Who cares?

    

How does it feel? 2004/07/01

Some will say I have no compassion, but I will write this anyway.

A document was found on radical islamist websites some months ago by researchers at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). The resulting research is fascinating.

If the document was authentic, it was prophetic, and tragic, resulting in the death of 119 innocent civilians in Spain. But I wonder, to those that survived, how does it feel?

How does it feel to be rightly judged “the weakest link?”

How does it feel to be so brutally manipulated by thugs and murderers?

How does it feel to know that your fellow citizens’ died in vain, only ensuring the killers to get their way?

Even Clinton advisor Dick Morris saw the contrast between the will of the Americans and Spanish stating “Americans will likely react the opposite from their Spanish counterparts - we'll rally around the president…”

You should be ashamed of yourself. Hang your head Spain. You have no spine to hold it up.

Following the class action pack? 2004/06/18

My employer, BEA recently had a fairly large hit to their stock price. The drop in stock price is not what I want to discuss here. What I want to talk about is the class action vulchers.

It's like they are circling, waiting for a company to show the slightest sign of illness. Check this out:

  • Stull, Stull & Brody
  • Law Offices of Marc S. Henzel
  • Law Firm of Schiffrin & Barroway, LLP
  • Geller Rudman
  • Schatz & Nobel, P.C.
  • Law Offices of Charles J. Piven, P.A.

    • Class action lawsuit have a stunning record of enriching lawyers, while those allegedly wronged get a stipend or less. What appears to be the standard practice for payment is that the lawyers get 30% of a settlement. So the larger the settlement, the larger the payout. But usually to get that large settlement, it also requires a large class action group. Meaning the remaining 70% is split amongst the total group of plaintiffs. So lawyers get zillions, the plaintiffs get pennies. It is embarrassing. Let me give some illustrations.

     Case  Lawyer got  plaintiff got  percentage 
     Citibank  $7,200,000  $18 million split among 20 million customers -- checks were for as little as 4 cents.  0.000000056% 
     Microsoft  $330,000,000  vouchers worth from $5 to $29  No real value. Future products priced to include settlement costs. 

    Clearly the system is broken. In researching this I found this organization that focuses quite a bit of energy on exposing this. In interest of equal time, these dopes glory in them.

    Will this never end? 2004/02/11

    Received a bill in the mail from AT&T Wireless for $243.25. At 7:15 PM I called the customer service number, punched in my phone number and was told the average wait time was “in excess of 20 minutes.” Didn’t want to wait that long, so I hung up.

    Called back at 8:45 PM, at which time there was only a wait time of "in excess of 10 minutes." Wesley answered and the first thing out of his mouth was "What is your phone number." Wow. Why did I enter it? I asked Wesley, he said it was to gain access to the system, but he does not get the numbers.

    I explained my situation. He said he needed to research the account. Back onto hold, and after 10 minutes of hold, the recorded voice told me I would be transferred to the next available representative and the average wait time was "in excess of 20 minutes." Waited. Waited. Hung up.

    Called back at 10:07 PM the average wait time was "in excess of 20 minutes." Got Bryce. He said he could credit my account for everything except the phones, as it takes 30 days for the credit to be processed through the system before it can be investigated.

    After a bit of pressure, he agreed to start the investigation process on the returned phones, even though the 30 days had not passed. Completed the information gathering and hung up at 11:14 PM.

    This company is makes Verizon's "we suck less" sound like business plan brilliance.

    ... and Continues 2004/01/26

    Called AT&T’s “National Accounts” and spoke to a very polite man named Christian. He apologized for the inconvenience and assured me the account was canceled and there would be no charge to me.

    The Saga Continues 2004/01/24

    I returned the phones in person to the AT&T wireless store. The took the phones but were unable to terminate the service due to it being opened through “national accounts.” They are not working on the weekend, so I would have to call them on Monday.

    My first 'blog 2004/01/16

    jobs

    I've had a pretty busy week. It started out by finding out that my team will definitely be reorganized to a different org structure. This is sad and good at the same time. My current boss, Steve, is awesome. But my new boss, Nick, is a reasonable guy. I don't expect him to live up to being Steve, but I will give him room to surprise me. As an aside, for a manager to look visionary, he should centralize things that are distributed, and distribute things that are centralized. This reorg is no exception. The organization is going to change from being aligned along functional lines, to being centralized. I'll still work closely with Steve, still sit in the same office, still have the same great team, and hopefully still be left alone to do my job, and given support with things get hectic. Yet I will soon report to Nick. But I like Nick's take on it -- "If it doesn't work out, we just hit ctrl-z and go back."

    bad phone karma

    On Thursday, I finally got fed up with my cell-phone and decided it was time to do something about it. I've been with my current carrier for 12 years, six phones, three phone numbers, and three name changes. In 1992 they were U.S. West, then AirTouch, and now Verizon.

