Spassmeister

Fantasy Baseball

2009-05-11T16:18:00.001-07:00

Software Helpesk Support

2009-05-06T21:04:00.001-07:00

As more trouble ticket systems adopt and blend with modern "self care" products have been developed to take the best of both worlds and combine them.

Apple Computers no panacea

2009-04-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

this is not news to anybody with a mac. Oh, it's great that the virus teams are not staying up nights as often to hit the lower market share apples, but in the past couple years I've had far more problems with mac computers than in all the prior years:

my G5 had a "coolant leak" that required a week in the Crywolf repair shop
my Macbook pro had a freezing problem that required a new board
my daughter's mac book pro (late 2008) has been down with problems for weeks now including keyboard freezing, trackpad freezing, no detection of the airport
my other dual-core G5 has had to be in for a memory failure

in short, every single computer that i've purchased from Apple in the past two years has had a significant hardware problem that required one week+ of shop time to correct.

that's why I found this NY Times article about the high ratings on mac computers so puzzling. Perhaps the PCs are just so much worse, but frankly that makes little sense.

Sexting

2009-02-13T09:58:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I'm Shocked. Really. Well, not really. You give young people phones with cameras..and what do you expect? in an era of "girls gone wild" this should surprise nobody. What should surprise people is that some enlightened law enforcement officials have read the letter of the child pornography laws strictly (so far so good) and decided that the proper course of action is to arrest the teens involved. This makes little sense.

Yes - such activity does appear to violate these laws. Laws crafted to PROTECT teens against predators, not punish crazy/quasi-normal teen behavior. And they guy they arrested had an image sent to his cell phone. We used to call that "push" in the business. How can a photo pushed to a teenager from another teenager be construed as anything truly "criminal" in the vein that this law was crafted? this is not exploitation, just sort of dumb.

You never think it's going to go this way

2009-02-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

Well, many don't. some do however. Call them skeptics or realists. They miss the great times but are well protected on the downside. Many never would have thought that 5% of a well funded startup would be worth $0.01 after a couple of years and $1B later, but many are in this boat (or in the water without a life preserver)

NASDAQ
Real-Time Snapshot:
02/06/2009 11:04 AM EST
0.19
Change
-0.01
% Change
-5.00%

Superbowl - wow what a game...and thanks Hulu

2009-02-02T12:29:00.000-08:00

Anybody who actually watched the game - and the terrific halftime show - had to admit this was one of the best SuperBowls ever. The first half ended with a bang and so did the end of the game. And The Boss commanded viewers to "put down your chicken wings" and watch his 12 minute show.

As always, there were many great commercials as well. Many TiVo fans - but not the sport fan variety - were actually using the FF function in reverse: fast forwarding past the game to watch the commercials. Ironically, one of the best commercials - and there were so many to choose from - was from on-line video firm Hulu. That is, you would go to their site to re-play high quality versions of the commercials. And if watching the commercials was not enough, the playback of the commercials was sponsored by Coke and others. Several on-line job hunting websites had ads as well reflecting some strength in that market as well as a sign of the times.

After all, "you're not going to turn of your television and computer at the same time"

HNY 2009

2009-01-06T18:21:00.000-08:00

How exciting to be starting a new year which must hold more promise than the last did. Fourteen months ago one of the board members of my last company told me "beware of 2008! it looks to be a dramatic slowdown compared with 2007". This man is in the hotel business where people book ahead a year in advance and he'd already seen a slowdown.

One of the many positive byproducts of networking outside of one's inner circle are market facts that you would typically only see months, or perhaps quarters, later. Some friends who work in commercial real estate are also great sources of information on future business growth...well...there's some new space available near the Doubletree hotel in the Carmel Valley area of San Diego (I'm always amazed at how transformational a hotel's web photos/images can be...this hotel is next to a virtually vacant office building and surrounded by two freeways, a huge street and a taco bell...find ANY of those in the photos of the hotel...)

I'm using Apple's MobileMe service now that i'm not an enterprise Exchange user any longer. For a month I pondered what I was doing wrong with my contacts until I saw an upgrade that performed that sync too. Thanks. So far it has not been all that smooth. but i'll save the details for later, but it needs some work.

