Check out my $3,700 sunglasses

I got them free from American Express. Which begs the question: If they were free, how did they cost $3700? Glad you asked. American Express gives you a point for every dollar you charge, so I used points to get the glasses.

Granted, I did get $3700 worth of other stuff, too. But, philospically, one could argue that it was the other stuff that was free...

PS: This is the fountain around the Navy Memorial.

ls -l `which top`

Learned a new command:
    ls -l `which top`
This executes the which command to get the path of the target file, then hands that over to ls, so it can be displayed. This is a compound command that will save from issueing the two comands individually.

My $1,023 Cell Phone Bill

I just got my Cingular bill: they charged me over $900 in roaming charges for calls made from my new house. So, I called customer service and asked what went wrong. They explained that even though I changed my address, I didn't change to the 410 area code, therefore all calls would be billed as if I were still in the old area code. Too bad I wasn't told that at the time I changed the address.

There is a second factor in play. I originally signed up for service with ATT Wireless, which was bought by Cingular. Appearently, I had been on ATT's local plan, rather than their nationwide plan. The nationwide plan would have cost me an extra $10 per month. Since I've had this phone for 18 months, that would have been $180.

Now, here's the question: How can Cingular think it is a good idea to stick a customer with $900 worth of roaming fees? Obviously, their technology could have absorbed the calls for $10. Instead, they agreed to wave $400, and then tried to talk me out of cancelling their service. They expect me to pay them $600, increase my monthly rate plan, and like it?

Of all the transactions I have to undertake, I dispise having to buy a house, a car, and dealing with cell phone vendors. How is this possible? You buy houses and cars maybe every five years. Cell phones are replaced every two. Why does it have to be such a big deal?

But I'm still drawn back to the original question: How can Cingular think that customers would like to pay them $600 for $10 worth of services?

STONITH

I learned a new acronym: STONITH

The term references how clustered systems handle a failure. During operations, all of the systems in the cluster are constantly running checks on their neighbors. If the systems, called nodes, sense that one of their neighbors has stopped responding, they force the failing system to switch offline, or power-off. Since the working node is killing the failing node, they are executing a stonith: shoot the other node in the head.

Gotta love that one.

We Are Stupid Consumers

A couple weeks ago, the oven on my Mother In Law's stove stopped working. She called a repair guy, who told her that it would cost $400 to fix the over. At that price, he advised she get a new stove. Good for him for not taking advantage of MIL.

But here's the problem: In economics, a stoves and other large appliences are what is called durable goods. Durable goods are suppose to have a 15 year life span. The stove in question was 7 years old. Oh, sure, there will be some that will fail in less than 15, but others will last 21, so it evens out-- right?

Turns out, the problem with her stove was that the computer that controlled the ovens temperature had failed. The repair guy explained that it was going to cost him $300 to buy the replacement part. WTF! Who in the world decided that replacing a $3 mechanical thermostat with a $300 computer system was a good idea?

And $300 for the computer? You can buy a bare bones Dell for $300!

Here's the problem: computers do not like heat. As a matter of fact, they prefer being supercooled. So why are we putting a computer inside a machine that is meant to operate at 400 degrees?

This is stupid... But you know what-- It is now the industry standard. I didn't like the stove in my new house and I had to look at about a hundred models to find one that didn't have a computerized oven.

We consumers should nat stand for this; but we will, because we're stupid.

I know how to deal with spam

I loved this exchange over at slashdot. Eventually it slipped into stupidity, but I thought the initial authors had some good momentum. The topic was regarding the comment that Bill Gates is the most spammed person in the world.

by PopeAlien (164869) on Wednesday June 08, @02:34PM (#12760276)
I dont get nearly as much spam as that, but even a few hundred a day is pretty irritating. My solution is to delete all email as soon as I get it.

I figure if its important I'll get a phone call.

by Everleet (785889) on Wednesday June 08, @02:48PM (#12760451)
Funny, I delete all phone calls as soon as I get them. I figure if it's important I'll get an IM.

by DoomHaven (70347) on Wednesday June 08, @02:51PM (#12760479)
Funny, I delete all IMs as soon as I get them. I figure if it's important, I'll get a visit.

by Poltras (680608) on Wednesday June 08, @03:03PM (#12760591)
Funny, I delete all of my visitors as soon as they show up. I figure if it's important, the police will come and circle the house.

by AndersOSU (873247) on Wednesday June 08, @03:07PM (#12760630)
Funny, in Soviet Russia the police delete you.

The original post.

New Scientist 11 steps to a better brain

While checking the tech headlines at CNET News, I came across a great article. It's titled 11 Steps To A Better Brain and (even though the writer didn't realize that he isn't suppose to start a sentence with a number) its a great piece of work. There are dozens of interesting items regarding actions that can be taken to improve intelligence and mental performance.

Insider Secrets: DIY home theater - CNET reviews

There's a neat idea explained in the article Insider Secrets: DIY home theater - CNET reviews regarding home theater backlighting. It's a three part article, but the second part is silly, and the third is stupid. I'll have to give the backlighting technique a try when I get around to setting my home theater system back up. Before that, my wife has to approve which room I can use. So much for the man / home / castle theory.

Howto Use Commands Within echo

Here's a new trick I learned yesterday. You can execute a command within an echo statement by enclosing the command in backwards quotes, and enclosing the echo arguments within double quotes. Example:
    echo "Current time: `date`"
In the past, I'd always done this as two lines. The first would capture the output of the command into a variable and the second would print the results using echo. Example:
    dt=`date`
    echo "Current time: $dt"
Granted, this is not break-through technology, but every incremental advancement gets me closer to world domination. Did I say that out loud?

Digital, On Demand, Cable

Over the last two weeks I've been moving. What a mess. Hundreds of boxes. Literally. It will probably be another six months before I find all my stuff.

No pickles. No bars of soap. (Don't worry: I have a lifetime supply of hotel soap...) No phone line. But I do have cable-- not that I watch TV, mind you. So why have cable? For the Internet! I have to have Internet... For my job... Yeah, for the job.

Here's the deal: I had to get my cable modem on the network, so I asked how musch for basic cable to connect to my cable ready TVs. The high-speed Internet was about $40, and the basic cable was $30. As it turns out, digital cable is $25, but you have to rent the set-top box for $5 per month. This means the price is the same.

Here's the catch: If you get digital cable, you get analog for free. How does that work?

I must admit, though, that I did watch TV. What I actually watched, was cable inDemand. This is some cool stuff. They have a repository of several hundred shows that can be run anytime you want-- for free. Old Monty Python episodes, Discovery and National Geographical specials, "gone to video" movies. It's actually pretty cool.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that you got a Tivo and can accomplish all that same stuff. No, you can't. What Tivo does is take what the cable company sends you, and lets you control it. This is stuff that is only being sent, as I request it.

From my observation, I suspect that there is some compression involved, as the picture quality seems to be lower than the realtime programming.