[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:46:26 GMT ]
What a stupid system. For the “wave of the future” cell phone companies have completely missed the customer-centric boat.
1 year contracts – why am I stuck with a contract? I bought the damn phone, and I pay for the service. How is this useful? Then if I want to change phones or service plans, I get charged like $300! This is criminal. Besides, it’s not like I ever actually signed anything.
Here’s the latest SNAFU - AT&T and Cingular merged a year ago. Guess who I had my phone with? AT&T. Cingular claims they don’t support it, and can’t change any of my rate plans. Further, they can’t transfer me to Cingular because my AT&T contract isn’t met!
Looking at their website now, they want a 2 year contract! Fuckers! I hope your stock drops because of mean blog posts like this one.
Bad business! Contracts are not protecting the customer, they’re a disservice.
Technorati Tags: cingular, puppy
Posted in Society | 1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 03 Nov 2005 21:55:10 GMT ]
First it’s America, land of the fat. Now, our bad habits are spreading to our pets.
Tara and I adopted a cat last week, and have been trying to figure out what it likes. It hates tuna. It hates the cat treats we bought. We were eating ice cream last night, and guess what? The thing practically tore away the bowl to horde more for itself.
I don’t know what the world’s coming to. Did I mention we tried warm milk too? All my stereotypes are falling apart…
Technorati Tags: family, kat
Posted in Society | 2 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 09 Sep 2005 03:18:00 GMT ]
Mostly in order. We read these out loud as a family.
- Treasure Island – Stevenson
- Tom Sawyer – Twain
- Huck Finn – Twain
- Robinson Crusoe – Dufoe
- A connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
- The time Machine – Wells
- Lost Horizon
- The Three musketeers – Dumas
- Red Badge of Courage – Crane
- Of Mice & Men – Steinbeck
- Shane – Schafer
- (tried) A tree grows in brooklyn
- Captain Courageous – Kipling
- (tried) House of the seven gables – Hawthorne
- Great Expectations – Dickens
- Ender’s Game, Speaker of the dead. Xenocide – Orson Scott Card
- 20,000 leagues under the sea – Verne
- Call of the Wild – London
- Brave New World – Huxley
- 1984
- Old Man & the Sea, Short Happy life of Francis Macomodon, Snows of Kilamanjaro
- A wrinkle in time – Madeline Llangle
- Alice in Wonderland, Through the looking glass
- (half) Pride & Prejudice
- (tried) Kim – Kipling
- Invisible Man – Wells
- Jayne Eyre
- A portrait of Dorian Gray
- Don Quixote
- One flew over the cookoo’s nest
- Stranger in a Strange Land – Heinlein
- Out of the Silent Planet – Lewis
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Animal Farm
- Grendel
- Farenheight 451
- Player Paino
- Dead Eye Dick
- Sherlock Holmes
- Poe
- Trustee from the Toolroom – Shute
Want to have successful children? Read to them! :)
Technorati Tags: family, reading
Posted in Society, Ambitions | 8 comments | 182 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:33:55 GMT ]
Another in my series of irritating corporate decisions.
Do you think coke does any user-testing? If so, surely they’d realize that the last sip of EVERY pop, jumps over the oddly-designed hole in the top of the can, and throws itself upon the neck of your once-white shirt.
Add that to the fact they recently changed the production process to use crappier aluminum or something, so when you try to open it, your fingernail slips inside the seam on the metal tab, then it scratches/cuts deep into your fingernail. My parents have descended to using a knife to open their pop cans! Bad design!
Read more...
Posted in Society | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 01 Aug 2005 17:07:21 GMT ]
Group communication is one of those things that fascinates anyone involved in social networks.
I’ve always been fairly good at it. There’s a lot of interesting things in life, and when you look at the members involved in a small group of friends, bringing up something everyone feels passionate, but not too passionate, about, is a good bet. Sometimes it breaks down, or gets more complicated.
Humans make things complicated. You ever notice that? It’s rather strange, because it seems like they could be so much simpler. To go for an example:
Had dinner last night with two friends from college and one’s girlfriend. The love triangle is where it gets interesting. I was interested in both of them at various times, and here’s the kicker: they were interested in each other :) Who got who? They got each other. But meanwhile they eventually broke up, moved distant, and the three of us don’t see each other much.
Trying to make conversation, I realized that the situation is really complicated. I’ve always been a believer that you shouldn’t be good friends with ex’s because they are always somewhat attractive, etc.
It gets worse silghtly worse, in that my friend broke up with her girlfriend recently, so was in a bit of a funk. And my sister and her boyfriend broke up that day (not present, but still had me a little glum). So there’s not huge amounts of ecstatic energy.
