I am Ahh-nuld

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his bid for the California governorship, is going to strengthen his candidacy and mitigate his lack of experience by surrounding himself with smart, knowledgeable, experienced people – exactly the strategy that Dubya used, in his successful presidential bid. Fair ’nuff.

The question *I* have is, why can’t we elect a smart person that surrounds himself with smart, knowledgeable, experienced people??? Is there a little known election rule that says a candidate can’t have more than a certain amount of IQ points distributed amongst himself and his advisors?? Why do we have to elect idiots?

End of an era…

*sigh* I just found out some really depressing news last week – apparently my old company, Sapient, is going to close down their San Francisco office. From peaking out at over 400 people in three different buildings when I left in early 2000 (it went even higher from what I understand), the office has dwindled down to nothing.

Definitely the end of an era.

Salim vs His Freezer

Before the defrosting process
Before the defrosting process
My freezer this morningMy freezer this morning, after picking out all of the ice

Well, I accomplished the *long* overdue task of defrosting my freezer. This was for two primary reasons – first, the amount of usable space in my freezer was absurdly low compared to what it should have been and second, because I wanted to eat a frozen pizza that had so much ice grown up around it that the pizza had become part of the freezer itself.

It was done in stages, I would turn off the fridge overnight and then empty the water that collected in the tray below the freezer, then turned it back on so as not to get too warm and ruin the food contained therein. I repeated this about 3 times and the fourth (last night) finally loosened the grip of the ice enough so that I could pick it out.

To celebrate, I ate that pizza.

Remnant ice in my sink
In addition to a few dirty dishes, I managed to fill the entire sink with ice formerly caked to my freezer walls

Why MCI can kiss my ass, part II

Three more reasons:

  1. Looking at my final MCI bill I noticed that I was once again suicidally overcharged. There were two problems with it. The first was the same overcharging as below. As before they (eventually) fixed that up. The second was in the last five days of my service with them the rates on my calls (to a cell phone in Japan) went up from 14¢/minute to $7.81/minute! The customer support rep (and the customer support specialist who I was transferred to and her manager) were not willing to do anything about this. They gave me the steps to escalate, more later.
  2. I just noticed there is a $40 charge from MCI in April that doesn’t appear on any of my statements. The MCI rep I spoke with couldn’t see it either and told me that I had to call the finance department on Monday.
  3. They discontinued my service in my first month with them after accruing a whopping $35 in charges!!

On a happier note, I also got my first bill from AT&T. Unfortunately they also lied to me, fortunately I don’t mind. Instead of charging me 12¢/minute to a cell phone in Japan like they said, they charged me 10¢/minute… 10¢/minute!! This is to a cell phone located over five THOUSAND miles away!! This is only a penny more than it costs me to call my parents who live 40 miles away!

I haven’t seen anything, including those 10-10-xxx numbers and any pre-paid calling card that can beat that rate (again it’s to a cell phone, I realize that calling a land line in Japan can be cheap as hell).

Yaaaaayyy!!

Just wanted to mention that, just over 2 weeks back (just before I left for vacation), my Mom had her masters thesis approved and is now well on her way to getting that elusive degree!

Why MCI can kiss my ass

When I switched my long distance service to MCI a couple of months back, they told me that calls to both land lines and cell phones in Japan were the same rate of 14¢/minute. I asked this question very explicitly because I know that most companies charge a surcharge for calls to foreign cell phones. I asked the question about four times in various forms and each time they were very clear on their answer.

In any case I got my long distance bill this month and sure enough, as I was promised, all the calls to Japan (all of them calls to a mobile) were 14¢/minute. However, I was confused that after accruing international long distance fees of $120, I somehow had a bill that totalled $350! Now clearly there was no way that my local toll + domestic long distance + taxes/fees was enough to make up that much of a difference. Looking more closely at my bill, I noticed the vast majority of that difference was in an "international mobile surcharge". Speaking with customer service, it was explained to me that MCI charges you the standard country rate on the itemized part of the bill then (essentially) hides an additional per minute charge (19¢/minute in this case) in the international mobile surcharge – this makes my calls to Japanese cell phones 33¢/minute, not the 14¢/minute I was promised.

I’m not sure which I dislike more, getting charged up the ass without knowing it, or being totally and blatantly lied to.

Further, the ease at which they reversed the charges makes me believe that this is a common problem they deal with and they basically count on people not noticing these additional hidden charges.