Well, heading out to CES tomorrow. Should be interesting as usual, but all reports are subduded. We'll be reporting from the floor of CES Thursday and Friday. Lots of new insight on developments from last year and 2009.

NextWave and Billion Dollar Lessons

2008-12-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

After the spectacular failure of NextWave in San Diego, it seems fitting to spend some time reviewing what went right and what went wrong based on public information and filed 10K and 10Q documents, as well as other public domain documents. More on this coming in January, but as a pre-cursor here's a book that covers the same topic:

Billion Dollar Lessons "what you can learn from the most inexcusable business failures of the last 25 years". This came a bit early to study NW, so we will cover it on Spassmeister.com..Here's an interview with the author.

Truthiness

2008-11-30T10:19:00.000-08:00

I welcome myself back to the blogosphere with a note from Stephen Colbert:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Truthiness

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

TiVo Series 3 - Part III

2007-01-14T20:31:00.000-08:00

Game Over

Both for the San Diego Chargers, and one of my TiVo Series 3 Boxes. I phoned customer care today and had a replacement sent out. Let me re-cap, in reverse order, the problems:

No program guide - the channel list is populated with the correct channel lineup, I can view the programs on both receivers (today, for a change) but there is no program guide data to record so I've got to record them "vcr style" - manually. When I try to schedule a program online, it will try too, but then I get a message on my tivo that says "your box does not think you receive that channel". Yea. right. my box knows I get it, it's checked off on the channel list and I can watch it.
One receiver goes out occasionally - One of my internal receivers, (slot 1) goes out from time to time. It's not the cablecard, I checked.
Continual Re-boots - i've had the common "infinite reboot" problem. Highly annoying.
Front Panel OLED goes out - only displays the top half of the time/program can be seen.

Oh, there's more. I'm just too tired to remember. this post is more to point the TiVo team to than warn people off these. When they work they're awesome.

TiVo Series 3 - Part II

2007-01-07T19:46:00.000-08:00

Well, as anybody could read on the TiVoCommunity forum pages, all it not well in Series 3 land. My own experience in the past couple of days is there along with the others. While one of the two TiVos works flawlessly, the other is beset with nagging glitches:

- one of the receivers seems to fail to decode the digital stream about once every other day
- when I reset the machine, with or without the cable cards, it goes into an infinite "reboot" loop
- sometimes tivo thinks that it's working, and records programs, but it is not - and I get junk recorded.

So, 50% failure rate at this household. I'm glad I saved one of the two boxes for sending back to TiVo for a replacement.

TiVO Series 3

2007-01-01T11:46:00.000-08:00

After years of waiting, the HD Tivo came out in 2006. I waited until the end of the year to purchase "them". I say that as my family are such tivo addicts that we already had two with lifetime service plans, which are now a thing of the past. I wanted to preserve this for the HD TiVo service as I believed, for a long time, that HD and TiVo is the way to go. Everybody seems to really like the new box.

The rationale is simple - once you go DVR you never go back..unless you have HD withtout TiVo (or decent DVR capabilties). Having HD withtout TiVo for years has been rather frustrating to say the least. I have to watch the HD live. Not a big deal on HBO, but now that most networks are broadcasting significant portions of the lineup in HD it's back to watching commercials. So naturally I was thrilled that it was avaialbe - albeit with a bit of sticker shock.

The installation involves a visit from the cable guy, which in my case was from TimeWarner in San Diego. This guy admitted he'd never done this before. In fact, when he arrived he was a bit surprised I needed 4 cable cards. The cards are from SA and have a PCMCIA form factor. Some folks have had lots of trouble with these. I was therefore expecting the worst, and have only had a few problems. First, I had Juan install the first set of cards on the upstairs Tivo with the Sony HDTV with an HDMI inteface. This was a snap. It powered up and I had it all ready for the installation. He did the cards, one at a time (you need to "authorize" the cards from the central TW office). Meanwhile, downstairs I tried to the second TiVo working. It was hung on the "just a few minutes more" page...for like 15 minutes. Naturally, I went into my office and searched messge boards and found that occasionaly you need to disconnect the wireless broadband USB connector during the boot up. Which I did and Voila! it worked.

