I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I used my MBR1000 with Verizon Wireless Broadband for much/most of my initial commitment to the service. The only flaws I ever found were that once every two weeks you had to power it down to reset because throughput would slow to a crawl worse than dial up. I attributed this to some kind of resource leakage or some kind of log getting full without a wrap capability. It was no big deal.

That said, I had more than my fair share of bandwidth issues with Verizon’s service. It basically was a classic case of having oversold the towers in the area. There were certain times of the day when even checking email was frustrating. Having heard these same complaints from many with Verizon Wireless Broadband and heard their “Trail of Tears” story about trying to get the issue resolved, I simply chose to suffer through it.

Low and behold, a few weeks ago Verizon gave me a “courtesy” call telling me my contractual obligations were all expired and that they wanted me to sign up for additional services in exchange for some new free equipment. I was never so glad to get a sales call in all my life. I thanked them for verifying my broadband contract was over because I had been wanting to get onto the 4G bandwagon since I saw the first commercial on TV. They sputtered and said “We’re working on that” and I responded “Sprint already has it only a few miles from here with a schedule that puts me in the coverage area before the end of 2011 Q1, quite possibly before the end of the year.” I thanked them profusely for letting me know I could finally be free of a 5Gig per month limit and hung up the phone.

I don’t download streaming porn, watch movies on-line, or even visit U-tube, but, even I get nailed by that 5Gig per month limit. If I wasn’t sharing the connection it would be less likely, but, with 4 computers on the connection, all it takes is for a round of updates to come out all at the same time and my limit is hit. I even try to avoid this by ordering CDs with new stuff from On-Disk, but this time the Ubuntu crowd decided to slip in a bunch of last minute changes which made the initial release of 10.04 LTS useless for all. I had to download my own new disks. Then I had to apply all of the patches. Then Microsoft decided to release some major patches for the sacrificial machine still running their worthless OS. You get the picture.

Every time I get close to the 5Gig limit, the back of my mind keeps tossing out the story of that sorry ass Bears fan who got a $27,000 bill for watching the game on his laptop.

http://techblips.dailyradar.com/story/27_000_to_watch_a_bears_game_chicago_sun_times_the/

So, after returning home from an out of state contract and finishing all of my computer upgrades, I decided to look into 4G service. The beauty of 4G service (when it arrives) is that it is unlimited (currently). I can pull down all of the updates I need and send all of the PDF files off to printer houses I want without having to worry about that 5Gig limit or that $27,000 phone bill.

A quick visit to the Sprint Web site made me think I lead a charmed life.

I’ve been well aware of the Sprint coverage hole in the town of Cabery because some family members have Sprint service and are there quite a bit. I’m also incredibly hopeful that coverage hole is coming to an end since Alliance Grain will be putting up a different/larger leg there this summer and I’ve been a one man lobby team shoving that information into every contact point I can find at Sprint. (For those who don’t know what a leg is, they are systems of elevating and/or transferring grain from unloading pits into various bins and silos. You can find some images here:

http://www.ag450farm.iastate.edu/sidenotes.htm )

A little bit of research showed that Sprint was selling a Franklin U301 3G/4G USB dongle along with a 4G plan which allowed you to operate at the 5Gig limit on 3G, but switch over automagically to unlimited 4G when it appeared in your area. These devices must be really popular because the “local” retailer kept getting stiffed on their shipments from central inventory. I ended up having to order one on the Web.

Word of warning. Sprint only uses Equifax to check credit. If you are like me, and have all of your credit information locked down to avoid identity theft, you MUST find your Equifax PIN and either unlock your credit for a few days, or buy a one time only PIN before you order. I burned almost a day on the phone trying to get this cleared up. (It didn’t help that I had miss-placed the PIN Equifax originally sent me and had to obtain a new one.) The real problem is that only a few people in Sprint’s credit department know how to refresh a data screen. Once they do a pull for your credit, it shows them only the originally pulled information until some magic keystroke combination is hit to force a data refresh. Most of the people working at the first level of credit checking don’t know how to do this. You have to bounce your way up to a second or third level manager before this “ knowledge” is passed along to anyone.

Farmer’s have a saying. “Never start anything on Friday as you will have nothing but trouble.” It’s a good saying. My modem arrived late on Friday, so I read the instructions during an episode of SG-U, but didn’t do anything until the following day.

