Industrial grade crazy haters come from Westboro Baptist, led by Fred Phelps. Westboro Baptist is bringin’ the hate to Hermitige High School in Richmond, VA on Tuesday, March 2nd. My cousin, and others, are going to counter protest. If you can, I encourage you to join.
A coworker has a laptop. It is a Dell. For it, she has a docking station. When the laptop is docked in the station, the desktop icons disappear for one user, but not for another. When undocked, all is well.
This, then, is clearly a minor config problem. Maybe a driver issue, but that it works for one user and not another screams config.
Sal in Jakarta, representing Dell’s award winning technical support, feels differently. “Oh, very bad. Your computer is in very bad shape. Too bad you didn’t take the extended warranty. I can help you, but it’ll cost you $239.”
When my coworker balked at this, Sal went on, “I’ll give you a minute to think it over. Talk to your husband. But your computer could crash and die any minute.”
What bullshit. This is the sort of crass money-at-all-costs behavior that gives companies, and entire industries, bad reputations. Michael Dell, for fucking shame.
Signs you work for the wrong IT department:
I logged into Gmail from my computer over the weekend. This isn’t trivial, I hardly ever do since I got Droid, but there’s things you have to log in for.
The first thing I noticed was a shiny new icon in the sidebar for GBook. I mean GoogleFace. I mean MyGoog. I mean… Buzz? Really? I love ya, Goog, but do we really need yet another social networking thingamajig?
Your furry host has scored himself an invite for Google Voice. I’ve been playing with it for all of nearly an afternoon, so it’s time to gush. Think of it as an unboxing video. Only without the box. Or the video.
Google Voice is a voicemail system with bonus features. As a simple voicemail system, you assign your mobile phone to use Teh Goog as your provider, and then configure as you would a normal voicemail system – record your name, an outgoing message, whatever. And then you configure, and configure. You can record different messages for each of your groups. You can record specific greetings for specific people.
But that’s not all… you also have the option of signing up for a new Google phone number. This number forwards incoming calls to up to 6 lines, so you can set it up to ring home, work, cell, 2nd line, beach house… or whatever suits you. And you can pick which lines ring for which groups, so you can give out 1 number forever to everybody, and if they’re family they can ring everywhere but if it’s some vendor at a trade show it will only ring at work. Or, better, just drop straight to voicemail.
And that voicemail… ain’t just voicemail anymore. The mighty Goog servers save your messages, transcribe them, send them to you in email (or sms or through the Voice app), and the messages live on their servers where you can google search them forever.
And I’m sure there’s plenty more, but I’m still playing. Of course, all of this is just padding out Goog’s arsenal of information as part of its Evil Plan, but in the meantime the tools are just so damn cool. Pardon me, I have a soul to sell.
I was speaking with someone recently about Google and their mantra, “Don’t be Evil”.
“They are evil,” he said. “I don’t trust them. They’re way more evil than Microsoft ever was.”
Now, evil is a subjective term. Google is a company, and they want to make money. They want to make money by using our information, on us, in an effort to make us give our money away. Not to them, mind, to whoever. They connect people who want to spend money with the people who have what you want to spend money on, and for this they collect tiny little fees… but they collect billions of tiny little fees, and turn those into huge mountains of cash.
But to get you to give up your money, they have to know you. They have to first get you to give up your information. And the best way, it turns out, is not to beast stomp throats like Microsoft, which is overtly evil. No, the most effective way is to make us happy. To lull us into joyfully flinging ourselves into whatever doom they’re engineering. insideously evil, if they are indeed evil.
They may be. My friend might be right. But if they are, it turns out that I don’t care. Their brand of evil makes my life easier, and me happier.
Evil is good.
Howdy, folks! I hope all’s been going well for all of you out there whom Icare so much about. You bother to read what I have to say, of course I care about you. So it’s kinda rude that I vanish for two weeks or so without any particular warning. Let me recap a bit, not as an excuse, but as an apology.
Right in the middle of Grandma’s in-out-in hospital adventure, some jackass locked me out of the dAndroid blog and went berserk with comment spam. I tried hacking it back, all the way down to hand-editing entries in the db. I’d probably have had better success if I weren’t distracted by Grandma’s condition. In the end, I decided that it was more satisfying to hit the kill switch on dAndroid than to yield to fucking spammers. I might rebuild it, but I’m in no rush.
Also in the middle of it, something went sideways in the sync engine on my Droid. Sync just STAYED on, and it would suck a battery dry in a hurry. Every solution I found to the issue included, somewhere, “after the factory reset”. So I factory reset. Bravely, for I knew that my delicate information was all synced to the massive servers at Teh Goog. And what wasn’t was safely backed up with my Droid app.
This, it turns out, is all true. Kinda. Mostly. Except when it isn’t. In some cases, an application was backed up – like, say, my mobile blogging widget – but not its config information. So I haven’t been able to blog on the go, mostly out of apathy. It’s not like poking in the info is difficult or anything. It also forgot things like my registration info for DocumentsToGo, and all of my email accounts. I’m still weeding a little.
Throw in the mix a steady stream of mini-blizzards and a renewed friendship that is always exhilarating, and at moments terrifying, and I’ve just been very saturated just being.
I apologize for my absence, but I’m back at the wheel. Thanks, y’all, for your patience.
With the help of Weight Watchers, I continue to do my best Wicked Witch of the West impersonation – to wit, “I’m melting! MEELLLLLTTING!” I’m down another 5 lbs from the last weigh-in, for a total of 28.4 lbs I’ve lost so far, and doing so has won me the keychain token seen here. I am currently 303.2, and have about another 5 lbs before I hit 10%. There will be celebration.
I swear to God, if you’d asked me 3 months ago if a stamped washer could cause an emotional response, I’d have laughed.
As it turns out, I did laugh, but not for the same reasons.
Grandma (mom’s 89 year old mom) has had a chronic bronchitis for a few weeks now. She spent last week in the hospital. They got her sounding better, mostly by pumping her full of steroids, and discharged her on Friday. She responded to being home by promptly Saturday morning sounding even worse than when she originally went in.
We gave it a few days to see how she progressed. While she hasn’t become any worse, she’s certainly not improving, so (on advice of our very own Aunt Supernurse) we decided to bring her back to the hospital.
Now, we work all day, so it was after work, after dinner, after phone calls to Supernurse, that this decision was made. Say, 8:30ish.
In just the most spectacular display of compassion I’ve seen in quite some time, my old man expresses his concern for the well being of family by screaming, at mom, at the top of his lungs, I – fucking – quote this among other things, “I DID NOT ASK YOU WHY YOU WAITED UNTIL NINE O’CLOCK, I ASKED YOU HOW COME YOU WAITED UNTIL NINE O’CLOCK!”
Spectacular, no? I really have to give extra credit for the full-fury nit-pick of semantic equivalents.
BTW, the ER wanted to Jiffy Lube Grandma – pump her full of steroids & send her home. Aunt Supernurse is gonna make sure they keep her for a pulmonary consult. We Heart Our Supernurse.