There is, of course, nothing wrong with the idea of cellphones. They can be quite handy, and I’ll readily admit it. I have a Tracfone, one of those pay-as-you-go cellphones, which I occasionally put minutes on, particularly when we’re going out of town. However, I’m a bit shocked with just how many people have cellphones, and perhaps more importantly, how much the gadgets are stuck to their ears. It doesn’t seem to matter where I go – the university, out to eat, to the grocery store – some people can’t seem to do anything without a cellphone glued to the side of their head.

I can understand businessmen and women needing to be available at any time; say, CEOs and other “important” folk. I’m sure there are plenty of other professions that require such constant availability, too. But I refuse to believe, for example, that half of my fellow university students are secret millionaires who must monitor their business around the clock, regardless of what they’re doing at the time. They take calls during class, they text message in class. They’re on the phone (or texting) while walking to and from class. They’re on the phone (or, amazingly, texting!) while driving. A few of them have moved up to not even needing to hold their phones; they have those little Bluetooth-powered earphones, so they can take that extremely important phonecall at a moment’s notice. After all, who knows when you’ll need to take a call and not have time to pull the phone out of its holder? And anyway, having a Bluetooth earphone latched onto your ear all day, whether you’re using it or not, holds a message: look at me, please¹!

To all of that, I have to ask: don’t these people get tired of being available around the clock? Don’t they get to the point where they just want to turn the little handheld slavemaster off, and go do something in peace and quiet? Do they ever think that maybe they should turn the phone off and pay attention to the human beings all around them? I’ll often walk by the university cafeteria and take a peak in, and while it isn’t always the case, quite often I’ve seen a peculiar sight: a cafeteria full of people, most of them sitting by themselves at their table, all of them eating and talking on a cellphone. All together in the same room, but essentially alone besides the person that’s on the other end of the phone. Strange.

As I said, I don’t have a problem with cellphones per se. Rather, I have a bit of a problem with how people use them. At times, it looks as if the people are being used by the cellphones instead of the other way around. In many situations in which face-to-face interactions should take precedence over a (usually relatively unimportant) phonecall, the reality is, the phonecall wins almost everytime. I wrote before about one of my classmates texting throughout a class, and unfortunately, that and taking phonecalls mid-lecture are extremely common. What is it these people are talking about that it can’t wait until a 50 minute class is over?

I suppose that, if you get right down to it, I just wish that people would use common sense with the things, and show a little more respect for other people. Being in mid-conversation with someone and them taking a phonecall to talk about last night’s football game or something similar… well, to me, there’s something wrong with that. There’s something wrong with so many university students thinking it’s perfectly normal to interrupt a class repeatedly so they can take that call about tonight’s forthcoming drinking binge.

For those who are expecting important phonecalls, fine; leave them on, but set them to vibrate², please. For those who aren’t expecting any important phonecalls – their wife isn’t pregnant and due to give birth at any moment, their father isn’t in the hospital, they’re not waiting on that billion dollar contract to be finalized – I wish they’d consider turning the ringing taskmaster off for a while. It wouldn’t hurt them to go through a class without texting or to have a phoneless meal with their spouse. It really wouldn’t. Those of us around them would appreciate it; at least I would, anyway!

Some people need to remember that they own the phones. Somewhere along the line, the relationship seems to have been turned on its head.

1. If you’re one of the folks who uses the Bluetooth headsets, my apologies – but I really do think they look absurd, particularly when they’re not in use. They make me feel like I’ve fallen into a science fiction movie – which, I suppose, could be interesting, but with fewer Bluetooth headsets and more Wookies.
2. I commend those who set their phones to vibrate when they’re going to be doing something that they don’t want to interrupt. However, it seems to be a common thing to set the phone to vibrate, and then set it on the table / desk they’re at. As one of my professors commented at the beginning of the spring semester, this is a bad idea; a vibrating phone on a hard surface sounds a bit like machine gun fire.

OpenDNS helps you navigate the Internet in a safer, faster, smarter and more reliable way. Our service is free and requires nothing to download. OpenDNS doesn’t replace your existing Internet connection, it just makes it better.

Here’s a link to their features page. If you’re interested in using their service, here’s their getting started page.

While the security features and the speed boosts that OpenDNS provides are all very cool, I think one of the coolest things they have is the CacheCheck. CacheCheck let’s you force OpenDNS to check the DNS servers for any given domain. If they’re not up-to-date, you can have OpenDNS update them on the fly. This is quite a bit different than how most DNS servers work: if they’re out of date, too bad. You have to wait for them to update. Granted, if someone isn’t using OpenDNS, they’ll still have to wait around for their ISP to update their DNS information. In other words, what are you waiting for? Set it up; it’s easy.

I hit the reset button, and immediately a loud humming sound started coming from the tower. Whatever was going on inside the computer tower, it was also causing the keyboard tray to vibrate. I hit the delete key to get into the BIOS, and headed to the Hardware Monitor section. Lo and behold… The CPU fan was near death. Instead of its usual 4000 – 5000RPM, it was doing between 600 and 1000RPM. The CPU temperature was at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, both the CPU fan RPM and the CPU temperature stats were in red, and with good reason. The thing was just about ready to melt, catch fire, or do a bit of both.

I shut down the computer, made a few phone calls, and found a computer shop that had a fan that would work. Half an hour or so later, all is well inside the innards of the computer.

We got lucky. If the fan had downright died instead of slowing down, the CPU probably would have been toast when I tried to check my email this morning. I’m guessing that the blinking power light was a sign that it had shut itself down or something due to overheating. At any rate, the CPU obviously didn’t burn up, because I’m writing this blog post via said computer.

Have anyone who reads the blog had similar close calls with their computers, or other electronics?