My laptop has a sacrificial Windows partition on it which rarely gets used, so the CD of software worked just fine. I was able to connect seeing anywhere from 1-4 bars on the little software display with the dongle plugged directly into the laptop. A half hour into this and life was looking good! I was easily going to have plenty of time to get cleaned up and attend my nephew’s birthday party…yeah right.

With a 3G only modem like the Verizon modem. All I did after initializing it was plug it into the MBR1000 and magically we were all connected to the Internet. Fat chance with this modem. I expected to have to flash the firmware because it was a new device. I didn’t expect to have to burn in an additional BIN file with modem drivers. I also didn’t expect to endure any of the problems or the countless hours on hold trying to get this working in 3G mode without automatically trying 4G every so often.

Every time I got connected to technical support I got a different little tweak to try, but I didn’t get a working configuration, or the truth…at least until they were about to go home for the evening.

See that line which is third from the bottom? It’s a negative number and it needs to be greater than -75 before your MBR1000 will even begin to function. (Remember, with negative numbers, greater than means closer to zero.) With my Verizon modem plugged in it stays pretty much at -51 because Verizon has some pretty great cell service in the area. With the Sprint modem installed it bounces between -61 and -128 with most of its time around -98. I tried every hokey trick they told me until they finally told me the truth. I even drove to Kankakee and purchased a 10′ USB extension cable so I could tape the USB dongle to a window far away from the MBR-1000.

Now, I am waiting for regular FedEx overnight delivery. I have a signal booster on order. It sucks, but until the 4G tower gets put up, that’s what I will need.

https://secure.spotwave.com/productfinder/product_finder_results.asp

I have never used this product, but I have used things like it in the past. Being out on a farm away from everything I have a long history of dealing with weak signal strength. On the plus side, I walked around the outside of my office last night with the dongle plugged into the notebook and found the place where signal strength seems to stay at 4 bars, so I should be good to go once it is installed. I even climbed up on the roof and took of the old Direcway satellite dish since I will want to use the hole where the cable comes through the wall for this things cable. (Besides, I haven’t had satellite Internet service in years now. For those who think 5Gig per month is bad, try living with 120Meg per day.)

—- days pass

Well, I ended up having to order from a different place. The Mac Mall vendor simply committed wire fraud over and over again. When their inventory reads “in-stock” it has absolutely no meaning. They waited until 4:30pm on the day I expected my delivery to call and tell me the product was back ordered. Their Web site continued to show it as in-stock even the following day. All I can say is that it is rather obvious ethics simply don’t exist at Mac Mall.

Even after ordering a SpotWave from another supplier and hooking it up, my Trail of Tears was no different. I could plug the Sprint dongle into my laptop and see 4-5 bars with the software. I even carried my laptop and held it in such a way that it was in the exact same location with the modem facing the exact same way to make sure of the signal strength with the SpotWave running. Plug it into the MBR1000 and you get nothing. Tech support keeps telling me to use longer and longer extension cables to get the dongle farther away from the MBR1000. Each increase in distance causes a significant drop in signal strength, not an improvement. I can even test the dongle in the exact same location and position with my laptop seeing 5 bars and get absa-(*^)(&ing-lutely-nothing when it is plugged into the MBR1000.

$60/month for a paperweight that doesn’t even hold down paper. Not to mention hundreds of dollars for a booster which is probably sprouting tumors inside my body as we speak. Not only that, but the firmware update changed that resource leakage problem from physically powering down once every couple of weeks to requiring a physical power down roughly three times per day.

Tech support at Cradlepoint no longer returns my phone calls or answers my email.

—- days pass

I have to spend a lot of time in meetings in the Naperville area one day, so I go onto Hotwire and book myself a room at Candlewood for an unbelievable price. I take along my $60 paper weight because according to the maps Sprint has the bulk of the Naperville/Warrenville area covered with 4G service. A consultant I used to work with is staying in the area and using Clear 4G (which is supposedly using the Sprint network). I spend a lot of time with my ear-piece in while driving around to meetings. A couple of times people ask me to email them stuff. I find a parking lot and boot the sacrificial Windows partition, connect to Sprint (3G because I can never find 4G) and surf to my email page to send them things. When my day is finally over I check into the Candlewood (very beautiful room, very comfortable, even the towels feel new) and test out my $60/month paperweight again. No 4G found. The consultant I know is staying at a hotel less than one mile south of where I am as the crow flies and gets great 4G with Clear. I get bupkiss with Sprint’s wonderful device. I use 3G for a few minutes, then plug in the provided network cable and boot a real operating system to get some things done.

