I saw that google has opened their google transit service by publishing an API. I think this is a fantastic idea so I wrote UTA the following letter. Hopefully they will soon be using this service.
click more to see my letter.
Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network
I was able to set up wireless for the SLCC (Salt Lake Community College) wireless network yesterday. I am taking classes from the Weber State University CS department to finish my bachelors and they are on the SLCC campus so I’m able to use their wireless network.
It was simple enough to setup but definately more of a pain than it should have been. They make you go into the library and sign a paper form then they configure an active directory account for you that allows you to login to the wireless network through LEAP. They then make you hand your laptop over to one of their techs to configure LEAP. To do this I had to wait in line for about 20 minutes behind the five other people also trying to get wireless set up.
I can’t help but think this could be much simpler. They could allow you to sign the form electronically then they could create your active directory account through a script and then provide good instructions and a download for installing LEAP. This could save them and many students a great deal of time. Hopefully this is what they will move to in the future since this really is a relatively simple process and shouldn’t be so tedious espicially for a school that says they have ~25000 students between their various campuses. It seems like it would be a reasonable investment to get an automated system setup.
Overall though it is at least nice to have wireless included as part of the fees I’m already paying instead of having to pay YAAF (Yet again another fee).
It seems Hollywood has gotten what they want and there will be no more cleanflix or similar companies. This means people cannot get edited family-friendly versions of movies. This is unfortunate for those who used this as a means to let their kids watch movies they wouldn’t normally let them watch. This is a difficult issue because parents want to control what their kids see but give them some freedom at the same time. Typically they are ok with a particular movie except for the language or a couple scenes that make it inappropriate for kids. One alternative that is still survived this ruling is clearplay. This is because they don’t actually edit the movie but only change what appears on the screen through their software.
See the article here.
When I got my blackberry phone from verizon I decided to get the insurance because the phone was so expensive. I also decided to get it because they said verizon accessories were covered. This is a big deal to me cause I seem to have more problems with accessories breaking than anything else.
The other day my belt clip on the phone case broke off and the stitching started coming off on the case itself. I was on vacation so I decided to not worry about it till I got back. Yesterday I took my blackberry with the case into the verizon store where I bought the phone. I told them I had the insurance and after a minimal amount of hassle they gave me a new case. This is what I hoped for and expected when I bought the insurance. Based on experiences I have had in the past with cell phone companies though I still thought in the back of my head that I’d have trouble if I ever had to use the insurance. Well I’m glad to say for once that it worked as I had expected to begin with. So kudos for verizon! They are making me a happy customer and I will probably continue to stay with them for a long time if the service stays at the level I have seen so far. This is completely opposite of the experience I have had with Cingular, AT&T, MCI, Sprint and even verizon in the past for various cell phones I’ve had. Hopefully this trend of having better customer service will continue, because in my experience cell phone companies have typically had about the worst customer service of any company I’ve had to deal with.
I started having problem with receiving e-mail on my blackberry phone about two days ago. I thought this was completely due to blackberry. So I troubleshot the issue in the tools provided by blackberry and verizon. After exausting the things I could try I called verizon. I went through all their levels of tech support and found out that RIM was indeed having trouble with their servers that they were currently fixing. Then the verizon tech person called me back a couple hours later and said the issue should be fixed. We tried sending test e-mails- it didn’t work. We waited…it still didn’t work. She then called up RIM again and put me on hold. While I was on hold I decided to check the google groups just for kicks. I found that others were having similar problems with pop access on their gmail accounts. I then tried to get pop e-mail through thunderbird. Sure enough, gmail wasn’t allowing the client to download all the e-mail through pop. After holding for a long time the RIM tech came on the phone. After I explained the problem to him in more detail, we both came to the conclusion that gmail pop was definately having some problems. He suggested that I should forward the e-mail from my gmail account to my blackberry built in e-mail account. So this is what I did. I now get e-mail much faster than I did before (almost instantly), which is a nice bonus from having this problem. In the meantime, pop access still isn’t working. Hopefully google will get this fixed soon. I wonder what people using outlook express only do when they have this kind of problem? They probably wouldn’t even think that gmail just isn’t letting their client download all the e-mail through pop.
Its funny how one real problem can so easily mask the true nature of another related problem.
I realized today once again that cell phones are not nearly as stable as they should be. I have not been receiving any text messages for about a week now, and didn’t think much of it because I really didn’t have any spare time to figure out what was going on. Voice calls were still working fine, which is another reason I didn’t look into the problem any further. The problem got worse today though when my friend IM’d me asking if I was there because he tried to call me twice. He said the first time a message came on saying that my phone had been disconnected, and then the second time it went to my voicemail. After hearing this I looked at my phone. The only message printed on the screen of my phone was “SIM card rejected”. So I turned off the phone, took out the SIM card, and reinserted it. Then I turned the phone back on and everything worked fine. The main question is why I had to do this in the first place?
Phones in my mind are pretty much embedded devices that should have rock solid stability. I don’t expect to have to reboot my phone evey other day like I would a Windows computer. If this was the expectation I would think it to be unacceptable. Apparently phones still need quite a bit of work though before they meet my expectations. Unfortunately this situation only seems to be getting worse. It seems that the first cell phone I had many years ago was much more stable than my current one (I don’t remember ever rebooting my first cell phone). Hopefully someday this stability will be normal and expected; though I fear this situation will only continue to get worse before it gets better. This is probably mainly because of the rush to add every new media feature under the sun to the latest phones without very extensive testing of these features.