Kelly's World- A View into the mind of Uber Geek, Kelly Adams » Rants

New iPhone: or why I cancelled my Rogers account

Kelly Adams — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 02:02:13 +0000

I’ve had a couple of tiring and rather stressful weeks at work in a row, so I decided to take Friday afternoon off. Since it was cold (and getting colder) I couldn’t really go for a ride on my motorbike. Instead, I decided to practice some retail therapy and “upgrade” my BlackBerry Bold to an iPhone.

My BlackBerry is on Rogers, so off I went to my local Rogers Plus store…

The folks at the Rogers Plus store were initially happy to assist with my upgrade. They had an iPhone 4 in hand, and were going through the usual 30+ minutes of electronic paperwork when we hit a snag. Apparently, my phone wasn’t quite eligible for upgrade: I was three months early. Being a reasonable person, I assumed this could be corrected via payment of some sort of fee. However, apparently that’s not the case. The Sales guy said I would have to talk to Rogers customer service and get an exception applied, and so I went home and called them up.

The first support person I talked to seemed quite willing to help. I made it fairly clear that I was willing to cancel my account and accept the fees ($40 a month for the remainder of my contract to a maximum of $400) in order to make the phone switch. I should point out that this fee is to the end of my three year contract, not the three months difference to get to my upgrade eligibility. He said I was “very close” to my upgrade date (May, 2011) , but he would have to hand me off to a customer retention specialist.

The customer retention specialist came on the line and more or less immediately told me he couldn’t do anything to help. I would have to wait three months, or possibly accept early upgrade to some other phone like an Android. He indicated that they were backordered on iPhones and so could make no exceptions. I told him “Fine, cancel my account then, you’ve just lost a customer”. There was stunned silence on the line, followed by “are you sure, Sir? You could wait, or we could give you this …”

And so, in order to preserve their stock of iPhones for customers they don’t yet have, Rogers lost a customer they already have. A customer who had paid them over $2,000 in monthly fees over the past 1 year 9 months. A customer who was willing to sign up for another three year contract worth another $2,000 in revenue.

And I get the dubious privilege of paying Rogers another $400 as I walk out the door. No skin off their nose, and I’m sure I’m not even a blip on their customer service radar. But I am doubtful that I will ever do business with them again. I’m now back on Telus, the service provider I had when I first came to B.C., and I have a nice, shiny new iPhone 4.

Interestingly, despite being royally screwed by Rogers and wasting $400 to exit their contract early, I felt quite good after this was all over. I got to stand firm on a point of principle, stupid and pointless as it might seem. And I got a new phone: goodness all around!

Getting tough on spam users…

Kelly Adams — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:30:26 +0000

I run a simple little blog here. I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive. I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments. The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else. Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.

Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed. Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress. There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs. Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.

Starting about two months ago, my site has been getting about 50 new user registrations per day. These registrations have obviously fake user names like “AAdaeFAe”, and email addresses mostly originating in Russia or China. I made an initial stab at stemming the tide a couple of weeks ago by adding a plugin that was supposed to require the registrant to correctly enter a reCAPTCHA code before they could submit- unfortunately, it didn’t work properly. But I don’t give up easily, especially when my inbox is filling with “New User” messages.

I now have a working reCAPTCHA plugin, as well as an automatic inactive user pruner. If a user manages to successfully create a user ID, and doesn’t post at least one comment within a certain time frame, their ID will be removed. This should clear up my user database fairly quickly: it already deleted nearly 900 IDs on the first pass.

The thing I don’t understand about this latest round of spam is: why? What possible benefit does a registered user have on a normal WordPress site? I guess it would be useful if, for example, I had my site set up to permit registered users to post unmoderated comments- but I don’t. A user has to submit a comment that I approve before they can submit future comments: thus far, no automated bots have made their way through the simple process of me looking for signs of intelligence in their posts. And you don’t need to register at all to go through this process on my site: an unregistered user can attempt to post a comment as well, and it goes through exactly the same moderation process.