Still $60/month for a paperweight which doesn’t even hold paper down.

—- days pass

Some non-technical person from sprint kept calling my land line offering to help resolve my issues. They also annoy me with an email. Why they kept calling my land line that I never answer unless I completely recognize the caller is beyond me. My email sig line clearly states my cell phone number, which is generally the only number anyone actually reaches me on. I email them the early portion of this document showing all of the maps and pointing out how I have contacted them incessantly about getting additional antenna’s in place to serve this area only to receive dead silence. In fact, in the town of Herscher, the Herscher Grain elevator was currently putting up a shiny new leg. Some antenna is hanging on it, but I haven’t talked with anyone in the know to find out just what kind and who owns it. I know this. It hasn’t boosted the Sprint/Nextel signal in the area even the tiniest bit.

The first of July comes and I find there is a shiny new firmware version for the MBR1000 and yet another BIN file for modem support. I dutifully install both and once again conduct tests with Sprint. Still absolutely worthless. The resource leakage issue has improved, but is still light years from being resolved. Even turning on the flag for brutal physical modem reset hasn’t solved the issue. We are now down to a once per day power down in order to fix connection speed issues.

Still $60/month for a paperweight which doesn’t even hold paper down.

What I can tell Joe and Jane consumer from this experience is that those maps are just random wishful colorings. According to the map on-line, I should have been awash in 4G bandwidth while staying at Candlewood Suites.

Did I even see a “ hint” of access? No. Believe me, I clicked on that 4G button the software puts up more than once looking for coverage, nada. One thing which really strikes me as I look at this map in more detail, however, is just how little Sprint cares. Illinois isn’t Washington. We don’t have mountain ranges cropping up between downtown Chicago and the suburbs. Why do we have all of these orange blobs in the 4G coverage area? Many years ago there was a comic strip which had the wife leaving yellow post-it notes around the house with things for the hubby to do (and not to do). The punch line was that until these little yellow things hit the market, he never knew the color of nagging. Well, until I took a good look at this map, I didn’t know the color of half-assed.

I have a particularly unforgiving place in my heart for companies that let MBAs choose the rolling out of coverage based upon “where they get a deal” to put an antenna instead of letting the engineers put together a coverage map and roll out plan. I’m not an engineer, but at a young and impressionable age, I worked as a computer operator for Airfone, Inc. before it was sold the first time. I did call record collection and ran the nightly jobs. We had a big map up on the wall which showed the location of each ground station. We also kept charts of how many calls came in to each ground station each day. (This was long before the process was automated.) Today, the company has been sold once again. Since most people have cell phones and many break the law by using their cell phone in flight, call volume dropped to far too low of a level.

http://www.unwiredview.com/2008/06/09/jetblue-buys-verizons-airfone-network/

Nobody has said just how much was paid for the company by JetBlue, but I’m pretty certain I know why the company continues to find buyers and new life long after most have written it off. The groundstation network (those things which received the calls from the airplanes) was complete. After the engineers got done mapping out and building the groundstations they thought would be needed, they tested the network flying around to ensure no dropped calls. (This was pre-cell phone days, so “dropped calls” wasn’t common in the English language.) As a result, we ended up building a few more stations to plug some coverage holes. A favorite of the operations staff was Winnemucca, not only because it was fun to say, but because it had peak volumes of 2 calls per day except around Xmas time where it might spike to 4. It could go for days without ever getting a call.

Let me be the first to say that these groundstations, while not high tech by today’s standards, where neither cheap nor easy to build. Many were built on mountain tops (or as close as could legally be built to the top.) Some had their construction supplies helicoptered in because there were no roads. Months would go by before communications and electrical power could be trenched to them. We had a photo of one which had a grain scoop tied by rope about 10′ from the top of the tower. It looked odd up there in the summer time when they took the picture, but it was there for when a service tech had to drop from a helicopter in the winter and dig their way down to the door just to get inside and fix something.

This is a far cry from what cellular providers have to do today to service areas like the suburbs of Chicago or even rural America. Much of the time they simply have to sign a deal with a building or grain elevator owner, then stick an antenna on top and run some cabling.

