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.
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.
The fine folks over at BBSpot have their own scoop on the upcoming Apple Tablet. It sounds interesting, but I have my own source that tells me that it will actually come in two colors, but Jobs keeps forgetting because of a memory protection fault in the other version.
Google’s new android based phone is called Nexus 1, a reference recognizable by anyone who has watched Blade Runner or read the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
Isa Dick Hackett, daughter od author Phillip K Dick, is not pleased. She has filed a lawsuit against Teh Goog on behalf of the Dick estate because “we were never consulted, no requests were made, and we didn’t grant any sort of permissions.”
So what? There is absolutely no need for permission from you for Google to name its product. If they were making a literary adaptation of the novel, you’d have ground for licensing considerations, perhaps, but copyright does not give you the full control over every possible reference as you seem to believe.
The motivation seems to stem from Motorola’s licensing of DROID from Lucas. The important distinction here is that DROID is a Lucas trademark, and the licensing and use falls under trademark law, not copyright. You’d hope her lawyers would try to explain the difference.
Yay, me, made it all the way through without resorting to the line “What a bunch of Dicks!”
Oh. Damn. Almost, anyway.
Henry Rollins is proof that intelligence does not directly correlate with formal education. He is one of the very few celebrities who can talk, at length, about a subject coherently and cohesively without devolving into a string of sound bites. He spends most of his time on camera these days as interviewer, so it’s nice to see him here in a lengthy bit as the interviewee.
While I’d rather it wasn’t with Tom Green in the interviewer’s chair – let’s leave it at “I’m not a fan” – he made probably one of his better career choices here and just shut the hell up for the most part and let Henry talk.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
As the year comes to an end, I encounter a late but potent entry in the category of “what has been seen cannot be unseen”: hardcore Star Trek cosplay.
There’s not enough Romulan ale in the universe.
No, I will not link to it.
Run, run, reindeer…. all the way to Google Maps*, where one can search for Santa all through Christmas Eve and track his progress around the world.
* – mobile maps on your compatible phone… apparently the web version isn’t playing along. For that, there’s NORAD’s Santa tracking, which is itself a Google Maps mashup