Ivo Janssen

I saw someone use a pay phone today!

From the NYT:

It seems that this provision is added to the "Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act" ("the Credit CARD Act", yes someone spent waaay to much time on this title). So in the end I guess I can agree with everything in this bill: Credit companies cannot jack up my rates and law-abiding citizens can carry a gun in a national park.

But that's not the reason I'm posting this.

Why is it allowed under Congress rules or US law to tack on completely unrelated riders to bills? Now Democrats who are in favor of gun control cannot vote this down because it would mean they have to vote against the credit card bill as well. And this happens all the time, especially with military appropriations bills, I understand.

This doesn't make any sense to me at all...

Just signed up for Pandora Internet Radio. I've never seen my favorite music explained and disected this well!  Please keep bringing me "trance roots" with "laid back female vocals" please! I'm excited, and I need to read up on the Music Genome Project some more.

Yes, that's hail.  There's more pictures, including my broken windshield. I didn't get pictures of the baseball (3" / 7cm) hail that hit the car, I was too busy making sure I got safely off the roadway

• The outermost nesting level is my home XP desktop at which I sit right now.
• It runs a VMWare Server session connected to my work VPN. You can see my work Outlook running.
• From there, I VPN+RDP into the customer site's only machine that allow RDP. I have some work utilities open, and a notepad as scratchpad.
• From within the customer's remote desktop, I have several RDP sessions to production machines open, checking various Services and log files.

I can't tell you how often I'm opening an Explorer window and not seeing what I was expecting.... :(

Yesterday, I participated in GLOBE at Night. From their website:
Two interesting observations (pun intended):

• My area gets Limiting Magnitude 4, which I think is rather good being in a city the size of Austin
• It doesn't matter whether I stand on my front patio, with street lights and patio lights all over, or drive 2 miles (to the quarry on McNeil-Round Rock Road) where there's much less ambient light. Both sites got a '4'.

You should do it too! It's fun, connects you with nature and the stars, and helps understand light pollution around the globe better.

Participate here.

I usually don't post my day-to-day activities in my blog, but I just had a wonderful weekend. Went to the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market, did a whole bunch of spring-time yard-work, including chopping down a half-dead pine tree and topping all the crepe-myrtles in our yard. And Chantal bought a car! A 2006 Pontiac Vibe, light blue, good condition, luxury package, and right price. Hopefully we can do the loan stuff early this week and she'll be driving it soon.

Even while I did a lot of physical work this weekend, it just make me feel completely recharged and ready for the workweek ahead!

When Will Emergency Rooms Go Back to Being Emergency Rooms?


My feelings exactly...

(more later, including much better quality pictures, this will have to do for now)

Last month I upgraded my phone from a simple calling device to basically a computer. Choosing between a Blackberry, a G1, an iPhone or a Windows Mobile device, I decided to go for the HTC Touch Pro (branded as the Fuze by AT&T) from HTC, running Windows Mobile 6.1. Why?

These were the reasons for going with the Fuze:

• I'm locked to AT&T so the G1 or the Storm are out.
• 640x480 screen (vs. 340x240 for the iPhone or the G1)
• Full flip-out keyboard instead of the iPhone keyboard
• Windows Mobile would supposedly have plenty of apps. While Apple's Appstore is relatively new, and the G1 is really unproven (background shell "reboot" anyone?)
• Customization: You can hack as much as you want into the Windows OS, instead of the "closed" OS on the iPhone.

Well, after 25 days I returned the device and got myself an iPhone 3G 8Gb... Because:

• Although the Fuze's screen was 640x480, it was only 2.5", vs. iPhone's 3.5". That means it's a lot less space to touch the screen, and a lot harder to see Google Maps while driving.
• I found myself typing on the real keyboard very little, even resorting to the on-screen touch-keyboard so I didn't have to flip out the bottom half  (which introduces a delay because it has to rotate the screen)
• My work's Wifi uses PEAP auth and Windows kept popping up a password screen with the Medianet (cingular1@cingulargprs.com or something) credentials which I then had to manually change. And don't get me started that it doesn't accept unsigned certificates unless you hack the registry.
• The gmail java app didn't work and using gmail in the IMAP "outlook" client was wonky, since outlook didn't understand tags. Each sync, I'd end up with a new tag "Sent Items" :)
• Opera worked decently but not as intuitive as I've seen Safari work. Sure you can tap to zoom in but it would constantly re-render the whole paragraph so you would not end up where you tapped. And you can only click a link if you're zoomed in! 