What do you talk about when getting together with old friends? Talk about your good times back when. But we all have bad memory ability, and anyways, the point is to have a good time now, not realize how far from then now is.
Next stop? What has changed, what are you doing now, etc. But that’s more a take-turns thing than a group discussion.
Anyways, I thought it was interesting how my internal ‘algorithm’ broke down somewhat. It didn’t really bother me, I was quite at ease, but it’s just fascinating. Group relationships, complicated humans!
Technorati Tags: love triangle, conversation, social networks
Posted in Society | 2 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:58:17 GMT ]
I, like all true nerds, got into Dungeons and Dragons in high school.
It’s this great game where you make up a ‘character’, and ‘pretend’ to go wandering around in dungeons killing things and saving people. There’s this whole world of rules, even more complex than the real world!
Sometimes I wonder if i should have spent more time learning the rules of the real world, and less of this fictitious one. Because I keep switching systems that makes me re-learn the (rather arbitrary) rules.
Anyways, you sit around for an amazing length of time, like 6 hours, longer than I’ve ever been able to sit still before, but I guess this involves wrestling and drinking lots of coke.
Most of my life I spent trying to be more efficient, to pack getting more things done into less time. Adventuring seems like the opposite. I leave in a vaguely social state knowing I had fun but that it took us 6 hours to decide what color each other’s hair was.e
Still, I think there’s promise to worlds where we can escape reality. Religion always bothered me on that level, since I’m fairly happy with my ‘real world’ existence, but something about Adventuring allows me to express creativity in a way that the real world limits.
Technorati Tags: d&d, nerds, puppy
Posted in Society | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:05:54 GMT ]
RealRhapsody is something of an interesting case to me. I’ve been using it for a good year now, and looking at previous reviews, it’s obvious that their design hasn’t been updated in 3 years.
They have a great selection, but the user interface was written by a programmer who hadn’t seen the light of day in years. It’s not terrible, it’s just not usable. Which should be important.
I’m more and more frustrated when I see things like this, that seem like an obvious ‘free money’ situation to the business eye. Given their popularity among the top-something subscription music services, staying ‘cool’ and being usable need to be top priorities, or they’ll fall by the wayside.
I fail to see how a company that sells and makes several million (or hundred million, whatever) can’t even do a good enough job to keep their lead. Is anyone being creative in corporate America?
I’m also frustrated by the lack of releases for other systems besides windows. Given that NONE of the subscription services work on mac, whichever one releases for mac will enjoy fairly good ‘forced’ subscription numbers. It couldn’t take them more than a week or two (which becomes a month with testing) to port it to another system. It’s written mostly in flash, for crying out loud (I think). Shoddy.
Technorati Tags: music
Posted in Society, Ambitions | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 18:37:22 GMT ]
Some friends of mine got married on Saturday, and I was surprised to hear them quoting some nice sections of this.
There are some great messages in this book involving how lovers need to stay separate people. I’ve always hated the whole ‘two becoming one’ idea of marriage. You fell in love with each other separately – if you both lose your ‘identity’, neither will still be in love anymore.
Anyway, lots of the ‘reed standing alone in the wind’ sort of feelings, which fits into the Ayn Rand philosophy I’ve been following some over the last year or two.
Self-love starts with selfishness!
Posted in Society, Art | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 26 May 2005 22:02:00 GMT ]
I think one of the major ‘lessons learned’ in the blogging world is that blogs are like businesses – 90% fail.
Most people don’t update them. Why? I can spectulate – their lives get busy, and they don’t get enough feedback that people are actually reading what they say. So tell me you like my posts!
I’m going to pledge to update this blog at least 4 times per week. I think it sounds reasonable. We’ll see how long I can keep it up!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think my life is decently interesting. I’ve been getting that ‘hey, I should blog this’ feeling much more often lately. I just need to make it part of my routine…
Posted in Society, Ambitions | 10 comments | 321 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:35:00 GMT ]
I’ve been struggling to get a blog online for some time now, and here it is. While exploring rails, I’ve also been examining drupal, which is in my opinon the best of the plethora of PHP cms’s out there.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy reading. I promise to actually post content, unlike my last two ‘homepages’ that remained static until their yearly updates.
My hope is that blogs represent one method of forming online relationships in today’s age. I’ve started to realize how I feel like I ‘know’ the people who’s blogs I read. If I can get them to know me, then we’ll have a real relationship going on :P And since thats what life is about, here’s nothin’!
Posted in Society | 1 comment | 6 trackbacks
