WalkerPad

I’ll see if I can get a few shots up from the chopper ride tonight.

Man… The most over priced two tank dive I have ever done, and tomorrow will be worse if I can talk Charise into going…. Why would I do that?

It was spectacular. 80f in the water, I dispensed with the wet suite entirely!

We did two dive to around 50 feet. Vis was 150 feet if it was 10. I saw white tipped reef sharks. We got around 7 or 8 feet away from them. I think they get cut from
tourist board because they where good sports and put on a nice show.
we swam through a couple lava tubes and some cool arches.
the highlight was probable molesting a poor octupuss who clearly did not want to play. The dive master dragged him out anyway. He felt like satin and wrapped a tentical around my arm for few moments. It was very cool but I felt bad for it. I think it was maybe two feet in circumference, the DM said that was a pretty decent size. I also saw a giant sea turtle, which was very cool but a good ways off.0

Kaily and Charise did the glass bottom boat, but Kaily got board quick and was not great.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Charise will scuba tomorrow, since they do all the gear for you

we are going to go see the water falls in a chopper today!

Well we went to the off broadway show they had on board tonight, tina and tony’s wedding (or whatever). Can’t say I was impressed, it was at best mildly amusing. I got the impression Charise thought the same.hopefully not a preview of the rest of the things we purchased tickets to.
That being said the comedy show I saw was decent, and the magician they had tonight was great and funny. I will grab his name later and maybe his DVD.

Damit, we are going to get off the boat tomorrow if it kills me.

Charise got a cool black dragon tatoo, spray on. I’ll get snap of it tomorrow if she will let me (or it survives).

ok, I’m generaly liking my iPhone. Sure there are lots of little things that could be better, and edge is a bit dodgy but seems ok in a pinch.. However this having to Wait for each picture to send, and over edge no less, is just lame design. WTF dose it not just not queue up in your dam out box? It’s not even logical since it is a true email and not weird
mmsms thing. Week design and anoying, wastfull.

I’ll be syncing over some of the cannon shots and sending them to the flickr feed tonight.

Course we have not made it off the boat yet, how sad is that, but we have some cool stuff coming up, not sure how much will be shootable though since water is involved . Charise lost my Sony men stick so I didn’t bring the under water housing. I’m alleeady regreting that last minute call though because we are going to swim with the dolphins the last day.

well I tried and I tried but I can not get posti to run right to get pictures onto the blog.

So on to the be plan, actual make that c, be was to use zoopmr but I can not mail shots there actialy their whole new mkIII ui is bit to busy for me. I still like zooomr best but I am starting to loose faith a bit (all the upload tools are busted accept their brows and post).

Anyway, plan C flickr upload by mail

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkerpad

(bah sorry wrong url)

I’ll catch up getting the photo stream going tonight.

at&t is odd or the iphone is. It alleays reports full signal, until you try to do somthing then gets busy recalculating and showing you all the bars you don’t have.

That being said, I am in the between hawaiin islands and able to post. Pretty cool.

Now my kindom for a easy to setup picture for wordpress and the phone (forgot how to use the post by mail thing i setup years back)

so we have been sitting here at the gate for about 20 minutes as highly trained air plane mechanic pushes a big stick at the door.

We finaly got off the dam plane and then on to a bus for more hurry up and wait. Kaily is acting like ants in her pants girl, but over all has done pretty good.

Thank god for the ipod vidoe, they should be mandatory for all traveling parents.

One gripe, Ncl could do more to help with luggage ;(

Weather is great. Can’t wait to get to the boat and get dinner. Right we are rideing through a industrial area so nothing to cool to report yet.

We had a great time at BBQ up empiregrade and then headed for scotts valley for the fire works. A friend of the Mckays has a store called close pin and we are all camped behind it waiting for the show. Well allmost, kaily is camped out with the owners kid inside playing with all the toys they have so moms can shop sewing stuff.;). I can’t seem add photos from my phone so I’ll get some up later.

Man so many things I could blog about, mothers day (great shots), fire works, the school district trying their dambest to stick it to Charise and get rid of her as the CEA president before she can start, kaily being well 3 and really cute…

But no

I’m going to (like every other blogger in the country) talk about the iPhone launch. Or more specifically AT&T since the phone look sexy with nice design (has anyone every paid so much for some flash, and a essentially closed system at that :p) and is a total brick since I can’t activate it due to AT&T and I think number porting but since AT&T says they have a high call vollume and hangs up on me I might never know what the deal is.
Three things have happened so far that disturb me and suggest my relationship with AT&T as my vendor is going to be no better and possible a lot worse then that with Verizon.

The lies: during the retail launch I went to a AT&T/Cingular store near my house (Grant Avenue, actually it’s Grant Road but that’s another story, in Mountain View).

