As a child of the 70s in a small town, Radio Shack was one of the only places I found where technology was just there to play with or even, if I saved my nickels even take home. My first computer came from a Radio Shack, and I sure wasn’t alone in that (hi, Rob!).

Back then, a Radio Shack was a haven of parts and gadgets and equipment for Serious Knowledgeable Hobbyists. Need a diode and a new soldering iron? Gotcha. Radio kit? Of course. And those wonderful 101-project kits defined my childhood. But it’s all gone now, for the most part, because people just don’t want diodes and soldering irons and DIY electronics anymore, and now all Radio Shack does is sell batteries and cell phones.

Anyway, Wired gets it.

A British sniper has taken the longest-sniper-shot record from the Canuck who bagged it last year. Both the old record (2,757 yards) and the new one (2,707) are about one and a half MILES. Oh, and he did it three times in a row, since after taking out two bad guys he destroyed their machine gun, too.

I’m not sure if it’s more or less impressive, given its sniper-specific provenance, but the new record was made with the relatively modern, smaller, lighter, and shorter-ranged .338 Lapua round, not the venerable .50 BMG used by the Canadian. (An American made a similarly impressive if much shorter shot at 1,367 yards with a 7.62NATO in 2005; the 7.62mm does not have the reach of the Lapua or .50.)

The real nerdery of this story, though, comes from the strange editing choices made in its presentation. I assume the range of Corporal Harrison’s shot was provided by the UK military to the press in meters, and yet it was converted to Imperial units for publication. This part makes sense, because as I understand it, the British public still “thinks” in those units (just like we Yanks).

However, the calibers of the weapons mentioned are completely inscrutable, since they’ve also “helpfully” converted the Imperial names to metric. This is weird and probably wrong.

Caliber names do have their roots in bullet (projectile) diameter, and express that diameter in either Imperial units (as a fraction of an inch — a .45 bullet is just under half an inch in diameter) or metric (e.g. 9mm). However, once named they are typically considered “proper nouns” stylistically, and not converted, for reasons of precision, because bullet diameter is only one measurement when it comes to defining a round. There’s also bullet weight, case dimensions, and (importantly) length and powder load, variances in all of which produce a different round that probably requires a different gun to shoot safely.

Consequently, “9mm” is always 9mm, even in the U.S. where we think with inches, partially because there are several handguns (and several more rifles!) that use bullets of roughly that diameter — .38 Special, .357 Magnum, .357 Sig, .380, etc. There is no ambiguity in saying “9mm”. There’s plenty of imprecision, though, if you just refer to the bullet size.

All this means that converting the “real” name — in this case, .338 Lapua and .50 BMG — to metric is just plain weird if not outright incorrect, and leads to reader annoyance. I had to go to Google to determine what the hell caliber he’d used, since 8.59mm means nothing to me. 12.7mm was big enough I was pretty sure what they meant, but odds are that the bullets for both guns were marked in fractions of inches.

But anyway: A mile and a half. Three times in a row. Damn.

He’s all over Apple on PhoneGate:

“Apple – you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming the man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man! …It wasn’t supposed to be this way – Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one! But you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes! What the fuck is going on?!

…I know that it is slightly agitating that a blog dedicated to technology published all that stuff about your new phone. And you didn’t order the police to bust down the doors, right? I’d be pissed too, but you didn’t have to go all Minority Report on his ass! I mean, if you wanna break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone! I mean, seriously! How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway! There’re no buildings around! What, does the open space confuse AT&T’s signal?!

This gives us a clue. The Apple Design Awards are traditionally given to extraordinary software developers working on Apple platforms, but as of this year, coders working on OSX are no longer eligable: it’s all about the iPhone and iPad only, which of course Apple controls with an iron fist.

It’s been fun to use OSX these last 10 years or so, but it’s becoming more and more clear that the Pilgrim solution may be in my future. I think Lightroom is the only thing I’d really have trouble replacing.

All you need to know about this post? Basically, someone decided to see if he could write Tetris in Javascript on a single plane flight. So he did.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

Gizmodo gives a bit more analysis of the whole thing here, and also considers why Apple couldn’t find the phone.

