Phil online

Pity the poor remnants of Ma Bell. They can’t help but be bureaucratic after decades of over-regulation and “5 nines” of reliability requirements. But Oh My God, it’s hard to deal with them.

And this is why Cable Modems will win.

Consider these examples:

In 2001 I ported my phone number from Bellsouth service to Comcast. It was so easy I don’t remember what I had to do to make it happen. Or maybe the physical wire hookup was so difficult that I don’t remember the pain of the LNP (Local Number Portability).

In 2003 I ported my number from Comcast to Vonage. I remember exactly what I had to do. It took me less than 5 minutes.
Step 1. I clicked a button on Vonage.com telling them I wanted to switch.

Step 2. I printed out the confirmation form for them to use to pressure Comcast to let my number go.

Step 3. I signed and faxed the form.

Step 4. I waited three weeks, and my Vonage account magically got a new phone number.

So now my wife is fed up with Vonage (too much unreliability, possibly the fault of Adelphia, our new cable modem service provider). She wants an old-fashioned landline. So I switched back to Bellsouth.

I told them I wanted to port my number from Vonage, but I want to have the Bellsouth service hooed up first. I don’t trust them to port the number first and also have my new service hooked up all on the same day. (That’s how they wanted to do it.)

So I have a new line with a new phone number from BS. Oh, but does it come with long distance? No… I have to add that. I wanted to add it from some other company, but that’s not so easy. So I chose to add the BS LD (online) until I can find the time to choose a better LD company. (To their credit, I only had to click a few buttons to complete this request, and I was assured it would take no more than three days to add BSLD to my line. Whoopee!)
Later I emailed them and asked them to port my old number from Vonage. They wrote back and asked why I wanted to port my new number to Vonage. No, no, I want this old number ported FROM Vonage to Bellsouth. They wrote back and told me I had to call in to speak with someone. This I did, after several rounds of voicemail tag.
I received an email that they would finish my request within 15 days.

42 days later, I emailed them again. I was told I would have to call in to complete this request.

I called. Someone who was far too happy to speak with me spoke with me. I explained what I wanted to do. She was confused. “Do you want two lines or is the second number going to be a RingMaster(tm) line?” No, I want to lose the current number and port the old number from Vonage.

She puzzled over this for a couple of minutes. Then she explained that on the day of the switch I would be without service for a few hours at the most.

Without service?! WTF? Why will I be without service?

“Sir, you did say you want to disconnect the old number, right?” Yeah, but what if I add the Vonage number as a RingMaster(tm) number. Then I would have two numbers on the line, right? Then couldn’t I just turn off the other number and still keep my service active? “No sir, when the first line is switched off, you would still be without service for a few hours.”

Holy Shit. I can’t imagine any VOIP provider treating their service like this. I told her so, too. But there’s nothing she can do about it.

Oh, but then we spent the next 20 minutes discussing my service options (yes, I want to keep them the same; I think I spend less than $25/month on long distance service; no, I do not want unlimited long distance from BellSouth; no, I do not need a 900-number block; yes, I understand there is a long list of alternative LD providers, and no I do not want you to read them to me; no, I still do not want one of the three internal wiring maintenance plans you are offering; etc.; etc.)

And finally I was forwarded to someone in India who acted as an independent third party to verify that I am who I say I am (or at least I know my birthdate) and that I really do want to make all these changes (which are really not changes at all) and that I really do want to port this phone number from Vonage (finally!).

And then I was done. It only took about 40 minutes on the phone, and I’ll only lose service for a few hours. (And a helpful recording will inform callers what is happening.)

What a joke!

And guess what? Comcast bought Adelphia. I’m thinking about switching my phone service to Comcast again as soon as they offer it in my neighborhood.

The sooner the better.

11-13-2006: Update:  They sent me a letter in the mail.  I think it says they won’t port my number until I pay the outstanding balance of 43 cents.  I think it says that because it’s all in Spanish.  I don’t read Spanish well. This is not raising my confidence.

Digital cameras have an interesting photographer-effect on people;  they make everyone trigger-happy.  When the film doesn’t cost me anything — in film, prints, or physical transport of rolls to the store — I am much more willing to shoot photos with wild abandon.  Not only that, but I’ll take 5 or 10 photos of the same subject, looking for the “right” angle, with the intent (if not the follow-through) to “delete the bad ones later.”

My first digital camera lasted for 6 years.  I shot over 12,000 photos in 6 years.  That’s incredible, considering I’ve probably shot under 1,000 in my life before I got that camera.  But my 2nd digital camera is about a year old and I’ve already shot over 5,000 shots with it. The difference? It takes pictures faster.  My old camera required 2 seconds between shots, and it could take no more than 6 shots per minute.  My new camera can shoot more than 2 frames per second, continuously.  The shutterbug in me has been set free!

Now what do I do with all these pixels?

I got this email today. It purports to be from MBNA, and it even has their logo linked from their corporate web site. Except for some red flags (like the dorky wording and punctuation), it appears legit. I might have believed it myself if it hadn’t come to one of my spam-trap email addresses. (more…)

I just got the strangest email from the History Channel (A&E): (more…)

I have my PCs at home behind THREE firewalls (all NAT Routers). At work, my PC is behind a corporate router over which I have no control. They turn off almost all outbound services, and no inbound services are allowed.

I want to be able to VPN to my machine at work from home, and vice versa. My office provides enterprise VPN, but I hate the software and hoops they use. Also, it doesn’t help me connect to my PC at home. So I started looking for a free alternative. And I found one. (more…)

I’ve been insanely busy the last month or so. I still am this week. But I’m trying to use Google Calendar to help organize my life with Perrie. I created her a calendar, and I linked it with mine. Worked great.