I suppose the best explanation I can come up with is this. In modern society, rattling the door knob on a house to see if you can get in is kind of pointless: 99.999% of the time it will be locked. It is therefore by definition a stupid way to try to gain entry. But because of the wonders of automation, hackers and spammers can rattle billions of door knobs a day: en masse, it becomes a less stupid strategy. Unfortunately, it becomes vastly more irritating…

End of American manned presence in space…

Kelly Adams — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:32:14 +0000

The last shuttle mission has flown and, with nothing to replace it, the U.S. manned presence in space has ended with it. The shuttle astronauts in the picture below are the last ones we will ever see.

I’m part of the Apollo generation. The era during which the U.S. was dominant in space, with hundreds of manned missions. The moon landings, Skylab, the shuttle, deployment of Hubble, and the ISS: all of these things marked milestones in my life. The men and women of the space program were, to me, sterling examples of the best humanity has to offer.

The tiny cost of the U.S. space program (the entire 50 year history of which costs less than what the U.S. spends in a single year on the military) has paid off in technological advances worth trillions. And yet, due to the shortsighted and unimaginative nature of current society, it is all over. There are no manned space vehicles being built or maintained by the U.S. after this month. There is a partially designed manned capsule, the Orion, but nothing to launch it with. When Americans want to go into space, they will have to beg the Russians or, perhaps, the Chinese for a ride. Nothing is left other than a vague intent to “one day” go to Mars, but without sufficient funding or a specific plan to do so.

To me, the end of the manned space program marks the end of my youth, and of many of my dreams for mankind. It feels as if the only outcome now is the gradual decay of humanity’s ability and will to go beyond. In a world dominated by petty squabbles over race, religion, and natural resources, the space program was… hope. A dream, I guess, and not a reality.

What is left to inspire us beyond our petty hatreds and cancerous greed? My belief is that it is the dreams that lift us above our animalistic need for territory, wealth, and dominance. The fact that the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth has abandoned its greatest and most noble dream tells me that we are failing. A tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions spent every year on destruction could have kept that dream alive, and yet it is over.

I’m hopeful that some fraction of humanity might step up one day to embrace “the other things“. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard…

DARPA worried there aren’t enough young geeks…

Kelly Adams — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:22:36 +0000

The U.S. Defence advanced research guys are worried that not enough young Americans are pursuing the sciences or engineering. They are looking for ways to encourage more young people to pursue degrees in these areas.

There is a problem here, and I can tell you exactly what it is. For years, the largest American employers of scientists and engineers have been pursuing a policy that clearly identifies technical skills as pure commodities. As commodities, they are trying to fill positions in these areas with the cheapest resources possible: that is, they are finding their geeks and scientists in India, China, Russia, and Brazil. The basic premise: they can get four or five guys with science degrees “over there” for the price of one in North America.

The big U.S. companies been doing this for a decade. The numbers are staggering: millions of technical jobs have gone “off shore” since the late 90′s. North American technologists wanting a continued career are increasingly being forced to lead a team, manage projects, provide “business analysis” services, or consult. None of these roles really require a technical degree, and they certainly don’t emphasize geek skills.

As a young person just going in to university/college, it isn’t very hard to see the trends. If you want a job in North America, you want business skills: a B.Comm, an MBA, or similar. Oh sure, you might pick up a science degree as well, but you’d be best off eliminating any geek-like tendencies from your personality early on. If you truly like programming, there is some hungry guy in China with a PhD who’ll do it for what would be starvation wages here: and the vast majority of Canadian and U.S. companies are more than willing to hire him rather than you.

The long term result of this “offshoring” of originality and creativity is, to me at least, obvious. In several decades, the United States will no longer be a significant innovator, creator or manufacturer. All of the skills necessary to do these things will exist somewhere else. The U.S. will be a nation of managers, with no one to manage: and I’m pretty sure that the Chinese and Indians can figure out how to manage people pretty well.

I hope I’m wrong. But my guess is that the trend is irreversible- as long as sending skilled technical work elsewhere is cheaper, companies will continue doing it regardless of the consequences. The one hopeful factor is that salaries in “developing” nations are gradually catching up. Maybe it will become less appealing to send a job overseas when it costs nearly as much as it does here. Time will tell…

Newsflash: people who don’t like computers prefer non-geeky workspaces

Kelly Adams — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:01:37 +0000

According to a recent study at the University of Washington, people who aren’t really interested in computing science are even less interested if asked about it in a room with science fiction paraphernalia, games, and soft drink cans. Apparently some of these non-technically-inclined people are women. Glory be, we have a great discovery!