This whole affair is just hilarious; the rapid fanboy fringe is positively frothy over self-serving interpretations of journalistic ethics and obscure readings of California’s lost property statute — and a few are even upset that Gawker Media wasn’t sufficiently deferential to the Apple counsel who formally requested the return of the phone. GMAFB. Gawker are, proudly, tabloid journalists. They had a shot at the hottest gadget scoop of the year, and they by-God took it. Good for them. Apple may not like it, but that’s the way the game is played.

Who is he? He’s the Apple engineer who, while field testing the new, unreleased 4th generation iPhone, left it in a bar, which led directly to Gizmodo’s hands-on feature. Scoop city for Gizmodo, hot water for Powell.

Oops. Apple is infamous for their security. There are virtually no leaks that they don’t orchestrate, and actual hardware leaks are, I believe, unprecedented. I hope Mr Powell doesn’t lose his job over this, but it wouldn’t at all surprise me. Consider that I’ve seen the “this is a shot of Steve Jobs’ office from earlier today” gag several places already.

There’s lots of whining from [pro-Apple](http://ihnatko.com/2010/04/19/the-increasingly-plausible-miraculous-engadget-and-gizmodo-iphone-4g/] fanboy-ish blogs (some of which I enjoy — but don’t pretend Gruber and Ihnatko aren’t fanboys), but it’s hard to blame folks like Nick Denton for running with this. Journalism, especially tech journalism, runs on the scoop, and Gawker Media found themselves in the proverbial catbird seat here (Ihnatko’s story was written early on; it’s since come to light that Gawker did indeed pay someone for the phone, which was apparently left behind in a bar (see first link)). Andy insists that Gawker have explaining to do, but I disagree: all the explanation we need is already there:

• It’s a real unreleased Apple product; and
• They got it.

Since they ran the story, their servers have been slammed. Cheap pageviews are one thing, but pageviews based on having a real scoop that nobody else has? That’s something else again, and it puts money in Gawker Media’s pockets, and bonuses in the employee’s accounts to pulled this off for Chairman Nick.

Here:

At first I thought it was unreasonable that the proximity of completion was exciting to me, and then I remembered it’s been running for a month and a half.

So, how’s YOUR backup plan coming?

Gizmodo has an appreciation of the ultimate gadget: The sadly grounded SR-71 Blackbird.

One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet if the cockpit lighting were dark. While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky. Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know and somehow punish me. But my desire to see the sky overruled my caution, I dimmed the lighting again. To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window. As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky. Where dark spaces in the sky had usually existed, there were now dense clusters of sparkling stars Shooting stars flashed across the canvas every few seconds. It was like a fireworks display with no sound. I knew I had to get my eyes back on the instruments, and reluctantly I brought my attention back inside. To my surprise, with the cockpit lighting still off, I could see every gauge, lit by starlight.

The excerpt also includes an account of a flight over Libya during which the author and his recon officer were fired upon. Apparently, when you’re in an SR-71, a perfectly acceptable defensive maneuver is to simply accelerate, which they did. To Mach 3.5+, over three and a half times the speed of sound.

Whoa.

Sadly, the author’s book is out of print, and the only copies available are limited edition, signed pressings at $400+ a pop. Oh well.

XKCD on how I spend my life.

It should come as no surprise to any of you that the background music for the Bill Paxton Pinball Machine is, at least part of the time, How Can The Laboring Man Find Time For Self Culture.

It should go without saying that any such machine — featuring as it does “Big Love” multi-ball mode — must obviously be the best example of pinball ever created. A shame there’s only one of them. There’s video, by the way.

(Obvious choice for alternate post title: “You’re stewed, dickwad.”)

A brief, yet helpful, lesson on elementary resource-locking strategy.

Jury says Novell owns UNIX SVRX copyrights. This pretty much torpedos SCO’s claims over Linux. Finally. After 7 years.

Why the hell NOT? Seriously, people. Do It. Smarter people than me (supra) have pretty much the same message. Today’s links are Mac-centric, but Dropbox works for everydamnbody, and there’s nothing Jobsian about having a bunch of drives in different places. Seriously, people, get on it.

One:

Two: Ahem.

Valve’s uberpopular Steam game distribution and library system is coming to the Mac, along with the much ballyhooed Portal 2. The system will allow you to play the PC or Mac version of any Steam game you own.

It’s difficult to overstate how significant this is for gaming:

Valve has stopped with the teasing and has officially announced that its online gaming service Steam is coming to the Mac. As a bonus, the company also plans to make the Mac a “tier-1” platform, promising simultaneous release of games on Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox 360.

