William Reardon’s Blog

Shortly after the launch of MyWeb2, I decided to take a bite of our own dog food and gave it a try. I imported my bookmarks from delcious and used it for a few months. A bit later, Yahoo bought delicious, and I wanted to switch back.

Only one problem: MyWeb2 didn’t make it easy to do so. There’s an import but no export. Grrrrr. Trapped user data sucks.

Like most Yahoo products, there is a slick REST api however. Now that delicious fixed their import, it’s was just a small matter of Perl glue to put the two together. Hence, MyWeb2 Export.

Austria No. 1 Among Sexually Satisfied

My mom passed her naturalization test/interview yesterday! For the test, they ask you ten questions of which you have to get six. She started off strong, answering the first five correct. She missed the new two (“What year was the Constitution written?” & “Who wrote the national anthem?”) and I started to get nervous. She knew number eight off the bat (“How many terms are members of Congress allowed to serve?”), so with that, the test was done. *Whew*

After that, they basically walk through the form with you. Have you ever been arrested, do you support the Constitution, etc. There was confusion on the location of prior citizenship, as technically my mom is only a British Subject, having been born in Tanzania when they where still a colony. When she came to the States some forty years ago, she came in with a British passport, so that more or less solved the question.

For the most part, she’s done! The swearing in should be sometimes in May. On the trip back from Chicago, she started to complain again about Bush and the War in Iraq. Damnit, I didn’t go through all this just so she could cancel out my vote. Now I’m wondering if I should have fed her some wrong answers when prepping her over lunch.

BTW, if you’re wondering how well you would have done on the test, you can review the set of sample questions.

Over on the new YPN blog, they have a group photo of the YPN & Content Match teams. As you can seem from the hand gestures, some of us apparently are hostile to the residents of Great Britain.

Where am I? I’m the head sticking out by the purple circle in the back. And speaking of hand gestures, check out Tim right under me throwing out big Y. That’s how things roll out here in Burbank, dawg.

One of my favorite things about Mac’s Terminal application is the ability to save window sets. With it, you can have a bunch of window instantly show up, all logged into the desired host, each in the exact location you want and in the exact size. Since they’re just files on disk, you can index them with Quicksilver, and then it’s just a few keystrokes to get a perfect, custom working environment up & running:

I’m all about reducing the friction in getting started on something, so I really like this. My only gripe so far has been that default key mappings are a little off. When I hit the page-up key, most likely I don’t want the window to page up, I want emacs, less, or whatever is running in the shell to page up. You can do it, but it requires doing Shift-PgUp — one keystroke too many. Poking around, I found it lets you change your options (including your defaults), but it turns out that since key mappings are stored in window sets, it won’t have any effect on ones you’ve already created. At last count, I have about 14 sets — too many to manually recreate. Cracking one open in an editor, I found they’re just simple XML. In that case, all it takes to fix them is a little Perl hackery: perl -i -p -e 's|scrollPageUp:|xxx|' * perl -i -p -e 's|33\[5~|scrollPageUp:|' * perl -i -p -e 's|xxx|33\[5~|' * perl -i -p -e 's|scrollPageDown:|xxx|' * perl -i -p -e 's|33\[6~|scrollPageDown:|' * perl -i -p -e 's|xxx|33\[6~|' * This will reverse things around so PgUp/PgDn are passed on to the shell whereas Shift+PgUp/PgDn scrolls the window. I’d suggest you tar up any directory beforehand, so you can recover should anything squirrelly happen. Note that you can’t just add .bak to the -i switch as the successive steps would clobber you original backups.

http://www.chevyapprentice.com/view.php?country=us&uniqueid=2c1491aa-1423-1029-98eb-0013724ff5a7

Frankly, not one of his better efforts.

That’s it, I’ve joined the cellular-only pack. I’ve given up the land-line and am relying exclusively on my cell phone for voice communications. I still technically have a landline — I have a contract getting me the “Pro” level of DSL for $18/month for until Feb, but I called SBC today and have them deactivate everything else. No CallerId, no 3-way calling, no long distance, no “local long distance” (whatever the hell that was). In the end, it’ll save me about $40/month and what I pay SBC now is cheaper than what it would have been to add Internet onto Cable, so I’m fine with it.

What finally pushed me over the edge? Well, a few things:

• About two months ago, my answering machine broke. Not a big deal — I’ve had it for, what, 8 years? It used a cassette tape for Pete’s sake! When trying to replace it, I learned that’s pretty uncommon now. In fact, even just an answering machine by itself is pretty uncommon. My only choices at Fry’s where a full-fledged automated telcom system or a combo cordless/answering machine for ~$100. Screw that. I just want an answering machine.

• A few weeks ago, the static on my cordless became more pronounced, to the point where I sometimes couldn’t hear the person on the other end. (It was fine on the wired $7 Walgreens phone, so I know it wasn’t the line.)

• I looked at my most recent phone bill and noticed I pay ~$20 for DSL, ~$20 for the long distance plan, and ~$20 for “normal” service. In other words, ~$40 for a bunch of crap I hardly use.
  

With all that — a new answering machine, a new phone, on top of close $40/month — I decided it just wasn’t worth it, so goodbye SBC.

It’ll be interesting to see how telephony has changed in about 50 years, if the big telcos are still around, and if so, in what form. They clearly have to change as they’re built on a model accustom to having a monopoly. Customer service is usually pretty bad, adding/changing options is fairly complex, typically require some kind of satanic bundling, and worse, in most cases, to change anything, you can’t do it yourself online — you have to call in, wait on hold, etc.

Personally, considering the abuse they’ve dolled out to their customers , I’m hoping SBC/AT&T will be out of business.