When I finally moved out of Richmond, I was a bit taken back at the poor quality of grocery stores elsewhere.  Some were ok, the Harris Teeters of the world, while others were almost universally terrible, such as Giant.  Apparently, there used to be Giants in Richmond before I was born but like Safeway, Hannaford, and FarmFresh, it was run out of town by the success of Ukrops.

Times have changed.  It seems most of the other chains have either adapted and improved.  Giant, the poster-child for all the things other grocery store chains did poorly, has the best self-checkout system of the grocery stores around us.  The store has been modernized, cleaned up, and no longer looks like a sad derelict left over from the post-WWII building boom.

Last night, Giant took it up a notch with handheld scanners.

The beauty of this little guy is that I can scan my groceries as I shop, see my total bill at any time, and when I’m ready to check out, I simply zap a little card at the register, pay, and I’m ready to leave.  No lengthy checkout necessary.  For someone who doesn’t particularly care to spend any additional time in a grocery store than necessary, this thing rocks.  For someone who loves tech gadgets as I do, this thing really rocks.

The evolution of grocery stores is much appreciated, especially as the wunderkind struggles.  Now if we can only get payment by cell phone and RFID checkout going, I might actually enjoy going to the grocery store.   Even if it’s only to play with the gadgets.

Especially as Facebook adopts more and more of the Twitter features into itself, Twitter becomes increasingly more reliant on “celebrities”  (not just actors & actresses but other well-known people: politicians, pundits, authors, etc) to maintain it’s importance.  This is unfortunate as I finally, after 2.5 years, found a true use for Twitter: Real-time news.

The Iran elections were the tipping point.  While CNN and the other news networks droned on incessantly about “non-news”, the Iran elections were making waves in the Twitterverse.  People’s profile pictures were turning green in a sign of solidarity.  In real-time, people were learning and collating all kinds of details about what was happening in Iran.  Everyone, as a whole, were reporting the news while the news organizations themselves were completely oblivious.

And this is what I’ve found Twitter to be good for.  If you want minute-by-minute updates of some event, or to discover what happened on your favorite TV show that you missed, Google is not your friend; Twitter is.  CNN or Google will tell you about it in a few hours or Google will tell you about it in a few hours.  Twitter Search will tell you now.  Now Twitter has a point.

1. A Few Good Men is awesome.
2. Jack Nicholson is even more awesome.
3. AT&T is worthless. Though, to be fair, no more so than their primary competitor.
4. Google Voice is neat (if largely useless for me).
5. iPhone is “the” phone.

AT&T: You want answers?

TechCrunch: We think we’re entitled to them.

AT&T: You want answers?!

TechCrunch: We want Google Voice on our iPhones.

AT&T: You can’t handle the iPhone with Google Voice!

Son, we operate on network that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by carriers with restrictions. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Verizon Wireless? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Google Voice and you curse AT&T. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know: That pulling Google Voice, while tragic, probably saved the network. And our existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves the network.

You don’t want the Google Voice on your iPhone. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at TechCrunch50, you want us protecting the network. You need us protecting that network. We use words like rate limiting, application approval and restrictions…we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.

We have neither the time nor the inclination to explain ourselves to a blog who writes and profits under the blanket of the very network that we provide, then questions the manner in which we provide it. We’d prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, we suggest you pick up a router and build your own network. Either way, We don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to.

TechCrunch: Did you order Google Voice taken down?

AT&T: We did the job you sent us to do.

TechCrunch: Did you order Google Voice taken down?

AT&T: You’re goddamn right we did.

If you have no idea what this is about, AT&T recently blocked the release of a Google Voice application for the iPhone.

Update: Brian would like it known that he saw this before me.  Please don’t let this remarkable event lead you to idolize him as he has a big enough ego as it is. 