Why was there a groundstation in Winnemucca? The story we operators were told was that it was a hole had been found during testing and that some very high roller people complained about dropped calls. We were told that these were the kinds of people who either carried around enough cash or gambled enough cash on any given day in Las Vegas to fund the company’s operation for a year.

So, long before cell phones became a phenomenon, there was a company building groundstations and erecting towers on mountain tops and servicing said equipment under some of the most god-awful conditions to provide a service certain clients absolutely had to have and others thought was a bit pricey. With that said, it was possible to get on the phone after taking off in New York and to talk all the way to Los Angeles if your pockets were deep enough. Most of the rest of the conversations where short and started with “Hey, you’ll never guess where I’m calling from…”

I guess it’s a lot like these Sprint coverage maps. Even looking at them you cannot tell if you’ll have service when you try.

It’s bad enough when massive banks which took millions, and in some cases billions, in taxpayer bailout money, import L1 and H1 visa workers with little to no care about either taxpayer opinion or national security. We’ve even gotten used to the “consulting firms” which were flying operatives over on tourist visas then billing them out as consultants to clients and paying these people on a 1099. Thankfully the IRS caught onto it as well and now there is a massive round up going on. Now, the colleges are even openly funding al-Qaeda. Of course, the IRS seems to have caught onto it at roughly the same time a guy was busted in Denver for buying lots of hydrogen peroxide for another group of guys in New York. Now CEO’s and HR executives are quaking in their boots because when the case goes to trial, those who signed the sponsorship will find out they agreed to serve the same sentence as the convicted.

Back in December, near the 15 ^th, a technical college in Madison Wisconsin put out an “ immediate need” requirement for a technical writer. In January, they decided to bundle all 89 IT project requirements they had into one massive bid. At no point was there a requirement that submitted candidates had to be a U.S. Citizen. Judging from the phone calls I received on this, there was also no requirement that any consulting firm submitting candidates for bid have a single U.S. Citizen on their payroll or in management. English certainly wasn’t required to be the primary language of anyone involved, which makes one wonder what the result of all the writing would be.

The “immediate need” still has not been filled. It’s now February 17 ^th, so this has gone on for more than two months. If a technical college is teaching their IT students “immediate need” means under three months, then they well and truly are turning out useless graduates, but, they don’t care, because they are directing our tax dollars into an area with the highest probability of those funds ending up in the hands of al-Qaeda. While it is true that there have been home grown terrorists in the U.S., the bulk of the recruits and funding still lies overseas. While federal authorities can track all of the charities in this country which sympathise with and are suspected of directly funding acts of terrorism against this country, It is a much more daunting task when the money leaves this country in the form of payroll or savings and enters a banking system which is not electronically monitored.

Earlier this week, the college managed to release counts, but not lists of names of those they selected. They have repeatedly had time to send out communications to all those submitting that “high bids” will not be short listed. There is no adequate description of what a “high bid” is. There is also no mention that as a school receiving federal money in one fashion or another that they are required to pay the prevailing wage AS DETERMINED BY THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR for each job.

Then again, you would think that a college, funded with federal tax dollars, either directly or indirectly via student loans and grants, and state tax dollars, either directly or indirectly, and the college savings accounts of U.S. Citizens in and around the area would demand that all contractors submitted be U.S. Citizens. It is the only ethical thing for them to do. So far, I have seen no evidence what-so-ever that is the case.

It’s been a while since all of the crimes happened. We still haven’t seen a criminal prosecution of Google executives, and as long as the Writer’s Guild has the drug induced fantasy that they will one day be adequately compensated, we never will see actual criminal justice handed out. This has lead to a new definition of “Googling”.

Googling The displaying on a Web site without permission or intent of financial compensation, copyrighted material, most notably books, in PDF or other easily pirated formats.

Given that nobody from Google has went to prison for it, this has become a new Internet Mega-Trend. There are now more and more sites engaging in the practice. One Googling site I discovered today doesn’t even try to look legitimate.

http://www.pdfqueen.com/

No ownership or contact information is displayed. Just like Google, they are breaking international law and they know it. It appears to have some serious crawling software behind it as well. When I was attempting to get my SOA book converted into EPUB format using Calibre, I found a number of bugs. I ended up sending the first 205 pages of the PDF file up as an attachment to the bug report as this file could reproduce every problem I was having. In order to look at that portion of the information in the bug database you had to be a valid registered user. I say this now because that very file and information leading back to it turned up on PDFQueen. There is no method listed for protesting the use of copyrighted material or requesting its removal.

