I actually had the same thing happen to me. Several months ago I interviewed with a smaller data warehousing company out of St. Louis. Things seemed to go well in the phone interviews and so they flew me out one day to interview in person. Things went well at the interview there (or so I felt) and the HR director informed me that he would be making a decision in a couple of weeks. In spoke to him a week later and he stated that they were still in the process. Then... nothing. None of my correspondance or phone calls were returned. A couple of months later, I got an email from the recruiter asking me what my status was and if I'd found a job yet because they wanted to bring me on board. By that point I had already moved to a new city and accepted a job with a new company. The whole thing seemed very unprofessional, though. I mean, they could have at least sent me a letter of denial instead of not returning my phone calls. I had already discounted them and in fact was angry enough at their unprofessional manner that I already decided I didn't want to work for them.
LOL. I think the big problem with Cingular was that they had just taken over AT&T and were having such a hard time intergrating the network that they really didn't care if people left. I had few issues with Sprint, but actually just switched to Verizon (Yeah, I know, I know) becuase I got zero signal at my new house with Sprint. I was close enough that my phone would lock on to a Sprint tower instead of roaming, but just on the edge so that I only received 50% of my calls. I refused to go back to Cingular. T-Mobile has zero coverage out here. Alltel is good (their headquarters is 20 miles away, in Little Rock), but with the constant rumors that they would be bought out, I didn't want to find myself forced to conform to a new carrier that I didn't chose if Alltel did get bought out in the next 2 years.
Basically, my point is that cellphones are really much more of a hassle than they should be and there's never a really great choice. I switched to Verizon simply because I have a friend who works there, and that usually brings about some extra benefits.
I'm no on a contract with Cingular, but I stick with them today because they provide me decent coverage, decent service and don't really seem to care what kind of phone I attach to their network. Funny, it was exactly the opposite behavior from Cingular which caused me to jump ship ~3.5 years ago. I needed to upgrade my plan, and they wanted me buy a new handset so I could switch to GSM (which was still horrible in my area) or pay extra for a GAIT plan and buy a GAIT phone in order to keep using the TDMA towers (which worked very well in my city). And of course they wanted me to sign a new contract with any of these new phones or pay out the wazoo for a new handset that they were requiring me to buy.
I told them that since it was going to cost me more money per month to have worse service they could kiss my ass. I ended up switching to Sprint (23% discount from work was a huge incentive) and (despite all of the horror stories) always had good customer service and good coverage (better than Cingular's GSM) in my area.
That reminds me of a previous place I lived. I was renting a basement with seperate entrance from a guy. I leeched off his wireless network and paid half of the internet bill in return. Anyway, on one occasion he went out of the country for three weeks. Well, on about day 3 the internet goes down. I ping the equipment and determine that I'm not getting any response from the cable modem. I was asked to feed his fish while he was gone, so I have a key to the front door. I went upstairs and spent about 10 minutes searching for the cable modem before I just said "Fuck it". I went back downstairs to my apartment, turned off the A/C and everything else that wasn't connected to a UPS, pulled down the picture that covered the fuse box for the house, and flipped the main breaker. That's right. I rebooted the entire house just to powercycle the cable modem. I was moving out the day he got back anwyay, so what did I care? >:)
You actually remind me about when I first moved in to my current house. It's a cinder block exterior house originally built as a milk barn probably in the '40's or '50's. I'm not sure when it was first converted to be used as a house, but I know that my grandfather "renovated" it back in the late 70's. About half of the outlets in the house are still 2-prong outlets... including the outlet in the laundry room that the washer needed to plug in to. My Grandfather's solution: grab one of the homemade extension cords from the barn: 2-prong connector on one end, what is probably 30 year old 14/2 wire (estimate), connected to a standard wall outlet box with a 3-prong outlet installed in it. It just didn't seem that safe to me...