I restart iTunes. It starts updating my iPod again. I notice that in the iPod area, for some reason, 11GB of space is free, as opposed to the 8GB that was free previously. Odd. Maybe it’ll show the correct space usage after its updated and I’ve reset everything. Then, iTunes crashes again. To try and get a completely clean slate, I unplug the iPod, start up iTunes, and then plug in the iPod again. I am presented with the iPod status screen. Space in use on my iPod? 50MB. In its repeated crashings, iTunes wiped my iPod clean. I now have a nice 2 hour wait before everything is back on it again.

Despite their advertising, Apple products are not always the most user-friendly. Grumble.

Update: I just sat down at my computer and opened up iTunes to see how the update was coming along. It wasn’t. The update crashed out due to an “unknown error”. Well, if I may say so… FUCK. Grrr….

Update #2: Well, seeing as the iPod was wiped anyway, to try and set things right I did a Restore on it. After doing that, I plugged it into the wall to finish the process. Then I plugged it back into my computer. iTunes opened up, started to update the iPod, and… promptly crashed. I did a complete reboot of myself, and I’m now trying it one… more… time.

Update #3: I’m now getting an error on the iPod itself about half-way through the update. It says that the battery’s dead and to connect the iPod to power. Uhhh.. the iPod should be charging from the USB connection to my computer, shouldn’t it? What the hell?

Final Update: To quote Monty Python, “And then, there was much rejoicing.” After much restarting, resetting, and general bickering with my iPod and iTunes, my iPod has now been updated with all of my music and podcasts without iTunes crashing. I’m almost scared now to check for podcast updates.

This is what comes back:

Hmm…. Okay, let’s try feedreader, with the words merged:

Wow. One little space takes us from 0 results to 238,842?

Okay, and now let’s try Google. Here’s the results for ‘feed reader’, with the space:

And now, here’s the Google result with the words combined:

Now, don’t get me wrong. I dig Microsoft. I’m not a Microsoft hater whatsoever. I’ve been using their operating system for basically since I started using computers (and yeah, I’ve tried Linux – didn’t care for it).

But if their brand new, state-of-the-art search engine goes from 0 results to 250K, based one just a space between the words.. well uhh..

Put that Beta sticker back on, guys.

Update: Scratch the 0 results. I just tried the search again (feed reader) and got back about 5 million results. I guess their servers had a glitch or something.

As a humorous aside, the top results for ‘feed reader’ at live.com is the Google feed reader.

microsoft, live.com, microsoft_search

However, it then turned out that even though my SkypeIn number was in the same area as my landline, calling the SkypeIn number counted as long distance. D’oh #2. So, I requested a refund from Sykpe, and they gave it promptly. Not a huge deal.

I bring this up because I find it interesting that I had trouble with Skype, and now I’m having a different problem with a different VOIP provider: Vonage. A few weeks ago, I started the signup process at Vonage to see if our landline number was portable. Vonage showed that it was indeed portable.

Fast forward to yesterday. We had decided to go ahead and sign up with Vonage, because it’ll let us save quite a bit of money on our phone bill (not to mention unlimited free long distance). I went to Vonage’s website and started the sign up process again. I entered our landline number as the one we’d like to keep, transporting it to our Vonage service.

No dice. Instead, I get this:

We’re sorry, telephone number portability is currently unavailable for your number.

Argh. What gives? It was portable a couple of weeks ago. What happened during that time to make it to where we can’t keep our number?

Anyone know if phone companies are signing deals with Vonage to keep Vonage out of a service area? If they are, I think I may be calling Verizon and raising some hell.

Update: It looks like I’m not the only one experiencing this problem.

Technorati Tags: skypein, skype, vonage, voip

Granted, I’d prefer to have a working SkypeIn number in my area, but ah well.

Technorati Tags: skypein, skype

I bought the SkypeIn number so that it had the same area code as my home phone. This would also make it so that any of my friends who wanted to call my SkypeIn number could do so at no charge to them. In theory, anyway.

Today, I got my regular phone bill. Guess what? Even though the SkypeIn number is in my area code, it’s counted as a long distance call. The area code that we use here is actually spread out quite a bit, so sometimes, you have to dial the area code, and it’ll count as long distance.. even if, technically, the area code is the same as your own.

It never occurred to me that my SkypeIn number might have the same numerical area code, but not be located in my actual area. Doh.

Because the SkypeIn number is essentially useless to me now (why would I want friends to call me at a local number if they’re going to have to pay long distance for it?), I submitted a refund ticket earlier.

Oh well. It’s still neat in theory!
Technorati Tags: skypein, skype

Tonight I installed FeedReader on our downstairs computer. I wanted to be able to access the (few) feeds I read from any computer (we have 1 down, 1 up), but I wanted to use a desktop application to get to them. I figured it’d be a real pain in the ass to keep the 2 installations synced up, in regards to what items I’d read, etc. Nopers. FolderShare handled it wonderfully.

I just set up a regular FolderShare from one PC to the other. I went upstairs and checked the folder: FolderShare was already copying over the files from the downstairs computer.

A few minutes later I was able to launch FeedReader and pick up right where I’d left off downstairs.

I don’t know how well this would work for programs that depend a lot on the registry in Windows, but for a basic application like FeedReader, it works quite well.

From the Sci Fi Tech blog:

Researchers at Akishima Laboratories have developed a way to spell out words and draw pictures on the surface of a pool by using 50 wave generators. The generators create “pixels” in the water and combine them to create the letters. Earlier versions of the pool had trouble creating straight lines and took up to 15 minutes to input each letter. This latest version, however, handles Ks and Ls with ease and takes between 15 and 30 seconds to input each letter.

That’s pretty damn cool. Having said that, this image is still making me feel a bit.. off. It just looks like something that shouldn’t be possible.