Category: Rant

9/11 + 1

Well, just got back from 2 weeks in New York City, probably one of the best trips I have ever taken… it was quite a crazy trip and we did some rather ridiculous things that most definitely changed my life… as I have nothing to complain about, I will save the details for another time and section… More later…

Obligatory rant: As expected, the transition to a new DSL provider (as described in the following entry) went poorly and that is why the site was down till now… for those of you that missed it…

Infrastructure carnage

Well, we are more than halfway through the year, this of course means that I am long overdue for yet another DSL provider/ISP change. My history thus far:

DSL Provider:

ISP:

  Northpoint  

Flashcom

—>
(1)		  Northpoint  

Telocity

—>
(2)		  Covad  

Aplus

—>
(3)		 Covad

 DSL.net  

(1) December 2000 – Less than a year into my service with them, Flashcom was unable to pay its bills to Northpoint (and probably everyone else) and was forced to shut down. Considering I was only billed intermittently during my time with them, this is not surprising. I was transferred with minimal pain and minimal service outage.

(2) June 2001 – This was a big one. Verizon backed out of its deal to acquire the struggling Northpoint Communications. Northpoint promptly files for bankruptcy. AT&T acquired Northpoint’s assets and decided that DSL was not part of its vision and cut off Northpoint’s DSL customers. We were told that we would be automatically migrated to Rhythms DSL. In response, Rhythms promptly filed for bankruptcy. After about a month or two of no service and no hope for any, I signed up with APlus.net, apparently Covad’s largest ISP.

(3) August 2002 – Enabling my fourth DSL Provider/ISP combination in three years, APlus.net has decided that it wants to concentrate more on web hosting and is jettisoning their DSL business. I am promised a seamless transition with minimal outage. I remain hopeful.

Dot-com wastelands

After being away from San Francisco for quite a while I was taking a long walk through the city now that I had a little bit of free time. I was greeted with a very sad depressing sight on O’Farrell street (between Van Ness and Polk):

kozmo

The offices for Kozmo.com, definitely one of the greatest dot-com services to go under, remain unoccupied, boarded-up and completely decrepit looking well over a year after they went under (April 12, 2001). What a sad statement on the dot-com bust and commercial real estate in San Francisco that prime real estate remains unused (I mean, really, who wouldn’t want to work across the street from the Mitchell Brothers theater!).

Amway Redux

Unbelievable, one of the Amway guys that I have spoken to in the past (see the September 3 rant below) actually called me up at home. Now before you say anything, yes, I realize I was asking for it when I gave him my home number (tho for the life of me I can’t remember doing that). The really ridiculous thing is that he expected me to devote part of my Thanksgiving weekend speaking to him about his opportunity.

Why I hate Hotmail II

  1. Corollary to point (1) mentioned earlier – the lack of a POP interface also means that you can’t use any other mail service to read your Hotmail mail (of course Microsoft provides the ability to use POP to suck mail from another mail service but once the mail is at your Hotmail account, it is stuck there)
  2. I have a couple of free mail accounts (Yahoo, Go, Excite, Hotmail) and Hotmail receives far and away the most porn and get rich quick spam
  3. In this day when hard disk space is so cheap, it is really pretty sad that Hotmail still provides a paltry 2MB… especially when all the other free mail providers are giving more
  4. The interface won’t let you in without javascript – this is just annoying, I should be able to disable it if I want

Why I hate Hotmail

  1. Hotmail accounts cannot be accessed via POP3 (it’s impossible to read Hotmail mail with any offline program except Outlook Express – you can’t even use Outlook)
  2. If you click on an external (non-MSN) link from an email message you get a new browser that has this evil frame that says that “You are visiting a site outside of Hotmail. To return to Hotmail, close this browser window.” Contrary to Microsoft’s beliefs, there is a world outside of MSN
  3. There is no way to get messages to be always saved in the “sent mail” folder. You must specify this manually for each message
  4. The junk/bulk mail filter is way too sensitive
  5. Messages in the “sent mail” folder are cleared every 30 days
  6. Many well publicized security breaches and a weak privacy policy
  7. Spam from Hotmail has a different icon than regular mail (again Microsoft utilizes a feature not available to the general public for it’s own benefit)
  8. Too much spam from Hotmail, when I get a letter from Yahoo, I always read it because it is invariably important. Letters from Hotmail are just more and more marketing propaganda and now go straight into the trash

Amway hell

Well, I was cleaning out my wallet when I came across the business card of this guy I met last week. Let me ask you, what is it about me that attracts all of these stinkin’ Amway salesmen??? For some reason I have met way more than my fair share of these people in the last couple of years.