At one of my previous places of employment, one of the higher ups decided they wanted to play music over the overhead speakers. Instead of installing a MUZAK system or even connecting the existing MUZAK box (currently serving up the hold music) her solution was to place a radio in the janitorial closet, lift the handset on the phone, dial the extension for the overhead intercom, and set the handset on the floor next to the radio. It worked, but every time somebody went in to the closet to retrieve some supplies, you could hear everything they said and did in the room.
Along a similar vein, in my last apartment, I decided that I wanted to be able to listen to music in the bathroom while I took a shower. Specifically, I want to listen to the MP3s stored on my computer. Digging through my junk boxes, I found an old battery operated FM transmitter from ~1999 and an old FM Walkman from ~1985. I also had several sets of extra computer speakers that I'd just managed to acquire over the years. The last component in this project was my old Marantz stereo receiver that I haven't used in a while because the volume potentiometer needs to be replaced -- it will only output sound when the volume is cranked to less than sensible levels and then it would only work for about 30 minutes, after which I think it got too hot to operate any further. 30 minutes should be fine for music in the shower, though.
Anyway, I had to run a stereo mini-jack to RCA cable from the rear speaker output on my PC to a pair of RCA female to female adapters to about 20 more feet of RCA cable which then plugged in to the input of my Marantz receiver. From there, I used a 1/4" to 1/8" headphone adapter to output the sound to a 1/8" to 1/8" male to male stereo cable feeding the FM transmitter. I did consider plugging the transmitter directly in to the computer, but the thought was that I would have a better chance of receiving the signal if I used the Marantz as an amp to boost the gain in to the transmitter. In the bathroom I then hooked the Walkman up to a set of 2.1 computer speakers, using a nail in the wall to mount the walkman as high up the wall as the cable would allow, since the cable also acted as the antenna. In theory, it worked, but in practice the signal from the transmitter was just too weak to reach the Walkman. The transmitter ran off AA batteries, so I decided to see what would happen if I connected a 9V battery to the leads. (Thinking that maybe if I upped the voltage, I could get more transmitting power.) The result was the release of the magic smoke and the end of my silly project.
Cool. I've been thinking about putting a dimmer switch in the bathroom for those late night decantations, but I haven't done it yet partly because I had a dimmer in the bathroom at the last house I lived in that wouldn't ever go all the way up for some reason. The result: the lights were never running at full capacity and so always made a light humming sound which drove me nuts.
The sad part is that I remember some friends in college doing this to our RA's camera when we found it left on the stairwell. She was so happy when she knocked on our door to see if anybody had found her camera! I wasn't there when she looked at the pictures, but I can't imagine she was happy for very long.:)
The biggest question I have about the dimmable incandescent bulbs is whether or not they "hum" at less than 100% brightness. I've never been a huge fan of dimmer switches/dimming lamps due to the fact that most standard incandescent bulbs tend to emit a sort of "hum" when you crank the juice down that my hearing really picks up on and drives me nuts. (I'm also that guy who could track down a "whistling" CRT monitor in the office from about 15 - 20 yards away. I actually like the fact that in my current job I spend most of my day in the server room where there is plenty of background white noise to help me filter out the other weird sounds I might otherwise hear.)
A bonus to not wearing your glasses (if you're me anyway) is that it makes it a lot easier to try to pick up on women. I can hardly tell what I'm looking at until they get about a foot away from my face. At that point you've pretty much already commited yourself so even if she is ugly you may as well stay committed. Hopefully you're also drunk and you won't remember much of her in the morning anyway.
The ribbon is a great UI concept and exposes hidden functionality in the older versions of Office. And that quote from the article is exactly why I discounted this list. Any new iteration of a piece of software that so thoroughly and completely fucks with the UI so that you have to relearn how to use the software just does not seem innovative. It may expose hidden functionality but in the process it also hides the functions that you actually want to use.
I don't know how many here have tried it, but I've found it to be an absolute bitch to use. I'm a geek and I like to play with new stuff and don't mind learning a new UI interface every once in a while... in a new piece of software. When it comes to Office, I just want it to work -- becuase work is where I will need to use the software. I want to be able to sit down type a document, apply any necessary formatting, and save it. And I don't want to spend 20 damn minutes looking for the header/footer insert function in the process.