Actually, not really, at least not in my uneducated opinion, with which you are free to disagree…

You see, I am of the belief that people who are interested in technology, who excel at it, have certain kinds of minds. Regardless of gender, they are people who like science, enjoy science fiction, and like different kinds of games. People who don’t have these traits might be interested in other things: medicine, law, psychiatry, or something else.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that all computer people are stereotypical geeks. But I do think a significant majority are: both men and women. I look at the desks of the twenty-something women at work and see anime characters, Hello-kitty plushies, chinese puzzles, strange high-calorie/high caffeine candies, and toy robots. I am doubtful that this is protective camouflage, because most of the guys desks are largely without ornamentation. I don’t see pictures of pastoral scenes or elegant tea sets.

I think everything reasonable to encourage women (and men) who are really interested in technology, computers, and science to pursue their interests is worth doing. But I really do *not* want people who have no interest in the kinds of things that make good technologists pursuing careers they have no aptitude for. I’ve seen people who should have been accountants, history teachers, or truck drivers become computer people, and I’ll tell you it isn’t a pretty sight. They have no finesse, no talent, no skill: just rote procedural work and a total inability to resolve anything they don’t have a formula for.

So here’s my suggestion: worry about how people can deal with logic puzzles and english language pseudo code and other base elements of computing. Look at how we can identify people of any gender who have these natural aptitudes, who get excited more by the problem and the beauty of the solution than in the billing rates or the mathematics of it, and give them access to interesting challenges. My suspicion is that the vast majority of them regardless of gender will prefer science fiction posters and games over tea sets and colour draping any day.

In fact, maybe a good test of man or woman is to expose them to a typical nerd workspace: if they play with the toys and use the nerf gun to shoot down the tower of pop cans, they should consider a career in computing. If they tsk tsk and begin hanging tasteful watercolours of lakes at sunset, they should go straight away into accountancy or law

Time to eat the neighbour

Kelly Adams — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:06:16 +0000

I have been hearing about this book “Time to Eat the Dog?” that, as I understand it, goes into the carbon footprint of the pets we share our lives with. According to this book, a medium size dog has a greater carbon footprint than an average SUV. The conclusion, presumably selected for its shock value, is that we should only keep animals if we plan on eating them. I’ve found a fair number of articles on line, including this one on the BBC site, that take this proposal at least somewhat seriously.

I personally think that my cats and, when I had them, dogs were pretty darned important parts of my life. So my “shock value” proposal is a bit different: I suggest we start eating our neighbours…

Think about it for a minute. There are 100 million or so pets in North America, but easily 350 million humans. The food calorie values consumed by each human are nominally twice the values consumed by a cat or dog of equivalent mass. Doing some quick math (about the same kind of math as done in the aforementioned book) the energy savings of consuming 175 million of those humans (about half) would have three to four times the value of consuming our pets. 300% better return for the effort!

But wait, there’s more to my proposal. Unlike a cat or dog, each human has an absolutely vast impact on the resources and carbon production within the environment. Humans buy VCRs and iPods, drive cars, heat their houses: we are, without a question or doubt, by far the the greatest carbon impact in the environment. Conservatively, I’d propose that each person removed from the environment would have ten times the impact of their food consumption value alone. So each person you eat is worth 10 times the value in terms of reducing carbon impact of an equivalent weight pet, and since humans generally weigh over twice as much as the average pet, we are talking 20 times the value per “unit” consumed- again, being conservative. Time to fire up the (solar powered) barbecue and get the rotisserie going!

Am I seriously suggesting we start chowing down on our neighbours? No, I guess not: for one thing, I don’t like that much fat in my meat, and the average North American is pretty… rotund- myself included. However, I do think that seven billion of us is probably three or four billion more than necessary. Our genetic imperative to spawn multiples of ourselves is at odds with our constrained living space. And it is time to set aside those lizard-brain drives to “be fruitful and multiply” before we are crushed beneath the effluvia of our own unimpeded breeding.