Once again, I’ve been Googled.

Scammed this from a message in comp.os.vms

–2010 Date Recognition Problems

(January 5, 2010)

German payment cards are not the only technology to be hit with problems recognizing dates in the new year. (See story below.) Smartphone users running Windows Mobile are getting text messages dated 2016. Symantec’s Endpoint Protection manager is labeling signatures dated in the new year as being out-of-date; until the problem is addressed in an update, new malware signatures will be dated 12/31/2009 with increased revision numbers. Other vendors affected include Cisco, SpamAssassin.

ISC:

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7870

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7873

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/The-year-2010-is-causing-I…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/symantec_y2k10_bug/

Yesterday was quite entertaining. I spoke on the phone with a pimp late in the day about a contract at a former client site of mine. This pimp was obviously not a native and was subbing work through the industry bottom feeder, US Tech (they’ve actually managed to take the title away from EDS which should tell you just how low the firm is.)

The hilarious part of the conversation wasn’t hearing from the pimp, but rather hearing a voice which was obviously not from the midwest of the USA lament about how the off-shoring and influx of illegals had trashed billing rates and slaughtered the quality industry wide. He received hundreds of positions every day he didn’t bother to post or work because the billing rates were so low you could only get someone that would end up putting you in prison via the sponsorship clause. (For those who don’t understand that, some time around the time of the Patriot Act the rules changed for sponsorship. If you sign on the line for someone who is caught planning or committing an act of terror against the country or the people you get the same sentence they do. If they get the death sentence, you’ll be the very next person strapped into the chair on that very same day.)

I found it odd that someone, who obviously knew his company made money with these people, would be so dead set against even working the positions. At least I found it odd until we got around to discussing my working on a 1099 basis only. He hem-hawed around about really prefering W-2, but finally admitted they could work 1099. They just had to fill out a bunch of paperwork for their lawyers because of some recent problems.

Ah, the truth starts to leak. Why haven’t we heard it on the news? I guess, indirectly we did. There were some business announcement about tax collections being up this year without any explanation as to why. Now, the truth has slipped out. Plane load after plane load of IT and other “consultants” have been coming here for years on tourist visas which do not allow for income generating work to be done. Well, a few firms finally got caught. You see, the tourist workers just plucked a company name out of the air without getting an EIN (Employer Identification Number), because they couldn’t.

Well, somebody slipped up and tried to issue a W-9 to one of these people. The IRS came to visit. The IRS went to a judge and got all of their payroll records for the past N years. The IRS collected all of the taxes on every person they had issued a check to, even if that person had already paid the taxes. It was a pay us now and fight to get your money back later situation. When the IRS got done collecting taxes and issuing fines, they sent all of the information they had gathered over to the Department of Immigration and Naturalization. When INS showed up it wasn’t a free visit either. I didn’t hear it from him, but there were a few contracts which suddenly re-opened within a few days of the INS visit as the people working on-site had to leave.

You’ve heard me complain for years about the incestuous relationship these off-shore companies have. When one of them gets a contract, the automated subbing network is so large that they all have the contract and are all trying to take a $5/hr cut. Well, the IRS is currently “following the family love trail”. If you watch postings on DICE it is pretty entertaining. You can almost chart the progress of the IRS. Off-shore companies which always flagged things CON_IND are suddenly updating positions to flag them CON_W2 or FULL_TIME. You can pretty much chart the day the IRS arrived.

Since none of those people could legally work here, none of them paid taxes. When they got sick they went to the emergency room and the taxpayer, not the off-shore consulting company, picked up the tab. Well, the bill is coming due. Guido and Vic are making the rounds and suddenly IRS collections are way up for the year.

I must confess that I was deeply saddened to learn that David Tennant would not be continuing as “the doctor” in Doctor Who. As a young kid, I was never that into Doctor Who. When the new series came about, I must tell you that I was less than impressed with the actor they had playing “the Doctor”. I watched some of the episodes because the scripts were so well done, but I couldn’t call myself a fan.

Things changed dramatically when they brought in David Tennant. I had no idea who he was or that he was even in the Royal Shakespeare company, let alone that he played Hamlet for them. The first thing to change was my buying of the premise. David’s acting ability is such that he was on screen for less than a minute and already I was simply along for the ride.