Good news:

After I figured out that with the component cable connection to my "old HDTV", which when purchased in 1999 was state of the art, and now, well, let's say it still works just fine. When I first started watching Discovery HD I was stunned at how lousy it looked. I had failed to simply press the small button on the front panel that toggled the output between 480i/480p/720p/1080i. Awsome picture quality!
The Tivo picture sharing from my iPhoto library works great, as does the music sharing from iTunes
everything else is as you would expect - just like the series 2 tivo

Bad News

One of the cable cards has "lost lock" about 3 times and I've had to reset the box. This is irritating and time consuming and I hope it does not continue. The last time the machine went into "looking for service" mode I had to call TW customer support - and it was this guys first call with a cablecard (I resisted removing the cable cards as the TiVo trouble shooting page said not to). I was told to pull the power cable, pull the cable cards, count to 30, reinstall the cable cards and plug the unit back in. That worked, but again, it took like 20 minutes to do all that.
between my G5, the home network and the tivo service, the music/photo service seems to need restarting a lot. I have to go back to system preferences, stop the tivo service, start the tivo service, and then it works.
you can no longer transfer between tivos (files are too big)
you can no longer "1 button" delete a program like on the series 2 machines, and naturally there is no longer a "recently deleted" folder

Finally, I'm not fan of what I've seen so far on TiVocasting. The CNET shorts are for luddites as far as I can tell and the other Tivopodcasts don't seem much better. But it's a good idea and I trust in 2007 this will improve.

Online Traffic data

2006-12-28T15:34:00.000-08:00

Does everybody have this accross the country? I mean a CA style Sigalert.com function. Arizona has something like it, but not quite as complete. Today there was slow traffic...really slow traffic...due to a "possible fatality". The normal 20 min drive from carlsbad to del mar (where I live) was estimated at close to three hours. Average speed on I5 south is currently 5 mph.

Traffic is bad in most cities I've lived: San Diego, Washington D.C., even Duesseldorf. But it is REALLY bad in California.

Even more fascinating than the speeds is the level of detail reported on the website linked from the Highway Patrol.

Have a look at this:

South Before 805 South Possible Fatality 12:42 PM

Thomas Guide Map Coordinates: Page 1208, Grid 4A

Traffic Hazard Fast Lane 12:44 PM

Black Sw or Sed; Lane #1 12:45 PM
Reporting Party #1;
now Advsing Just South of Carmel Valley Road 12:45 PM

Find Out If Tows Needed and Start Them 12:46 PM

Blocking #3, #4 12:48 PM

Bringing in Break 12:49 PM

Starting Tow 12:52 PM

Message/Item Delivered Guardian Tow 12:53 PM

Far Right Lane Blocked, Closer to the 805 12:56 PM

Roll Evidence Tow, 12:57 PM

Might Be Long Term Closure Here, 2 Right Lanes 12:58 PM

Sig Alert Issued 12:59 PM

Message/Item Delivered Caltrans Const Regarding for this Area/ Regarding Line 23 12:59 PM

Hold off on the Evidence Tow for now 12:59 PM

Roll Coroner 1:03 PM

Message/Item Delivered Coroner 1:04 PM

Message/Item Delivered Caltrans Supr 713 Regarding Line 27 1:08 PM

Transportation Management Center Working on Having Sign Truck Respond 1:12 PM

CHP Unit on Scene 1:13 PM

Sign Truck En Route 1:28 PM

CHP Unit Enroute 1:40 PM

Lanes Closed 1:46 PM

Sign Truck is On Scene in Area Unable to Set Up Due to Traffic Queued, Can CHP Provide

Update on 1:46 PM

Extremely Slow Speeds South 5 from Oceanside to Carmel Valley 1:46 PM

Guardian Tow Back On Top, Will Need Evidnence Tow Black Avalon in Center Divider 1:57 PM

