Disorderly Content

I love my iPhone, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. Some of the flaws are limitations in AT&T's network (EDGE is butt slow); some are inevitable with a first generation product (I actually had the phone freeze on me -- once); some are edge conditions (but not EDGE conditions), like not being able to specify a different port number for my outgoing mail server; and some are in the area of support for *ugh* de facto standards like Microsoft Exchange. (Being able to update my work calendar via the network would be really nice.) But the most annoying flaws are the ones that could be fixed easily, like not being able to put in my own ringtones. How ironic, from the guys who are turning the music business on its ear.

Which is why I'm so happy that hackers have already taken on the iPhone. By the time I discovered it, iFuntastic was already at version 2; it's now at 2.1. And it's just the kind of user friendly application you'd expect for an Apple product, even if Apple themselves may not be very happy about it. Basically, iFuntastic breaks into the iPhone's file system and lets you change things around. Current features include adding ringtones (both MP3 and unprotected M4A files), rearranging application icons on the home screen and replacing the carrier name with something more personal. So now I have all kinds of cool ringtones. And I can't wait to see what they do next. Exchange calendar and contact support would get my vote...

I just finished The Book, a mere 36 hours after purchasing my copy at the Palo Alto Borders. I might have savored it, made it last, but my concern about accidentally reading a spoiler kept me going. Well, mission accomplished. And in case you haven't reached the finish line, I won't say anything more than that it was a fitting end to the series, and that I'm glad I was along for the ride.

They say New York is an adventure, but I wasn't prepared for this. I'm at the Grand Hyatt, conveniently situated on top of Grand Central Station. It was storming this morning, complete with some impressive sound effects. So I didn't think too much about the noise while I was relazing back in my room this evening. Then I noticed that there was a kind of consistent rumble. And then I realized that there was a vibration up here on the twenty-third floor. That just didn't seem right.

Getting down to the lobby, my plan was to head over to Times Square, find some dinner and then catch a play. But there was a problem: it seems all the exits from the hotel were blocked. True, we could leave by an elevated exit on Park Avenue, but a distinct lack of sidewalks and an abundance of taxis made that an unappealing option. But it did give me a fine view of a huge column of white smoke or steam coming from the building across the street. It seems a steam pipe had burst, killing one person and injuring a bunch of others.

In the meantime I had two choices: stay trapped in the hotel and hope things didn't get worse (a choice that didn't work out so well for World Trade Center workers a few years back), or keep looking for another way out and, assuming the subway wasn't available, walk to Times Square. Eventually a couple of tourists and I got a hotel employee to show us a hidden exit through the bar, which dropped us into the subway concourse. We found a way out of the station, around the building, under the yellow tape and through all the onlookers, many of whom were taking pictures of the scene with their phonecams. Me, I kept walking.

Got to the theater, had a nice meal at the Japanese restaurant across the street, enjoyed the show (Curtains!, starring David Hyde Pierce, which was good but not nearly as good as Spamalot) and then walked back to Grand Central, wondering all the way if I'd be allowed back into the hotel. Which, happily enough, I was. And where I am writing this tale. Or at least I was.

A couple of days ago I received a LinkedIn invitation from a former colleague. Nothing odd about that; it's what LinkedIn is supposed to be for. But this one was special. It came from my former manager, the VP of a startup where I spent a few interesting (in the Chinese curse sense) months. What's odd is that this particular VP fired me, the first and (so far) only time that's happened to me. Ours was a contentious relationship; he had a tendency to stretch the truth well beyond its breaking point. (When someone tells you repeatedly, "I am an honest man", the one thing you can be sure of is that he knows otherwise.) On one memorable occasion he told a potential customer that we had passed a validation suite that we had never actually run! I waited until after the meeting to raise the... umm... variance between his remarks and reality, but in retrospect I can't be surprised that I was terminated a month or so later.

So I guess I'm surprised to hear from him, and even more so that he believes I'd consider letting him into my circle of respected industry contacts. Or maybe he thinks old age has softened my memories of that time, or of my bitterness at finding myself suddenly unemployed. If so, he don't know me very well.

Last night I took advantage of two of New York's finest, starting with some pretty good pizza and finishing up with Eric Idle's assault on the Great White Way. The pizza experience was enhanced by conversation with the couple at the next table, who were from Arizona and agog at their first moments in Manhattan. (Having grown up here, I can only smile knowingly at the innocence of tourists.) Spamalot needs no enhancing; the newer cast both looks and plays as well as the better known folks who opened the show. There were a couple of moments when they came close to losing it, which is one of the unexpected joys of life performance. Tonight I'm thinking deli, to go with my ticket to Curtains! Let you know how that turns out.

Am I getting more absentminded? Or was I always this way, and just too bewildered to notice? I ask because I had one of those moments a couple of days ago, one of those "Damn! What do I do now?" kinds of things. And they do seem to happen with increased regularity, although they're still rare enough that I don't plan to check myself into the padded room any time soon.