The failures of AT&T are certainly readily obvious to anyone that has an iPhone in the US.  The significant issues that most people had about the iPhone used to be balanced between the two companies, AT&T and Apple.  No cut & paste?  C’mon, Apple!  Weak 3G speeds?  Speed up those upgrades AT&T!  No MMS?  Who cares but it seems to be missing from the smartphone most geared toward the consumers, don’t you think Apple?  Occasional dropped calls?  What is this, 1995, AT&T?  Unfortunately for AT&T, Apple has pretty much removed any noteworthy issue from their end.  The 3.0 OS is a huge improvement on the (arguably) best smartphone already.  However, now all of the issues are on the AT&T side of the partnership and as a result, AT&T is taking a massive beating in the tech community.  Pundits are clamoring for Apple to take their iPhone to other carriers who they believe would be fighting each to have a chance to carry a device as successful as the iPhone.  More specifically, the masses are clamoring for Verizon to swoop in and start carrying the iPhone — to save the iPhone or some such.

I have my doubts as to whether this will happen any time soon and if it does, I suspect it will be a pyrrhic victory at best.

By most accounts, Verizon phone service is more reliable, in more places, than AT&T’s and thus the thinking is that, by getting the iPhone on Verizon, we’ll have all the benefits of the iPhone plus the best carrier service available.   The latter may be true but the former is very unlikely.  Verizon is by far the worst of the cell phone companies when it comes to features on their phones.  They have a long history of disabling features (GPS, syncing, etc) on their phones to make them weak impersonations of their counterparts elsewhere preferring instead to sell you an add-on for an astronomic one-time or monthly fee to provide something the phone has built-on.  Memories of my crippled Verizon Motorola RAZR phone that I had several years ago haunt me — the number of disabled features were ridiculous especially when you saw the same phone on Cingular (AT&T) — seemed like two completely different phones.

They haven’t changed too much.  Take a look at the  iPhone AppStore — Along with the user-interface, this is the feature that really sets the iPhone apart from their wannabe competitors.  If the iPhone was available on Verizon, it wouldn’t exist.  Or rather, given it’s success, would be replaced by whatever abomination Verizon creates because Verizon doesn’t want anyone other than Verizon to have an application store on their devices.

No thanks, Verizon.  Not until you change your approach to customers.  Overblown hiccups and missing MMS with AT&T are minor frustrations that I’ll happily keep if I have to choose between that and my iPhone features.

Along the same lines, I’m the sort of person that finds reading the game recaps online much more interesting in general than watching the games live.  So Saturday night before bed, I brought up Sports Illustrated and ESPN to read their draft summaries of the first & second rounds.   For two companies that usually take the lead in adopting technology into their coverage, they really need to get rid of one really annoying and out-of-date feature they have on their pages:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”120″ />

For those who aren’t programming nerds like me, that little tag in the head section of an HTML page forces the page to refresh the page every 2 minutes (120 seconds). It’s very difficult to read down through a page when the page refreshes and moves back to the top every X seconds. Both SI and ESPN have this annoyance turned on.

I want my content to be as fresh and updated as possible but that’s why years ago, people started using XMLHttpRequest — it allows you to load the content dynamically without forcing a page refresh. Then, use a little styling and coloring to indicate updated content. Easy enough.

SI, you’re behind the times. You too, ESPN. End Web Developer Rant.

While the Facebook community revolted, as they do each time Facebook changes, I think the whole idea of “life streaming” is fascinating. I learn a lot more about my friends by observing their behavior and activity online than I do from “Likes”, “Dislikes”, “Relationship Status”, etc (the typical stuff found on a social network).

Even better than viewing miscellaneous status updates from my friends are viewing the items they find interesting.  I use Google Reader to aggregate news and it has a built-in method for quickly sharing articles from the web.  That is automatically displayed to all my friends and vice-versa when they find interesting articles.  I use Reader more than even Search or Maps.   The feed of items along the right pane or via the “My Life In Links” tab above is an RSS feed of my Google Reader Shared Items.

The consistent problem with life streaming is that activity on one online site doesn’t show up on my activity at another site.  There are any number of approaches to resolve this including propagation websites like Ping.fm, aggregators such as FriendFeed, multiple site-posting functions in applications, and any number of others.  They all have varying degrees of usefulness but all seem to be lacking in some way.

In the meantime, I’ve been testing various items.

• Google Reader RSS/Atom Feed or click the “My Life In Links” above.
  
• FriendFeed or click the “FriendFeed” tab above.