Innovative my ass. Microsoft just ran out of ideas for genuine enhancements to Office so they just screwed with the UI and called it "new".
For instance in New Orleans (pre-katrina) the drivers were extremely agressive and would not let you in no matter what and pretty much there could be aliens landing on the side of the road and nobody would care or slow down. Additionally, New Orleans was very much plagued by the "asshole in the left lane" syndrome. I counted on my way to work one day and found that I passed more cars on the right than I did on the left. But you are spot on about the agression. My parents once made a comment about how much more agressive my driving became after moving to New Orleans. I moved to Atlanta after Katrina, and I found the drivers there to be even worse with their "me first" attitude to driving. Now I live in Little Rock and here it's mostly just the old farts in their 20 year old pick-up trucks who won't move out of the left lane to let people pass. This causes people to take more chances in undertaking the slow driver which in turn tends to cause more accidents.
Or maybe I'm just crazy for wanting to drive the speed limit on the freeways. This is why I like Houston. It hasn't been uncommon for me to do 90+ on the freeway there and still get passed.
Those are the lanes at the side of the road that are a few miles long and are mostly empty throughout the day, right? Or where people drive bumper-to-bumper at a barely noticeable faster rate than the folks driving bumper-to-bumper in the regular lanes? I can't speak for LA, but when I lived in Atlanta the only times I ever used the carpool lane were to (illegally) pass a group of cars that decided to form a rolling road block at non-rush hour times. During rush hour times, the traffic didn't seem to be moving much better in the HOV lanes than in the other 12 lanes.
I think the real story anyway is that the demo consoles are freezing up on the customers in the stores. They shouldn't be doing that and it makes for a poor selling point if the customers always see a PS3 hard locked. (Also, what happened to putting a user-enabled reset switch on the front of the kiosks.) We all know the rep lied, but why was the console freezing up in the first place?
So far, I have been to three different stores and seen the demo console frozen at each one of those stores with nobody bothering to reset them. (Meanwhile, I was able to try out the Wii at my local EB with them letting customers check out the Wiimote with their driver's license.)
All I want to do on my phone and my time is make or receive my phone calls. Since Verizon apparently has a problem sticking to that script, I'm sure there are still others willing to play along... If you're only making and receiving calls on your phone, then you won't see these ads anyway. They only show up when you browse the internet on your phone. Christ. Even that piece of information made it in the description -- you didn't even have to RTFA to find that out.
I have to agree. You remind me of my recent discussion about tires with my dad. I need two more, but just spent ~1 month unemployed, so my dad was going to buy some for me... until he saw how much the tires for my car cost. He couldn't understand why I wanted two more tires just like the ones already on my car when he could get me a set of cheap-o Michelins for half the price. Yeah, you could get a cheap-o set of any brand for half the price, Dad, but I like to drive. I may only drive a (stock) Honda Civic, but I'll be damned if my $100 tires don't make my little Civic much more fun to drive than with the tires that came on it. My Dad just couldn't understand it and refused to buy the "overpriced" tires for me. (Although yesterday he bought some for his car and finally realized just how must the price of tires had gone up since the last time he bought a set.)
That said, I'm still not sure how my $85 Cuisinart toaster is any better than a $15 Wal-mart toaster...
And call me crazy, but I also think that a really nice gift for one's spouse instead of earrings or a new car that you don't need is--gasp!--a realistic plan for retiring some day so that we can spend wonderful decades together without having to work our asses off for useless junk... You must be single.
