The netbook has arrived in time for Vietnam. I’ve already installed skype, apache2 and the jdk6. Here is a self portrait:
My netbook's self portrait
And, of course, the WordPress admin interface seems to work just fine. :-)
Slashdot.org has article on the naming of computer servers, so I thought I’d share.
When I started at my current job, we got to name the computers that sat in our offices. I named my first server “merckx,” after the most decorated road cyclist of all time. For the first couple of months, my co-workers could never remember the order of the consonants in his name.
A few years later, I upgraded my development machine to another box and I named it “indurain.” He was the latest (at the time) 5-time winner of the Tour de France. My co-workers we pleased that that was a least phonetic.
The team grew and I got to name another machine: “hinault.” Yet another 5-time winner of the bike race. Yes, I have a one track mind. He name is pronounced EEE-no so I had to spell it out for my colleagues for them to access it.
Keeping with the trend, I named the next one “anquetil.” Yet another French name.
Within days our IT staff decided that they would take over responsibility for naming our servers from that point on.
If you don’t get this, it is probably because you have a life…
I thought this was funny.
Then I proceeded to e-mail the image, from the desktop computer in the basement, to my wife.
She, meanwhile, e-mailed me back telling me to come upstairs.
I think I’ll stop blogging now.
I rarely go on eBay. After about five years, my feedback score is a whopping 11 transactions.
I do however use eBay when the going price elsewhere is more than I want to spend. I was looking for a car charger for my cell phone and somebody had an auction for a new one last week. The guy was throwing in a holster for the phone too. And I had the winning bid of $0.01. Yes, one penny.
But this morning I was fiddling with the holster and, at a weak point in the plastic, it broke.
A half a penny wasted.
I am putting the finishing touches on my family’s Christmas letter. It will appear on this website sometime next week.
There are three phases to writing the annual letter:
(a) create a list of what the family did over the past year, then
(b) convert the list to witty letter with warm wishes, and finally
(c) remove the paragraphs where Chris indicates I’ve shared too much.
This takes me more effort than it should. I do put the time in because, unlike this blog, more than handful of people read it. I worked on portions of the Word document on my lunch hour and I dragged it between work and home on a tiny flash drive that I keep on my keychain.
In addition to writing the letter, I’ve been busy with work, holiday activities, and (a relatively recent development) fending calls from contracting firms. Yesterday I got a call from a woman who got my resume off my website and wanted it in Microsoft Word format. Recruiters and contracting firms want resumes in Word format so they can edit resumes before forwarding them onto potential clients. You can’t do that with PDF files, which is why the resume on my website is a PDF file.
Anyway, against better judgement I said I’d e-mail my resume to her a mutable format. After all, its just a drag-and-drop from my keychain too. And this morning, after firing off the e-mail, I got a response…
“Hi Ken, Thank you for sending me your holiday letter! Sounds like you have a wonderful family. … Would you be able to send me a copy of your resume in Word format?”
I have a subscription to the Java Developers Journal. Years ago (pre-tech bust), when they were trying to build a subscriber base for advertisers, they gave away subscriptions to anyone who was willing to fill out full page profile questionnaire at JavaOne.
In the beginning it wasn’t that good, but it quicky became the Java magazine with the largest subscriber base because it was FREE.
A couple of years ago, the glossy magazine was wrapped in a white construction paper cover. The inside of the cover was an updated full page questionnaire. The outside urged me, in a huge font, to update my profile to continue receiving the magazine free:
Interestingly enough, that did not instill panic in me and I didn’t bother filling out the form. At the bottom was the URL to renew online if you didn’t want to mail in the cover, but both forms wanted my e-mail address and I didn’t want to give it to them.
The following month, I received the same dire warning that that month’s issue was going to be my last. And for the past two years or so I’ve gotten “!THIS IS YOUR LAST ISSUE!” on every issue.
For quite some time now the magazine has been $69.99 (ouch!) a year for subscribers who weren’t grandfathered in. Even so, it seems that insisting to its readers that they had just received the last issue of an expensive magazine wasn’t working for them, so the white paper cover warning, still in a huge font, was reworded last month:
Although they had stopped lying about it being my last issue, I still didn’t bother renewing.
And this month? No paper cover at all. They have given up on getting responses from people like me. The URL to renew online now yields a “404 Not Found.” Apparently you cannot renew your subscription for free anymore.
Will they drop me? Perhaps. Will I fork over $69.99 a year for it? No way. I’m guessing their subscriber base (and advertiser revenue) will plummet if they stop giving away the magazine.
My apathy has got them exactly where I want them.
If only I cared. :-)
Mom, you can skip this post… It is all geek talk.
