Author Archives: woodp

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 …

 

Lottery Fever!

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While checking out at my local grocery, there was a line – a long line – at the lottery machine. OK, I don’t think I’ve seen that before. Lottery fever is here!

It started out a week or so ago with a CNN article instructing their readership how to “invest” in the lottery. Articles in Forbes and others within hours embarrassed CNN to pull their post. I’d love to find it on an archive site someplace.

No one won Wednesday’s $300M lottery so it’s rolled over to tonight’s drawing. Last I heard, Americans had spent $1.5B in tickets and the projected winnings would be $640M … and counting.

As a Stat Major, I was taught that lotteries are God’s way of punishing people for poor math skills. Anyone who buys a ticket in a 1 in 175,000,000 chance can’t grasp large numbers. Others tell a “You have a better chance of …” story but even that doesn’t stop ticket purchases.

Looking at it from another direction, $1.5B in ticket sales means every man, woman and child in the US bought 4.5 tickets each! Since children can’t buy tickets, practically speaking that mean the average (eligible) player must have purchased 10 tickets. Really?

Of course, 99.99999942857143% of the tickets are losers, and I’m guessing 99.99999942857143% of the population realizes that. And I’m also guessing they bought those tickets for the same reason I did … For the chance and for the thrill of being this (!) close to $640M.

So to that lucky 0.00000057142857% who wins tonight, congratulations!

Political Promises

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The Romney aide gaffe about changing political positions before and after the convention was entertaining, but the reality is every candidate shifts as the campaign unfolds. Borrowing from a CNN report, can you identify who said what?

1. “He won’t streamline the federal government and change the way it works, cut 100,000 bureaucrats and put 100,000 new police officers on the streets of American cities, but I will.”

2. “And after we fund important priorities in the ongoing operations of our government, I believe we ought to pay down national debt. And so my budget pays down a record $2 trillion in debt over the next 10 years.”

3. “My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors and stay within the public financing system for the general election.”

Hint: The comments were made by Clinton, Bush (#2) and Obama, but can you match statements and candidates?

Christmas in March

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Normally, Sedona in March is cool, crisp and showing all signs of spring. But not after this Mar 18-19 spring storm …

Driving on the Wrong Side

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I5 Cross-Over near Castaic

In this country, we (usually) drive on the right side of the road.

While sitting in a bar in Sedona, AZ, a local asked me how I had arrived in Sedona. Explaining I had had driven north from Phoenix, he grinned and asked me if I had recognized the uniqueness of the road.

“Um, I’m not sure what you mean?”

Patiently, he explained that at one point between Phoenix and Sedona, the road (Interstate Highway 17) contains a short section where the northbound traffic crosses the southbound traffic and proceeds on the left side! According to him, this is the only place in the United States where the lanes switch sides.

I couldn’t recall the cross-over, but anyone who’s driven Interstate Highway 5 north of Castaic (and actually noticed) would know there’s a 4-5 mile lane reversal there as well. And I’m guessing there are others.

In one way, my bar friend is right, these are fairly unique situations and it gave me something to think about on the ride home. Think about the geography that creates this situation – One lane can fit but an oncoming traffic lane requires a ramp and a totally different route. Fascinating.

Roadtrip – Audio Musings

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One of the songs in my personal rotation is Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain.” There’s a YouTube video that I’ve watched and I have an MP3 copy on my Blackberry for personal listening. Earlier today, on a road-trip, the song came on the radio and I cranked the volume up a bit.

The song sounded notably different than the YouTube video – Percussion sounded better. I suppose that’s to be expected – Car stereo equipment should be better than PC speakers. But as this was a road-trip, I had time to experiment – Out came the Blackberry and its sound was piped into the car stereo system. Wow! Now the percussion popped! Seriously, drums were clear and distinct, but violin accompaniments and her voice just seemed more alive than the radio.

Disclaimer: I had ripped the CD myself, using variable bit encoding to get the MP3 as loss-less as possible. And now I was quite pleased with the audio results.

But it also gave me pause. Long ago I had agonized over the sound quality loss moving from records to digitally sampled CDs. Now it hardly matters when I watch a YouTube video through PC speakers or listen to streaming music on the internet. Sad really, that music reproduction quality is diminishing, but I savored a win in my recognition that I could still differentiate quality and appreciate it.

Then I unplugged my Blackberry and turned the radio back on. Only 400 miles to go. What to think about next?

Moving Servers

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Old Provider's Logo

There are about 50 companies on the web that publish RBL (Real-Time Black Lists). These RBLs contain lists of domains believed to be spammers. Then Yahoo, Comcast and all the other email providers subscribe to one or more RBL companies to know who they should be blocking. It’s pretty simple actually, if badspammerguy.com gets on a blacklist, it’s improbable that he can send any more email. Want to know if you’re on a blacklist? Go here and type in your email domain:

The problem with blacklists is there’s lots of collateral damage. Because websites share servers and networks, a blacklisting on one domain could affect others on the same server or network.

And that’s exactly what happened to me two weeks ago. Somebody else who shares space in the same networking center got himself black-listed, and I and several others suddenly lost our ability to email out. It took four days to get the blacklist company straightened out and all returned to normal.

Friday I lost email again. So I wrote to my provider asking to be reprovisioned far away from this bad guy. My provider said “No.” He said I should just deal with it because it’s a fact of life. Those weren’t his exact words but they were close enough. He also suggested several exotic (and expensive) ways to minimize issue. Three times I asked him to reconsider and three times he said “no.”

So even though I’ve been a four year customer, this morning I started the big move. Found a new provider and I’m moving domains one at a time. The first was this one, woodp.com, and it appears to be up and functioning fine. One down and another 200+ to go.

Then I’ll let my old provider know how expensive his stubbornness was.

Lessons from Bob Hoover

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At a recent aviation conference, legendary test pilot Bob Hoover was a guest speaker. He moves a little slower than he did as a test pilot but his wit and story-telling still came through. Among pilots, safety and learning are prominent themes, and Bob used the occasion to tell a story about safety and learning.

Seems years ago piston and turbine aircraft had the same size fuel hoses and a young line boy accidentally serviced his piston engine aircraft with jet fuel. This is similar to pumping diesel into a standard, combustion engine – It’ll run for a while but the the engine will die. Worse, diesel fuel can actually hurt engine components. It’s similar in airplanes.

In Bob’s case, he had enough fuel in the fuel lines to taxi out, depart and climb to almost 100 feet when the jet fuel caused his engines to quit. The airport (Brown Field outside San Diego) is surrounded with mountains which are probably the worst emergency landing locations imaginable. Bob drew on his skills and landed uphill, stalling right at touchdown, and pilot and passengers emerged with nothing more than scratches. Amazing!

Later, after he returned to the airport and found the extremely red-faced line boy. He looked at him and said “Tomorrow I’ll be back to fly and I’ll need my aircraft serviced. And when I do, I want only one person servicing my aircraft. And that person is you.”

Bob knew that of all the line boys at Brown Field, only one was guaranteed to have learned that jet fuel in a piston engine was something to be avoided.