Since we signed up so early in their Houston rollout AT&T was still doing a free install, so we lucked out there. But I can understand the $150 setup fee, at least if you're in an older house/neighborhood. Like I mentioned our installer was over for a good four hours mapping out the cabling in the house and setting up the home runs we needed where we wanted the equipment.

Overall the U-Verse group has been great to work with, but YMMV.

Cheers,

Josh

Hell yeah. I was only in a couple actual fights growing up and learned some valuable lessons about fighting fair when there's not a ref around. In the third grade I learned that getting hit in the mouth with a rock during a fight with a bully is not only unfair but it also hurts a lot and ends the fight very quickly. After that I made it a point to never get in a situation where my opponent could get the best of me with an improvised weapon so the next time I got into a fight (also third grade) I responded to being shoved by punching the brat in the mouth. A few years later in 7th grade I'd realized what a nice soft target the throat is and when a situation with a class bully came to blows I had both hands around his throat before he could land a punch. Had to be pulled off him by the teacher.

After that I never had any problems with bully types again in school, not even when we moved to the other coast my freshmen year in highschool. By then I'd stood up to bullies enough times to know that I could handle myself physically if need be and perhaps more importantly had developed such a sharp tongue and bitter attitude (I was predisposed to be a sysadmin at an early age) that the usual verbal taunting that typically proceeded physical violence ended in my favor most of the time. Like the article states responding to hostility with hostility did give me the confidence to keep the target off my back most of the time. The bully thing spirals out of control pretty quick for a lot of kids because bullies go after weak targets so the kids least able to deal with it end up getting the most abuse because they'll put on a good show for the bullies. The kids that won't take any shit get tested a few times and then ignored.

What's been surprising to me is how much school yard behavior is carried over to the work place. All verbal of course and usually a lot of passive aggressive bullshit instead of physical threats. Still though there are bullies every bit as cowardly and insecure in the work world as there were in school and just like there you have stand up and give them a bloody nose to get any peace.

Cheers,

Josh

While living in my last apartment I had SpeakEasy DSL which was my only connection to the outside world, because of some weird local (Houston) ordinance that parceled out cable service monopolies to multi-tenant buildings to a handful of local cableco's who survived entirely on gouging apartment customers and didn't even bother advertising their service to people with a choice (house dwellers). If I wanted TV type entertainment torrents and usenet downloads served my needs just fine, would be even easier today with Hulu, Netflix instant and Amazon VOD but I digress.

After renting a house and moving in with my GF we had to cancel SpeakEasy because we were too far from the CO and ended up on Time Warner. At the time their service was actually really good overall. The tech showed up in the middle of this four hour window and we were online within an hour. Couple times we had problems they were cleared up pretty quick. Internet service was almost as good as SpeakEasy, speed was fine, reliability was a little better but no static IP options and the uplink speed was too slow for running a server. Overall though life was good in cable tv land. Then they did that weird switcheroo with Comcast and it all went to hell. Within about a year everything started to go to crap. TV service got worse when comcast "upgraded" to their branded interactive guide service which was slow as hell to update, put in a worse and more expensive VOD feature. Internet stayed OK at first but then we had a really bad month when we were out for over a week due to a botched network upgrade on their end. They wouldn't admit that it was a network wide problem though and didn't mention a big outage on their telephone support line voicemail system but hold times were so bad they were rolling the tech support queue over to accounting (WTF?!) after an hour just to get a live person on the line which was worse because they had no information and no ability to help.

What finally pushed me over the edge was maybe a month after the huge outage when internet service crapped out again. Ten minutes of poking around on my part and I realized our modem had just lost it's provisioning because we had a solid connection but our IP had changed network routing was restricted to a private IP pool. Plugged a laptop directly into the modem and found too that DNS was being hijacked to a webapp for the installer to use to provision the modem. Should be an easy fix for phone support. First I spent an hour on the phone with a tech that not only ran though the while reboot and check that your cables are plugged in bullshit but also suggested I upgrade flash if I was having problems with internet video. After that she told me she would open a case with a higher support team. She gave me a case number and told me I'd be contacted within three days. On the fourth day of no service and no callback I got on the phone again and when I finally got through was told no such case number existed and was in fact in the wrong format for their ticketing system to begin with.

After screaming for a minute and going through the same scripted bullshit I was finally given to tier two support. She was more helpful but insisted on trying her own thing and kept assuming the problem was on my end. Every ten minutes of not making progress I'd beg her to reprovision the fucking modem but she kept insisting there was no record of my modem being moved into unprovisioned space. After a solid hour she setup a conference call with a network engineer and then fucked up the three way call and disconnected all of us. Per normal crappy tech support farms she had no direct call back number and had no ability to call out on her line. So back in the queue I went. Finally I got a support goober that just did what I told her and had her boss reprovision the modem - big surprise that solved all my problems.