I believe Aero is simply a user interface branding, barely even software-related but more about design. While the filesystem would be purely software related. It could actually be interesting to watch.;-) Yeah. As long as you're not the one paying the defense lawyer's fees.:-P
Re:Glad they're calling in the pros
on
The Google Phone?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Or we could all just get phones with built-in QWERTY keyboards. I've never been a huge fan of text recognition software -- my handwriting is so bad that I always had issues on my Palm. Now that I've bought a phone with a QWERTY keyboard, I rarely carry my PDA. It's a heck of a lot easier to type out a note to myself on the keyboard than it ever was to write it on my Palm PDA. It's also a heck of a lot easier to enter data on websites with a full keyboard.:)
Re:Glad they're calling in the pros
on
The Google Phone?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I would really like to know what exactly you are referring to when you speak of voice recognition. My phone (LG vx9900, aka LG enV) has voice recognition for a list of commands. In fact, the amazing thing to me compared to my last phones is that I haven't had to train it. It's able to parse the name I speak and match it to a name in my address book with about 90% success rate. Note that this includes several friends with names that the phone itself has trouble pronouncing. Which brings me to the other interesting thing about the phone: voice synthesization. It will tell me out loud who's calling (by name if they're in my address book or by number if they're not) and it will read back my text messages to me. I think this is all done on something like a 400MHz embedded chip.
Re:iPhone could still be the name for Apple's phon
on
The Google Phone?
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· Score: 1
One is a VOIP phone (released by Cisco/Linksys)... the other is a cellphone/iPod hybrid... I honestly think Apple could say that is enough of a differentiation for patent trademark disputes. I disagree. They are both phones first and foremost. It doesn't matter that one will use GSM and/or CDMA technology and the other VOIP+WiFi -- the primary function for both devices will be to make telephone calls. And, I think that any judge would find that the items are both too similar to use the same product name. Furthermore, since Cisco/Linksys has already released working products under the iPhone brand name, I would wager that chances are slim that Apple would be able to obtain the iPhone brand name without a large outlay of cash in the direction of Cicso/Linksys
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As Robert Mondavi once said: "Find a job that you love and you'll never work a day in your life."
I actually had the same thing happen to me. Several months ago I interviewed with a smaller data warehousing company out of St. Louis. Things seemed to go well in the phone interviews and so they flew me out one day to interview in person. Things went well at the interview there (or so I felt) and the HR director informed me that he would be making a decision in a couple of weeks. In spoke to him a week later and he stated that they were still in the process. Then... nothing. None of my correspondance or phone calls were returned. A couple of months later, I got an email from the recruiter asking me what my status was and if I'd found a job yet because they wanted to bring me on board. By that point I had already moved to a new city and accepted a job with a new company. The whole thing seemed very unprofessional, though. I mean, they could have at least sent me a letter of denial instead of not returning my phone calls. I had already discounted them and in fact was angry enough at their unprofessional manner that I already decided I didn't want to work for them.
Their loss, really.
I didn't know that rufies cost that much...
LOL. I think the big problem with Cingular was that they had just taken over AT&T and were having such a hard time intergrating the network that they really didn't care if people left. I had few issues with Sprint, but actually just switched to Verizon (Yeah, I know, I know) becuase I got zero signal at my new house with Sprint. I was close enough that my phone would lock on to a Sprint tower instead of roaming, but just on the edge so that I only received 50% of my calls. I refused to go back to Cingular. T-Mobile has zero coverage out here. Alltel is good (their headquarters is 20 miles away, in Little Rock), but with the constant rumors that they would be bought out, I didn't want to find myself forced to conform to a new carrier that I didn't chose if Alltel did get bought out in the next 2 years.
Basically, my point is that cellphones are really much more of a hassle than they should be and there's never a really great choice. I switched to Verizon simply because I have a friend who works there, and that usually brings about some extra benefits.
I told them that since it was going to cost me more money per month to have worse service they could kiss my ass. I ended up switching to Sprint (23% discount from work was a huge incentive) and (despite all of the horror stories) always had good customer service and good coverage (better than Cingular's GSM) in my area.
I guess things have changed with them recently.