The number one most effective way to reduce the impact of humanity on the environment is simple and obvious: birth control. Reduce net population growth to zero globally. Begin the long, slow process of reducing our populations to some more manageable level. Robert and Brenda Vale (authors of Time to Eat the Dog?) think they were courageous to propose eating the family pet, but the real courage would come from seriously proposing the true solution: reduce the human population.

Clear evidence of what is important…

Kelly Adams — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:37:07 +0000

A young man in the United States stands accused of a horrible crime. Federal agents recently raided his home, and he faces as much as ten years in a federal prison. According to his accusers, his wanton illegal acts are many and varied, and all necessary steps should be taken to insure he pays for his crimes.

What did Matthew Crippen do that is worthy of such quick and sure action involving numerous agents and investigators? He was modding XBoxes and PS3s, enabling them to run unofficial (and presumably illegally copied) software.

While Mr. Crippen faces hard time, thousands of murderers, rapists, ponzi scheme operators, anti-government gun fanatics, and evangelists stealing millions from their parish wander free. What elevates the crimes committed by this university student above these others? It is the fact that he is potentially stealing profits from greedy, litigation-driven organizations like the RIAA, the ESA and the MPAA. These organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on lobbyists, who skillfully line the pockets of government officials year-round. Of course their concerns about the crimes of Mr. Crippen get immediate and forceful attention.

Numerous appointees to the Obama administration are former ESA/RIAA/MPAA lawyers, fresh from years of successfully threatening teenagers and unemployed single mothers with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. But that isn’t good enough. Now it is time to throw those youngsters and poor people in federal prison, since we all know they are the real cause of the downfall of the American economy. The cancerous greed of the banks and investment companies had nothing to do with it. And if you believe that, I have several thousand premium shares in my new get rich quick scheme I’d love to sell you…

Cyberwar? No, malicious script kiddy

Kelly Adams — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:21:09 +0000

According to the lead Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, the U.S. should launch an all out retaliation against North Korea for their role in the recent cyber attacks on American and South Korean internet targets. Unfortunately for the American people, Mr. Hoekstra is either an idiot, willfully ignorant, or intentionally twisting reality for his own political ends. The best experts in the industry agree that the attacks were launched by an attention-seeking amateur.

For those who don’t know, a number of American and South Korean websites were “attacked” via a simple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that started on July 4th. The attack disrupted some sites, but for the most part nothing was actually crashed- instead, sites just started responding more slowly. The best security people in the world started looking at what was going on, and found that the attack was originating from thousands (about 50,000) PCs in the Asian region (Japan, Korea, etc) infected with a variant of the MyDoom worm. MyDoom was in the news about five years ago, and the changes in the version used for this attack were minimal and amateurish. The code itself made no attempt to hide itself from current anti-virus software, which easily detects and blocks it from installation.

Based on the evidence, it is pretty clear what happened. Someone took the publicly available source code for MyDoom, hacked in some simple changes, and released it into the wild where a few thousand users running very unpatched and unprotected PCs got infected. The juvenile hacker then sent commands to his moderately sized bot network to attack websites that would get him or her some attention.

There is no “cyber-warfare” here, not even anything sophisticated enough to require a Russian mob connection. This is something anyone with a modicum of computer skill could do, and requires nothing even remotely like a nation’s support to accomplish. A 14 year old with a C compiler and poor self control skills: that’s what this would take. Anyone claiming that this is a professional or national act of war is, quite frankly, an idiot.

I’d hate to think the honorable Mr. Hoekstra is a malicious thought-manipulator trying to prey on the ignorance and gullibility of the American people. I’m sure Peter Hoekstra is instead just stupid.

Iran repression: the other side of the technology story

Kelly Adams — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:42:58 +0000

The news has been full this week with stories of what is going on in Iran, and more specifically with how technology is helping protesters get their message out. Without Twitter and its ilk, the story goes, no one would know what was really happening under the boot of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Unfortunately, the protesters are not the only ones benefitting from technology. Iran’s oppressive government, with help from Nokia and Siemens, has implemented a subversion scanning system currently deep-inspecting nearly every piece of data flowing in and out of the country. Apparently this includes virtually all phone calls. Better yet, they are now using crowdsourcing techniques to help put names and addresses to photos of protesters. Protesters who will undoubtedly be “disappeared” once identified.