Except, my entries are all off by three hours. All the time zones look fine, but my imported-from-Outlook times are all wrong! Grrr! (more…)

Lodefizzle is Mike Davidson’s made-up word entirely for SEO testing. It’s sure to get crapstormed as more people write about it (thus wiping out any hope of gleaning from extant results), but the article is pretty interesting at the moment. Check it out. Lodefizzle.

[02/16/2006 — Update: I’m on Page 1 Google results for the term Lodefizzle.  Props 4 my madd 530 skillz, baby!]

My mother-in-law has a phone number very close to to 867-5309, the subtitular phone number from Tommy Tutone’s one-hit-wonder, “Jenny (867-5309)”. When I call her I remember her number by singing the tune in my head and transposing some digits. It’s a useful mnemonic for me.

My wife doesn’t do mnemonics. She accidentally dialed Jenny’s number instead her mom’s. When she did, before the ringback occurred, the phone played “Jenny I’ve got your number 8-6-7-5-3-0-9″. And then it started ringing.

Whoa! What the heck was that? Cool trick!

I’ve since tried a few other area codes (212-867-5309) and verified it happens on all of them.

It appears to be a Vonage trick, since I have Vonage as my sole phone service provider in my home. I tried it on other phones (my cellphone, my office phone) and none of them do anything like this. Ergo, it must be some geek trick that someone played with at Vonage. Maybe they were showing of the new Custom Ringback Feature to the VP of marketing. (Apparently he wasn’t impressed because this feature is not offered to customers yet.)

I tried Googling to see if anyone else found Jenny’s number on the wall, but all my searches led to some news article about a guy auctioning off 212-867-5309 on eBay, and someone hacking Vonage with the same number.

Woo hoo! I bought a new digital camera. I don’t have it yet; FedEx does. But I held one last week at Fry’s. I’ll write more about it here when I get to play with it some.

I got it for the zoom. I knew I needed more zoom than my 3x Kodak DC290, but I didn’t really appreciate what a zoom could do until I marveled over this site of hummingbird pictures. In particular the (more…)

I bought something on eBay last month. Now that they’ve integrated PayPal, it’s even easier to pay for the item. So I did, by clicking the large, yellow “Pay now” button.

I got a confirmation email. Two weeks go by; no package.

So I went to send an email to the seller. I scanned the message for his email address. And I noticed something strange: the wrong zip code. (more…)

I’ve got the new carputer half-installed in my dinky little car. It’s running on a tablet PC I picked up for cheap. I bought a new license for iGuidance and installed it on there. It’s not perfect because it’s running Windows 98 and it crashes a lot. (Windows 2000 is more helpful at cleaning up resources you forget to release.)

But it works. And it has maps. And it knows directions. And it speaks.

It’s basically TomTom GO for only $200. (more…)

I had given up on the idea of a carputer in my little car. But I saw this ForSale ad on mp3car.com that piqued my interest. It was for an industrial tablet PC. It’s basically a 10″ touchscreen with a computer built-in, for less than half the cost of a 7″ touchscreen. How cool is that? And he has so many broken ones, he throws in a couple of those for spare parts.

It all arrived this week while I was out of town. I’ve only had an hour or so to play with it, but I like it so far. Here’s my write-up…
(more…)

8 years ago I was working for a company in the computer telephony business. I was the CT/Voice-guru-designate for the company, so I got to go to conferences and see what the dreamers were dreaming of in the future. The dreams were all over their demos and promos. They didn’t work all that well, and they were expensive as hell.

The holy grail of the industry was a sort of turing test for IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. This is where you could call a customer support line and talk to a computer without realizing it was a computer. It would almost be as good as talking to a real human. They’ve been doing this (more…)

Well, I’ll tell you why not: Money and Time

Don’t get me wrong. I love the carputer (more…)

I’ve had bad luck in the past with epoxy resins. You know, the kind where you mix the epoxy with the hardener in equal amounts, and it turns to plastic. It always turns to mush on me for some reason.

But I started making the mounting box for my DVD-ROM drive, USB ports and power switch. I got some epoxy, mixed it up, slapped it on the edges, and 10 minutes later it turned to plastic. It’s super cool. I must have had a bad batch before.

So I started the housing. I’ll have some photos up later. Now I need to put some parts-mounts in there and make it look all pretty.

I bought a slim-line slot-load DVDROM drive from this guy. I bought it sort of on a whim: I knew I needed one, I hadn’t gotten around to getting it yet, and a friend dropped by to ask about them. I said, “Oh sure you can get those. Here’s one for… um, $95 shipped, with the IDE adapter. I think I’ll buy it.” And I did.
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In the continuing saga of my Tivo transfer speeds:

I have now doubled my Tivo download speed to about 750KBytes per second. I acheived this by connecting (more…)

Yes, it’s time for a new carputer. Not that there’s anything wrong with the old one. It’s only 6 months old and it’s working beautifully. But it’s permanently attached to the minivan, my wife’s car.

This new carputer will be installed in my car, a 1992 Mazda Protege. And since I plan to replace this car soon-ish, I’ll make this carputer portable enough to move to my new car.

Requirements:

MP3 playback through stock head unit
Color GPS navigation
Touchscreen would be ideal

(more…)

I had a single computer programming class in high school in the 80’s. On the first day, the teacher handed out a badly xeroxed version of this image. Welcome to software development! (more…)

Excerpt from an interview I gave recently:

When I was a kid in school, computers were rare. The first personal computers came out in the late 70’s. Cheap calculators have more power than those original boxes. In the 6th grade I was in an experiments class in school that had a computer. Most of the time it sat at a “Ready>” prompt or running games that other kids loaded from cassette tape.

One day when I walked in, it was busy flashing a message onscreen. It said “Brent Pristas is a programming god” or something like that, and it had (more…)