Hear hear!

I for one would be delighted to get those calls back to being handled in the United States, by native English-speaking and Spanish-speaking reps. I don’t even call tech support anymore unless I need an RMA because I rarely can understand the person on the other end of the phone. Even calls to American Express and other companies with other large customer-service organizations are being handled overseas, and not just by India anymore: Romania is a top call-center magnet in, and Sirius/XM has their call center in balmy Jamaica (ask me how I know).

In a complete fit of incredulity, in this article, TollFreeForwarding.com states:

“It will cost jobs while aiding the continued destruction of American wealth and influence. As an employer, it is prohibitively expensive to do business in this country, primarily because the talent pool is tiny due to our poor educational system. Even in a down economy, American technology companies have difficulty finding well-trained individuals who are prepared to work at the pace of international business.”

File that one under Oh Puh-LEEAZE!

Are you kidding me!? It’s America’s shitty talent pool? Really? Bullshit. You left out an important bit from that statement: …because the talent pool [who is willing to work for minimum wage and no benefits] is tiny due to our poor educational system. Yeah. Our educational system teaches kids to demand a living wage and health insurance, I guess that’s what makes it so poor. As a product of the American educational system–and as one who started their career in a BlueBehemoth call center, supporting OS/2–I find that quote highly offensive, and completely unfounded.

I realize that over in India it takes a Master’s degree from Bangalore U. to ensure one is qualified enough to ask someone if they’ve rebooted their computer (because that’s the next step on the script), but why don’t we give our American men and women a crack at it, ‘kay? I’m pretty sure they can handle it…

WelYgl it’s only been a fucking year since tethering was announced for the iPhone; now AT&T is poised to implement it–along with draconian pricing models to ensure that tethering isni’t at all useful to those who choose to tether. Their top-tier, most expensive plan, caps out at 2gb–down from 5gb on their “unlimited” plan.Plus, in a move in-line with their unmitigated gall, they did it as the iPad’s popularity is zooming stratospheric. You’ve got to admire the timing.

So rather than add capacity, the fucking slimebags at AT&T fixed the fact that they have the shittiest, narrowest-diameter data network of all the majors by crippling their data plans. Fucking brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that!? Some executive somewhere just got a big, fat bonus check for dreaming up that marvelous piece of marketing.

But Corsair, you use Verizon–and you hate AT&T anyway. So why get so bent-out-of-shape over this? It doesn’t affect you.

Oh, but it absolutely will affect me–and you, too, no matter what carrier you’re on. You see, when one carrier decides to do this sort of thing out in the open, it gives the green light to all the other carriers to do the same thing. It’s like collusion, but out in the open, and it’s just one more way for the telecoms to bend us over the barrel one more time for one more go-round.

I tether my BlackBerry Storm 2 under Verizon, and pay the oppressive $45/month + $15/month for the 5gb privilege. If Verizon follows suit, I’ll be pissed. Not pissed enough to leave them, of course–their service is still the best of the best–but pissed enough to write them angry letters and compose angry blog entries.

Big Red should use this as an opportunity to chuckle, shake their heads, and sock it to the Blue Bastards at AT&T–with an ad campaign that says: “Gee whiz, AT&T. It’s a shame that your pathetic network which can’t keep up with all the growth is so bad that you have to put usage restrictions in place. Can you hear me now? Oh–you dropped my call? Oops.”

My commute

Total distance traveled: 54.1 miles.

The first half–A to B–is on Palm-Tran Route 40. I used to take Palm Tran route 62 to the Lake Worth Tri-Rail station, but the route was very crowded, and very stop-and-go. And the worst of it: the last bus left the Lake Worth station at 6:30pm, which meant that if I had to stay late at work, I was stranded. Eventually I started driving to the Lake Worth station, but that schlep back and forth from one end of Lake Worth Road to the other–a route lousy with traffic lights every few feet–got to be too much of a pain-in-the-ass and about summertime I stopped taking Tri-Rail altogether and drove the Turnpike to work.

However, a new development came along that made me revisit my commute: Palm Tran, in cooperation with the City of Wellington, built a 140-space Park & Ride behind Fresh Market on 441 and the Mall at Wellington Green. I got an e-mail about its opening in November, and decided to check it out. Turns out that Route 40 is limited-stop service from the Mall at Wellington Green (and the new Park & Ride) to the West Palm Beach Intermodal Transit Station (a.k.a the West Palm Beach Amtrak and Tri-Rail station).

There’s only one problem with commuting to work on Route 40:

Palm Tran route 40 rush-hour schedule

Look at how many westbound 40 buses serve the afternoon rush hour: One. One bus? Are you kidding me? That means if I take P634 from Cypress Creek, which leaves the station at a pretty reasonable 5:24 in the afternoon, I arrive at WPB-ITS at 6:15 (assuming the train is on time, a dangerous assumption nowadays) and have to wait an hour for the 7:15 Westbound 40–which would put me back at the Wellington Park & Ride at 8:10pm. Total commute time: a staggering 2 hours and 46 minutes.

No thank you.

Maybe adding one more on-the-half-hour westbound 40 bus will help: It’d have to leave WPB-ITS at 6:45pm, which isn’t really a big enough window for Tri-Rail P636, which is often ten or more minutes behind schedule.

If I want a reasonable commute time, my only option, really, is P632–which, because it departs Cypress Creek at 4:54pm. I have to leave work at 4:40pm to catch. And If I miss it, I’m screwed.

Maybe I’m too picky. Maybe I just want instant gratification. Maybe I should just be thankful that I commute in South Florida, and not New York or Chicago, where public transit is ten times as crowded, it snows, and hour-long layovers for connecting transit are commonplace.