Sign Truck Assignment Completed 1:58 PM

Starting Break to Look for Evidence 2:00 PM

Sign Truck En Route to South 5 Just North of 78 2:17 PM

CHP Unit on Scene 2:22 PM

Roll Evidence Tows, Total of 2 2:32 PM

Confirm Caltrans is En Route with Sign Truck and Cones 2:35 PM

Message/Item Delivered Star With 2 with Flatbed Tow Truck 2:36 PM

Caltrans Supr 713--Please Advise If this Will Be a Closure ? 2:42 PM

Caltrans 713 Advise Will Have Cone Truck En Route 2:50 PM

Sign Truck On Scene South 5 Just North of Cassidy on Right Shoulder With "5 South Accident

Use 78 East to Interstate-15 " 2:55 PM

CHP Unit Enroute 3:01 PM

Caltrans 713 97 With CHP--Advise Not Closure / Cone Truck Disregard 3:11 PM

CHP Unit on Scene 3:26 PM

Roadway Open Leave Sig Alert for at Least Another 30 Min 3:28 PM

A year without blogging

2006-12-27T09:36:00.000-08:00

After years of blogging I took a year "off" to spend all available free time working out and working and with the family. And well, it's that time again.

Christmas 2006 was the usual blowout. I did my part by purchasing a Wii system (on ebay..the stores were sold out). It was EXACTLY what I was hoping for:
- easy to install
- easy to use
- quick easy internet connection

Unlike some reports, we have not yet thrown the remote into the screen. Great to see girls finally getting into boxing too. My 5 year old (see photo) managed three strikes in a row and was the house champ!

Screen sizes

2005-12-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

I landed a PSP for Christmas. Whoopee. Just what I asked Santa for. I had been talking with the president of Intercasting Corp. over the holiday's. They just released a Brew app, Rabble, that allows user mobile content to be easily posted...sort of a "myspace" for mobile devices....which got me thinking again of screen sizes.

The folks at lunch were raving about the PSP screen. I'd seen one before, but having my own was a bit different. I'm a fan of PS2 and XBOX driving games and tried one on the PSP. It's a bit of a challenge. I suppose I need to try one on the phone now. as for video playback, a bigger screen is nicer, but I've been having no trouble ripping content onto my iPod video.

One blog reivew comparing the PSP and the Video iPod concluded:

It is very close to being a toss-up. The PSP has its strengths, and so does the iPod. Of course we didn’t try to watch either of them hooked up to a TV — something that you can’t currently do with a PSP — but the resolutions of the files lead us to believe that the difference would have been negligible. Really, it’s all about what you want. If you want super-sharp video and can stand the small screen size, the iPod isn’t a bad choice. If you want the larger screen and don’t mind losing a little bit of the image clarity, the PSP is your gadge

We never stop working for you

2005-12-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

Well, that was fun. Long blogging haitus due to much work and little time. But I digress.

After telling my friends and family for years that they should switch to verizon as they have the best coverage overall, I've converted to really disliking them immensly. I'm more of a VerizonPathetic visitor now. This story captures what's happend with the Samsung A890 story.

Can you see it to the right in the phone graveyard? Well, there it rests in peace never to be charged again, maybe. This was an early death brought about by poor design and worse support. What happend to Samsung anyway?

Rather than go through the whole litanny of issues, let me summarize this wonderful experience:

I purchase a TREO 600 to do email and voice calls on the same device. I'd seen Stewart Alsop rave about the treo years earlier at a BREW conference, and I assumed it had to be better than the wireless Palm device I'd been using. Well, it too sucked. It begain a bit of a saga documented earlier.
Well, that was problematic to say the least. After a $4300 phone bill and lots of problems, my company installed Goodlink software and the problems were reduced. they did not go away, however, as a new issue arose: I missed abotu 50% of my phone calls as the push email service had taken over my phone.
to keep the email productivity going, but also stop missing phone calls, I switched to a family plan and put all the phones, including the new Samsung A890, on the same plan. In total I had the following on my 3000 min plan: treo 650, EV-DO card, my daughter's Kyocera Slider, an other daughter's E815, and the others. Well, I had to forward my calls from the Treo to the Samsung, and carry two phones, but the problem SHOULD have been solved. but no. The MALLOC error surfaced.
I've been on the phone countless hours with Verizon about the Malloc error. I've recived 3 "new" A890s all with the same problem. I've been told repeatedly by Verizon that "...the only choice you have is to pay full price for a different phone, or keep getting replacement A890s". this despite the fact that I pay Verizon like $450/month for the family plans, I've been a loyal customer, and their equipment is faulty.
I ordered a new e815 from the web site to "upgrade' from the A890. After a few weeks with no phone I look into why it's taking so long only to find out "...you must have listed a PO box as your address". Huh? I did no such thing. Moreover, why was I not contacted about this issue by phone or email?? I told them "...cancel the order. I'll buy one of these new Razr phones instead". my reason was for the bluetooth and to try yet another new phone.
well, when I tried to go back to the web site, I was unable to order it online since my "canceld" order on the e815 was preventing me from doing anything else (it's still that way by the way). So they told me to upgrade a different phone and then switch when it came in, which is what I did.
I finally spent another 30 min on the phone yesterday since I had to activate the Razr on one account, move it to another account and switch ESNs back to normal. What a pain. I was not able to do this online for some reason (you can switch ESNs on line now, most of the time).