A few episodes into the new doctor I noticed that the level of writing for the show was skyrocketing. The scripts kept going farther and pushing the actors and they kept rising to the challenge. I must admit that I only “liked” the Rose Tyler character. Perhaps because the “wholesome blonde from a bad part of town” angle of her character seemed a bit cliché, perhaps because it was a bit too obvious everyone was trying to push for a love story with that character.

Then the writers introduced Donna Noble. What a treasure of a character! The chemistry between her and the doctor was simply could not be written into a script. During the all of the finally specials you heard several times people saying that David Tennant was an actor without limits. While I agree with that statement whole heartedly, I think a good many of the people saying such things failed to notice that Doctor Donna kept in locked step with the Doctor throughout her existence in the series.

It’s a horrible thing to watch the end of such a magnificent pairing and an even more tragic thing to see a young and brilliant actor walk away from such a remarkable show. I understand being young and wanting to branch out into other things. I also understand wanting to go out on top, rather than riding a once loved series all the way to the bottom as so many have done before. Speaking as one who is long in the tooth, at some point in the not too distant future, the energy of youth will fade and one will look back fondly on this time wondering why they didn’t try to make it last just a little longer.

One must pity any actor who thinks they can fill the shoes of David Tennant or that they will be given a companion character like Donna Noble or an actor (actress) like Cathrine Tate to play the role. Speaking as a published author who has never written screen play, I have to ask, where do the writers go after having written for David and Cathrine for so long? Do you continue lunging forward setting up the replacement for a spectacular flame out in just a couple of episodes or do you pull back to the level of writing we saw with the first new Doctor when I wasn’t a fan?

I am going to miss the Doctors without limits. Their particular DVD set may find its way into my collection.

I can’t read the following article without thinking they must have been hearing the opening bell from AC/DC’s “ Highway to Hell” throughout this entire demonstration.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Microsoft-shows-off-Windows-apf-68417458.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=4&asset=&ccode=

MickeyWare has failed each and every time it has pushed a tablet onto the public. Bloated software and bad design cannot be compensated for by marketing. I’ve been there since the beginning. Early in my DOS days I was writing route auditing systems for Waste Management using the GridPad computer and proprietary pen based OS. Try as Tandy might, they couldn’t speed up the interface enough to compensate for the fact it had an 8086 running under it. Probably the worst thing they ever did was to allow for the display of graphics because management wanted every button to have a bitmap once they found that out. Adding insult to injury was the fact we had what amounted to EEPROM cards for both software and data storage. The combination of these two things made every screen paint horribly slow.

This isn’t the first time MickeyMouse Ware has tried to push a tablet on us. Anyone reading this old enough to remember when PenWindows came out? http://danbricklin.com/tabletcomputing.htm It is nice to see that not much has changed since that blog was written in 2002. What is more impressive is the fact we have seen nearly every computer manufacturer drop one of these turds onto the market and, without exception, they have all failed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer Just take a look at the long list of convertible PCs at the end of that article. I’m not even certain the list is complete, but I remember the hype surrounding each one of those products as the plopped into the toilet of life.

The convertible was always the holy grail for hardware designers. In theory this allowed you to satisfy your existing notebook base while grabbing new sales territory. In reality, they simply polluted landfills faster. That flexy-twisty spot used some form of cable in every design and the cables always broke.

We shall see if Apple has figured it out. Microsoft is obviously a has been company given the joint announcement they had with HP about yet another market turd this week. They had to be rushing to have a conference in front of Apple just so they could try to make it sound like they didn’t attempt a cheap imitation of yet another Apple rip-off. Anyone remember Zune???

I’m willing to be Apple got it right. I’m willing to bet they ditched the “convertible” idea completely and simply provided extra USB and/or PS/2 ports on the side of a razor thin table. You see, today’s “gear kids” already go through keyboards like an older generation went through Boones Farm wine. Not only do they keep multiple keyboards laying around at the various places they tend to work (as do most business travellers today), but the younger crowd tends to carry these things in their backpack. http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/5a7f/ I’ve seen them for under $20 in some mail order catalogs. I’ve tried typing on them in a few stores. Definitely not the easiest on the fingers, but you can get through a couple of meetings with them, no problem.