Shortly after that we got a flier annoucing that AT&T was rolling out U-Verse service to our neighborhood and we signed up within the first week of availability. Tech came out on time and was an hourly employee of AT&T, not a per job private contractor like the standard cable installer. He spent a good four hours on the install, re ran a ton of old cable in the attic to give us a clean run to the drops for internet and TV. Service has been exemplerary and the few times we've had problems our tech support experience has been great. Tickets were opened when promised and the service guys that have been sent out showed up on time and really knew their shit. Comcast can go suck it.

Cheers,

Josh

Yes they did But no one remembers because it was a Dr. Pulaski episode.

Will I be able to tether the iPad to my iPhone's 3G connection? Yes I know at the moment AT&T doesn't allow tethering on iPhones in the US but that's not a hardware issue, it's a policy issue. I'd potentially be interested in buying a iPad WiFi version if they decide to allow it to play nice with the iPhone. There's potential there for the iPad to tether to an iPhone and take advantage of the latter's 3G connection AND GPS services. If Apple and AT&T decide to allow such tethering it would be worth my while to buy an iPad, just for the gizmo factor. But if they insist requiring existing Apple and AT&T customers to pay AT&T a second time for 3G access just because they are using a second device then screw it, it ain't cool enough for me to pay twice to use the same network I've already bought an unlimited access plan for.

Cheers,

Josh

The yahoo article was light on details but since YouTube works just fine on a Linux box I can't think of good reason why the new rental service shouldn't play just fine on my Linux HTPC. Unless they do something stupid like require Silverlight w/DRM for the rentals. But if they are going to offer these rentals in a Linux friendly format I will definitely support that choice with rentals, especially if the XBMC or Boxxee teams release a nifty and stable YouTube movie rental plugin.

Cheers,

Josh

Since there is no good way to tell with processed foods where the raw ingredients come from or what was done to it at the factory I by and large eschew eating processed, packaged foods. Over the past few years I've given up eating fast food, drinking sodas and have ditched all the standard "junk food" I grew up with. I threw out my microwave a few years ago as part of this effort to remove TV dinners as an option for nights I was feeling lazy. Right now I'm fortunate enough to have access to three different Saturday farmer's markets a short drive from my home so in any given week about 25-50% of my calories come from local farmers that I've come to know and trust over the past year. It's not just bean sprouts and granola either - I get fresh wild caught gulf shrimp, grass fed beef, free range chickens and eggs, farm raised hog and the richest, creamiest freshest goat cheeses in addition to the wonderful seasonal fruits and vegetables. I know everyone involved in the whole chain of sowing, growing and harvesting what I buy at these markets. That's how I found a free market solution to the problem.

Of course it's not as though the government has actually made this free market solution easy - none of these small farmers qualify for the kind of subsidies bigger farmers growing industrial crops get. Not to mention new regulations being written to solve food contamination issues caused solely by industrial farming are putting a huge squeeze on these small farmers that don't have the vulnerabilities to contamination that the industrial farms have in the first place. It's kind of hard to get E.Coli in your spinach if your supply chain consists of pulling it out of the ground and driving it thirty miles into town the next day unless you detour to a feedlot on the way and wash it in the waste pond first. Likewise it's kind of impossible to get dangerous E.Coli in your beef when you avoid putting your cattle in an overcrowded feedlot on an unnatural diet of subsidized (GM?) corn and antibiotics.

Of course I know I'm lucky - I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford to pay a premium for better food though I've certianly made cuts to other parts of the budget to afford this and to live in a large enough city (Houston) that's also close to a lot of agriculture so the supply and demand works out for my farmers to keep selling to me. I've also had to make some big adjustments to how I live - I've really had to make food a hobby and part of my social life in a much bigger way than it is for most Americans. I spend two or three hours nearly every Saturday morning hitting up the markets, chatting with farmers, ranchers and fishermen buying up what looks good and fresh. I've had to learn our local growing seasons so I know what to expect from month to month. I'm learning all about home food preservation, canning and charcuterie so I can buy my favorite produce in bulk at the peak of the season and enjoy it all year. It is a lot of work, easily 15-20 hours a week, but I eat better than I used too and both my GF and I have lost quite a bit of weight once we dumped all processed foods from our diet starting about two years ago. Side bonus is avoiding organ failure due to Monsanto products.

