That's roughly the headline I'd give to my answers to a bunch of good questions I was asked in October at Quarum.org. I really like what Quorum is trying to do, by the way. (I mean: besides talking to wackos like me.)

The opposite of Ernestine

The phones went out today — or most of them, anyway. We have six phone lines coming into our house, plus a separate DSL line. The phone lines are all from Pacific Bell. Five are on the 361 exchange. One is on 363. The 361s all had pulsing blanks in the signal, like a busy signal with silence instead of tones. You could answer or dial your phone, but you'd be lost in a strange acoustic world where sound and silence shared the line, switching back and forth twice each second.

For a while the problem involved all six lines. This meant I couldn't call 611, the repair number. My cell phone's home is Seattle, 800 miles away from here, so dialing 611 on that thing wasn't an option. I figured there must be a regular 7-digit phone number for Repair, but no. Doesn't work that way. The world should only include Pac Bell phones, no?

So I called 650-555-1212 on the cell and got Directory Assistance to tell me there isn't an alternative to 611. But... the woman on the phone there told me to hold for her supervisor. That woman's name was Coby. She told me she would personally send a fax over to the Repair people and stay on the case until something happened. I could hardly believe it.

Eventually the 363 line opened up and I navigated through the 611 customer-avoidance system until I obtained news that there was a problem (as best I could interpret the somewhat off-subject recording) with the 361 exchange that would be fixed by "(pause) five (pause) o'clock (pause, click) PM (pause, click) December (pause) six (pause, click, whirr) two thousand."

Not long after that, Coby called back to see how we were doing. I told her what the recording told me, and she was genuinely pleased.

The phones are back now. I don't think Coby had anything to do with it, but it's still nice to know there is at least one fine human being working for the phone company.

The Uncontained Web

I was a philosophy major in college. David Weinberger is a Philosophy Ph.D. You can witness the difference here.

It's kinda deep but real good.

The bowl overfloweth

Says here in WIRED News that you can get this gizmo called Truster that tells you if somebody on the phone is full of shit.

Apparently Truster listened in on the recent presidential debates and found that Bush out-BS'd Gore by a score of 57 to 23. The Gore numbers suggest that maybe can use Truster as a Turing test for robots.

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