Questionable business practice?
by Tim Faircloth on Jan 20, 2009, 10:41 am
My girlfriend has a family plan with Cingular Bellsouth AT&T, and she recently got a new phone.
One good thing about AT&T is that it’s not a big hassle to transfer all your contacts, text messages, and other data over to the new phone (and activate it) — you just move the SIM card over. Right?
Wrong.
First off, we noticed that pictures are not stored in the SIM card, and neither she nor I could find a way to move them onto the card for easy transport. After a bit of finagling we found a way to get them to her email account. Annoying, but not a huge deal.
Then we noticed another problem: only 44 out of her 120+ contacts transferred over. What’s the deal? Did the card run out of memory? Is it doing some sort of selective transfer?
After some analysis of the numbers that did transfer vs. the numbers that did not transfer, we found a disturbing pattern. Every number that did transfer was either an AT&T cell number or an AT&T land line. My number was left out because I have Verizon (as was the case many of her other Americus contacts), and countless others were left out because they have phone service through their non-AT&T internet providers.
I use a (free) service from Verizon to back up my contacts and don’t have such problems. Is this an isolated incident, or have other AT&T customers encountered the same problem?
New Comic
by Tim Faircloth on Jan 16, 2009, 4:47 pm
Those of you that actually look at my links may have noticed that I’ve added The Stonemaker Argument to my list of Comics.
I find this comic to be distinctive because it’s not your standard few panels of drawn characters. Each episode is a story or explanation of a natural event using comic strips to illustrate a point.
You know what? It’s harder to explain than I thought it would be. Just click the link and find out for yourself. Right now there’s only four posts, but they’re wildly hilarious to me (especially the first one).
Knife roulette
by Tim Faircloth on Jan 16, 2009, 3:42 pm
Don’t worry, it’s fake. If you notice, you never see the back of his right hand (where he’s glued a fake knife blade and some fake blood) until after he crushes the cup.
Still, it’s one of those “hey, this is a cool OH MY GOD IT WENT HORRIBLY WRONG” tricks. More of a practical joke than a magic trick.
A geek can dream...
by Tim Faircloth on Jan 14, 2009, 11:36 am
I want:
and
One problem is that the router is not yet available for sale (it’s a brand new item), and another is that I couldn’t afford the $60/month broadband plan from Verizon.
There’s always the possibility that I could get work to pay for the plan (for those times when I’m far away from internet access and the boss-man calls me for some emergency problem), but I doubt it.
The only other problem I see is that the router is made by Netgear, and my recent experience with their products has been negative. As a matter of fact, the only good router I’ve ever had is my Linksys WRT54G (I believe mine’s a WRT54GS version 4.0). I bought it on a whim when my Netgear piece of crap was acting up and I liked it so much I’ve recommended it to several of my friends and family.
Anyway, it looks like it’ll be a while before I’m playing World of Warcraft at my dad’s farm in the middle of BFE, but a geek can dream.
Coincidence and the Lottery
by Tim Faircloth on Jan 13, 2009, 12:42 pm
It could just be a coincidence
Sometimes in life we attribute coincidence to psychic powers or luck. It turns out we live in a world with a lot of variables, and we tend to ignore the pieces of information that are not coincidental when we find something lines up.
I’m reminded of my time back in my Bobby’s Minit Mart days (I worked as a minimum-wage cashier for five years). I was astounded that nearly 75 to 80 percent of our customers bought lottery tickets of some sort — often in excess of $20 worth at a time. These people were so convinced that someday they were going to hit it big and all the money they’ve spent would come back to them ten fold. I guess none of them read about the odds on the back of the lotto form.
I actually read those statistics and did a little math in my head. It turns out that in order to guarantee that you’ll win, say, $100, you have to spend $150. The whole system is set up so you have to spend 150% of what you would win.
What always got me, though, was how these people always believed that someone was out to get them — that there was some dude sitting at a computer looking at sales statistics to make sure that nobody wins.
