AT&T drops "Fewest dropped calls" campaign
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 27, 2007, 9:41 am
I had Cingular (back when it was called Cingular) for two years. I’d have, on average, two or three dropped calls every month. I’ve had Verizon for almost four years now, and I think I get maybe five dropped calls per year.
I cried bullshit from the moment I saw the first Cingular commercial claiming that they had the “fewest dropped calls”. Now the truth comes out.
The wacky world of the web
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 21, 2007, 10:32 am
I thought I’d share two things I’ve found floating around the interwebs over the past few days.
I give you The Ten Commandments of Linux courtesy of Linux Brain Dump. I think the author was spot-on with these rules… especially 2 (“Thou shalt use the package manager when possible”), 8 (“Thou shalt use the command line”), and 9 (“Thou shalt not try to recreate Windows”).
I’ve also found the Faux Stick-On Sunroof for all those guys that want to impress the ladies (or ladies that want to impress the guys)… until someone actually gets in your car and finds out you’re just a big phony. I personally prefer to impress the ladies with the fact that I get 40 mpg (beat that, plastic stick-on sunroof man!).
Ubuntu's lost its shine
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 21, 2007, 10:07 am
People are getting into linux more, which is a reaction to Dell selling computers with Ubuntu pre-loaded. Geeks everywhere are talking about how Ubuntu is so awesome, but lately I’ve been thinking about switching back to Debian or even switching over to Saybayon, a Gentoo-based distro. All my distaste for Ubuntu lies with the one thing that gives it strength — that “ubuntu-desktop” package. Let me explain.
The “ubuntu-desktop” package is a dummy package (in and of itself, it contains no programs) that depends on several “operation critical” packages, like xorg or gnome. The good thing about this package is that it gives you all the essential tools for a working desktop in one package, but the problem is that it’s not very modular.
Here’s a list of dependencies for the ubuntu-desktop package. Is it just me, or does that seem a bit extreme? If I uninstall any one of these packages, I am forced to remove the mother package… and suddenly every other package on that list is marked as “no longer needed”, so every time I use apt it tells me I’ve got several packages I don’t need (when in fact I do need some of them).
Well shit. I don’t want to have to download the newest openoffice package set (at about 100 MB each update) when I barely use it, but I don’t want to uninstall it because I do like so many of the other tools which would be “no longer needed”.
I have an idea for the Ubuntu team (if they’re listening). Split that package up. No one package should have fifty dependencies (actually much more than fifty, but I stopped counting). It’s just absurd.
New Mexico Trip, part 5: Monday
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 16, 2007, 4:36 pm
This is a continuation of my New Mexico trip series.
I also have a few pictures from Monday.
I have to apologize in advance for the depressing tone of this post. Monday was, after all, a sad day for me.
Monday morning I managed to wake up just early enough to turn off the alarm so I wouldn’t wake Rob. I had to rouse Katie about 6:30 so we wouldn’t be late. Stacia woke up about that time as well so she wouldn’t be late for her first day of the school year.
I gave Stacia a warm hug Katie and I headed off to the airport. We rode in silence for the most part, but though it wasn’t unusual, it made me uneasy. It started to set in that I wasn’t going to see her or any of my new New Mexico friends for quite some time. I think Katie pretty much felt the same way, but I’ve never been that good about reading her emotions. When we arrived at the airport, she got out of the car and hugged me. We had a short goodbye and I was on my way.
I want to stop for a minute. Even now when I think about how I felt during those three hours I get a little choked up, and I think it’s natural. I’ve been back in Americus for a few days now, and I keep thinking about going back to New Mexico, and taking Jessi with me so she could meet all these great people and see these beautiful sights.
I’ll have to go back someday.
It seems like the right back east was fraught with calamity. The night before, my manager (at GSW) had called no fewer than eight times and left eight simple “call me” voice mails (which violates one of my cardinal rules of leaving messages). I called him back, explained why I hadn’t gotten his messages (my cell doesn’t get reception in Navajo), and despite the fact that the problem was resolved, he wanted me to check in about two o’clock. Admittedly, I didn’t know when two o’clock was because of the craziness with time zones around the Arizona / New Mexico border this time of year (since Arizona doesn’t observe DST, New Mexico is an our ahead of Arizona), but I told him I would check in when I got to Phoenix.
The flight from Flagstaff to Phoenix was late to arrive and took longer to get to Phoenix. Instead of a forty minute layover, I had to run like hell from my arriving gate to my departure gate to get there in time. I didn’t get a chance to check in with my manager until I was actually on the plane. The situation hadn’t changed — everything was still working smoothly. Big surprise, eh?
The ride from Phoenix to Atlanta was almost an hour overdue, and though I was slated to get to the big A around 6:45pm, I didn’t get out of there until 8:30pm. I was tired, irritated, and a little depressed when I met Jessi at the baggage claim, and I failed to give her the attention the moment deserved. All I wanted was to get home and go to bed.