It all started with CNet and Warren Buffett.  A few weeks ago, I was watching the CNet Buzz video podcast that I subscribe to via TiVo and they were showing all of the cars at some auto show and they talked about this Chinese company, BYD, that was making (seemingly preposterous) claims about an electric vehicle.  A major supplier of batteries, BYD is branching out into the electric car business.  A Chinese company and their claims of pie-in-the-sky breakthroughs typically aren’t worth the breath to even mention them but this one has one very big reason to get your attention: Warren Buffett has acquired a 10% stake in the company.  This is very peculiar as he’s not really known as a risk-taker.  Regardless, I filed that away as “interesting…” and promptly forgot about it… 

As I ate my lunch on Thursday, I was perusing some of the financial news I subscribe to.  It just so happened there were a few mentions of the BYD company.  This is almost certainly do to the fact that Warren Buffett is an investor but still, the company was starting to get some press.  Always curious, I decided to do a little research on my own.  I googled and visited any number of websites and eventually came across a compromised website.  The website had been hacked and was distributing viruses.  When I navigated to the site, Adobe Reader launched on my computer and seemed to freeze.  That was a bit odd but a moment later, my computer decided to restart.  No good!

I immediately suspected I had just been infected with a virus of some sort, one that was taking advantage of a vulnerability in Adobe Reader.  My computer restarted “normally” but a few glances at the event viewer indicated that something had started and instigated the restart.  Unlike most events, the application that triggered this activity didn’t have a name, just a string of characters.  A google for that string led to several results for a rootkit.  Uh oh.

I’ve been using Windows since Windows 3.0 (though I remember thinking Windows was a waste, DOS worked perfectly fine).  As far as I know, this is the first time I’ve ever been infected with a virus, trojan, or any of their ilk.  I have never particularly cared for Windows as an operating system and have preferred Linux since I first learned it in 1998.  Linux was my primary OS until OS X came out and I picked up my first Apple computer in 2002 (2003?).  With Linux I learned there was a better way to do things and then, with OS X, a nicer way to do those better things.  Since that time, I’ve kept a Windows PC, mostly for the odd PC game, but very rarely as my primary computer.   At work, most of my work is done on Linux machines but I do have a Windows PC that I use as essentially a dumb terminal.  

 I have two rules when it comes to Windows.  Don’t connect it directly to the internet and don’t use Internet Explorer.  I’ve spent way too much time fixing Windows computers for relatives who have violated one or both of those rules.  As the saying goes, Internet Explorer is good for one thing: Downloading Firefox.  As I mentioned before, I’ve also been testing out Chrome and it was with that browser that I was surfing when I got infected though the vulnerability was most likely in Adobe Reader.

Rootkits are nasty.  Really nasty.  The very nature of a rootkit makes them extremely difficult to get rid of.  The best option is a complete wipe and reinstallation of the operating system, which is what I decided to do after running numerous virus scans Thursday afternoon.  Since the Windows PC is essentially a dumb terminal as I said before, no great loss except for time.  Friday morning, Operation Refresh PC begins.

Most people who try out Linux give up in the installation phase.  ”It’s too complicated.”  The funny part about this argument is that installation of Linux is so much nicer, smoother, and easier than Windows.  However, no one typically ever installs Windows as it comes pre-installed by the Dells and HPs of the world.  If something fails, that person typically falls back on the support disk provided by their vendor or, more typically, just buys a new computer.  The latter makes no sense to me but the average person simply doesn’t understand the different between the computer hardware and the computer software.  If one is broke, the whole computer must be.  

I’m sure there is a reason that vendors do not typically include Windows installation CDs with your purchased computer.  And I’m sure there is a perceived notion of preventing piracy.  And I’m sure some business manager thinks the support CD is good enough.  And I’m sure that is all wrong.  My particular vendor, Gateway, didn’t even provide the support CDs.  They provided a software program to burn a support CD and helpfully included some blank CDs… Why they couldn’t provide a copy of the support CD directly is beyond me.  It couldn’t have been less useful than the software program which helpfully never worked, exiting with a worthless error message when I thought maybe it would be a good idea to make those support CDs.  Silly me.

