So Long Vonage

Dear Vonage,

I write this farewell with a heavy heart. There are many reasons why I didn't want to let you go. In the end, I failed you and you failed me. It's time to leave.

My friend was an early adopter of VoIP and his testing led me to sign up for your service. I've been a loyal customer for about five years now. I recognize that you're a pioneer in the field. I appreciate that Vonage isn't part of a monopoly. I liked most aspects of your service. I never cared much that 911 didn't work quite as reliably as with a POTS line, and I realized that the telcos were the real bad guys in that situation.

I really wanted to make it work. I stuck with you when my cable company started offering VoIP. I even went so far as to take pleasure in thwarting their telemarketers when they called to offer their service to me, "No, I have Vonage and I pay $15 plus tax." That always shut them up.

That was then. Now it doesn't shut them up. Their first tactic was to offer a year of service at the same rate. I don't like introductory offers as much as permanent ones, especially when after the introductory offer the deal isn't as sweet as what I have. Now they've changed the deal so that it's permanent. On top of that, they discount my television and internet service as well, making the phone bill virtually disappear into the cable bill. The pragmatic side of me, the one that would rather have that extra $15 for his son, said that it was time to bite.

You failed me first, though.

Despite the easily implemented advanced functionality of VoIP service, you never implemented the one feature that I wanted so dearly, the only feature I miss from the Verizon days. All I asked was for an anonymous call rejection function. It's not that hard, and most phone service providers offer it.

ACR was the real deal breaker. Without it we still receive too many telemarketing calls. Even New Jersey's strict telemarketing regulations don't eliminate all of these incredibly annoying calls. This includes the one company that sneaks under the telemarketing radar by being a charity*. Another large segment of these calls were pre-recorded campaign statements during the last major election. They're an annoying way to push information or make a sale. The worst offenders use a call box to call several numbers at once and put the others on hold. These organizations don't want you to know who they are because you might not answer the phone, you might complain about them, basically you might do something to stop them from annoying you other than give them what they want - normally your money.

When I found out that my cable company offers ACR and their service will save me money it was too much. I couldn't stay with you. I'm sorry. I wish you well. Maybe some day I'll be back.

Sincerely,
Dan

*They've called with a few charities. The names are always very close to legitimate charities, but slightly different. One can assume that some money makes it to the claimed beneficiaries, but this company always shies away from any attempt to find out more about them. If you interrupt their script with a challenging question or request for more information that doesn't involve a commitment to donate they hang up on you. The last few times they've called I've taken to saying, "Take me off your list," as fast as I possibly can. A few times I've made it through the sentence before they hung up on me. My guess, based on their shady telemarketing practices, is that almost none of this money goes to charity, instead it probably gets sucked up by "overhead" in the form of huge salaries for the executives. I bet some of the new employees even think they're doing legitimate charity work, maybe they are... but that's not the way to do it.

Gentoo: Buried in Packages

I have a dirty little secret.

I've been a horrible administrator on my home network, in large part due to the neglect of my home server. I admit it, I've not done any reasonable upkeep on my Gentoo Linux machine for over a year.


"What's the big deal," you say?

It's just that any security vulnerability, performance enhancement, or feature enhancement over the last year has been ignored. This means my machine is vulnerable, slower than it should be, and probably not as feature rich as it could be.


Why on earth did I do this to myself?

Well, I did it because of the same thing that's plaguing me right now. Gentoo really is more complicated than it need be. This problem manifests itself in that Gentoo is not really the right operating system for a lazy administrator or a novice who isn't adept at troubleshooting a GNU system.

My problem started with simple laziness and neglect. At first I didn't update because I just forgot, or it was too much trouble to login and run the command. That situation went on for a few weeks or months after a year or two of fairly attentive administration.

Then when I finally did update everything broke. The package management system changed so that certain packages could block the installation of other packages. This change was enough to throw me off of the routine I had used while updating. When I tried to figure it out, the whole thing blew up. I managed to get the system to update, to the detriment of my Gnome installation. I found myself without a window manager, with an ailing system that I, again, couldn't update. I gave up.


Flash forward a year or so...

I've played with Ubuntu over the last year on my laptop. I was really impressed with the installation and administrative tools. I gave serious thought to replacing my Gentoo server with an Ubuntu install. Then I stopped and thought of the effort that would take. I'd have to setup some sort of temporary network or almost all facets of computing, as well as phone service, for my house would come to a grinding halt. I decided I would give Gentoo another chance.

This Sunday my friend was talking about updating his Gentoo installation. This sparked the desire to fix my machine. Now it's on.

I logged into the machine. I ran the commands. Updating failed magnificently. Search on Google for a solution, fix that. It fails again. Search on Google again, fix it again. It fails again. Rinse and repeat.