That reminds me of a previous place I lived. I was renting a basement with seperate entrance from a guy. I leeched off his wireless network and paid half of the internet bill in return. Anyway, on one occasion he went out of the country for three weeks. Well, on about day 3 the internet goes down. I ping the equipment and determine that I'm not getting any response from the cable modem. I was asked to feed his fish while he was gone, so I have a key to the front door. I went upstairs and spent about 10 minutes searching for the cable modem before I just said "Fuck it". I went back downstairs to my apartment, turned off the A/C and everything else that wasn't connected to a UPS, pulled down the picture that covered the fuse box for the house, and flipped the main breaker. That's right. I rebooted the entire house just to powercycle the cable modem. I was moving out the day he got back anwyay, so what did I care? >:)
You actually remind me about when I first moved in to my current house. It's a cinder block exterior house originally built as a milk barn probably in the '40's or '50's. I'm not sure when it was first converted to be used as a house, but I know that my grandfather "renovated" it back in the late 70's. About half of the outlets in the house are still 2-prong outlets... including the outlet in the laundry room that the washer needed to plug in to. My Grandfather's solution: grab one of the homemade extension cords from the barn: 2-prong connector on one end, what is probably 30 year old 14/2 wire (estimate), connected to a standard wall outlet box with a 3-prong outlet installed in it. It just didn't seem that safe to me...
At one of my previous places of employment, one of the higher ups decided they wanted to play music over the overhead speakers. Instead of installing a MUZAK system or even connecting the existing MUZAK box (currently serving up the hold music) her solution was to place a radio in the janitorial closet, lift the handset on the phone, dial the extension for the overhead intercom, and set the handset on the floor next to the radio. It worked, but every time somebody went in to the closet to retrieve some supplies, you could hear everything they said and did in the room.
Along a similar vein, in my last apartment, I decided that I wanted to be able to listen to music in the bathroom while I took a shower. Specifically, I want to listen to the MP3s stored on my computer. Digging through my junk boxes, I found an old battery operated FM transmitter from ~1999 and an old FM Walkman from ~1985. I also had several sets of extra computer speakers that I'd just managed to acquire over the years. The last component in this project was my old Marantz stereo receiver that I haven't used in a while because the volume potentiometer needs to be replaced -- it will only output sound when the volume is cranked to less than sensible levels and then it would only work for about 30 minutes, after which I think it got too hot to operate any further. 30 minutes should be fine for music in the shower, though.
Anyway, I had to run a stereo mini-jack to RCA cable from the rear speaker output on my PC to a pair of RCA female to female adapters to about 20 more feet of RCA cable which then plugged in to the input of my Marantz receiver. From there, I used a 1/4" to 1/8" headphone adapter to output the sound to a 1/8" to 1/8" male to male stereo cable feeding the FM transmitter. I did consider plugging the transmitter directly in to the computer, but the thought was that I would have a better chance of receiving the signal if I used the Marantz as an amp to boost the gain in to the transmitter. In the bathroom I then hooked the Walkman up to a set of 2.1 computer speakers, using a nail in the wall to mount the walkman as high up the wall as the cable would allow, since the cable also acted as the antenna. In theory, it worked, but in practice the signal from the transmitter was just too weak to reach the Walkman. The transmitter ran off AA batteries, so I decided to see what would happen if I connected a 9V battery to the leads. (Thinking that maybe if I upped the voltage, I could get more transmitting power.) The result was the release of the magic smoke and the end of my silly project.
Cool. I've been thinking about putting a dimmer switch in the bathroom for those late night decantations, but I haven't done it yet partly because I had a dimmer in the bathroom at the last house I lived in that wouldn't ever go all the way up for some reason. The result: the lights were never running at full capacity and so always made a light humming sound which drove me nuts.
The sad part is that I remember some friends in college doing this to our RA's camera when we found it left on the stairwell. She was so happy when she knocked on our door to see if anybody had found her camera! I wasn't there when she looked at the pictures, but I can't imagine she was happy for very long. :)
The biggest question I have about the dimmable incandescent bulbs is whether or not they "hum" at less than 100% brightness. I've never been a huge fan of dimmer switches/dimming lamps due to the fact that most standard incandescent bulbs tend to emit a sort of "hum" when you crank the juice down that my hearing really picks up on and drives me nuts. (I'm also that guy who could track down a "whistling" CRT monitor in the office from about 15 - 20 yards away. I actually like the fact that in my current job I spend most of my day in the server room where there is plenty of background white noise to help me filter out the other weird sounds I might otherwise hear.)