Valve has developed a Mac-native version of its Source engine, using the cross-platform OpenGL. “We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” John Cook, Director of Steam Development, said in a statement. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward.”

Beginning in April, Mac users will be able to access games via Steam, including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series. The Mac Steam client is based on the latest version for Windows that is currently in beta, which is where the first hints of Mac OS X compatibility were discovered.

Huge. Huge. Huge.

Chemist Derek Lowe has thoughtfully provided us with a list of Things I Won’t Work With. A bit:

The latest addition to the long list of chemicals that I never hope to encounter takes us back to the wonderful world of fluorine chemistry. I’m always struck by how much work has taken place in that field, how long ago some of it was first done, and how many violently hideous compounds have been carefully studied. Here’s how the experimental prep of today’s fragrant breath of spring starts:

The heater was warmed to approximately 700C. The heater block glowed a dull red color, observable with room lights turned off. The ballast tank was filled to 300 torr with oxygen, and fluorine was added until the total pressure was 901 torr. . .

And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. “Oh, no you don’t,” is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal, “. . .not unless I’m at least a mile away, two miles if I’m downwind.” This, folks, is the bracingly direct route to preparing dioxygen difluoride, often referred to in the literature by its evocative formula of FOOF.

Well, “often” is sort of a relative term. Most of the references to this stuff are clearly from groups who’ve just been thinking about it, not making it. Rarely does an abstract that mentions density function theory ever lead to a paper featuring machine-shop diagrams, and so it is here. Once you strip away all the “calculated geometry of. . .” underbrush from the reference list, you’re left with a much smaller core of experimental papers.

And a hard core it is! This stuff was first prepared in Germany in 1932 by Ruff and Menzel, who must have been likely lads indeed, because it’s not like people didn’t respect fluorine back then. No, elemental fluorine has commanded respect since well before anyone managed to isolate it, a process that took a good fifty years to work out in the 1800s. (The list of people who were blown up or poisoned while trying to do so is impressive). And that’s at room temperature. At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature. But that’s how you get it to react with oxygen to make a product that’s worse in pretty much every way.

FOOF is only stable at low temperatures; you’ll never get close to RT with the stuff without it tearing itself to pieces. I’ve seen one reference to storing it as a solid at 90 Kelvin for later use, but that paper, a 1962 effort from A. G. Streng of Temple University, is deeply alarming in several ways. Not only did Streng prepare multiple batches of dioxygen difluoride and keep it around, he was apparently charged with finding out what it did to things. All sorts of things. One damn thing after another, actually:

“Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred.”

And he’s just getting warmed up, if that’s the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that’s -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng’s reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.

For years, Microsoft has offered webmail for Exchange sites via a tool called Outlook Web Access (“OWA”). It’s an acceptable tool, but has generally lagged behind more widely-used webmail tools like Gmail. Also, and crucially, the most fully functional version of OWA has heretofore only been available to users with Internet Explorer — which gives the short shrift to multiplatform folks with Exchange accounts, but that was never something Microsoft gave two shits about. Sure, you could still use OWA from Firefox, or from a Linux box, but you’d have only limited access to the tool (no formatting, no rules, etc).

Well, we just upgraded to Exchange 2010 at work (hosted externally, thank God), and I’ve noticed something amusing about the 2010 version of OWA. It still has a “basic” version you can use optionally (nice on a low-bandwidth connection), but you get pretty much the full set of features on nearly every browser I’ve tried: IE 7 and 8, obviously, but also Firefox (Win and Mac) and Safari (Mac, but probably Windows, too). There’s actually only one browser I’ve tried that forces the crappy OWA on the user: Internet Explorer 6.

It’s not often I’m happy about something Microsoft does with web standards, but this is clearly an example. OWA required IE-only in the past because it was built to rely on special Microsoft-only proprietary web development techniques, and only IE honored them. At the same time, IE6 was built in such a way that properly-built web apps typically had to have special “and for IE6, do this” code clauses because of how dependent it was on MSFT-only tricks, and how poorly it handled standards-based development. MSFT did this deliberately, it’s assumed, because a fully-functional cross-platform web hits them where they live, and they wished to retard its growth.