It actually managed to update around 200 packages before I hit the big roadblock. Unfortunately, that roadblock is that to update glibc I must switch the system over to gcc 3.4.6 from 3.3.6.

In short, I have to completely rebuild my system. Overnight last night 115 system packages rebuilt. Today I started rebuilding the 552 packages in world. As I write this it is working on package 180. All of this after 4 days of work. In the end I'll probably have spent a week on this.


If you would just...

I fully expect that a knowledgeable reader will think, "Just keep your system up to date." That's not the point. The point is that the way that Gentoo works makes that just a tad more inconvenient than most other systems. Further, it shouldn't ever take a week to fix a system that hasn't been maliciously compromised. I would lodge the same sort of complaint against a hosed Windows install.

Reinstalling from scratch was never an option. If I reinstall it will be Ubuntu. Reinstallation would have been even more work, even if it would have taken less time, and it would offer no advantage over simply installing Ubuntu.

I'm sure that some Gentoo guru can pop out of the woodwork and say, "If you'd just run this command..." Again, that's beside the point. If Gentoo were more intuitive then I wouldn't have missed whatever command it is you may suggest. It's not like I haven't read the handbook. I've basically done all three "stages" of the manual installation. I have a decent idea of where to start looking when I troubleshoot this box, but when time after time it involves searching around and 30 minutes of research after finding some hits, that's just a little ridiculous.


Not that it matters

I'm going to keep Gentoo on the machine for now. I'll probably leave it on there until I'm ready to install new hardware. While I'm too lazy to properly administrate a Gentoo installation, I'm also too lazy to replace it.

Sweetly Poisoned Information

Recently a coworker asked me about an email forward that she received. The email, entitled "Sweet Poison (A MUST READ)," was little different than most junk that's forwarded around. In my response I included the process I use to discredit, and very occasionally verify, the factuality of chain mail. It's pretty simple and I suggest everyone who's confronted with these things adopt a similar solution.

As I'm fond of saying, the best way to fight misinformation is with truth. My reply is as follows:

http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/aspartame.html

In this case it appears that the information contained is disputed at best. Also, this appears to be a grassroots marketing campaign. If you search for “Sweet Poison” you’ll find that it’s a book written about “exposing aspartame dangers.”

As for debunking, there’s a process I use:

1. Anything, and I mean anything, written in 20 point green fonts, interspersed with varying paragraphs of other font colors, faces, and sizes, is likely junk. 99.999% of the time this holds up to be true. I’ve never found any reliable information contained within an email like this.
2. The mere fact that several AOL users have forwarded this around is a sign that the content isn’t worth reading.
3. Once we’ve established that it’s likely worthless we can take two courses of action:
1. Delete the email
2. Reply with information proving it worthless:
1. Pick a phrase from the email or subject and paste it into the google search input. Usually the subject itself or the first sentence or two works, just make sure it’s somewhat unique.
2. Search for it. Look through the first page or two of results. If you see snopes.com, breakthechain.org, etc. then click on the link.
3. Unless you already know what the link says, read it. It’s best to be informed.
4. Send an email back to the sender. Ask them to forward the truth around to everyone who they sent the original email to, as well as the person who sent it to them.
5. Be prepared for an argument. Forwarded emails are often successful because it’s easier to accept the lie than it is to swallow the truth. People confronted with the truth will often get defensive of the falsity that they propagated and will resort to tactics such as attacking you for wanting to be right.

You're on Candid Camera

After a long, hard weekend of watching football, I thought I'd share some things not to do while at a football game.

Easily at the top of the list is to not pick your nose. There's television cameras present at pretty much all football games. Use your knuckles, a tissue, or go to the bathroom.

If you're on the other side of the camera, and you're broadcasting live on network television, avoid the guy wearing the "West Fuckin Virginia" shirt like the plague. He will hold it up so that the world can easily read its message.

If you're going to paint yourself red, paint your armpits or keep your arms down. It's bad enough that your pits are being exposed as such, but the paint everywhere else actually highlights the fleshy, hairy, sweaty ovals. One can almost smell you through the screen.

Implement Fair and Equal Holidays

I don't know why I never posted this one. Interestingly, since I wrote this my company has reinstated Comp Time for the few employees that can take advantage of it. It wasn't the easiest task, but I had to do all of the programming to make that happen. I still think that workers would be better served by making a fair holiday schedule, or perhaps unlimited vacation like Netflix does. Originally this post was going to make a point about increasing productivity. I'm not going to make that point, but the concept of fair holidays seems reasonably argued...

The current corporate culture regarding employee holidays, in the U.S., is wrong and largely discriminatory. The prevailing thinking regarding holidays has not caught up with the progressive, inclusive, worker-oriented thinking of the modern office. The good news is that it can be changed. Read on to find out why and how.

What's wrong? I'm fine with the federal holidays.