A bonus to not wearing your glasses (if you're me anyway) is that it makes it a lot easier to try to pick up on women. I can hardly tell what I'm looking at until they get about a foot away from my face. At that point you've pretty much already commited yourself so even if she is ugly you may as well stay committed. Hopefully you're also drunk and you won't remember much of her in the morning anyway.
I know that I personally signed up around September or October of 1996.
To be thorough, however, according to Wikipedia's article on Yahoo! Mail:
According to that article, Rocketmail was launched in March 1997.
So, Yahoo! Mail only existed 9 years ago instead of 10.
I don't know how many here have tried it, but I've found it to be an absolute bitch to use. I'm a geek and I like to play with new stuff and don't mind learning a new UI interface every once in a while... in a new piece of software. When it comes to Office, I just want it to work -- becuase work is where I will need to use the software. I want to be able to sit down type a document, apply any necessary formatting, and save it. And I don't want to spend 20 damn minutes looking for the header/footer insert function in the process.
Innovative my ass. Microsoft just ran out of ideas for genuine enhancements to Office so they just screwed with the UI and called it "new".
Or maybe I'm just crazy for wanting to drive the speed limit on the freeways. This is why I like Houston. It hasn't been uncommon for me to do 90+ on the freeway there and still get passed.
I think the real story anyway is that the demo consoles are freezing up on the customers in the stores. They shouldn't be doing that and it makes for a poor selling point if the customers always see a PS3 hard locked. (Also, what happened to putting a user-enabled reset switch on the front of the kiosks.) We all know the rep lied, but why was the console freezing up in the first place?
So far, I have been to three different stores and seen the demo console frozen at each one of those stores with nobody bothering to reset them. (Meanwhile, I was able to try out the Wii at my local EB with them letting customers check out the Wiimote with their driver's license.)
I have to agree. You remind me of my recent discussion about tires with my dad. I need two more, but just spent ~1 month unemployed, so my dad was going to buy some for me... until he saw how much the tires for my car cost. He couldn't understand why I wanted two more tires just like the ones already on my car when he could get me a set of cheap-o Michelins for half the price. Yeah, you could get a cheap-o set of any brand for half the price, Dad, but I like to drive. I may only drive a (stock) Honda Civic, but I'll be damned if my $100 tires don't make my little Civic much more fun to drive than with the tires that came on it. My Dad just couldn't understand it and refused to buy the "overpriced" tires for me. (Although yesterday he bought some for his car and finally realized just how must the price of tires had gone up since the last time he bought a set.)
That said, I'm still not sure how my $85 Cuisinart toaster is any better than a $15 Wal-mart toaster...
While the filesystem would be purely software related. It could actually be interesting to watch.
Or we could all just get phones with built-in QWERTY keyboards. I've never been a huge fan of text recognition software -- my handwriting is so bad that I always had issues on my Palm. Now that I've bought a phone with a QWERTY keyboard, I rarely carry my PDA. It's a heck of a lot easier to type out a note to myself on the keyboard than it ever was to write it on my Palm PDA. It's also a heck of a lot easier to enter data on websites with a full keyboard. :)
I would really like to know what exactly you are referring to when you speak of voice recognition. My phone (LG vx9900, aka LG enV) has voice recognition for a list of commands. In fact, the amazing thing to me compared to my last phones is that I haven't had to train it. It's able to parse the name I speak and match it to a name in my address book with about 90% success rate. Note that this includes several friends with names that the phone itself has trouble pronouncing. Which brings me to the other interesting thing about the phone: voice synthesization. It will tell me out loud who's calling (by name if they're in my address book or by number if they're not) and it will read back my text messages to me. I think this is all done on something like a 400MHz embedded chip.
OK, so /. doesn't support Cyrillic characters, apparently...