Monthly Archives: April 2012

Shame on you, T-Mobile!

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Two months ago I needed to change my mobile phone number – A published directory had reversed some numbers and I was getting unwanted calls – Five minutes and $15 later, the nice folks at the T-Mobile had issued me a new number and I was merrily on my way.

About a week ago I started receiving calls from unrecognized 800 numbers. Sometimes they just hung up and sometimes a disembodied voice left a message. I tend to arbitrarily delete those. But when they kept coming, I listened to one.

Seems they were coming from a T-Mobile collection service, Enhanced Recovery Collections, and for the last week, I have been “pressing 3″ and sending emails trying to get the calls to stop. So far no luck.

What really peeves me about this affair is the relationship between T-Mobile and ERC – I understand T-Mobile’s frustration at debt collection could lead to them hiring a debt collector. And I understand a debt collector is going to use any contact information that T-Mobile provided.

But what’s missing here is that when T-Mobile gave me the deadbeat’s number as my new number, they apparently failed to notify ERC the number now belonged to a good guy. Idiots!

 

Gmail Storage

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Back when Gmail was in its infancy (probably not that long ago), Google offered a whole Gigabyte (!) of email storage for free. Not only that but Google slowly increased the cap – You could actually watch the counters increasing your capacity. Surely I would *never* need that much storage!

(Right, and PCs only need 640K and so on …)

Well, last week, I came up on 95% capacity of my now 7.5G mailbox. Google makes that threshold very painful. Just about every click in Gmail results in a red “Storage Warning” that has to be acknowledged.

Fine, I’ll do something about my bulging email box!

Finding and deleting the large attachments in Gmail is a challenge, but Lifehacker came to the rescue last week with a Gmail/Google Docs solution. That didn’t appeal to me because Google Docs would now have all my historical emails, and frankly, Google has enough of my information – I would prefer not to just give them everything else.

Plan B – Install a copy of Thunderbird and link it up to Gmail via IMAP. Then use Thunderbird’s attachment processing to find and manage those huge Gmail attachments. Installing Thunderbird was a breeze, configuring was a slightly greater challenge, but waiting the six hours while Thunderbird indexed my Gmail box was painful. Thunderbird would restart indexing every time an email (or SPAM) came in so I ended up disconnecting the internet to get anything done.

The next morning all those 20M emails were identified and unwanted attachments deleted. In a little over an hour, my 7.5G mailbox was down to 6.2G. Good enough, I thought and uninstalled Thunderbird.

Today, three days later, Google unveiled their new Google Drive. As part of the rollout, they’re increasing all Gmail mailboxes to 10G! Argh! They couldn’t have done that three days ago?!?!?!

And no, I’m probably not going to adopt Google Drive any time soon – For starters, I’m very happy with DropBox, and second, Google Drive is closely integrated with Google Docs, and as I said earlier, I’d prefer not to keep all my personal and business documents in Google’s cloud where they can index and categorize them easily.

Self-Driving Car?

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Really? That’s not something you see every day on a California highway …

Approaching it from behind, the rotating cylinder on the roof caught my attention. My first thought was I was looking at a Google Maps car, but as I pulled in closer, I could see the bumper sticker:

“Self-Driving Car”

In addition to the spinning cylinder on the roof, there were assemblies running to the left rear wheel. A white panel fan was following the car in its 4 o’clock position, and my first thought was the “drivers” were steering remotely. But after a while the van dropped back too far to accurately see where he car was going. So I pulled along side.

Two mid-twenties were in the front seat, just chatting back and forth. Their hands were too low to see if one of them was holding a steering wheel. More likely they were monitoring the road and some internal telemetry.

I wonder what the navigation system is – GPS is too inaccurate and spotty to be relied on completely. Even a massive map database seems impractical – Maps usually don’t include lanes or parking spaces. Unlike a stretch of IH-15 north of San Diego that had magnets embedded in the lanes for sensors to pick up, this was just a normal stretch of Highway 50.

My guess is the car would need proximity sensors to avoid other traffic that merges in and out of its way, and some sort of visual recognition to stay in lanes, and finally a huge database to know where stop signs are, what posted speeds are and so on.

Google doesn’t tell you much in their description page or YouTube video so all I can do is speculate. But I guess there are multiple vehicles – The one I saw had a license plate of 6HCM164 while the one in the YouTube video is 6HCM166.

Still, something you don’t see every day …