What was once considered an oddity is now considered common place, and that is the true norm of life. I’ve had a habit for years of rotating out keyboards every so many weeks or months, just to break up the monotony of typing. You see, I have to blame Chicony for this. Some time, not long after I bought my AST Premium 286 PC, I bought a Chicony KB-5181 clicky keyboard. That keyboard was the absolute best! It had the perfect spring and it was loud with its clicks. Most of today’s keyboards (even the cheap ones) don’t make any noise, or simply make a plastic rattle when you type fast on them. The 5181 had IBM PS/2 keyboard users telling me I needed a quieter keyboard. (You might still be able to find a PS/2 keyboard to get an idea just how loud the 5181 was.) I moved that keyboard from machine to machine to machine.

The problem was that the old keyboard used a big-DIN connector. I had various adapters to take it down to PS/2, but they all seemed to fail after a while. Finally, it became apparent that the keyboard driver chips on “modern” computers simply wouldn’t support a keyboard that still had an XT/AT switch on the bottom of it. (Yes children, there was a time when you couldn’t move a keyboard from one computer to another without tossing a well hidden DIP switch on the keyboard.)

After having gotten to the point in life where I had to toss that (and the other old big-DIN) keyboards out I had accumulated over the years, I got into the habit of picking up keyboards if I happened to see one for under $12 (usually $6) that seemed to type nice. I was doing my travelling consulting bit then, and the one thing you could always leave out of your gear to save space/weight was a keyboard for your notebook. Oddly enough, there always seemed to be room to bring the keyboard back. I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.

I suppose if I hadn’t gotten into the “cheap keyboard” phase and hadn’t been travelling to client sites I wouldn’t have gotten into the accumulate keyboard phase. I simply would have went out and dropped another $60-$80 on a keyboard I loved and moved it from machine to machine again. Of course, I take computers with me more now that I have a notebook instead of a singer sewing machine to lug around. Unless you are really old, you probably don’t have any concept of what a 38lb portable computer the size of a portable sewing machine looked like. I even had trouble finding a picture on-line. Mine weighed in at 38LBs because I had the 9” color VGA monitor and a whopping 40Meg hard drive with a dual 5.25 and 3.5” floppy drive. Those of us who needed to be able to add cards into our computers (like Digiboard 8 port serial cards or PIO-48 cards to control relays) had no choice. Eventually “ lunch box” computers came out. They weighed less, and as long as you didn’t need to put in a full length ISA card, you could get by with them. All of them had a built in drop down or tilt out keyboard that “could” be used to type on, but most of us also lugged around a keyboard we liked. A lot of vendors now sell “ rugged” versions of these lunch box computers pretty much for the same reason many of us carried a sewing machine.

Before I confuse the younger crowd too much, there were no batteries with either the luggable sewing machine sized or lunch box sized portable computers. You still had a big black standard power cord wadded up in that box which had to find an outlet. You didn’t even think about trying to use such a thing on the plane or a train. In many ways I miss my 486DX laptop from those days. I could use it on a train and running DOS with WordPerfect or a programming text editor it got over 6 hours of battery life…sigh

So, HP and Microsoft are proving once again that they don’t have the vision required to open a can of beer, and the rest of us are waiting for Apple to come out with a tablet that allows a user to hook up their own keyboard if they want it.

There will be a significant business niche for a tablet computer, just not a consumer niche. The GridPad, while ignored by most of the PC trade rags, sold many units to business customers. Developers wrote customized business applications for them, and despite the cost of the units, they were put into the field. Until you think about just how hard it was to keep paper auditing forms clean and legible from inside the cab of a garbage truck, you cannot begin to understand how much money was saved by spending some on the GridPad and the auditing software. The data went straight into the corporate systems once the auditor got back. It wasn’t real time, but it was close enough for then.

I have seen UPS and other delivery companies steer away from pen based and touch screen based computers in their vehicles. Both companies appear to spend quite a bit of money on developing custom hand held computers. Part of me things the government should force both companies into handing some of that technology over to the U.S. Post Office so they could be a little more up to date on the package delivery side. Despite all of the brew-ha-ha you hear during the health care debate, The high end shipping companies don’t seem to have a problem with the Post Office being there. I have physically seen most of them come into my local Post Office to drop off packages for people. It appears the higher end carriers have some kind of arrangement for when shipping is light or doesn’t require signature that they simply drop it off at the local post office for delivery. In other words, the high end shipping companies have found a way to make money using the post office. I suspect the health insurance companies will do the same, much the way we now have Medicare with high end companies providing “supplemental” insurance.