It was at Thrillerfest a couple of days ago. I was back in my room, changing from jeans and a particularly colorful Tommy Bahama shirt to a slightly nicer outfit for the banquet. Then I got on my computer for a while. And when I walked out of the room, I suddenly realized I'd neglected to transfer stuff from one pair of pants to the other. Important stuff. Like my room key. And my wallet. And the thought struck: how exactly do I get a new room key when I don't have any ID on me?

So I explained my plight to the desk clerk, who drilled me on all the details of my reservation: name, address, how I made the booking, when I checked in, when I was due to check out (which caused a moment of panic, cleared up when I explained that I had two contiguous reservations). Then she asked for the last four digits of my credit card number. Not being good at that sort of thing, I recited the whole number and then repeated the last four. She was shocked that I knew my card number. (Doesn't everybody?) But she gave me a new key card, and I headed off to the dinner with a lighter step.

So now I check my pockets regularly for forgotten or lost items. Which isn't about being a nervous tourist traveling the subways and the streets of New York. Although maybe it is, at least a little.

I just spent the weekend at Thrillerfest, the second annual conference of the International Thriller Writers. What in the world was I doing at an event for writers? Blame my friend Barry; he thought it would be fun, educational and possibly even lucrative. It was certainly the first, and definitely the second; we'll have to see about the third. But, interestingly enough, I took to it in a way I haven't done with tech conferences since I don't know when. I actually went to almost as many sessions as time allowed.

Some were better than others, as you would expect. The panel on sex in thrillers was particularly memorable, not just for the obvious reason or that they plied us with alcohol (there was some challenge to see which panelist could get a champagne cork to go the farthest), but also because everybody was so darn articulate and outrageous. But the comic thriller panel may just have been my favorite. One friend was surprised I went there instead of to the technology panel. That just proves she doesn't really know me at all.

Afterward I bought books by two of the panelists. The one I started this evening is called The Rabbit Factory and is by a former screenwriter named Marshall Karp. It's a cop story about a murder in a Disneyland-wannabe. And I think I knew before I finished chapter one that I was gonna enjoy the ride. Recommended after twelve chapters, whatever happens from here on out.

Having a blog that supports comments means dealing with comment spam. For a long time I dealt with the spam in an ad hoc and mostly brute force way: deleting it and filtering out anything uniquely spammy to keep the same spam messages from recurring. It was a holding action at best. And when I prepared to go on my first long vacation where I'd have limited net access, I seriously considered turning comments off for the duration. It's not like I get many real comments, after all. But in the end I found a better alternative, a simple CAPTCHA I hoped would deal with the more egregious spammers. So far it appears to be working, even as I realize that mentioning it is practically begging to be attacked.

So today, with that vacation a couple of weeks in the past, I got curious about my website traffic, and specifically about how many spam attempts I was receiving. It's easy enough to detect: just look for the POST requests in my log and see if anything interesting pops up[. What I found surprised me: a single IP address was responsible for three quarters of the 25,000 attempts to post a comment to one of my two blogs in the last month. (During that month I had maybe three actual comments, so either the CAPTCHA is working really well, or I'm confusing real commenters as well as the Minions of Satan.) That IP address belongs to a domain called netcathost.com, which a Google search reveals to be a Minion of Satan of long standing. He apparently owns a sizable range of IP addresses, which makes me wonder why I only get the one. Still, it makes it easier to deny his bot access to my site, even if my simple CAPTCHA is good enough to block his messages.

I've been playing with my iPhone, which really is the most delight-producing product I've experienced since maybe the Nintendo 64. Okay, there were extenuating circumstances with the 64, like demoing Super Mario on a big projection screen in front of a couple of hundred people. But this is still like that.

One not so happy experience, as I related earlier, was trying to type. I made lots of mistakes, which is kind of an issue. Granted, I wasn't any better with the tiny keys on my Nokia; heck, I may even have been worse. But it didn't help my confidence any as I tried to decide whether to take the plunge. In the end of course, I made the leap.

Anyway, last night I was practicing my typing, using the Gettysburg Address as my content. And I learned an important lesson in getting the iPhone to do my bidding: fast and wrong is better than slow and accurate. You see, the phone is so good and taking that jumble of mistyped letters and figuring out the word I meant to type, I can type quickly and sloppily and still get the right result. It's really remarkable how much faster I'm going after only a little practice.

I learned a long time ago that how a product demos is often a poor indicator of how well it behaves in real life. (In one particular case, demos was all a particular product was good for. And convincing the CTO that his baby was ugly and talked funny did not go well.) Here we have the opposite, where the product works better than you expect. Which is yet another delightful moment brought to you by the guy in the black turtleneck. (Steve Jobs, not me. Can't wear turtlenecks.)

Not that I didn't try. I mean, I did last an entire week before my resolve collapsed. Okay, it's true that resolve doesn't matter in the absense of any opportunity. But it's the thought that counts, or so I've always been told.

In case I'm not being clear, and when has that ever happened?, I refer to that obscure object of desire, the iPhone. As I wrote a few days ago, I waited until day two of its availability to try one out, and I was impressed, although not yet ready to take the plunge. That lasted maybe another day, at which point said obscure object was also unavailable. And so it remained until today, when for the first time since its release, Apple Stores in this part of California actually claimed to have stock.