The implication with this new “everybody but IE6” approach with OWA is that OWA has been rewritten in a much more standards-friendly way, and so much so that the full version won’t even work in IE6, and MSFT didn’t care to write a special version that would.

Welcome to the standards-based web, Redmond. Come on in. The water’s fine.

Upload this as your profile pic, and then watch the screaming.

Almost 20 years ago, some heathen compatriots and I worked hard to create absurdly baroque DOS prompts with ANSI.SYS and, inevitably, larger-than-normal environment memory on pre-Windows systems. I wish I had a copy of the PROMPT command used to create my own version of that monstrosity — it danced the cursor around to put the current path at the top of the screen, the date in the corner, yadda yadda yadda.

It turns out, people still do this sort of thing on unixy systems.

Geek behaviors present during conversations.

Someone has built a Windows 3.1 emulator in Ajax and Javascript. The attention to detail is disturbing and astounding. You can play Minesweeper or, if you like, spawn a browser and visit the site recursively. Notepad works, and will save files to your desktop.

[Via MeFi.]

Or, maybe you do.

Gizmodo points out the bestest robot flower girl EVER.

Today’s strip, My Hobby: Abusing Dimensional Analysis, is my favorite in weeks. Shame about England, though.

Microsoft never met any problem they couldn’t make more complicated. You can see this in nearly everything they do, from relatively simple things like the Zune — way, way, way more fiddly than the iPod — to their mess of a mobile platform (really? a “Start” menu on my phone? Are you high?) to how they manage server settings for tools like IIS and SQL Server to, well, even Word and Excel these days. Trapped my increasing commoditization, they keep shoveling more and more features into tools into which almost no one dives deep — my bet is that 95% of all Word users have no idea what 95% of the features do. And yet they add and add and add, and Word gets slower and slower and slower.

Complication is sin in computing. Simple tools are better. This is a bit of a religious position, but my 20+ years in computing has left me with the strong opinion that a whole bunch of flexible, small, generalized tools is a way better solution that an proliferating patchwork of giant, inflexible programs dedicated to single tasks.

My current proof of this is Team Foundation Server, MSFT’s current offering in the source-control-and-work/bug-tracking world. It is, of course, the path of least resistance for the MSFT developing hordes (while the rest of the dev world uses tools like Subversion). I’m not writing code on this project, so I can’t speak to that side of the tool, but as a product manager I do know something about the bug-and-issue-tracking side of the thing. And it’s a friggin’ joke. Everything takes ninety more steps than it ought to. The only way to interact with it, really, is to install and use VISUAL STUDIO — there is a web client, but it sucks balls even from IE8. If you’ve used more lightweight, flexible tools like Bugzilla, working with backlog of items in TFS feels like assembling a ship in a bottle with a broken pair of tweezers.

Of course, TFS does come with a rich set of templating features, and is skinnable and has workflow features and is all kinds of customizable. It’ll talk to Excel for bulk entry, even!

And yet, here’s the rub: none of that shit really matters for 99% of the people who need an issue tracker. It’s a pretty simple use case, which is why so many of the popular tools are simple web apps with little in the way of system requirements: Management uses the list to figure out what needs doing; they set priorities, and assign items to developers. Developers use the list of things assigned to them to know what to work on, and in what order. Dialog ensues on each work item as required. Everything should be simple and straightforward. Nothing gets lost in the shuffle, because the universe of items is fairly simple and easy to see.

Not in the land of TFS, though. You’ve got a boatload of work item types to sort out (bug? enhancement? product backlog item? sprint backlog item? task? there’s MORE!), and there’s no way to change the type post-creation, which is an EXCELLENT way to ensure some double-entry and/or the loss of an item because it’s in the wrong type. It’s thick-client dependent, but even that interface looks like something from the Land that UX Forget (constant scrolling, e.g.). It just took me 10 minutes to find the “jump to item #” feature, for crying out loud.

Who comes UP with this shit? Are they fired yet? Christ.

For various reasons, today I have my calendar up on:

• My Mac’s iCal
• Outlook inside VMWare
• OWA on my client laptop
• Outlook on my corporate laptop
• My iPhone

Just now, all 5 of them began noisily alerting me to my first meeting today.

“I have a business installing styrofoam nuns. Fuck a fruit basket.”

NSFW (profanity). But do not miss this.

…of Scalzi’s masterwork The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.

Enjoy.