But the worst I'm saving for a paragraph by itself, since it supersedes all the bulletpoints above. It was SLOW.  Seriously, firing up Opera took like 15 seconds, folding out the keyboard would rotate the screen which leads to a redraw time of at least 5 seconds. Then you'd have to go into Taskmanager to manually kill Opera otherwise it would suck batteries in the background. Hitting the Home button would not respond by going to the home screen 50% of the time. Once I loaded 10 or so apps, the phone's performance became simply unbearable, even browsing through the contact list would become seriously slow.
And sometimes I'd wake up in the morning, touch the screen only to see it spontaneously reboot. Seriously??? A phone that reboots at random times?? How many calls did I miss because of this?

Now, this might be because I loaded the thing with a bunch of 3rd party CABs (installable apps) that would degrade stability, but I don't want to use a virgin phone. I want apps. I'm sure that once I install 10 apps from the Appstore on the iPhone, the thing won't start rebooting on me.

So it turns out, the iPhone connects to the PEAP wifi right away, syncs with gmail perfectly, syncs with my work exchange (even better than Outlook!), Safari renders various "mobile" pages like google, wunderground, etc. better than Opera, and the keyboard is adequate for the amount of typing that I do.

So there it is. I now own an iPhone. And I'm loving it!

Yay.

I'm just going to view the thousands of dollars I lost in my 401k and my investments, as my way of making a donation to the Obama campaign... Hope it's worth it!

As photographed by me last month, after learning a tremendous amount about our solar system, and our place in the universe. The planetarium is an essential tool to teach the American population about science and nature, and well worth of government subsidies.

Update: The 27bstroke6-blog has a whole article on McCain's contradiction.

Yesterday, I got a new Wells Fargo debit card in the mail. Now, I have multiple accounts with them, with multiple cards, and none were expiring. The new card had a different number from any of the cards I have. So I had no idea what account this new card was linked to, or which old one I should destroy. That's inconvenience #1.

So I called Wells Fargo, and found out that one of my old cards was put on a "potential fraud list", and "for my security" they sent me a new card, causing me to have to go to various utility companies and change the credit card number they have on file for me, so bills will continue to get paid. That's inconvenience #2.

After continuing to prod through multiple escalations with various supervisors, I finally got a hold of the Wells Fargo Fraud Department, who could still not tell me why my card was on a fraud list. All he could tell me was that Visa had provided several banks with a list of possibly compromised account numbers. But that's all they knew. And "just to make sure", they're inconveniencing me with the hassle of figuring out what account this card refers to, contacting billing companies, etc.

This is what Bruce Schneier calls an externality. The banks, in a CYA (Cover Your Ass) action, do nothing to figure out how the card got compromised, but simply place the burden of this hassle on me, the external consumer, who has to spend a Saturday afternoon of his time to fix the bank's mess.

And the worst: there's absolutely no way for me to find out which company potentially lost my information, so I could be sure to not patronize them in the future.

Lame.

11:06 <oirad> do Nugget and/or equiraptor have their iPhone 3G's yet? ;)
11:07 <sobel> they're probably sweating in a line outside the apple store
11:07 <sobel> can't you just order those things online?
11:11 <Leto> but then you wouldn't get it NOW!
11:11 <Leto> the US is the country of instant gratification NOW. drill off
             Florida NOW. get your iPhone NOW.
11:12 <Leto> which is why I don't understand why Netflix is winning over
             Blockbusters...
11:12 <sobel> you're starting to understand america, but you have not
              considered the La-z-boy effect
11:12 <sobel> laziness trumps impatience
11:12 <Leto> ahhhh
11:13 <sobel> Netflix offers NOW enough but allows you to stay put

It's almost First Wednesday, and that means Nuclear Tacos. This Wednesday they will be hosted by ME at my new place on 13266 Kerrville Folkway. Usual time (7:30), unusual place!

Map is here, it's in the same subdivision as the Cowhouse (Milwood), you can recognize the house by the firehydrant at the curb and the red Ford Thunderbird in the driveway.

I have some homebrew on tap, but probably not enough, so BYOB!

(woot, first time of hosting anything at my new place!)

I have some friends from NL coming in this week. Who's up for Salt Lick on Friday night?