    While named AirTouch, they earned the moniker "scare touch." They were notorious for having lousy customer service. As an example, at one point my wife's old analog phone had been hacked and cloned. The carrier noticed that my phone was making calls from Seattle and Chicago at the same time, and then made a cursory attempt to contact me. That night, I was to meet my wife in downtown Seattle and we were going to call each other to connect up. But every time I attempted to call I got this weird error message, and the call failed. The carrier had disconnected the line, leaving me unable to contact my wife. Gee, thanks for the help. So I ordered new digital phones to replace the aging and vulnerable analog phones. A week and a half later, still no phones at the house and my follow calls uncovered that the phones order had not in fact been placed and it would be yet another week before the phones, now properly ordered, would arrive. I canceled the order went to the store and bought them off of the shelf.

    So why keep going back to them? Isn't that like sniffing the sour milk, retching, and then putting it back in the 'fridge just to repeat the process on another day? I suppose it is because of what I believe cell phones are for. First and foremost, they are for talking. When I get in my plane to fly off to some far remote place like the San Juan Islands, I believe that I should still be able to use my phone to talk. And Verizon has a very excellent coverage footprint. I've said in the past, I hate Verizon's service, but I love their services. When the phone works, it is awesome. When I have talk to one of their customer support reps, I want to commit felonies.

    Having the ability to pull a device from my pocket that allows me to ring bell in most every home in developed world, or a similar device on millions of others, and conversely others can ring my device is a fascinating convenience. I frequently ponder how I lived before cell phones were invented.

    PDAs are another interesting gizmo -- essentially an electronic day timer that hangs on your belt or fits in your pocket like a wallet. But I do not want another gadget on my belt or a wallet in my pocket. When I worked at Nordstrom, I had a company supplied pager and my own cell phone. I would get paged, only to pull out my phone to call them. Why didn't they just call me? Even if I did not answer they could leave a voice mail. Anyway, I think that two communication devices are too many. And a PDA is really just a device for communicating with yourself. "HEY, TIME TO GO TO THAT MEETING!" Oh yeah.

    I want a phone / PDA combo. These have existed for a while but they never lived up to what I thought the primary function of the phone should be, that of talking from where ever I was. Nearly every one was based on a technology that did not work with a Verizon's wide coverage area.

    About a year ago, my digial startac started acting up on me, and I headed to the Verizon store to pick out a new phone. There on the shelf was a fancy color display Motorola 720 phone with a set of PDA like features! It even had optional "sync to outlook" accessories.

    I bought it, and I have regretted it ever since.

    How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

  • After paying an additional $80ish for the synchonization software and cable (available on e-bay for under $20 -- my bad.), running the synchronization program caused the cell phone to lock up not turn on. Verizon gave me a new phone.

  • The synchronization software would crash my computer while updating the phone’s calendar. (I loved the error message it gave: "An error occurred and log is being created. OK?" NO, IT IS NOT OK!) I spent several hours on the phone with Motorola "technical support" (which was neither) during which they adamantly denied that the crashing program was malfunctioning. They asserted that since it never crashed at their site, the problem must be on our corporate Exchange server's database. I attempted to counter that this was unlikely as Outlook did not crash while using the same data. Tech support didn't see the connection. I eventually discovered that if Outlook Web Access is used to move a mail item to a calendar the item was not converted to a calendar item. When the sync program found the mail item in the calendar data set, it crashed.

  • Contact items that had only one name (like "Home") are not successfully reconciled and end up being duplicated.

  • There are excessive restrictions to what a recurring event can be. First is that a recurring event cannot have an end. If there are only ten occurrences of a meeting, or the recurrences only exists until the end of the year, the event will not be added to the calendar.

  • The next restriction is that a recurring meeting cannot occur multiple times in the same recurrence period. So if an event is scheduled for Monday and Thursday, the event is not be added to the calendar. The error actually said, "A recurring event cannot occur more than once a day, week, month, or year." Well that about covers it.

  • The belt clip is weak -- on three counts. The phone does not stay in the holster, the holster randomly disconnects from the belt clip, and the metal spring that forms the belt clip deforms and falls off my belt. Could you make it any more worthless?