Like I said it's a lot of work just to eat but we've only had access to cheap and easy food year round for what the last 50-60 years or so? My food routine isn't any more onerous or expensive than what my grandparents generation and earlier grew up with and they seemed to manage just fine.

If the .gov were going to do anything to actually help our food system first we'd end subsidies and price supports, ban the import of foodstuffs from countries with even worse food safety records than our own (looking at you China) require that all packaged and processed foods clearly list not only the ingredients but the source of said ingredients down to the name of the farm or ranch it came from. Likewise all packaged animal products should be required to have a picture of the actual farm the animal was living on at the time of slaughter (or milking or egging or whatever) Then consumers can really make a choice about what they are eating and where it came from. Until then we're stuck paying a hefty premium for actual food from actual farms .

Cheers,

I think it just depends on what you're comfortable with. I learned photo editing on GIMP long before I ever tried out Photoshop. I can see advantages to both UI formats - multi windows vs single window - but since I've put so much time into learning the GIMP multi window UI I get frustrated when trying to play in the single big window that Photoshop uses. It feels kinda awkward to essentially be running a Photoshop desktop within my desktop that has a slightly different UI and window management features than my actual desktop. With GIMP all the windows it opens are managed by my desktop and behave like any other application windows, which I prefer. As someone else pointed out though GIMP is a lot easier to use if you use multiple workspaces and can give it it's own workspace. When trying to run GIMP alongside other apps things start to get cluttered really fast, so I can see why you might want to just have one big window for all the photo editing stuff open that you can put on top of everything else or minimize out of the way easily if you only use one workspace.

Anyway I overall really like GIMP and will continue to use it on my Linux and MacOS systems. I also really like Unbutu and will continue to use it as my desktop Linux distro regardless of which apps they feel comfortable included in the supported packages.

Cheers,

Josh

I think you've summed up the shift very well. Throughout the mid 90's and early part of this decade I worked IT in small shops - IT goon for my Uni's library while a student, Unix admin at a small indy ISP, IT Manager (I had a staff of one!) at a cancer clinic. The clinic position was very stressful and prompted my departure from working in a 'pure' IT role and my next job was as a weird hybrid of IT, client services, sales support and system integration at a mid sized producer of CBTs. My current role with a Fortune 100 company is officially a sort of IT traffic cop - I don't really do any hands on work but I coordinate the efforts of a lot of disparate IT teams. It's not bad work but kinda boring after a while. Anyway about a year ago I took a position with the server admin team here, thinking I'd be happy getting back to hands on work again. Within a week I was on the phone with my old boss requesting a transfer back, for exactly the reasons you described.

All the work in that department was scripted out, automated as much as possible and mired in process docs. About half of my new colleagues were IMO unqualified for their jobs and aren't people I would've hired as my assistant when I was working at the clinic but they could follow the process docs and run the scripts to setup new servers. All the real troubleshooting ultimately fell to the competent half of the team even if they weren't in the on call rotation they were getting bugged. Mind you this wasn't a primary support group, we were considered third level (final) support for server related issues, there were two other layers between us and the users. In theory everyone there should've been an expert or have had a lot of troubleshooting/admin experience already.

Before I left I was talking with one of my friends on the team, one of the smart ones, and got some background. About two years prior to my brief period there they had still been a classic server admin team. A group of experienced, guru types that knew their shit and got work done. Then a change in management philosophy came over corporate IT that put more of a focus on process and standardization and documentation. Some of the more hackerish guys took off and the remaining old school team was under such pressure to document and standardize processes that they more than doubled the size of the team to keep up with newer more "efficient" operation. It was pretty clear that I'd be spending my time just pushing buttons and following process docs if I'd stuck around.

I'm not sure if this represents a broader trend in IT overall or just my experiences but for me the 'glory days' of IT work are pretty much over.

Cheers,

Josh

I've always maintained that if I'm ever falsely accused of a crime then I would waive my right to a jury trial and go with a judge. While not exactly perfect I figure a judge will be a lot harder to sway with over the top, scare mongering arguments that the DA might prefer to use on a jury. However if I'm actually a guilty, hell yeah I want a jury trial! Again figure the judge will see through some bullshit but with a jury of my nominal peers I'm willing to give the Chewbaca defense a shot or whatever else my attorney wants to try to trick, confuse, browbeat or scare them into acquitting me.

Cheers,

When discussing cars an infinite loop is called a roundabout ;-)

I wonder if this SCO business will resolve itself before Duke Nukem Forever is released...