find it suspicious that it should go offline five days before activation date for the switch to SBC. Call Speakeasy, they can’t bring up the line. Dude suspects someone has “pulled the crossover,” whatever that means. Call SBC, who tell me that DSL takes five days to activate, so this is normal. “Normal?,” I ask. I was very specific with the salesperson that this was a “switch” order from another provider, and that cancellation of Speakeasy and activation of SBC would happen on the same day. Big downtime was not an option for me. On this particular I could not have been more clear.

“We have no record of any technician starting the conversion, sir.”

“But you also just told me that conversion normally starts five days before activation, right? And it’s exactly five days before scheduled activation. Doesn’t it kind of seem obvious that an SBC tech knocked my existing service offline prematurely?”

Silence.

“Hello?”

“Yes?”

“Sigh. You say you have no record of work being done, but you also say that you “normally” take people offline five days before activation. While the salesperson guaranteed that cancellation and activation would happen the same day.”

“Sir, you’ll need to talk to our maintenance department. But they’re closed.”

God, dialup sucks. And Mail.app gets really ornery when the connection type gets changed out from under it, which sticks me with webmail (saving my litany of complaints about Mail.app for another day).

So, “Beispeil #22” that you get what you pay for. Low-cost service means corporate armies of uninformed, low-tech employees reading from scripts while customer sits in limbo. Will take on the drones tomorrow. Worth it? We’ll see.

Your sound I understand the languages.

I don’t understand the languages.

I hear only your sound.

The sun is shining slowly

The birds are flying so low.
Honey you’re my one and only,

So pay my what you owe me.
Beispiel Nummer zweiundzwanzig.

- Laurie Anderson, (Example #22.)

Preparing OS X master disk images for student/staff/faculty Macs for the upcoming school year, decided it would be cool to give them some starter RSS and iCal subscriptions. I wrote an RSS generator for our events database quite a while ago, and realized it wouldn’t be too hard to modify the same PHP script to also spit out .ics with the same data. Used Apple’s Developer Connection page on writing to the .ics format and filled in a few blanks with the IETF’s documentation.

Hit a roadblock when iCal refused to subscribe my initial feed attempts, then realized they’re very serious about .ics having CRLF line endings. Tweaked that and it worked neatly.

Mac users click here for instant subscription. Other .ics users can subscribe manually via http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/jschool_events.ics . (Note you currently have to go back to May to see any content; that will change as the next event cycle begins in September).

I’ve complained for years that I can never seem to get out in front of the email inbox. One of the most continuously frustrating aspects of my job is that a million small distractions conspire to prevent me from tackling larger projects, and I know I’m not alone in this.

The problem for many workers is not just the amount of communication, but the fact that it takes time to mentally “shift gears” and sink fully into a larger task after handling a piece of communication (it takes the average person eight minutes to return to a creative state after an interruption).

Many workers today feel too connected, and are beginning to rebel against connectedness itself. Personally, I’ve found that I become more productive when I shut down my email client completely and just deal with mail in larger batches two or three times a day. I rarely enable iChat for the same reason, as useful as it can be at times. CNET:

“It used to be: ‘I’ve got to be online, it’s so frustrating that I can’t get on,'” said Chris Capossela, a vice president in Microsoft’s Information Worker unit. “Now that’s happened. People are ultraconnected. And you know what? Now they are starting to realize, ‘Wow, I want to actually stop getting interrupted.'”

Interesting that Veritas’ marketing department has actually implemented “email-free Fridays” for the same reason.

The “Slow E-Mail Movement” is probably inspired by the slow food movement.

With so many mail scanners rejecting mail with .zip attachments (which so often carry malware payloads), some sites are moving to a “.piz policy.” Need to send a .zip attachment? Rename it to filename.piz and instruct recipient to rename it back. A pain in the neck, but effective if you can manage the user education component. Hopefully .tgz will remain unsullied for a while, but I predict that all compression formats are ultimately doomed as simple attachment formats.