[For those of you who are not familiar, Amway is a complicated pyramid scheme – do a Google search on "Amway" an you will come up with many sites that will explain it better than I can (obviously, skip the first link that comes up to the Amway site itself, you won’t get any useful information there!)]

Let’s analyze my interactions so far…

When Where Who approached me
November 21, 2001 Unbelievable, the guy calls me up at home (I can’t believe that I gave him my home number!) and wants to know if I’ll spend part of my thanksgiving weekend meeting with him Either Raja or Rajesh below (can’t remember)
August 24, 2001 Palo Alto Fry’s, I was looking at mice, minding my own business Raja, president of RM Internationalthis guy was a big-shot, he was *president* of a fictional company!
Mid 2000 Sunnyvale Fry’s, I was checking out the new flat panel monitors, minding my own businessI was looking for a KVM switchbox for NAISA Rajesh, Bizonet
Mid-1998, on 2-3 separate occasions Sapient’s Perimeter Atlanta office, in the elevator Random dude in the elevatormore than one person from my team had seen this guy, which makes us think that he spends his days riding the elevator in our building soliciting people with his *opportunity*
Early 1998This was not long after Sapient screwed me out of the Australia project, this was why I spoke with the guy for as long as I did San Bruno Comp USA, I was looking for a parallel port splitter, minding my own business Jukka, JCM Enterprises

Based on my experiences, there are many common traits that these people all have. You can recognize an Amway salesman if:

  • they use phrases like: "own your own company", "part-time job", "supplement your income", "utilizing e-commerce/the internet", "internet enabled business". Now that the bubble had burst, my most recent guy steered away from internet buzzwords and used phrases like "creating business plans for enterprises" etc. These phrases are very standard and with practice you will recognize them in their various forms very quickly
  • they are quick to hand you business cards with fictional companies [cards printed on cheap paper, the company name is the person’s initials, the company URL takes you to a place similar to the links above, sports presumptuous titles
  • they are vague when pressed for details and then try to get you to come to an informational session at a nearby hotel or someone’s house
  • they always feel it necessary to give you some contact information that is not printed on the card (usually a home/cell/pager number)
  • they absolutely deny any affiliation with Amway or Quixtar

Some of these guys are better at the spiel than others. A good Amway salesman will introduce their "opportunity" very casually into the conversation. If they are less experienced it will be clear that it is being forced into the conversation. I was alone at the time I was approached by each of my Away salesmen.

For those of you that know me, what is it about me that attracts these people???

Dubya’s energy plan… or lack thereof

From today’s news – US to reject germ-warfare pact. It seems to me that dubya needs to spend less time telling the world to kiss his ass and more time coming up with an energy plan that at least tries to address the vicious cycle of fossil fuel use and global warming.

On a related note, do you realize that they already have made a movie out of dubya’s energy plan? It is called The Naked Gun 2½. The bad guys in the movie and dubya seem identical ideas when it comes to energy use. At least the good guys in the movie prevailed…

Drive by media…

The thing that bothers me the most about the Chandra Levy case (aside from the fact that it is standard media carpet bombing of an issue where the big picture is lost in the day to day esotericies) is that way too much time is spent analyzing and obsessing over Gary Condit. According to the DC Police Department this case is still being considered a missing person’s case. This is not a criminal investigation. It is definitively incorrect to say that there are suspects in the case and until the DC police change their status, I really wish that people would lay off the daily fine-tooth analysis every time Gary Condit farts.

While it is fine (and expected) that the police will investigate all avenues in Chandra Levy’s disappearance, it is clear that "all avenues" don’t start and end with Gary Condit.

Condoning stupidity

I’ve been doing some thinking about this and, as much as I want Al Gore to win the election, I just can’t stand by the suit to disqualify the ballots in south Florida because they were “confusing”. In the end, I just can’t condone stupidity. If the people who filled out the ballots were too dumb to realize that 2 holes would invalidate a ballot or they lacked the good sense to doublecheck their own ballots then should not be allowed to vote!

Manual recounts are a very reasonable reaction to an election this close however.

BUT, my coworkers and I have come to the conclusion that it is pretty silly to be splitting hairs over a couple hundred votes. We think that if the election is closer than (say) one one-hundredth of one percent (a 900 vote difference in a population of over 9 million), it should be declared a statistical draw and the votes either split down the middle or discarded.