I showed up around 3:30PM. First question on everyone’s mind was how many do you guys have. They wouldn’t say, instead they told everyone to wait and that it would be ok.
This was CRAP, there was no reason to do this except pure laziness and not wanting to manage the line or resources responsible. I wasn’t to worried though there was only 38 some folks in front of me and I figured (correctly as it turned out) that they probable got a minimum of 50 phones.

Then they opened.

The line moved so slow, it took over two hours to process 37 some odd people. Why?

Because they lie, bald face lie. They where insisting that you MUST get a credit check to buy the phone. That made each sale take forever, particularly on a totally over loaded AT&T system.

The person in front of me and myself both told them to go pound sand when the trotted out the “we can’t sell you a phone without a credit check line”. The truth of course is you could do the credit check at home through iTunes. Or you could pay a fee (something they wouldn’t mention) of like a 250 deposit, or you could even get a goplan or whatever as a last resort. But they thought lying to us was better.
Meanwhile they cut line off at like 50 people leaving another 30 or so totally screwed having wasted hours. They offered them a drop ship order for like an extra 15 bucks or so or they could get a regular consignment fill after a week or so.
Why did they need to wait HOURS to find out they where out? The store clearly new how many iphones they had, they obviously could have handed out numbers or done any number of other things that would have been responsible to potential/current AT&T customers. Instead they decided to screw them and steal their time.
Why force the credit check, and agian they where flat out lying about this requirement at the store, insisting you had to have it. When I pushed back, the store manager rushed over to ‘explain’ to me why it was important. I still said no and they sold me the phone and the whole thing took like five minutes. The way it should have for the other 30+ people.
God, one of the worse crimes a retailer can commit is to wast it’s customers time and AT&T seemed quit comfortable doing that on multiple fronts.
The next lie. I was going to buy Charise a 4gig iPhone. The AT&T press release clearly stated 2 (TWO) phones per person. They woudln’t do it. The manager said it was only one and tried to suggest that press release only applied to apple stores (which it didn’t from the language on it). They insisted she had to be there. So I guess charise looses. Though at this point I have half a mind to walk away from the whole deal because of how bad AT&T has sucked.

And now I sit looking at my phone wondering how good it is because AT&T says it can’t finish activation until ” 1:24 EDT July 1st” because of something maybe having to do with number portability, the language is so totally unclear as to be almost uninterpretable. AT&T provided a helpfull number that, says sorry we are busy, or we are experiencing technical difficulties, try again later and hangs up.
Ah, a quality service to be sure.

Man cel companies sure you like you to work hard to take your money, but AT&T seems to be taking it to a whole new level :p. I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if Apple had just sold them as unlocked phones and had a reasonable open system like palm for people to develop against it.. that would maybe would change the world a bit, but this? Meh.

Zats not funny

Mentions that that their store sold out in less then an hour so I guess not every AT&T store was forcing people to do credit checks by lying. Ah inconsistency, the mark of quality process . Anyway instead of AT&T hanging up on my (Saturday morning after iDay) they put my on hold for 10 or so minutes and then disconnect me after one ring, been bumped off 5 times now in a row. Almost a funny level of dysfunction… almost.

Engadget has a pretty empty blurb about the problems here but no real news

So Charise got the call tonight. She was voted in as the CTA President for Cupertino. It’s a part time position technically, I’m not sure how well she will manage that she is pretty much an all or nothing person but hopefully this will work out better over all for the family.

It’s definitely going to work out well for the CTA, they got a real lucky steal on this one… the rest of the candidate’s couldn’t even get their paper work in on time and most of the self written biography’s never even clearly stated what they where running for or why. of course my interpretation of such things might be slightly biased and Charise is totally beyond mud slinging or gloating… so I’ll do it for her, I get all the fun jobs.
So, cheers love!

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

So Comcast finally made good on the long standing rumor that they where going to start double dipping and put up add banners into their allrady crapy sub par interface on the noisy Motorola boxes.

Zats not funny has a article up on this but doesn’t go into the most broken part.

This has me totally pissed off and is going to drive me to spend a bunch of cash on either a MCE box with a cable card tuner or a series 3 much sooner then I had wanted to (I was waiting on price drops and product maturity).

The worse thing about these totally intrusive banners is they make the guide less usable then it already was (which is saying something). When ever you move up or down with the arrows it catches on the stupid banner slowing scrolls and adding tracking problems to what is happening on the screen.
It dropped the WAF even lower then it already was for the over all experience, which ranked pretty low compared to our old direct TV HD tivo.
So my question is what kind of crack are Comcast exes smoking, they do know they are already charging me for the box and guide right? Do they really think they get to double dip like this with out driving away customers to their competitors?
First day it popped up I reached for the phone and started to call dish network but decided to wait until we smoked through the current show list.
My god, the greed and stupidity in the cable industries is just insane. Their willingness to train wreck the customer experience for a couple bucks is just nuts. We might not have a great range of choice right not solve this type of problem but at least we have a few, and more coming.

This whole scenario clearly highlights the importance of enforcing, brutally, even the crappy not really open standard like cable card and forcing cable companies to deploy and support them.