When I arrived Friday morning, I tried to track down a standard install CD of Windows XP.  If this wasn’t a work computer, a quick visit to any number of sites would have helped me track down a copy and have it burned in less than 30 minutes since those anti-piracy measures work oh so well.  I had a valid Windows XP license after all.  Regardless, I played it straight and took the much more difficult road finally tracking down a copy from a coworker.  

As I mentioned, Windows installs are not nearly as smooth as people would probably expect.  Fortunately, my computer avoided any issues and, after an hour or so of acquiring the XP CD, was up and running.  Well, mostly.  Windows didn’t identify several pieces of hardware in my 3-4 year old, stock Gateway PC.  Most notably, it didn’t identify my ethernet card.  Lucky for me, it offered to go online and find updated drivers for it… Obviously, Windows never learned irony.  

I’m sure they have their faults but Gateway did have a great little interface for tracking down drivers for your computer.  You typed in your serial number from the back of your computer into their support website and it would returned a list of devices and driver software for each of them.  From my other primary work computer, a Linux machine, I typed in that serial number and … got a message that Gateway support was no longer available and it was handled by a third party.  Of course.

At least the Gateway site was nice enough to provide a link to the new support provider.  I had vaguely remembered hearing something about another company buying Gateway awhile back and I’m assuming this was the company I was now being sent to.  Whatever the company was, the website failed to load.  Just my luck that their support providers website was down.  Except that it wasn’t.  Or rather, it wasn’t the site but the whole company.  That’s right, the company that bought Gateways business unit, MPC Corporation, went out of business in Dec 2008.  Lovely.

My ethernet device was on-board and, since my motherboard was of an Intel manufacture, I assumed that I also had an Intel ethernet chipset.  Seemed reasonable at the time.  From the Linux machine, I found a software package on Intel’s site that identified and installed drivers for all Intel ethernet devices…. Sweet!  I started the download and started brainstorming methods for transferring this software to my Windows PC. 

I feel my company must be one of the least tech-savvy tech companies in existence.  Our work environment is completely unsuited toward getting anything done.  If it wasn’t for a collection of problem-solving, work-around-finding engineers, I simply don’t know how we’d get by.  I didn’t have my kit of gear with me so I had to make do with the equipment in my office.  No USB thumbdrives, no USB or firewire cables, etc etc.  I did have those blank CDs helpfully provided by Gateway so I finally found a use for them.  

I burned the Intel software to a CD-R (so wasteful, I know), popped it into the Windows PC, and ran the software.  ”No Intel devices found”.  So much for that idea.

At this point, I figure I’ll have to wait until the next day and bring in some gear from home (e.g. USB ethernet, thumb drive, sledgehammer, etc).  Then I glance over at one of the other computers in my office, a 10-year old desktop.  On a hunch, I checked and sure enough, it had a PCI Ethernet card in it instead of the now-typical onboard devices.  I popped that out and into my work PC and voila, Windows XP recognized it!  Swapped some network cables around and I was online.  I was able to now track down drivers for my on-board ethernet card (which happened to be some random brand I have never heard of before), get that configured, pop out the PCI card, and put it back in the other computer.

I finally had a stock Windows install with a working network adapter.  The former is essentially useless without the latter as I then had to go track down numerous software items to make Windows usable: Firefox, Notepad++, and TweakUI among others.  If only that was all that was required.

Unfortunately, my company recently migrated to an Exchange-backed mail system.  I can’t imagine Exchange wouldn’t be as popular as it is, with the price that it is, if there wasn’t a decent reason to use it.  That said, I have yet to figure out what that reason is.  Worse, I was forced to transition to Outlook so I could start accepting “meeting invitations” instead of a standard IMAP client.  Outlook seems to me to be one of those things, like Windows, where people are familiar with it and so that’s what they they think is the best.  I find it slow, cumbersome, and non-intuitive.  Give me anything else, any day.  

However, my company is much too small to have a person doing IT.  Well, probably not really, but regardless, we use an external hosting provider for our Exchange services: Mailtrust.   It seems to work for us, more or less.  They helpfully provided a .PRF file on the website along with “Basic Instructions” on how to setup Outlook to work with the Exchange server.  Those instructions didn’t work but at least they provided them.  

