Holidays 'n Such-like

Had a lot of fun. Spent most of the holidays with slatepelican, which was good. Usually I'm not a huge fan of Christmas and that whole time of year, because I find the shopping super stressful, things are always really rushed, airports and planes are packed, etc. But slatepelican made it a lot more fun.

We spent a couple days in Chatham, then headed west to Calgary to hang out with my family, and then returned to NY for New Year's with bugbearcub in tow. (Actually, technically we were in tow I guess, since we arrived a couple hours after he did.) mrwise and his sister also made an appearance for New Year's, which was good (and, as always, klASSy).

iPhone

Wow. This thing seriously looks awesome. Too bad it's super expensive and will only be available on Cingular. Now I have to decide whether the iPhone is worth getting a 2 year (blech) contract with Cingular, and if so, whether I can put up with my craptacular Tréo (see below) until then.

The remainder of this post is somewhat rant-y, so I'll leave a cut here for those who are all ranted out.

More Tréo Woes

It just keeps getting worse. Every time I try to get mail manually in VersaMail, the unit freezes and I have to manually restart it. Every once in a while when I try to get voicemail, the phone app crashes. Calls get dropped. Opening certain contacts entries causes the unit to restart. Blazer (the web browser) causes a restart when opening certain web pages.

I've actually just started giving up when the stupid thing crashes; I just forget about what I was trying to do and move on with my life. I really can't be bothered at this point.

The funny thing is that I thought maybe some of these bugs had been fixed, so I upgraded the software a while ago. Since then I think I've actually had more problems. Way to go. Paying $500 for a phone on a contract starts to look good when this is your alternative. Of course I suppose I could just join the masses and get a Razr, which seems to suck a lot less than Tréos. Though I suspect Google Maps on Razr wouldn't be nearly as good as on the Tréo. The other alternative is a CrackBerry, of course, but getting another smartphone if I'm planning to get the iPhone seems silly.

LiveJournal

While we're on the topic of things sucking, what is it with LJ asking you to login every time you post a comment? I swear it didn't use to be this braindead. But I just posted 3 comments on LJ, and each time I had to login again. WTF? Do they have some strange one-time login only for posting comments? That seems stupid.

January 12, 2007 (link)

Googlers

So yesterday at 9:19am one of the facilities folks sends out an email to the NY mailing list: sorry about the lack of espresso beans, our delivery was lost, we'll be getting more later today or probably tomorrow.

30 minutes later, realising they're about to be overrun by the growing mob of caffeine zombies, another email: we will have more beans in place within the hour.

In any case, I'm in Mountain View right now so I missed the excitement. I'm sure it wasn't pretty :P

January 13, 2007 (link)

LJ Feature Request

I would like to be able to get the full, logged-in version of my friends page as a feed. How to do this? Well, with Google Calendar we have feeds for private data that do not require authentication but have a hard-to-guess random token in the URL that you can reset at any time to a new random string, in case it gets compromised. Yes, this is "security by obscurity," which we all know is bad, but one of the fundamental problems with RSS and feed readers is that there's no widely accepted security model, so you have to resort to this kind of hackery...

January 15, 2007 (link)

Shameless Plug

Every term, as soon as the first assignments come out, UW students inevitably procrastinate by generating some kind of pretty course schedule for themselves; none of the ones that QUEST generates are very good, and we all know it's much more fun to play with schedule generators than do assignments.

Well this term, Google's got you covered on this noble, time-honoured tradition. Thanks to jbdeboer's cool UW scraper, all of UW's courses are now available in Google Calendar:

Step 1: Login Don't have an account? Get one!	Step 2: Search Search for courses.
Step 3: Add Add the calendar to your calendar list.

Repeat the above for all your courses. Hmm, maybe we made it too easy to get that course schedule set up. Oops. Sorry about that. I hear drinking beer is also a good way to procrastinate.

NOTE: I did not do anything "special" or Google-specific to achieve this. Anyone can import iCalendar files into Google Calendar and make them public.

January 21, 2007 (link)

Excitement

I have had quite an exciting day so far, and it's only about 1pm. Right now, I'm on a flight to St. Louis. Why St. Louis, you ask? Well, that's a funny story.

My day began at about 9:35 am. Anybody who knows me knows that this in itself is highly unusual, because I generally don't wake up before about 11 on the best of days. In any case, I groggily glance over at the clock out of curiosity while preparing to roll over and go back to sleep. Hmm, 9:35 am. I realise that my stupid fucking hotel never gave me the wake up call I ordered. Or I slept through it, which is possible I suppose, but wake up calls generally do wake me up.

This was a big problem, though, because I was supposed to be on a plane at 11. By most definitions, I was technically already supposed to be at the airport. Crap. I check out of the hotel and catch a cab over to Google, where I left my car because I was in the city yesterday and parking there is a pain in the ass.

On the way to Google, I call American. It goes a little something like this:

me: I need to change my flight. I'm going from SFO to LGA.
AA: Ok, hmm, we can send you through Dallas at 11:05.
me: No, I need to go later, something, uh, "came up", I'm not at the airport yet.
AA: Ok, you can go through St. Louis at 12:30. That's the last flight of the day that will get you to New York.
me: Great, that works. How much is it to change that?
AA: Oh, nothing. Your flight was cancelled so it's free.
me (floored, because I have never had an airline change stuff for free, and I had absolutely no idea my original flight was cancelled): Uh, ok. Thanks!

That was lucky occurrence number 1. Now I get to the parking lot where I left my car, and.. no car to be found. It's just gone. I start freaking out. I have no clue where I would go or who I would call to get my car if it had been towed. I have no idea why it would be towed just sitting in the Google lot over the weekend, either. More crap. I start trying to chase down some security folks or someone who may have a clue what happened to my car, or at least who to call to find out. As I'm running around campus, I suddenly see it. It's a couple lots away from where I parked it. For some reason somebody decided to tow the car across the Google campus over the weekend just for shits. Whatever, if that's what floats their boat, fine. Finding the car was lucky occurrence number 2.

I hop in, grab a tank of gas, and am on the 101 by 11. Remember that my flight is at 12:30, and I still have to get to the airport, return the car, check in and get through security. Hmm. Not looking good.

I pull in to the rental car return at 11:15. Anybody who knows this area knows that it should really take you longer than 15 minutes to drive from Mountain View to SFO. Heh. Heh. That was the fastest I've ever driven. I was doing about 150 (or "90" as they call it here) the whole way.

Get to the checkin desk at the airport. No line, sweet. Get to security. Massive line going down the hallway farther than I can see. Crap. Then some extremely nice airport worker ushers me in to the business class line, which is about 5 people long. Sweet. I must have looked really desperate at this point. This was lucky occurrence number 3.

I get through security at around noon, find a coffee shop, slam back a quadruple espresso and get on the plane, and now I'm typing this. I sincerely hope the rest of my day is more relaxing.

Back: December 2006

Next: February 2007