Their souls make his tummy happy.

I for one welcome our new dancing Japanese robot masters.

Paul Graham explains why.

This is apparently from last year, but how often do you see a Halloween costume this amazingly cool? Dude built a Luke-and-Tauntaun setup that beggars belief. Check it out.

The 50 Most Interesting Articles on Wikipedia. You’re welcome.

Over at CHUD: Jack Kirby’s Inglorious Basterds — the imagined 1970s comic adaptation of Tarantino’s latest, as drawn by Jack “King” Kirby.

PERFECT.

The Windows version of Remote Desktop doesn’t cache my credentials, so I always have to provide at least a password to get into our remote machines.

The Mac side version? No problem.

Yet another reason to love Perl and Perl culture.

Randall Mundoe graphs the movies.

We give you: Eternal justification for Autotune: Carl Sagan Remixed.

While I understand why you say that “many technical issue can be resolved by using the support functions of our web site,” at no point in my technical career has this ever, ever, ever been a good use of my time.

The much-publicized collossal cockup over at Microsoft regarding T-Mobile Sidekick user data reads like an IT horror story, and that’s because it completely is (some are even saying sabotage). And it didn’t take long for some folks to immediately start using the story as proof that cloud-based computing is a bad idea.

However, that’s not the lesson here, and cloud-based services are not the real problem in this picture. Let me explain.

The Sidekick, for those who don’t know, is a clever piece of hardware made by a company called Danger, and sold exclusively through T-Mobile. Unlike most PDA phones, this one came with no sync cable — you put your addresses into it, and it sync’d up to T-Mobile’s servers over the air.

That’s where “cloud storage” comes in. In the IT world, that phrase means “storing your data out on some servers in some data center someplace that you don’t own.” Use Gmail? Your mail’s in the cloud. Rely on hosted Exchange? Same goes for you, except now your calendar and contact data are in the cloud, too. Google Docs? Cloud. Various web-based collaboration tools? Cloud. You get the idea. It’s got power, but it’s also not always a perfect fit. Right tool, right job.

In the phone context, this has strengths, especially for casual users — no software to install on your PC, no cable to lose, and you can get to the data from any browser (like, say, at work and at home) even without your device handy. Changes made on either side get sync’d to the other, and everything’s groovy.

There are some costs, too, obviously. The biggest one is potentially security, as Paris Hilton learned back when the Sidekick was the “It Phone” and some private snapshots from her Sidekick account ended up on every gossip blog in the universe. It wasn’t the work of some nefarious hacker cracking T-mobile’s site; it was almost certainly just some dude who managed to guess Hilton’s password in the privacy of his own home with no access at all to Hilton’s phone. Game, set, match. The lesson here, though, isn’t “cloud storage bad;” it’s “use a real password.” Who wants to bet it was her dog’s name?

The real gotcha of the Sidekick architecture, though, is the one that’s happening now. Not only did the Sidekick not require a cable to sync to your desktop (Outlook or whatever), it couldn’t. There is no easy way (of which I’m aware) for a Sidekick user to get their own backup of their Sidekick data. It was and remains a “trust us; we know what we’re doing” situation — which, as I’ve said before, is never a good idea.

Now that the Sidekick servers are toast, and everyone knows that Microsoft did essentially no backups, that lesson should be clear.

But let’s be specific: The lesson isn’t that using any cloud service is bad. The lesson actually doesn’t have anything at all to do with cloud services. The takeaway for the savvy after the Sidekick affair is bone fucking simple:

Make backups. Lots of them.

If the system someone is selling you doesn’t allow YOU to make your own backups, buy something else. I use cloud services, if you want to call them that, for two different sets of data on my iPhone. Using MobileMe, my desktop calendar and contacts sync with my phone via Apple, with changes automatically pushed from one side to the other whenever required with no cable involved. It works like a charm, and my data is in three places — my phone, my desktop, and MobileMe. And my desktop is very backed up. I do the same thing with my corporate Exchange data, which exists in even more places (since I use multiple computers with multiple installations of Outlook in addition to my normal computer).

I also use other kinds of cloud services. My Nogators.com mail is hosted at Gmail, and Imap’d down to my clients. That’s pretty darn cloudy, and I wouldn’t go back to running my own servers if you paid me. But, again, I also have backups.