As if daring them to disappoint me, I didn't arrive at my local store until they'd been open a full ninety minutes. And business was brisk, although I was face to face with an available salescritter within seconds of entering the premises. Who confirmed that they did indeed have 8 GB iPhones. And moments later I had one in my own hot little hands. I had other shopping to do, so it was a good three hours before I could get home, activate my phone (like most pleasurable experiences in my life, all too brief) and call a friend to gloat over my purchase.

Which really is everything they've said it was, at least in my case. Still have to figure out how I'm going to sync the calendar with Microsoft Exchange at work, although I think I have an answer. But everything else is just fine. And my nine month old Nokia smartphone? It'll be lining a drawer as soon as I get the last notes off it.

...or maybe not. Maybe it'll all be wonderful.

What am I babbling about? I had a little lie down on Thursday afternoon, when my phone rang. It was AT&T, trying for the nth time to sell me their DSL service. And for once I didn't tell them no. I'd been thinking for a while that I was getting ripped off by Earthlink, which is charging me way too much for a service that should be either faster or cheaper after all these years. And maybe it was being awakened from my drowsy state. So I listened.

The rep on the phone was bad. Really bad. You know how it's obvious they're reading from a script? This guy was barely literate. I learned the hard way that stopping him to ask a question was a bad idea; not only was getting the answer like pulling teeth, but it meant he lost his place in the script and had to start from the beginning. Again. And again.

Anyway, at first it was about price: half what I pay now. So I asked about speed, only to discover it was the same as my current service. So I said I'd only bite if they could get me faster service. He finally agreed to put me on the list for a callback when they had faster service in my area, at which point his supervisor got in on the act. Turns out he'd misread his screen, and that I could get the faster 3 megabits per second service. So back we went, they described everything (several times), I agreed (several times), they went over my hardware environment to make sure I could actually use this faster service (several times, complicated when I told them I'm a Mac household, but then uncomplicated when I pointed out that I'm already running 1.5 mb/sec DSL and that I do know a little something about my environment). And eventually I got them off the phone.

So we'll see. I'm supposed to get a letter, confirming all the terms and the speeds and feeds and costs. And then eventually I'll get my new modem and my password and such. Twice the download speed (and ten times the upload speed, which'll be nice for sending out photos) for half the price. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?

Yeah, that's what worries me.

I got an email from my brother today to tell me that Hy Zarat died. Neither one of us had met Mr. Zarat, who missed his hundredth birthday by a month or so. But still we felt connected to him, through some rather tenuous links in the old Shiffman family tree. (A tree with a few recursive branches, or so I'm told.) Hy was my father's cousin, some fourteen or so years older, so I doubt they were exactly close. He was more of a curiosity, the relative who was famous.

Okay, so if he's so famous, how come you've never heard of him? You have so heard of him; you just don't know it. His biggest claim to fame is as the lyricist for Unchained Melody, that hit song for the Righteous Brothers that reemerged a couple of decades later in Ghost. And the Washington Post mentions in his obituary that he had several hits in the 40s. Heck, just getting an obit in the Post means you're somebody. Somebody dead, but still.

I didn't know about any of that; I mostly knew him for a series of records he did in the sixties, science-related songs that I loved before I got older and cool and embarrassed by stuff like that. (Okay, I'm still waiting for the cool part.) But they're cool too, in their way. Heck, They Might Be Giants did a cover version of Why Does The Sun Shine? from Science Songs. And they're cool? They are, right?

What a sad,cynical world we live in, when what a major corporation tells us turns out to be absolutely true. But such is the case here, where my pre-holiday planning got me a 100% accurate answer from my wireless provider.

I have a smartphone, one of those devices that does email (mostly) and web surfing (badly) and is also a phone (some of the time). I got it with an unlimited data plan, which is nice; I don't like surprises when the bill arrives. Anyway, as I was getting ready to go to Australia and New Zealand on holiday, I wanted to know what it was going to cost to have the phone retrieving email, roaming charges being what they are. So I got on the phone to Cingular/AT&T, forced my way through menu hell to get to a person, and then waited a while while he tracked down the information. The answer: $.009 per kilobyte. Which I verified: nine tenths of a cent. (I remembered stories on Consumerist about somebody being quoted a rate that turned out to be off by two orders of magnitude. No, he assured me, it really was a fraction of a cent.

So I turned off most of my mailing lists and disabled automatic retrieval of my work mail (they could use my personal address if they absolutely, positively needed to reach me). And I calculated the cost, based on last months usage figures (gotta love having detailed bill information on the web) and decided it wouldn't be too big a hit on my budget. And off I went to enjoy an antipodean winter.

Today I got an email notice that my phone bill was ready. And, as they used to say at Holiday Inn (it was Holiday Inn, wasn't it?), the best surprise was no surprise. My bill was right about what I expected. To quote Hannibal Smith, I love it when a plan comes together.