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Monday, September 10, 2001
Further distinction for the gentleman 
Seems to be working
| | I just got off a phone interview in which I said blogging at its worst was an accessory to procrastination, only more useful than going to the fridge for the third beer of the day. Anyway, to justify the upside of procrastination, I pointed at the poster by the same name at Despair.com, for which the coming Depression is both existential validation and commercial hog heaven. |
Developing perfect bitch
| | Just spent the whole morning troubleshooting the phones in our house. |
| | We have four lines here: mine, Joyce's, a house line and one more for the fax and the DishTV receiver (which needs to snitch on us while we're not bothering to order pay-per-view programs). Line 1 is Joyce's, which rolls over on busy to Line 2, which is the house line, except on the cordless 2-line phone in the kitchen, where Line 1 is the house line and Line 2 is Joyce's. With a number of extensions in the house, we'd like to know each line by what phone manufacturers call a "distinctive ring." The two new AT&T phones Joyce got at Circuit City produce the same distinction between Line 1 and Line 2 that you get from listening to a pair of mosquitoes. One goes "drdlrdlrdlrdl" and the other goes "drdlrdlrdlrdl." See? I just listened with the help of a little portable keyboard, and I believe the tones produced are B for Line 1 and B-flat for Line 2. The one-line Panasonic in my office warbles in C. I don't know what the Uniden cordless in the kitchen plays, but it doesn't matter because it makes the same sound for Line 1 and Line 2. It's also loud at all settings, in both the headset and the base station, making it hard to tell what one-note tune the other two phones are playing when a call comes in on either line. |
| | We decided the best solution would be to quiet the Uniden in the kitchen. If you started reading this blog from the bottom you'd know that earlier today I had some nice things to say about Uniden because they let you easily find and download an owner's manual on their Web site. Now I take that back. At the time (about 1am) I failed to notice that Uniden doesn't have the manual for our phone, the EXI 2926, which Google finds listed in 69 pages on the Web, but not on the Uniden site. Uniden's site search also seems unaware of the product. Wooops! I take that back. Here it is, for sale in "like new" condition. (Hmm... Costco was selling it as new.) Guess discontinued models aren't supported on the Web site (amazing since all 39 models of 900MHz digital phones in Uniden's listing appear to be pretty darn similar). |
| | Worse, when you call Uniden at their customer support number, you get one of those infuriating messages that tells you "Our office hours are from ...." when you're calling during office hours, and then puts you through a phone maze that terminates with "All our customer service representatives are busy right now. Please call back later." Like when, next year? |
| | Joyce called repeatedly until she got a human being, who said it was possible to turn off the base station's ringer, but not the one on the handset. BFH. The Uniden support person also said "I don't know much about this unit. It's a brand new product." At the time Joyce didn't know it existed only as a refurb on the Uniden site. |
| | Other complaints: 1) The Uniden phone is yet another electronics product with gray-on-black lettering that's getting harder and harder for geezers like me to read; and 2) The AT&T phone won't let you pick up the phone (which defaults to Line 1, push Line 2 and dial. It gives you a dial tone, but the tone persists while you try to dial. |
| | Well, now Jeffrey's home, which should make work this afternoon a whole lot easier. |
| | And now, right on cue, some phone — not sure which line — is ringing. |
Frontiers of Fun
| | Bernie just wrote to ask if my ears were burning. "Check out (this interview) and search for Doc." Very nice. |
| | Now that I've got some of the fun people fooled, I have to work harder on the rest of you. |
Frontiers of celebrity
| | Santa Barbara isn't quite the Hamptons, but it's as close as you get on the West Coast (and a helluva lot nicer, if you ask me; and I love the Hamptons). Which is to say there is no shortage of well-known people. |
| | Most of them are from Hollywood. Oprah just bought a place not far from ours (at >50x the price). A friend recently ran into Sigourney Weaver window-shopping in Montecito. Jody Foster and Jeff Bridges are said to be locals. And the list is a lot longer than that. |
| | Anyway, we had dinner with a new close friend who worked quite a while in Hollywood. She's one of those people you see listed about a third of the way into the credits, though her work involved quite a few front-line stars. We hadn't talked much about The Industry in the past, so I thought I'd ask her to run down some of the major good guys and assholes she had known. I won't share the latter (though she had some great stories); but I thought it would be worth passing along her number one Nice Guy: George Segal. What made him nice? He's interested in people other than himself, and he's a listener. |
| | I had exactly that experience, by the way, with Harry Anderson a few years ago. Remind me later and I'll tell you the whole story. |
| | But right now I'd rather tell you a different story, about a different kind of star turn. |
| | This morning after mass, while we were hanging outside the church eating donuts and drinking coffee, we ran into some other Santa Barbara newcomers. This couple had just moved from New York, had a couple boys around Jeffrey's age and a very cute recently adopted little girl. We talked and joked about being new in town and how we had all moved there almost impulsively, and other stuff like that. |
| | Then he asked me about Linux Journal, since I was wearing a company shirt, and we got to talking tech industry trash. He "worked with start-ups," he said. That suggests retirement from a dot-com success, and he did look a little familiar. When I asked his name, I had one of those embarrasing "of course" moments. He wasn't only somebody I knew — though not personally — but that I had singled out in the past as something of a bad guy. I told him as much, and he was very gracious about it. |
| | I reciprocated by graciously failing to wince when he said he hadn't heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto. As we left, I wasn't sure which was worse... discovering that he had no idea who I was or what I do, or discovering that he was actually a nice guy. |
Useful developments
| | Whole lotta ya'll are coming over from Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com, where his lead news item kindly says this: |
| | Doc Searls has a correct analysis of why Microsoft is less evil than AOL. Micro-summary: Microsoft will win because it views users as customers. When a Linux guy says that MS is less-than-fully-evil, you gotta pay attention. |
| | Speaking of usability, I'd like to commend Uniden on providing a remarkably useful Web site. The company makes a crapload of phones, one of which we bought a couple weeks ago at Costco. It's one of the thirty-nine listed on this page here. Since we lost the manual, we were hoping a copy might be on the site. It was, and it was easy to find right from the home page. All thirty-nine phones have their own link with a picture of the phone and two links providing a choice of downloading a .pdf of the manual or viewing it in the browser. While I would have preferred to read (and search) the manual in .html, the site still got us the answer we needed in a very short time. (Unfortunately it wasn't the answer we wanted, which was a way to turn the ringer off on the thing.) |
When is or was it right now or then?
| | I kinda suck at remembering to "save as" a new day for each new day in Radio Userland. This is why the main subject in yesterday's discussion view roundup was "Saturday, September 8, 2001, even though it was the blog for Sunday, September 9. Friday really was Friday, but Thursday was Wednesday. None of ya'll have busted me for this error yet, so I'm getting the jump on ya. |
| | Oh, and while we're not at it, watch for the topics on the left to change soon. |
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