The Dosquatch Says…

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.

Social Commentary, Technology, economy dell, tech support

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?

Social Commentary, Technology google

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.

Social Commentary, Technology evil, google

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.

Social Commentary, Technology evil, google

I’m having an issue with SMS that’s seriously twisting my panties in a knot. I have a friend, and the things she says are important to me.

It is somewhat distressing to find that a disturbing number of her messages are not reaching me. I am DROID/Verizon, she is Crackberry/nTelos. I’ve beaten Google about the search box looking for a trend on any one of or combination of those attributes so I know where to start fixing.

I can’t find a trend, and Verizon (predictably) blames nTelos. I’m at least a little distraught, probably more than I’ll admit here, and am begging you fine readers for thoughts.

Navel Gazing, Technology crackberry, droid, ntelos, sms, txt, verizon

My text messaging has taken a recent upward turn. I’ve been carrying a 250 message feature on my line. $5 is reasonable, and it’s been covering me fine… but here it is only a third the way into the m/onth and I’ve almost hit the limit.

I thought about just increasing my line up a step, but I noticed something. After reviewing the current plans and promotions, I realized that upgrading the account would appear to cost an extra $20, but it would also automatically cover some features I have on – everybody gets the feature (unlimited txt, for instance), I loose a line charge or three, and the apparent $20 turns into a flat push.

Seriously. It’s basically panning out as a free account upgrade, and it might end up costing less as some of the usage charges I know I’ve been seeing should be swallowed up in that magic word “unlimited”.

The mind boggles.

Navel Gazing, Technology billing, vzw

I’d like to play with Google Voice, but it’s currently in closed beta, invite only. If anyone has an invite available, I can trade for a Wave invite.

Technology

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.

Social Commentary, Technology apple, laugh it's funny, matrix

This is as close to disasterproof storage as you are ever likely to need. Holy Crap.

Technology

AT&T has begun courting the FCC with the notion that Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) needs to be shut down and replaced with a purely IP based system. They state this as “when, not if”, and are pushing for a firm date to pull the plug.

The motivations include cost – maintaining a single comms infrastructure for all mediums is inherently less expensive – but they also cite the ubiquity of broadband service.

Were only that true. Perhaps it’s time for another round of “bring me a fucking wire” so I can finally be done with this craptastic sat service (motto: “we’re slightly better than dial-up”).

My one biggest hope here is that this push will finally yank the wired providers onto common carrier turf.

Technology communications, ISP, telephone