Jessi and I didn’t talk much on the way to Eatonton. I was glad to see her, but I knew that I’d be leaving her soon too. Other problems arose, but I won’t discuss them here.
I took off from Eatonton and arrived home around 12:30am.
…and that’s all I have to say about that.
New Mexico trip, part 4: Sunday
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 15, 2007, 10:41 am
This is a continuation of my New Mexico trip series.
I also have a few pictures from Sunday
“Tim, wake up!”
unnnnngggggg
“Tim, don’t you want french toast?”
uunnnnggggg
“Tim, they have COFFEE!”
err?
I slowly open my eyes at nine am to see Rob’s smiling face as he shakes the covers. “Let’s go get some coffee!”, he says.
So we get dressed and head over to Jen and Kevin’s place for french toast and coffee. Tim drives his F150, Katie sits in the cab, and Rob and I sit in the back. When we arrive, Kevin’s cooking the toast and Jen’s buzzing around making sure everyone has what they need. People trickle in and out and we talk about yesterday. I met that girl (whose name I still can’t remember — Karen, maybe?) that was in my graduating class and we chatted a bit.
Then Tim, Katie, Rob, and I decided to head out to help Tim with his straw bale house. We all rode a mile or so down the road, then off the paved road to his building site. Luckily, Katie remembered her camera so I have a few pictures of us all working our asses off in the desert. Whenever I took a water break I would just stop and look around at the beautiful rock formations around us. What a great place to live:
Around noon we went back to Stacia’s house and ate spaghetti. Tim mentioned an old abandoned camping area he had gone hiking in before, so we all decided to go and make an afternoon of it.
We piled in to Tim’s truck along with Tim’s two dogs, Diablo and Juanita. We drove a few miles out to the old campground. Unluckily, the gate was locked, so we parked outside the gate (at the bottom of a hill) and started walking. I remembered to bring my camera this time, so I got a few snapshots:
Diablo and Juanita roamed around sniffing this and that as the four of us took in the scenery. Rob looked around for prickly pear cacti (and found a few) for a recipe he wanted to try out. I took a few more snapshots from the top of a foothill (close to Valley View in the picture above), and decided to cut our little trip short because of a storm on the horizon.
By the time we got back to the truck, it had been raining lightly for about five minutes and the roads were muddy. After a few minutes of trudging up the hill, we got stuck in the ditch about half-way up. I have to say I got a little concerned that we wouldn’t get back by nightfall, but Tim had thought to bring some animal crackers for us to munch on while we waited on help (or for the roads to dry).
After about an hour of waiting, the rain stopped and a few of us adventured out to see if we could find help. Luckily, there was a group of Navajo around that pushed us out, guided us back down the hill, and showed us a safer route back to the paved road.
Along the way, Diablo felt like taking a jog, so he jumped out:
We drove about four miles trying to tire him out so he’d get back in the truck, but Diablo was just way too energetic. We had to stop and grab him before we got to the main road. Tim joked about working another hour on the house, but we were all way to tired to take him seriously. I took a few more snapshots on the way back to Stacia’s house:
When we got home we attempted to grill supper, but the grill didn’t stay hot long enough, so we had to finish our pork chops and grilled prickly pear blade in the kitchen. The prickly pear just wasn’t for me, but the pork chops were good. We all had to get up early the next morning, so afterwards we went to bed.
New Mexico trip, part 3: Saturday
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 14, 2007, 4:51 pm
This is a continuation of my New Mexico trip series.
Saturday morning we all got up early, filled with anticipation. We swung by the school to pick up a few students (and parents, and pretty much anyone else in the neighborhood that felt like coming) and drove out to a remote place along the banks of the Little Colorado River in Winslow, Arizona.
I wouldn’t call it “cliff diving”… more like rock jumping. I couldn’t get the nerve to jump off of anything higher than an estimated twenty feet, but several others were ballsy enough to leap from almost sixty feet above the water! About noon, we all retired for a few minutes for a quick PB&J sandwich, then went back to swimming and jumping for another two hours.
Overall a very fun time, and no major injuries.
I also met Jen and Kevin on this little outing. Yay for new friends!
Regrettably, I forgot to bring my camera (as did everyone else I knew), so I don’t have pictures of the event.
None of us wanted to leave, but we wanted everybody back in Navajo before it got dark, so we headed out. The trek back home was long and slow. That night, Jen and Kevin came over for a while, and invited us back to their place in the morning for french toast and coffee. Rob and I both perked up at the mention of coffee since we’d both been rather caffeine-starved since we got there.
J&K didn’t stay long, though, and none of us had the energy to stay up very long after they left.
New Mexico trip, part 2: Friday 8/10/2007
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 14, 2007, 2:12 pm
This is a continuation of my New Mexico trip series.