Those folks in Iran using Twitter to let us know about what is happening there are taking their lives into their own hands, thanks to technology sold, implemented, and serviced by suppliers from supposedly enlightened democratic nations. If I was one of the employees from Nokia or Siemens responsible for their wonderful new spy system, I would be asking my bosses some pretty pointed questions right at the moment. Right before I put in my resignation.

Why are so many computer users skinflints?

Kelly Adams — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:13:37 +0000

A couple of days ago I responded to a review of a Twitter application I use with the following observations:

The review I was referring to was one in PC Magazine about a BlackBerry Twitter application I use and love called Tweet Genius. Twitter’s 140 character constraints make it a bit tough for me to be completely clear, but my point is this: why is the $10 cost of a highly useful application considered sufficiently noteworthy to be mentioned several times during an otherwise positive review? And why is it that this “it is great, but a major drawback is that it costs something…” kind of notice is so common in software reviews these days?

I developed a set of usefulness versus cost measures of my own based on common “mundane” items about 30 years ago. I compare software cost to the cost of a cup of coffee, the price of a movie ticket, the price of a reasonable meal, to the expense of a night drinking with my buddies, and to my hourly billable rate. Anything that I like and use even a bit is worth the price of a couple cups of coffee, even if I stop using it after a few days. If it is useful/entertaining for more than a couple of hours, it is worth the price of a movie ticket: if it keeps me entertained for a weekend, it is worth the cost of a night at the movies for two. Something that serves a daily useful purpose over a good span of time is worth the price of a a good meal for two, and if it really makes my life easier and happier I start comparing the time it saves against my billable hourly rate. As my wife Irene will attest, I can quickly scale this up to justify a couple of thousand dollars for something that makes a significant, long term impact to reducing my stress level and making work more efficient, easier, and more enjoyable.

Admittedly, I have a good job and am an adult, so my acceptable cost standards are obviously going to be higher than, say, an unemployed college student. But even that college student will buy a cup of coffee or two a week, or buy a couple of beers on a weekend: and so a $10 to $20 cost for something that is actually useful is a pittance even by their standards. A pittance as in at least as worthwhile as something they can piss away in a couple of hours.

Thus I am perplexed when I see someone repeatedly calling out the “high” cost of something that has a price not much more than a couple cups of coffee. What standards is this type of person using? Is their only basis for comparison the fact that they can get something else not quite as good, or burdened with crapware and advertisements for free? Are the reviewers or their perceived audience really so cheap that they would hesitate to spend $10 on something that works really well? And I should note that Tweet Genius is currently (as noted in the review) on special for half price: $5 freaking bucks.

What does it say about the computer-using culture when paying someone $5 to benefit from the fruits of hundreds of hours of their labour is “expensive”? Just how little do we value not only the time of the person who created this thing, but our own time and happiness?

Note that I have my own foibles about price. I refuse to pay for the same thing over and over again in different formats (e.g.: music, movies): if I pay my money, in my opinion (but not the opinion of the studios or the law) I should be entitled to watch it however I want on whatever device I want without paying for it again. Likewise if I buy a game and it refuses to play on my computer due to draconian DRM, I’ll step out of bounds to get a version that does work. And if there is an honest-to-goodness *better* alternative, by all reasonable measures, that is free, I’ll certainly check it out. But I’m quite willing to click on the “Pay me $10 if you like this” buttons for tools, utilities, and webcomics I use/enjoy, even when there is no mandatory payment.

I guess, having worked to create intangibles like software, articles, and stories in the past, I respect that it actually *is* work for the creators. Work worthy of being paid for. More than that: I place a high enough value on my own time, stress level, and happiness that I’m quite pleased to pay someone who creates something to give me back/reduce/increase these factors in my life. Not paying, particularly for small developers and “cottage” companies, isn’t “sticking it to the man”: it is fundamentally screwing ourselves over.

A cost of five, ten, or even twenty dollars isn’t “expensive”: it is a couple of coffees, a couple packs of cigarettes, or a couple of beers with your friends. And if your head is screwed on right, it is a realistic cost to pay for the labour involved in virtually any moderately useful application.