Well, so far no MALLOC errors, but the video quality sucks compared with the Samsung, which was not all that great to begin with. Oh yea, you cannot send videos to/from the Razr like you could with the MOT and Samsung phones.....but that's a story for another day.

Driver Distractions

2005-09-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

the women in the photo above is driving north on Interstate 5 in Southern California (specifically, just north of the Santa Fe Drive exit in Encinitas) at about 75 mph while jotting notes on a pad she is holding to her steering wheel with her left hand. Neither hand is "on the wheel", and, her eyes are apparently switching between the road and the notes she's making on the pad. Note to her friends: buy her one of those "voice recorders" for her next birthday. It would lower the danger factor to that of the cell phone while she drives....

That old scapegoat the cell phone - can't live with it, can't live without it. Few would argue that it's completely safe to talk on your mobile phone - let alone send text messages or otherwise go through some painful IVR during your drive. During a recent international conference on driver distraction the point was made that lots of issues can distract a driver other than (and including) the mobile phone.

Some more comprehensive analysis has concluded that there are, as most of us experience, and increasing amount of distractions in our vehicles. Combine grooming to children (or worse, grooming your children), watching porn?, eating, drinking, changing the radio station or CD track, watching your navigation system, etc., there are plenty of reasons that one can become distracted while driving. A comprehensive study indicates that fiddling with your stereo was the most common, and tending to your infant the most distracting.

New Travel

2005-08-21T05:44:00.000-07:00

New and old travelers mix together during the summertime like no other. During the school/work year, one can see the "typcial" mix of pushy business travelers who've consumed far too many Starbucks beverages, and can often be as a result remarkably rude, and their cousins, the grumpy/greedy geezers who, despite all of their travel, still get really nervous when they travel.

But ahh in summer. It's more crowded, but the TRUE road warriors: moms with at least one baby, a toddler and a 5-7 year old are out in force. These poor souls are too busy to complain or wear their "platinum traveler" status like some sort of bizarre badge of honor. No matter how even tempered one is it tests one's patience when the "I'm platinum!" guy literally shoves his way past our frazzeld parents to get some precious overhead space since "only an idiot checks their bags". Yes. it's more convenient not to check. the tonic of books or ipods, activities that calm the mind and soul, are used by less stressed among us and reflect somewhat more contemplative traveling demeanors that would benefit all.

Malloc error - Samsung A890

2005-08-20T04:35:00.000-07:00

In the continuing saga of the curse of the early adopter, I've been once again stung with a recurring problem: my Samsung a890 freezes about 20% of the time I receive a call. to be clear, the phone rings, and when I hit "send" to answer, it locks up. totally. blue screen of death...ON MY PHONE! How annoying is that?

So, naturally I call Verizon and they tell me...drumm roll..."...gee, never heard of that problem before...you need to bring it in to the store..."

....AAAGGGHHHH.... I need to go to the Verizon store! Is there a more delightfull experience than sitting, I mean standing, in a Disneylandian wait line at the Verizon store to get something fixed that's Samsung's fault in the first place? I've got a better idea. How about the ship me a new phone set up as I've customized it with a return envelope like amazon would do? It would be simple enough to store my settings and address book information on the network side (since we dont' have SIM cards for that purpose). this would also make phone changes simpler.