I woke up at four o’clock Friday morning in Eatonton. The morning before I followed Jessi up so she could drop me off at the airport and I wouldn’t have to pay ten bucks a day for parking. By seven I had given Jessi a goodbye kiss and I was waiting at the terminal. My flight to Phoenix was scheduled to board at 7:40am.
I remember having a silent chuckle as one of the boarding passengers told her friend the flight to Phoenix was about an hour long… we take off at 8:10 and arrive at 9:05. It appears she had forgotten to factor in the fact that Phoenix is three hours behind Atlanta. The flight actually took about three and a half hours (we arrived early).
After a layover in Phoenix, I boarded a small prop plane headed for Flagstaff. This leg of the flight was short, and I chatted a little with my seat partner idly for most of the flight.
Katie picked me up and we started our three hour drive to Navajo. We chatted a bit, but mostly she pointed out certain landscape features or laughed at the some of the gaudy monstrosities put up by some of the local tourist traps. We arrived in Navajo around five o’clock
When we got to the house, I met Rob, Stacia, and the animals. All were amazed that Poppers came up and licked my hand instead of running in fear at the sight of a stranger. Tim came over for a visit later on.
Not much happened that night. Katie and I were tired from traveling, and everyone else had had a hard day of teaching or, as in Rob’s case, loafing around. We sat around, played video games, and shot the breeze over a few cold beers. Stacia introduced me to Kiwi (who I actually got to hold for a few minutes). After it got dark, we all went for a short hike and stargazed for a few hours before turning in.
New Mexico trip, part 1: the cast
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 14, 2007, 11:10 am
Last weekend I traveled to New Mexico to visit a friend. I’ve been promising her a visit since before she moved, and I’ve finally gotten a chance to actually do it.
Before I get into everything, I have to say that New Mexico and Arizona are beautiful places. It’s a shame that this trip out west is the first I’ve taken in more than ten years. There are beautiful rock formations to look at, and in other places there are prairies that stretch for miles. The sky, for some reason, seems so much bigger. You can see rainstorms from miles away, but there’s always a blue patches in the sky regardless of the weather you’re experiencing. Since the nearest town (with all its lights) is almost an hour’s drive away, the stars (and the cloud of the milky way) shine brightly at night. There are so many stars in the night sky that it’s hard for me to pick out any specific constellations.
I’ve decided to break this post up so it’s easier to write (and hopefully to read). In this post I’ll cover the people that made the trip wonderful.
I went to visit Katie, who I met some time ago while playing Kingdom of Loathing. We first met face-to-face when we both decided to go to a meet-up in Columbus, OH, and we’ve been close friends ever since. When she’s not galavanting around the country with Americorps or Habitat for Humanity building houses, she makes money by substitute teaching at the middle school a few blocks from Stacia’s house.
Katie lives with Stacia (actually pronounced “stah-see-ah”, but she generally goes by the American pronunciation, “stay-see”), who is a full time teacher at the middle school. She owns a slightly skiddish dog named Poppers and a friendly cockatiel named Kiwi. Katie and Stacia went to High School together.
Rob, another of Katie’s high school friends, was there as well. Rob was the one that originally got Katie started with Americorps, and decided to visit Katie for a while before they headed off to join up with the Habitat bunch this coming week. If he ever gets dissatisfied with building houses with organizations like Habitat, he’s got an engineering degree to fall back on.
Tim is the cross-country coach at the middle school. He currently lives down the street from Stacia, but he’s building a straw bale house on some land owned by the family of one of his track students. He hopes to make it self-sufficient by using a cistern for water and solar panels for electricity. Hopefully he’s got a plan for sewage. He’s a pretty cool guy (how could he not be with a name like Tim?) and I hung out with him a lot, which caused quite a bit of confusion. I often found myself asking “me Tim or him Tim?” when someone asked a question.
There’s also Jen and Kevin, who live about a block from Stacia’s house. They teach at the middle school (big surprise, eh?). I didn’t really hang out with them much, but they deserve special note because they’re a cute married couple and they made us all french toast Sunday morning.
There are several other people I met that I want to mention, like Nick and Gavin and all the Navajo middle schoolers that I met. I also talked to a girl that graduated from my high school the same year I did, but for the life of me I can’t remember her name right now. Kelsey? Megan? Somehow I feel that’s way off. I’ll think of it later I’m sure.
It sucks that these people are so far away now. They were all very friendly people and I’d like to visit them more. I wish I could have stayed longer, but my life and my love are here in Georgia. I’ll have to go back again some day and visit them all, even though Rob and Katie will be gallivanting around with Habitat for the next year. Maybe Jessi will be able to come with me next time.
"Fight Apathy or Don't"
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 14, 2007, 9:49 am
Most of the time, graffiti is stupid and destructive. Sometimes it’s actually beautiful. Other times it can be quite humorus.
