Here and There

hi AT&T,

how r u? i’m home. same place u dropped those callz last week. tryin to txt my girl. on my iphone. can;t. awsum!

kthxbai

A few weeks ago, I tried calling San Francisco’s invaluable 311 service from my iPhone while at work. I got an “unable to complete this call” message to the effect of, “We are unable to complete the call as dialed. Please hang up and try again.”

What? Annoying, but whatever. I borrowed a coworker’s phone and made the call (to complain about a Muni driver, no less).

Well, today, I needed to make a 10-digit, out-of-area-code call, also from work, and got nearly, the same message.

So I got on the horn with AT&T customer service. We ran through several diagnostics, then they transferred me to technical support (ironically, the transfer caused them to drop my call). Tech support ended up asking me to stop by an AT&T retail store to try switching out the SIM card.

I just did that, to no avail.

Then, I got home and tried calling both 311 and my 10-digit number, and guess what? Voilà!

I came across a bitch forum page on the AT&T website, so I know I’m not alone.

I’ve never heard of this problem happening with any other carrier. It really makes me hope this rumor is true.

But this is a good thing, I promise. My Twitter feed will clear up a lot of real estate on this here blog for when I really have something to say about something. A majority of “posts” over the years have more constituted micro-blogging than anything else. After much contemplation, I decided Twitter offered the perfect space in which to convey these little bit-size nuggets of awesome.

So follow me, please, into the random unknown. Or just check that nifty widget at the top left of the site.

Who knows what we’ll find …

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

Not that I ever fell out of love …

Yesterday was a big day for teh Goog. They announced Google Earth 5.0, which includes the ever-useful underwater views and past maps (the announcement occurred at and coincided with my own trip to the California Academy of Sciences (more on that later, here or Yelp), and an appearance by Al Gore, with whom I did not lunch).

And, nearer and dearer to my own OCD, they’ve released tasks for mobile browsers, including iPhone.

Honestly, if they just get comment-capability built into Google Reader, I will rest well.

Okay, the swearing in has happened, the balls are commenced. Now comes the sobering moment — there’s work to do, folks.

You see, many of us lost our jobs. I was fortunate to find work quickly. But others are still hurting. We’ve got to get work for them, and we’ve got to buttress our unemployment insurance programs for those who aren’t able to find work in the meantime.

We’ve got wars to end, troops to bring home, foreign alliances to rebuild. There’s an active Middle East conflict in progress, and godammit, we better really try to help bring about a peace this time.

Also, at home, there’s an urgent need to start real programs to try to stop global warming. We’ve got to kick into gear cleaner ways of generating energy, whether by tidal power, solar, wind, geo-thermal, whatever. There’s smarter, more efficient ways of going about our daily lives, like high-speed rail, hybrid vehicles, reusable bags at the grocery and drug stores. The list goes on.

The point I’m trying to make is, let’s recover from our inaugural hangovers and get to work. Lord knows there’s no shortage of work to be done.

In this post on his blog at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum discusses his problem with full-on advocacy of high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles. There’s no key quote or anything. He’s basically saying, rightly, that the routes being considered for the West are a whole different story than what they’ve got out East, mostly due to a difference of population density. On this point, Drum is absolutely correct.

But where he’s somewhat dismissive of Central Valley cities along the proposed route in California, a rail line would ostensibly connect those towns (Bakersfield, Fresno) to the more plentiful opportunities that exist in bigger cities like San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Build it, and they will come, sort of.

I realize it takes like 17 years to turn the Titanic 45 degrees, but a stipulation on that $15 billion “bridge loan” Congress gave to Chrysler and GM last month should have been a mandate not to manufacture one more gas-guzzling car. Nothing below 25 or 30 mpg leaves the floor. Hell, the technology is there, why not insist that every car built from this point forward by those two companies be a hybrid?

Some days, I really don’t know what U.S. industry to hate most. As far as we’ve come, the priorities of individuals and businesses in this country are beyond whacked-out.

A couple of related posts on Andrew Sullivan’s blog today got me thinking about cars and raising the gas tax.

UPDATE: No sooner do I post this than I discover my former place of employment has advocated for the same. And in a much more insightful manner, to boot. Wired.com’s Dave Demerjian has more.

ORIGINAL POST: Now that the average price of a gallon of gasoline has fallen by well more than 50 percent since summer, state governments and Washington should both look into raising their tax rates on the fuel.

Record-high prices of gasoline exacerbated a drop in consumption this year, something I think we can all agree is a good thing.

States are in trouble financially. California’s legislature is still battling it out with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to close a $40 billion budget deficit. I realize that increased gas-tax revenue alone won’t close that gap, but it will help, while also reducing consumption.

And the federal government can use that increase to help close its deficit (though I’m not of the opinion that reducing the national deficit is key at this time) and possibly also use it to invest in green-energy technology.

I usually try to see both sides of issues. And I understand that not everyone has the luxury, if it can be called that, to stop driving, or stop driving as much. But in tough times, we all need to adjust and make sacrifices. That’s something horribly absent from the so-called leadership of the past eight years — calls for sacrifice.

There’s also the fact that for those who absolutely do not have the choice not to drive, they’d be paying more to play. My answer to that is almost identical — an investment now in less-harmful means of generating energy will pay huge dividends down the road. That, and I don’t expect a bump in gas prices, nowhere near what we saw last summer, to bankrupt anyone. If that were the case, I would hold that all options were not exhausted.

I read something the other day, a story about a young person who was really excited that gas prices had fallen from summertime highs. “I’m gonna drive everywhere now,” the person said, in essence. That’s exactly the kind of recklessness low gas prices leads to. In order to curb consumption and help speed the development of healthier alternatives, we need a higher gas tax. Now.

I noticed a week or so ago that just before the end of YouTube clips, there appear several “related videos” thumbnails just below your video. They’re coming on a good five or so seconds before your video finishes playing.

Distracting. Unnecessary. Lame.

Do I need to say how great this is?

It strikes me over and over again how useful it would be for RSS readers to include an option to view comments, should they exist for a particular item.

For example, Google Reader is my reader of choice. There, along the bar at the bottom of each item, along with items like “Add star,” Share,” and “Email” would be a link that said something like “Show comments.”

Of course, I don’t know much about how RSS and comments work. Perhaps the software that runs whatever site is in question would have to enable RSS on its comments. I’m not sure. But it seems … possible. Right?

Yesterday, I posted about how the new Google Reader is janky on iPhone.

Today, I moseyed on over to the Reader blog and then to its Digg page. There, I found in the comments a completely different Google Reader URL from the one I had bookmarked. Funny that Google didn’t bother to document this change to iPhone users, and that if you visit Google on the phone’s Safari browser, the link at the top in the nav bar still points to the old URL, the one that doesn’t wrap text. Oh, well.

As I noted earlier today, Google unveiled a new look and functionality to its Google Reader app.

Well, they’ve gone and spiffied up the Reader for iPhone as well. And (see screenshoot) it’s kinda got a major flaw — headlines aren’t set to fit on the phone’s screen. You have to scroll from side to side to read them.

Of course, more than with normal browsing, headlines are everything with RSS.

White Whine, yeah, but also a case of going live with a flawed product.

I have to say, it was worth the browser crash*

Google unveils a new look for its (beloved by me) Google Reader. The RSS tool continues to be my main go-to after Google Mail.