LIve from Atlanta

2005-03-14T12:46:00.000-08:00

Yawn...

Ahh...standards meetings. 1000+ engineers in a room at the 802 meetings in Atlanta GA discussing if they should use the word "Primary" or "initial" for 30 minutes. 802.16e is nearing clean up mode, 802.20 is apparently still moribund, 802.22 is just getting moving.

There are a few well known standards groups:

IEEE - A group of individuals who participate in a non-exclusionary basis to develop a wide range of standards..examples include 802.3 (ethernet) and 802.11 (wifi). In this group, the vote in the committees goes with the individual, not the organization they represent.

3GPP - The group that brought you GSM (under the ETSI name)

IETF - the group that creates the internet standards.

A question raised frequently is - which is the best way to create a standard?

the answer is left to the reader..

Treo saga

2005-02-28T20:17:00.000-08:00

I'm on jury duty today...so while I've not had computer access today, I've had mobile phone access with my Treo and Goodlink software...except..for maddening problems with the basic phone itself! I was finally happy with the RSS reader for palm and the good software, and then my phone had the following symptoms:

- constantly thought it was going in and out of service. No matter how many bars of digital coverage I had, the phone kept shutting down indicating "no service".

- worse, when service returned (seconds later) I'd try to place a call. sometimes this worked ok, but other times the phone would dial the number, and then the seconds would begin tracking call time when suddenly (sometimes after 2-3 seconds, sometimes longer) the screen would freeze completely and the call would drop.

So, after putting this off, I called customer care. The first call was a good CSR who had me do a "factory reset". On the Treo600 this means holding down the "K" key and the "<-" (backspace) keys simultaneously while pressing in the reset hole with a paper clip in the back of the phone. That was fun, but, still the dropped calls....whereupon I was transfered to Betty (CSR#2) the data phone expert. sometimes I think these 'data phone experts' are actually just CRSs with more tenure. She had no good ideas, but did have me do the OTA programming (*228) followed by "additional programming":

#*#000000

this gave me the typical cell phone parameters (MIN, MDN, ESN (Hex), SID) that she had me read to make sure "I had the correct phone". huh? This made no sense at all, but it was another step. I then was transfered to "tom". he did not take too much time. Asked me a few other questions and then made sure my address was correct. So this time on Wednesday I expect to be using yet another Treo 600. I suppose I shouldn't complain - a friend of mine is on his third.

MOT, WWiSE and 802.11n

2005-02-24T11:25:00.001-08:00

Motorola and QC on different sides (again) of the 802.11n standards debate. Will this get stalled? will it make it out of standards purgatory next year? Glenn Flieshman's piece describes some details.

clearwire's european vacation

2005-02-23T20:48:00.001-08:00

According to Unstrung, Clearwire is taking their nextnet "sumo sized" home gateways to Europe. Is this the real play?

and in unrelated news, more "pay for play" broadband popping up; still in Europe. Answering the question, "why should the average user pay for the guys who use 100GB/month?". Who could disagree? This is not the Universal Service Fund so frequently in the news these days, that's subsidized (or in the case of the recent news, not subsidized) by the public.

Carrier Grade?

2005-02-10T20:35:00.000-08:00

Carrier Grade?

Well, I won't take side on the metro-network issue. I don't really think it's fair to take taxpayer money to invest in something that people may already be paying for, but if it helps spread the wireless industry, why not. Of course with rock-solid/carrier grade installations like this one - people will soon learn the value of an always-on connection.

Ding Dong the witch is dead

2005-02-10T15:48:00.000-08:00

Everywhere, it seems, people are talking about the Carly Fiorina's departure from HP...including her $21M parachute. As if she needed it. Well, at least they had the nerve to fire her. What if she had played a big role in founding a company based on a business model that was "bubble-based": it would only survive under conditions of extreme overvaluation? I'm not talking about pets.com, but some telecom companies that blew through billions and left shareholders holding the bag. Most of those guys got the boot they deserved. Most got lots of cash though. The sick part is that some are still in executive positions in the very same companies that forced millions of losses on others. That's criminal.

To be continued...