  • Fearing that the belt clip would not retain the phone at the carnival, I put it in my pocket only to have it crushed by the ride's seat belt. Verizon gave me a second new phone.

  • The phones display is slow. Often scrolling through the phone book I would hit the scroll button and buffer the events and scroll past the person I wanted to call.

  • There is no way to navigate to the middle of a letter. So if you have like 30 people's names that start with an "S" and you want to call the one in the middle, you have to position to the first "S" and start scrolling to the 15th.

  • The address book always repositions back to the beginning. So if I am calling the guy from middle of the "S" range, and I call the "home" entry and do not reach him, and then want to call the "mobile" entry, the positioning process must be repeated.

  • The text based browser is too small and to slow to be of any value. For instance, if I want to check my yahoo stock portfolio, I start the browser (30 seconds) select portals and directories (ten seconds) select yahoo (six seconds) select finance (six seconds) select my portfolios (six seconds) select the portfolio (six seconds) and minute and four seconds later I discover I spent more money on air time than I made in the market that day.

  • The browser does not display graphics so looking at the traffic map while mobile is not an option. Why make a cool color graphics display and then make it text only?

  • When receiving "instant" messenger messages, the phone would receive a text message indicating that there was an "instant" messenger message waiting. I have to start the browser, go through the connection process and then use the painfully slow navigation process to get to the place where I could read the message. What would be so wrong about just displaying the message?

  • If I start the call with out the ear set and then switch to using the ear set mid call, I can still hear the person on the other end, but they cannot hear me. Hanging up and calling back rectifies the problem.

  • While on ear set, I cannot answer or end a call without removing the phone from the belt clip, opening it, and pressing the answer button.

  • Voice entries for the phone book are not retained by the synch software. If I back up the contact list and then restore it, the voice entry indication stays with the entry, but the actual voice dialing entry is no longer present.

    I think you get the idea by now.

    the leap

    Wednesday I finally broke down, hating the phone enough to commit two nearly unspeakable sins. I got a GSM phone from AT&T wireless with the smaller coverage area, and I bought the MPx200 Windows Smart Phone -- from Motorola.

    I went to Verzion first. They wanted $500 for the Samsung smart phone. When confronted with the competitive pricing offer of less than half, heck, nearly a third, they offered to take a $100 off, remaining over $200 more expensive. I went to AT&T and ordered the new service over the phone. AT&T said the phone would be fed-exed to me. Sure enough when I got home Thursday night the new phone was waiting.

    Now this is a cool phone. It has the windows XP like color scheme, and the organizer navigation is snappy. It came with the synchronization software, and cute USB connection cradle that also charges the battery, the coolest is the ability to use the IR port to synchronize. And the synchronization actually knows how to synchronize. Amazing.

    the sudden stop at the bottom

    Oddly, it did not come with a belt clip. And there was some assembly required. I had to put in my own SIM chip. After assembling it, I had no service. The signal strength display showed the max signal, and the phone clearly displayed "No Service."

    I re-read the manual and I called AT&T to find out what I had done wrong or if there was some additional step I had over looked. The customer support representative was friendly and courteous, but could not help me because there is a separate group that supports the "next generation" phones. She attempted to connect me to them, but could not because according to her records, my phone number did not exist, nor did my order. She eventually passed me off to the "next generation" who assured me that it can take up to 24 - 48 hours to get the phones activated. Pretty odd that they can get the phone shipped to me before they can get it turned on.

    Yet even more odd is that I'm still sitting here early Saturday morning with no service. What I have is a folding PDA with a $50 a month fee.

    This phone is going back too.

    Introduction 2004/01/16

    A couple of months back my coworker, Rod, took some time off of being a software engineer and set off to write weblogs, or just blogs for short, and for some reason there is no apostophy at the beginning. Blogs are kind of like public diaries. Folks write down what they are thinking or doing, and post it to a website for all to see. Rod observed that there are several styles of blogs and several content models for blogs.

    The world is divided up in to two kinds of people, those who categorize people, and those who do not. Rod falls into the former.

    The style category is really about frequency and persistance. Some like Dave or Joel blog pretty regularly, where as others like Adam, blog every now and then. And then others like Carl, start a blog and that's all. I hope to fall somewhere between the first two. I don't want to feel compelled to write all the time, but if I have something to say, I'll try to say it.

    As for content models, many weblogs are about technical stuff, while some are just random musing about cats and airplanes. I will probably end up in the latter.

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