I think that it can be safely assumed that everyone, shy of management, is a fan of paid holidays. The key word of that statement, though, is everyone. The current system of holidays that most companies employ is to give employees a popular set of federal holidays off as well as a few religious holidays.

Unfortunately, federal holidays don't hold the same value to every citizen, nor do religious holidays. Often one religions holiday schedule is fairly divergent to the next. Some religions have many important holidays that employees would like to spend with their family. Some holidays require the devout to observe a practice that conflicts with their ability to attend work or function in full capacity.

Can't they just take vacation? What about Comp Days?

Vacation is often the solution employees are forced to implement. How is that fair to them, though? That creates an inequality based on religion. Someone of a faith that aligns well with federal holidays and any others that the company chooses effectively gets all of their holidays paid as well as any vacation time. This means that they can vacation as they please and still spend important holidays with their friends and family. Workers who are forced to take paid holidays that do not match their religion must use vacation to compensate, which lessens their effective vacation time and limits their schedule.

Another solution has been to use compensatory, or "comp," time, to allow workers to pick which holidays they adhere to. There are a few problems with this, some new and some old.

To start with the old, we can look at the "closed office" phenomenon. Basically, each of these company holidays also designate a day when the offices of the company are closed, retail aside. This means that on these holidays everyone is expected to be away from the office. There are limited facilities on these days. The secretary won't be in, the HVAC may be off, and the doors may be locked. These things provide a challenge to an employee who wishes to work on these days. This likely leads to that person feeling that this is unwanted behavior, and often it is, which can make them choose not to work those days instead of going against the status quo.

The newer problem is that straight hour for hour compensatory time is, for most workers, illegal. It's difficult to properly implement. There's undue effort required of the company's HR department to track it. Worst of all, it still doesn't allow the required flexibility. At best you can offer this to any employees who fit into the narrow category of straight overtime pay. If you're feeling especially generous you can give this benefit to employees who are salaried, but at that point you're actually going well beyond your responsibilities and you still have the headache of tracking all of this.

For example, last Thursday marked the beginning of the Jewish holiday, Rosh HaShana, and the Muslim holiday, Ramadan. While I must admit to a lack of knowledge regarding Ramadan, I know enough about Rosh HaShana to say that most practicing Jewish people took the 13th and 14th off.

I work with a few of these people. I didn't ask what they did but we can assume that they either worked on Labor Day and Independence Day, the last two company holidays before these, or they took vacation time.

Please Stop with the Balance Transfers

Dear Banking Industry,

Please, I'm begging you, stop sending me all of these balance transfer checks. I'm not going to use them. I don't want to waste my time individually calling you to tell you to stop. Your persistence in the face of my obvious, yet silent, rejection has become an annoyance.

It's not that I don't appreciate the thought. Sure, 0% for the next 12 months sounds great. Maybe I can even ignore the upfront fee. I'm just not interested, though.

I wouldn't even write this but, you see, I'm a little paranoid about how easily these could be abused. I already have to worry about identity theft and other fraud. These checks just seem like a back door into my account. I'd rather they never entered the postal system, never sat in my mailbox, nor ever entered my house.

I'll make you a deal. You know your fancy website with all the security — the user name and password, the site key, the encrypted communications, that one — if you give me an easy way to transfer balances there, whenever I may need it, then I'll consider using it. Granted, I'll only use it if I can save money that way but the chances that I'll use that versus all of these pieces of paper you've been mailing out are greatly in favor of the online interface.

If you do this you should save quite a few trees. You'll probably save some money, too. That's something to consider if you've had your hand in the sub-prime mortgage market lately.

Sincerly,
Dan

Follow up to Your Account

Last time I detailed a problem when people enter email accounts that don't belong to them but the service doesn't allow you to remove the account.

In response to this, a friend of mine suggested that I mention Mailinator. It's a service that allows you to make up an email on the fly and check it. There's no passwords and no expectation of privacy but that's better than sending information to someone else. It's a great idea if you just want to check out a service.

Also, I received an email today about a new Yahoo! account that was created with my account as a secondary. I was impressed that Yahoo! has a system that allows you to remove your address from the account. Simply click a link and then a button to confirm. Of course, I spent a few seconds analyzing the URL before I went to it.

One of the big problems with situations like these is that they can be used to verify that your email address is valid. That may make removing your email from an account tantamount to clicking a link from a spammer. I don't have any evidence of this, and it does sound like a lot of work, but it is possible. That's why I think that the best way for a site to handle this is to require validation upfront but don't allow the user to know if the account owner ever validated. Just remove the account after a short time without validation, a week or a month should be enough.

Lastly, it should be noted that this is somewhat related to the newly defined BACN. This is a little different. It's like getting someone else's BACN. It's also unsolicited so it's a little more like SPAM. You can assume that someone might want it but you're not that someone.