Ah well, sorry, I veered off course there.

At any rate, the TabletPC is not going to be a “ wow gotta have it” product for consumers, especially in a down economy…unless Apple has found a way to get their smart phone to be solid at its current size, but expand to a full tablet with 24” monitor on demand, I don’t see the Tablet being more than a profitable niche. Actually, for Microsoft and HP, it won’t even be that.

From time to time you will add various image files from somewhere on your system as background images. At some point in the future, you may want to understand how to get them out of that combo box list labeled “Picture:” below.

The poor man’s cheat is to simply rename the file from A.JPG to B.JPG and the entry will “appear” to be removed from the list. The truth is, the entry is still there, but only verifiable entries are displayed. The information which populates this particular combo box is squirreled away in the file plasma_disktop_appletsrc. Under Karmic Koala (9.10) KUbuntu it can be found under .kde/share/config. Please note that the leading “.” is actually part of the name and indicates a hidden directory. If you are going to search for this file from Dolphin you need to turn on the little checkbox which tells Dolphin to show hidden files.

Once you have opened the file in your favorite text editor, you need to search for userswallpapers. That is the variable which contains the full path and file name of every item which will show up in that combo box. Simply delete the entry or entries you wish to remove.

We all get these phone calls. Well, this week I got another one. Here’s how the phone call went:

Caller ID: (312)-646-7089

Caller: this is blah from blah-blah-blah. I see you have some Linux in your background and I’m looking for a good Linux person, do you have time to talk?

Me: I’m kind of busy now, but, what is it you are looking for?

Caller: Well I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about your background and seeing if you were keeping yourself open for new opportunities.

Me: What is it you are looking for?

Caller: Well, as I stated, I’m looking for someone that is good with Linux and I saw you had some Linux in your background. Are you good with Linux?

Me: What do you mean by good?

Caller: You have a good day now. <click>

I expect these types of phone calls when it sounds like the person on the other end of the line has American English as their fourth or fifth language, not when the person sounds like they were born here. This guy obviously has about thirty two seconds of total IT experience and is trying to make a living with it. Anyone who actually understands the very first thing about IT knows just how absurd this guy sounds. They also know that this is the last person who should be recruiting geeks on the phone.

Since it appears that there are a lot of people working in HR for corporations, and as technical recruiters for consulting firms, let me add a few minutes to your education so you don’t sound like such a genetic misfit when you call a geek on the phone.

Linux is an Operating System. When it is actually running on a computer the combination of operating system and hardware are called a platform. “Good with Linux” is not a job title, it is a sub-requirement of an actual requirement. When you call up a geek and ask them if they are “good with Linux”, if they are even remotely qualified to fill the position you are trying to fill, they are going to ask you “what do you mean by good” or “what is it you’re looking for” or, they might choose to let you know just how far out your ass you are speaking by asking “what is it you are really looking for?”

Job Titles for geeks tend to include: Business Analyst, Technical Analyst, Technical Writer, Programmer, Programmer Analyst, Systems Analyst, Systems Administrator, Performance Analyst, Security Admin., etc. Each of these open requirements could have a sub-requirement of “good with Linux”, however, the definition of good is relevant to the skill set required for the actual job title. “Good with Linux” is a completely different set of skills when you are talking about a Programmer verses a Systems Analyst. A programmer needs to know about various tools, libraries, and languages for the development of software on the platform. The required set of tools + libraries + languages will be different for each and every shop looking for a programmer that is “good with Linux.” You cannot just drop a C++ Qt programmer into a Python Gtk shop.

Likewise, “good with Linux” has completely different definitions for Systems Administrators at a shop to shop level. It doesn’t matter if the “good with Linux” Systems Administrator you are talking with is a living god with the Tivoli tool set if the shop that put out the requirement doesn’t use Tivoli.

I didn’t publish the name of the person, or the company name, mainly because I didn’t bother to remember them. Caller ID helped out with the phone number though. Hopefully, the waste of oxygen who called me will read this, for it will exponentially increase their value in the universe.

I’m sure they eventually found someone that claimed to be “good with Linux.” I’m sure they presented that candidate with a glowing report. I’m also absolutely certain the time each client site manager spent reading that resume was nothing more than minutes of their life they will never get back.