ASCII Stereogram Movie generator
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 8, 2007, 10:31 am
Yeah. It’s frickin’ cool.
Great Stuff
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 7, 2007, 2:57 pm
…and now for something completely different: a man with three buttocks (no, not really).
W3C Compliance, Part Deux
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 7, 2007, 11:17 am
In an earlier post, I made arguments for compliance to W3C standards. I think I have a little more to say.
The world of web surfers don’t give two shits about compliance. For this reason, webmasters must care.
We all bitch about how IE sucks because it doesn’t comply to standards. How then, are we to convince Microsoft that it’s important to us if we don’t make a concerted effort to follow these standards ourselves?
Do you want to go your whole life writing IE hacks into your pages? I don’t!
Standards are created so we can all communicate or act on common ground.
Our highways and automobiles are all held to certain standards. The Department of Transportation has to lay out our roads in a certain way, and cars that travel on that road must have certain features. Do you think the DoT would make a road with lanes that are only twelve inches wide? If GM decided to make a car with no lights, do you think it would be approved for highway travel? Of course not!
Why then, do we as geeks settle for narrow roads with no lane separators? Why, then, do companies like Microsoft create cars with no headlights or brakes? Why do we just sit here and pass it off?
These popular blogs that aren’t compliant are serving as a horrible role model, yet we just say “well, compliance is secondary”. That’s just… not cool. If we don’t support these standards, we’ll always have to deal with non-compliant browsers; we’ll always have to put hacks in our CSS and HTML.
Minesweeper the Movie
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 7, 2007, 10:30 am
The boys at College Humor have been known (on occasion) to come out with a gem of geekery. Here’s the latest example: Minesweeper the Movie
I’m still waiting for a Nethack movie.
W3C Compliance
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 7, 2007, 9:33 am
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of articles and blog posts arguing that W3C compliance isn’t a priority. Articles like this one: Top blogs fail W3C Markup Validation.
There are several arguments for the cause. Who’s to say that I have to use all lower-case in my markup tags? Why should I worry about putting that closing slash in all my br tags? If my page renders properly in popular browsers, why is it so bad that my page doesn’t validate?
In my book, validation is very important. Settling for “my page looks ok in popular browsers” is criminally close to “my page looks ok in my favorite browser”. Saying “It’s not compliant, but it’s pretty close” is a few steps away from “It’s not compliant, and I just don’t care”.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not evil or horrible to have a non-compliant page. Content and design should be the first priority, but compliance should be a factor in the way we structure our content and design.
It’s one of those slippery slopes. One day we decide it’s ok to use a few upper-case tags or leave out a closing slash in a break tag or two… the next maybe we decide it’s ok to leave out the quotes in a link’s target. Before we know it, the standards are completely ignored. Do we all want to become like Internet Explorer?
Another reason to hate windows
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 6, 2007, 4:38 pm
So, GSW bought me a 250 GB external drive so I could back stuff up. It’s pretty cool. Didn’t even come with an instruction manual — just plug up the power, then the USB and start copying stuff, right?
Well, not exactly. First off, my computer at work only has USB 1.0 because GSW is too cheap to buy me a new computer, so it takes forever to copy files.
Also, windows is retarded. I’m copying thirty-some-odd GB of data from my hard drive to my external. The little copy box says it’s gonna take something like an hour.
So I go do other stuff. I get coffee. I check my email. I fix a web page or two and reply to a few emails. I get bored and play solitaire for a while.
Thirty minutes into the copy I get a pop-up. Windows can’t copy file such-and-such because it’s being used by some application. Instead of skipping the file, it stops dead in its tracks and decides not to copy the rest of my data.
Bill Gates, I’m going to take a moment to address you personally, even though you’ll probably never read my blog. I realize you probably don’t do much of the programming for Windows, but you do hold a bit of clout in the company.
Bill, this is a bug. It needs to be fixed. Now. Oh, and Vista sucks. Fix that too.
Linux would give you a warning about the one file, but it would go right on happily copying over all the other files.
I’m not sure how Mac would do it if you’re copying from the Finder, but if you were copying from the command line, I’m pretty sure it would all be gravy.
It looks like I’ll have to boot on a live cd to backup my files. Thanks for nothing, windows.
I still think Rob Beschizza is an idiot...
by Tim Faircloth on Aug 1, 2007, 12:15 pm
…despite the fact that his article, Ten Reasons To Throw Away Your Cellphone, has been posted on digg, reddit, and even Lifehacker.
Read my previous post about his article. Go on, read it.
As an aside, I think Lifehacker’s been getting worse and worse for quite some time now, but that’s another story.
In any event, I’m not alone. Edd Morgan agrees with me in a blog post I picked off of digg. I’m sure he’s not the only one.