Well, I must not be the only one, because here it is almost June–and the Wellington Park & Ride? Empty. A beautiful, nicely manicured, empty boondoggle. It sits empty every day, because nobody in Wellington with a car is interested in getting home fifteen minutes into prime-time.

That is, until, I had to become one of them.

We’re installing a new phone system here that uses an open-source phone switch called Asterisk. In preparation, I have to install a box with CentOS on it (and before I get a bunch of uppity comments of how CentOS isn’t the very bestestestest Linux distribution to do the job, save it–I was asked to use CentOS by my boss).

I know my way around IRIX, HP-UX and AIX pretty well, but Linux? In my personal opinion, it is the very embodiment of the phrase “too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup,” like most open-source development ventures are.

Even worse is that I now have to go with my hat in my hands and beg for help from these very same damn Linux Hippies I’ve been busting on for years.

It would seems I’ve been hoisted by my own petard.

Rather than search the Internet for the answers to some of my newbie questions–most Linux snobs hate newbie questions anyway and tell most newbies to RTFMP and go pound sand (wonderful “open” community, eh?)–I thought I’d try to make amends for my past sins, extend an olive branch, and ask the help of my damn Linux hipp– er, I mean, Linux developers.

So I e-mailed one and asked how I grant my regular user account SUDO privileges. I got back this:

Ok.

Let goes to the magical recipe book. Here is what you will need:

1. 2 pork ears.
2. 1 bat wing.
3. The guts of a goat, sun-dried.
4. A very big pot.
5. Some exotic herbs that grow only in the Oceania islands.

…

visudo is the magic word you want. It’s a utility built on top of vi to edit the /etc/sudoers file. That’s where you define the sudo privileges for an account.

Now, if you ate more tofu, you’d certainly inherit all this knowledge by osmosis by sticking your had in the tofu box. All knowledge is contained in the conservative juice.

Ha ha. Damn Linux Hippies.

(I guess I had it coming)

What really, really bothers me about Linux is that none of the fucking Linux hippies I encounter, on the Internet or in person, has a fucking STRAIGHT ANSWER FOR ANYTHING!!! All I want to know is how to install GIMP under CentOS. Under Windows, it’s a breeze; click-click and you’re done.

I’ve googled the question: “Install GIMP under CentOS 5″ and I get 20,000 different answers from 20,000 different “experts.” And exactly none of them descripe a simple “click-click” install, which is what a total n00b like me needs.

I have a bunch of Linux people here in my office (and a friend or two) who resentfully turn up their noses at everything Microsoft and swear on their dead grandma’s graves that Linux is the greatest thing to ever be invented in the history of Earth, better even than the wheel or fire. Well, I got news for you Tofu-eating Linux hippies: Windows doesn’t make me RECOMPILE THE FUCKING KERNEL to install a simple graphics editor! These guys scratch their heads in squnty-eyed wonder why end-users aren’t flocking in droves to Linux. If the Goddamn learning curve wasn’t VERTICAL, I’m sure you’d get more users.

God help me when I try to install Asterisk and use this thing as a phone switch.

Wow. That was a lot of work.

I look forward to having time to write again.

P.S. I took that ridiculous CAPTCHA thing off my comments section.

Butterfly: No. … As long as they’re not naked.

Me: Oh you can rest assured that would never happen. I demand that all my passengers wear a helmet.

*drum fill*

The latest crop of smartphones out there on Big Red’s network: the Pre, the Pixi, the Droid (both Eris and Motorola), even my own BlackBerry Storm 2 come close, but cannot quite replicate the iPhone experience. And they certainly have not been able to replicate the runaway success of the iTunes and the App store.

In a classic understatement, a few days ago AT&T itself admitted that it had a problem with “overpenetration of the iPhone into the New York City market.” And what is really intriguing is the growing number of users out there who love their iPhone, but hate AT&T. Even more intruguing is that there are spots on AT&T’s own message boards where iPhone users are bitterly complaining about AT&T’s poor service, where some users are going as far as saying that if an alternative–any alternative–comes along, they’ll jump at it and tell AT&T to go pound sand. Yes, I know that these people can jailbreak their iPhones–and subsequently void their warranty–and switch to T-Mobile or some other GPRS/GSM carrier. But most iPhone users, it seems, aren’t willing.

The latest exclusivity-ending rumor to circulate quotes analysts saying that the iPhone will come to CDMA networks like Verizon’s as early as Summer, and that Apple is arranging its Asian supply chains to include CDMA chips into the mix. I can only hope they’re right. I would love to have an iPhone–if for no other reason than to take the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” path. But I will never, ever, ever go back to AT&T to do it. Not ever.

I really hope AT&T’s exclusivity stranglehold on the iPhone is, in fact, ending much sooner rather than later. I wouldn’t exactly say that the arrangement is killing Cupertino, but I will go so far as to say that Apple could be selling a lot more iPhones to CDMA subscribers on Sprint and Verizon–when a customer leaves AT&T like a rat leaving a sinking ship,  they have to buy a new iPhone. And a sale is a sale, no matter what; I know apple hasn’t discounted that possibility.

Ultimately, non-exclusivity could work out in everybody’s favor, actually–Cupertino could sell a lot more iPhones, and iPhone users would be spread more evenly throughout all the carriers, leveling out the traffic and relieving their burden–they wouldn’t have to work quite so hard to satisfy their remaining, loyal (albeit misguided) customer base.

Butterfly, on the other hand, faced with the same dilemma, chose rather to go to work. God bless her, the trooper. Of course, she’s trying to hire folks for her department and staying home when you have had interviews scheduled for weeks is a bad thing.

If I feel this terrible tomorrow I’ll have no choice but to burn another sick day–and I really don’t want to. Bleargh.