So, again: the problem, dear reader, lies not with the cloud, but with our selves — and our ability to measure our backup security in time zones and spindles.

Or, at least, it is if you didn’t hire incompetent web devs in the first place. Derek Powazek nails it down for us:

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

It may not be quite that bad — someone probably does have to explain to the masses why semantic markup matters, or why having meaningful links and real site structure matter and, in general, why HTML generated by something other than Word or your brother-in-law is important — but to a first approximation, he’s right.

What’s good SEO? Here’s the key:

The One True Way

Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

Please ditch the ribbon and give me this instead, mkay?

Very, very cool.

Last week, I gave up and ordered Uverse with Internet only from AT&T. I really didn’t want to, and I may still tell them to go to hell, but at this point it appears to be the only way I can get high-speed ( > 5MB) connectivity into my house for less than a couple hundred bucks a month.

The first hurdle was getting them to sell me Internet-only. I have Vonage, and I’m very happy with it; I see no reason to go with AT&T’s phone service. I have DirecTV with a real Tivo; there is absolutely no reason to go with AT&T’s retarded DVR technology, HD be damned. But you can’t sign up for net-only Uverse online; you have to go to the phone, where you talk to an idiot.

Well, that’s not fair. The dude I got might not have been an idiot — but if he wasn’t, he was a liar. You pick.

The point of contention here is that I asked, over and over, will ordering Uverse disconnect my DSL? I have a 3MB down/768 up circuit here already, and I wanted to keep it so I’d have a fallback if the Uverse sucked. Over and over the idiot/liar assured me that yes, I could keep the DSL, it wouldn’t go away, it’s completely separate, etc. Fine; I ordered it, and scheduled Tuesday installation.

This morning, of course, we had no Internet. After lots of local troubleshooting and a phone call to my ISP, it turns out that yes, AT&T deprovisioned my line. Getting it back would be basically re-ordering the service from scratch. I called AT&T Uverse support and explained to them what had happened, and they were of course all about “well, he shouldn’t have told you that, because it’s not true, we regret the error, etc.”

I have one word for that: Bullshit. AT&T doesn’t care. They never care. They’re AT&T, and they will keep screwing customers as long as they possibly can. The call center I ordered Uverse from probably has a fucking sign on the wall encouraging the drones to say anything and everything to get a customer to sign up; if they don’t, it’s implicit in the comp plan. And now, of course, I’m on the hook – it’ll take weeks to get my DSL back, but some dude in a truck is theoretically showing up here tomorrow to set up Uverse. Gotcha!

The not-quite-so-dingy side is that I got them to ditch the install fee ($150) over this, but that’s cold comfort since the Glenbrook Valley types got a no-fee install without even asking.

Here’s the really annoying part: I have two copper lines into the house, only one of which has been active. If ATT had been honest about how DSL and Uverse interacted, I could have ordered the Uverse onto the other line and kept the DSL after all. Instead, because of their incompetent/sociopathic salesjerks, I’ve basically lost a day of work over it.

So, AT&T? Fuck you. Fuck you twice. I tried to avoid you, and when I finally gave in you were right there with a “gotcha” you clearly care nothing about. Die in a fire. Seriously. In the meantime, I’m shopping for non-Uverse broadband. Even at $65 a month, it’s leaving a pretty shitty taste in my mouth.

At first, so-called “white hat” bulk mailers like Constant Contact looked like a good idea, but it appears their clients are not universally scrupulous, so signing up for Mailing List A frequently results in me getting on lists B, C, and D as well. Politicians are the most obnoxious about this, but they’re not alone.

Consequently, I went over to Google to tell it to sideline anything with a ConstantContact (or BlueStateDigital) mail header — except Gmail doesn’t know how to do headers. Grrrr.

After a second attempt at “put this on my calendar” appeared to fail, I did a little research. The data detectors are pretty good, just not quite foolproof. Sure, the month and day are right…

I noticed this in the WSJ on Thursday, too.

These aren’t labeled as such, but these “Uncomfortable Plot Summaries” remind me of nothing so much as the asinine blurbs for shows in the old TV Guide. So often did they miss the point of a given show that I used to say they’d summarize the New Testament as “Jewish carpenter runs afoul of Roman law.”

Anyway, not all of these are funny, but any list that reduces Highlander to “Elderly immigrant destroys property” has to have a few other gems on offer.