Clicking through to the “Advanced Instructions” provided me with a PDF with even less useful instructions until the very end which instructed me to run, from the command line:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Off
ice12\OUTLOOK.EXE” /importPRF “c:\Documents and Settings\sdawson\Desktop\shawn.d
awson.prf”

It appears the only way to import a profile into Outlook is through the command line.  All of the setup wizards in Outlook that attempt to automagically setup your profile couldn’t take the time to add a “Import Profile” function, I suppose.  The one “automagic” method of setting up Outlook that should have worked was probably due to my company’s non- tech-savviness but I can only work with what I have.  That doesn’t excuse the fact that Outlook/Exchange should have a basic server/user/password setup and an import profile function that doesn’t require dropping into a command line — Isn’t that was Linux is for?

So finally, after all of that, I finally had my Windows PC functional.  Along the way, I thought of many of those colorful metaphors with which I could express my deepest feelings for all things Microsoft, Intel, and Adobe.  In the end, I decided to write a long and pedantic article on my blog.  From my Mac.

I had been experimenting with online video and checking out various streaming sites available for personal publication of video.  UStream was the one I had heard most about and so was one of the first I tried.  The ease of use and quality were pretty impressive at first.  Unfortunately, randomly videos would be unplayable after recording – No good!  After losing a lengthy video I had recorded using their online recording system, I contacted their support on Jan 7th.  I had been experimenting with a few other video sites and eventually I settled on Mogulus, even though it’s much more sophisticated and complicated for my needs.

I pretty much forgot about my support request until I received this email earlier this week.

from Mazy Kazerooni via RT <support@ustream.tv> reply-to support@ustream.tv date Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 3:07 PM subject [USTREAM-Support #XXXXX] Resolved: Issues With Recorded Videos

According to our records, your request has been resolved. If you have any

further questions or concerns, please respond to this message.

Oh, really?  What exactly was resolved?  I certainly never received any notice that you had done anything to resolve my issue.  Nor is the issue resolved as the video in question is still unplayable.  Also, while I’m quite patient, I think waiting 1.5 months to get a response is a bit much, especially if the response is as worthless and misleading as the one above.  Customer support, indeed…

Update:  With comical timing, I received the following email while I was creating this post.

So it’s not resolved but it hasn’t been looked at yet.  Thanks – I look forward to my next email in April!

watching psych w/ christina

After starting twitter way back on Feb 8, 2007 with the profound tweet above*, giving it up for awhile, and then starting back up last May, I’ve more or less kept up regularly.

Besides trying to explain the point of it, the most popular discussion related to Twitter is if it would ever break out into the mainstream.  Slowly and steadily, it has slowly started to accumulate more and more non-tech-related celebrities, for better or worse.  John Cleese, M.C. Hammer, Dave Matthews, and Lance Armstrong  were some of the more tech-savvy celebs who were fairly early adopters of Twitter.

Recently, the biggest name to hop on the Twitter bandwagon is a celebrity most Americans have never heard of but is absolutely huge in the UK, Stephen Fry.  He quickly shot way up the charts and is, as I write this, #2 on the list of most popular Twitterers, passing many of the well-known tech alumni who have dominated the charts since it’s inception.

Other “pop-culture” celebs who are on Twitter include Britney Spears (or rather, her PR person), trucker cap Ashtun Kushter, trucker hat lover Demi Moore, Harry Potter girl Emma Watson, the surprisingly NOT hot Mischa Barton, High School musical girl Vanessa Hudgens, the Guber-nator, and the Guber-nator’s wife.  I don’t see the point of following any of the above but other people will.  The draw of Twitter is increased exponentially the more people there are on there to follow so despite my misgivings of the pop-culturalization of Twitter, I suppose it’s better for all in the long run.

• Famous Twitterers - http://mashable.com/2008/10/20/25-celebrity-twitter-users/
• Celebrity Twitterers - http://allieiswired.com/archives/2009/01/celebrities-who-twitter/
• Top Twitters - http://twitterholic.com/

* For what it’s worth, Christina and I are still watching Psych and it’s a must watch.  Great show!