The point is that in certain lotto games, it’s not true that someone always wins, especially when people get to choose their numbers since people, by their nature, are not random.
For example, let’s look at a simplified version of the Georgia Lottery game called Cash 3. Choose a three-digit number and buy a ticket with that number for $0.25. At noon each day, I’ll announce a winning number, and if you have that number you win $200 (even if you’re not the only winner).
Cash 3 actually is a lot more complex, but I won’t go into that here.
Predictably, many people will chose triples (000, 111, etc), or predictable patterns or dates, but few people will decide to throw caution to the wind and pick random numbers. Even those that do chose randomly would most likely be biased in some way to a specific set of numbers. In any event, it’s possible that I could sell 10,000 tickets and still not sell out my entire range of possible numbers (from 000 to 999), even though any 3-digit number is just as likely to win. A triple only has a 10% chance of falling, yet easily 50 to 75 percent of my customer base will likely chose a triple number.
Man, that’s going to be my new get rich quick scheme. Would anyone like to play?
XBox Woes
by Tim Faircloth on Jan 9, 2009, 11:18 am
This Christmas I got two games for my XBox 360: Burnout Revenge and Too Human. When I got back to Americus, I had a few days left before I had to return to work, so I basically vegged out in front of my 46” TV with surround and played with my XBox until my girlfriend returned from work… then we’d usually veg out in front of the TV together to catch up on Numb3rs, which streams from to my Xbox from Netflix.
Apparently the strain of several hours of use was too much for my poor console.
Friday morning I woke up to play some Too Human (I had already burned through most of Burnout Revenge), but only got to play for about five minutes before the screen froze and all I could do is restart it manually. When I hit the power button to start the console back up, I was greeted by the Red ring of death. Damn. I tried everything to get it working again. I restarted it again. I unplugged it and went to take a shower. I took the game out. I checked connections. I even used up the last of my canned air trying to blow dust out of the system (though not much came out, surprisingly). I even went online to see if Microsoft had any quick fixes. No dice. Luckily it’s still under warranty.
So as we speak, my poor ailing console is probably sitting on a storage shelf somewhere at a repair facility in Mesquite, TX waiting to be fixed. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get a new one. Until then, I’m stuck using my PS2 as a DVD player, which doesn’t upconvert so it looks like crap on my TV.
Le sigh.
Oh well. At least I get a free month of XBox Live Gold out of the deal. I wonder if I’ll get a new warranty, too.
Since November...
by Tim Faircloth on Jan 9, 2009, 10:46 am
Happy new year, readers! Sorry for the holiday posting blackout. I was fairly indisposed. It looks like I’ve got some catching up to do.
I spent this Christmas (as many of you know) in Houston, TX, visiting my girlfriend’s family. They’re great folks — kinda weird sometimes, but they remind me a lot of my family. I think everyone’s quite impressed with me (her cousins didn’t know what to think until they fired up the Wii and I joined in with them). They’re also very generous. I expected maybe three gifts, but when all was said and done I seem to have hauled in almost as much as my girlfriend.
All in all, I had a good time, but next time we’ll have to fly. This driving straight through and arriving at 7am stuff just isn’t for me. On another side note, I learned that you should never warm up coffee in the microwave until you’re absolutely sure that the coffee cup you’re using is microwave safe.
I’d post pictures, but sadly neither I nor my girlfriend brought a camera on the trip (and neither of us thought of it until we were in Louisiana).
In other news, you may notice a new blog link off to the left for ATOzTOA. I first found this link when some useful digg user linked to his Effective Use of Vim series, but there are several other articles there that reveal a few linux tricks that I didn’t know about (like Linux Commands I Hardly Knew and Linux Commands I Hardly Knew - Reloaded). I’d recommend a thorough browsing of the site to all you linux and Mac geeks out there.
In further geek news, I’ve read some interesting stuff about CSS3. Looks like in the future we web designers won’t have to worry with javascript hacks to make the corners of our divs rounded.