It is only a matter of time before I hand my four year old computer down to my kids. Their nine year old computer doesn’t run the games they want to play. Chris and I seem to get along just fine with the new laptop, so we may not need to replace the oldest computer when it dies. (Although it is less likely to spontaneously die because they rarely use it anymore.)
Right now we have all our files on the desktop machine and share them over the network, but I am getting the willies trusting my Quicken data to my 7-year-old system administrators when they take over the machine.
The current object of my affection: Netgear’s Storage Center. Plop in some [mirrored!] IDE drives and my data is not subject to the vicissitudes of first graders.
As far as I can tell the network drive does not implement NFS, SMB or any other standard network mount protocol. It appears to use a proprietary UDP-based protocol from Zetera. UDP probably makes the drive pretty fast for streaming data, but it also means it requires special drivers on the client machines. Zetera says drivers are coming for Linux. We’ll see.
So about that “Congratulations on Your Anniversary” card we received…
Shouldn’t it be a plain “Happy Anniversary” card?
Is staying married between your 10th and 11th anniversaries so remarkable nowadays that warrants congratulations? “Whew, you guys made it another year.”
Perhaps there was a reason the card was addressed only to Chris.
[Readers: feel free to leave snide comments regarding my starter marriage twenty years ago.]
There are two basic ways of operating a business.
The first way is to offer a good product at a fair price. There is a continuum here, because you could also offer an extrodinary product at an inflated price or a mediocre product at a cheap price. But I digress.
The other way is to gouge your customers. Give you customers a bad deal and hope they don’t notice [insert link to a Marysville Ford dealership here] or hide the price from the customer until it is too late for him.
A several years ago, I had AT&T long distance and was paying 15 cents a minute for most of my toll calls. The plan was creatively called the “10 cent a minute plan.”
When Sprint (the long distance company, not the cell phone one) offered me a no-monthly fee “7 cent a minute plan” with the first 50 minutes free each month, I didn’t see a catch. So I switched and started paying 10 cents a minute for most of my toll calls. It too was a creatively named plan, but at least it was cheaper.
At least until I called my Canadian niece on her sixteenth birthday. They charged me the “overseas” rate of $1.55 a minute so the 38 minute call came to around $70. And I wasn’t even aware that Lake Erie was a sea.
It doesn’t cost near Sprint that much to route the call: It is pure price gouging. If you sign up for their $3 per month international plan, the same call is 3 cents a minute.
No one I know would willing pay $1.55/minute for a phone call, but they get away with it because they hide the price from you when you sign up of the phone service. Afterward, I looked on their website for the phone rates. It took numerous clicks to get to the PDF file that had the rate buried inside it.
What is surprising though is that they don’t lose more customers after surprising them with this exorbidant rate. They certainly lost me. Had they charged me the merely outrageous rate of, let’s say, 30 cents a minute I would have grumbled but probably stayed as a customer. But by charging me what they did, they almost guaranteed that I they would not have me as as customer the following month. They will generate $0.00 in revenue from me from now on.
Since I have broadband, I jumped to the Voice-over-IP company Vonage with their $14.99 plan for all my land line calls. So the big loser here is SBC who will no longer make $300/year from me. [Insert ironic remark here mentioning how my company sells networking hardware to SBC but not Vonage.]
The deal I found was for a free Linksys box [Insert ironic remark mentioning how Linksys is owned by Cisco, one of my company's competitors], free Vonage activation and a $50 Gift Certificate on top. Nothing is painless however: it required that I fill in 3 rebates that all were set to expire Saturday. And I hate rebates.
As I was checking out Friday, I pointed to the flyer I had brought with me and told him I wanted all three rebates. (I was paranoid about getting every rebate.) Although he told me they were all in there as he handed me the bag, it didn’t seem like it and less than a minute after I exited the store I was back at the Customer Service counter showing another guy that I only had received two rebate forms at the checkout counter. The second guy took my receipt and had to consult with a third guy. Turns out I had to buy an activation card (for $0.00) in order to get another receipt and the final rebate form.
Friday night I unpacked the CompUSA bag and the receipt for the original VoIP box, required for all three rebates, was missing. Turns out guy number two had kept it in the mix up. So I spent Friday night putting together two girls bikes instead. Arguably that should have been my priority anyway.
Saturday I went back to CompUSA and, thankfully, guy number two was there so I didn’t have to explain myself again. The receipt had since been thrown away, but he easily printed off another. This is good, because I had to activate the account over the Internet that day to get the rebates.
With a busy day, I figured I would plug everything and register with the computer after the girls went to bed. With a 9 pm ice cream run, that was later than it normally was, but would still have a couple of hours to spare. As we drove home from the ice cream place, we saw that the entire neighborhood was dark.
The power was out.