I switched my service back to AT&T. They don’t have the best rates in every single category, but far and away, across the board they have the best deals. I have signed up for the "AT&T Anywhere International Plan" which supposedly will give me a phenomenal 12¢/minutes to both cell phones and land lines in Japan for calls that I make from my calling card ($19.95 minimum usage). These guys were very up front about the surcharges that they charged so hopefully this deal actually pans out – it certainly can’t be any worse than what I just switched from tho…

Note to self, this is the first post where I started putting the titles in. All the posts previous to this were put in my be after the fact (~Fall 2018)

State of cell phone service in the US

In the past 6 months I have had, for varying reasons, three different cell phones with three different carriers. My thoughts on each along various criteria…

Coverage and Service – far and away the most important criteria. The damn thing’s gotta work to be useful

  • Cingular – Utter and complete crap. It was always a mystery whether or not my phone would work when I pulled it out. Secondly, this GSM phone took the longest time to find a signal (5-20 seconds compared to <5 seconds for TDMA and CDMA). Finally, SMS was regularly dropped silently – was not a reliable medium.
  • AT&T – AT&T’s TDMA coverage is excellent. However, from what I understand, the GSM coverage, while being a shade better than Cingular’s GSM, is still far from ideal – Basically, GSM in the United States is not ready for prime time. Additionally, they have done the best job of creating interesting content and services (american idol voting over SMS, 411 over SMS) – granted when I say interesting, it is not interesting to me, but they are definitely trying.
  • Verizon – Far and away the best service coverage, both in terms of quality and area covered. I never have to worry whether or not my phone will work no matter where I am. However the lack of full international SMS is a little annoying.

Customer Service – at the end of the day the bar is usually set pretty low on this so any improvement is immediately noticeable

  • Cingular – Like pulling teeth, customer service people consistently lacking in knowledge. Secondly, their billing system is flaky requiring even more calls into customer service. Finally, switching from a national plan to a local plan (or vice versa) resets your service contract (essentially adds a year to it).
  • AT&T – Fantastic. Customer service people friendly and helpful and most importantly, knowledgeable. I have had a couple of non-trivial billing issues, all of which were solved quickly and efficiently. Additionally, price plans changes are made effective for that entire billing cycle, not prorated from that point forward.
  • Verizon – Most of the time they are really friendly and want to be helpful, but tend to lack in higher end brain functions. I find that even simple tasks, even though they eventually always get solved, always take a *loooong* time.

Phones

  • Cingular – Not bad actually, but does it really matter – with coverage this bad, you never can use the damn thing.
  • AT&T – While there is a good selection of GSM phones, the TDMA and GAIT (combined TDMA and GSM) phones are lame.
  • Verizon – Definitely improving, especially on the high-end.

In summary

  • Cingular insults you across the board with bad marks in everything. I will give them credit that they are trying the hardest, offering features like nights that start at 7 and rollover minutes, but then again, they need to because they really need the most help.
  • While AT&T‘s TDMA coverage is fantastic, it limits you to a selection of really lame phones and no GPRS/advanced data services. Since the GSM coverage is not acceptable, it means that it is not possible to get good coverage, data services and a cool phone all at the same time.
  • Verizon‘s excellent coverage and a kick ass phone makes it the best carrier of the bunch.

Some thoughts on the other three national cell carriers in the U.S….

  • T*Mobile/Voicestream – Tie up with wi-fi hot spots is possibly compelling, but still limits you to GSM coverage. Cingular and T*Mobile tend to share towers so the crappy Cingular service you get in the Bay Area is the same crappy service you will get on T*Mobile.
  • Nextel – Don’t know much about them except that nobody that I know has service with them. I guess if you are into push-to-talk then it is the carrier of choice.
  • Sprint – From what I hear, Sprint is far and away the best value for money in terms of the number of minutes you can get for the price, plus you can get unlimited data for just $10. However, it seems that Sprint’s coverage is pretty rotton. Has one of the better selections of phones though.

Why I hate Hotmail IV

My continuing tirade against Hotmail redux

Got this letter from a long lost friend:

Tried to send the link to the CIAC's website to everyone I know (I've gotten too much of this crap lately), and hotmail told me I have sent too many messages in the last 24 hours, so it won't let me send anymore (it cut off the last 20 or so people on my list)...

Why to we willingly let them do this to us?

I-5 Wasteland

I find it very amusing that for all the diversity that you find in San Francisco and LA, the only radio that you get in the wasteland of I-5 between the two is country, Christian rock and Spanish music.

Silly Scientologists

Dianetics flyer, frontI just recently got the most nonsensical, preposterous, absurd and just plain silly flyer in the mail. For those of you that don’t know, Scientology is one of those borderline-cults created by L. Ron Hubbard, who realized that he could make more money by selling his science fiction stories as a religion than as just stories.

If you don’t believe me that these people are whack-jobs, take a look at the back of the flyer that I got (click on the image on the right to see the actual page). This thing is ridiculous on so many levels that I am not going to make any comments and let you read it for yourself. That first paragraph especially, just cracks me up!

Dianetics flyer, back

Click me for detail

Dianetics Auditing Success

"I was ill for months in the hospital. I was under intensive care for weeks with a bleeding ulcer infection and kidney failure. My heart stopped three times and I died three times. I also was unconscious for over a week, and I basically did not want to live. The doctors were going to give up on me and stop the treatment. The nurses did not expect me to live.

"My wife had a very hard time with it and she couldn’t even call to see how I was doing; she had to have someone else call for her. She then received some Dianetics auditing and came to grips with it, at which point she was able to come into my room in the hospital and give me some auditing. She came in every day.

"I soon started becoming more aware of my environment and had a determinism to survive. It made life bright enough to live. Many other people helped me through it using L. Ron Hubbard’s technology. I am now recovered and would not have lived if it weren’t for the technology by L. Ron Hubbard that helped us get through it." – D.H.