It’s the only way we will even get a little tast of market choice.

Ideally sat companies should be held to the similar standards and free market end user devices should be able to easily interpolate between ANY provider.

I like to dream that MS is drifting this way slowly with MCE, but they are such pussies when it comes to the IP owners that I have trouble believing their end goals are the right one’s. Will they stand up for the right reasons, like giving users a good seamless experience that supports controlling their environment, or sell out to the way comcast does to make a buck at their users expense the minute they think they have a little market control… *sigh*. Zats not funny correctly points to the amount of space in the 360 that waasts on adds… how soon until that viral infection spreads to MCE.
Guess it’s time for a letter to the FCC, like they care about actually protecting consumers :p.

Me.

I was about to sign up with AMIE st to down load the new Barenakedladies CD. AMIE st apparently is selling it without DRM, and that is a business model I totally want to support but hell if I can agree to their user agreement which basically says we can and will do whatever the hell we want with your personal information including rent or sell to any one that want to pony up to us. *YIKES*.

Now on the one hand I want to give them some credit for being upfront in the user agreement but it’s still to much to bear. They need to rethink this strategy of theirs and allow people to just be their customers without basically saying w are going to spam you and so is everyone we do business with. I think if they check around they might find most folks would not knowingly agree to this and merely click through as a robotic process. Taking advantage of that is pretty predatory and all to common, is that the company they want to be… Not being on the DRM band wagon suggests they are smarter then that.

To wit

“3 By agreeing to this Agreement, you expressly agree that AMIE may use your personal information, including without limitation, to:

1. 6 Provide you with content, services, instructions, and a more personalized experience based on personal information, such as your zip/postal code and any content or other preferences you provide; and
2. 7 Provide you with news, free newsletters, updates, targeted advertising, promotions and other related offers.”

Combined with

“However, by agreeing to this Agreement, you acknowledge and agree that AMIE may sell, rent, or share your non-personally-identifiable information to a third party. The third party’s use of such information is governed by the privacy policy of the third party and AMIE’s use is governed by AMIE’s privacy policy. By your use of the SERVICE, you expressly agree that AMIE is not liable to you, or responsible for, the alleged improper or misuse by any such third party of this non-personally-identifiable information.”

Nowhere do they disclose what information is supplied/sold to 3rd parties or even properly clairfy what non-personally-identifiable means to them. and then…
“AMIE also may disclose relevant information about AMIE’s customers to its contractors (e.g., a customer service contractor or a credit card clearing service) in order for the contractors to provide specific services for AMIE and for AMIE to better serve its customers. AMIE’s contractors are bound by strict contractual requirements to keep all personal information they process strictly confidential and to use such information solely on behalf of AMIE.”

Which is just funny, if you look at the kind of data leaks that happen external to companies, that is nothing compared to the integral data leakage. How long before sales gets at the information, not long… and sing AMIE st is not liable what do they are care anyway.

Anyway, bit of rant. I’ll sing the privacy statement that says we will never sell or rent any of your data in any form to anyone even if we are acquired, liquidated or bought out.

Guess I’ll just go buy the CD with some cash and rip it, shame.

To be fair their are much MUCH worse privacy polices out there, I was just disappointed by this one because I wanted to support them.

This grabed my attention at http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2007-03/barenaked-and-drm-free/

Edit: fixed some really dumb typos :p

1. Elias Says:

   March 7th, 2007 at 8:44 pm Edit this.
   Visit EliasHey man, sorry our user agreement came off so poorly- we definitely don’t have intentions to sell your email address and stuff like that, though I can see how the language is pretty aggressive to that effect. Definitely hit me up if I can answer any questions about it, but we’d love to have you be part of the site and promise to be respectful of your privacy!!
   -Elias

2. Griffon Says:

   March 8th, 2007 at 12:18 pm Edit this.
   Visit GriffonThat’s nice but it would better said in the user agreement where it has teeth . I would like to buy some stuff but this is non starter for me as it stand now and problem a lot of other folks.

   Also mandating that user will receive news letter etc. instead of making it opt in is not supper friendly IMO. In fact it really flys in the face of opt in system which is what you should have for all marketing related activities.

   Don’t make barriers or speed bumps between your potential customers money and you by making them join a bunch of junk that they very well don’t want or care about. Mandating that in user agreement… just seems wrong to me.

This completely and totally sums up my experience as a PM at my last job

So it’s been a pretty long day, up to China Basin for the MRI. Crazy down town SF driving and parking (3 dollars per 20 minutes?!?!). One ridiculously expensive but very good dim-sum lunch down town. One super backed up and running late Dr. But, it is all worth it, since it was another clean MRI. The Doc says Charise has made improvements again in all function levels and will likely to continue to improve slowly, over time, as long as she continues to work for it. We graduated to 4 month scans instead of 3 .
Oh yeah, I finally got the holiday and birthday and other pictures up.

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