This weekend I learned an important lesson: don’t try to make a double phone switch moments before leaving home for the weekend. The call to Sprint went well enough and she assured me the changes would take effect within 4 hours. They didn’t, of course, because the agent had skipped the important part where I need to reprogram my phone with the new number. She said it wasn’t necessary, so I went along…doh, big mistake. Coming home late Sunday night I discovered the next surprise: Sprint customer service is not open 24/7. On Sundays, for example, they’re only online from…
I recently received an unsolicited offer from a credit card services company asking me to sign up for their affiliate program. It looks like my blog was discovered based on my Nascar postings, because the first card profiled is the Nascar-related Visa. What was interesting to me was the amount of money being offered for these deals. There were a lot of brand-name cards like Discover, Chase, American Express, Bank of America, and so on. You could earn anywhere from $30 – $50 for each card approval. Not too bad for just putting an affiliate link on your website or…
The passing away of John Backus — leader of the team that invented the Fortran programming language — has been making the rounds yesterday and today. I didn’t recognize the name immediately, but it’s been interesting reading up on the history of Fortran and how it was created: Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers…
I know there’s no shortage of bad or weird error dialogs for software these days, but I’m still surprised when I encounter one in real life. Tonight I had to use my daughter’s HP Photosmart printer on our main Windows PC, so we dutifully installed the CD first to pick up all the appropriate drivers. Sure enough, about half way through a maze of several different installation wizards, this beauty showed up, trying to warn us of “issues blocking installation”. Luckily, it seemed to be a red herring, because clicking Continue let the wizard(s) finish, then we were up and…
Amazon’s new web services have been gathering a lot of momentum recently, in particular the Simple Storage Service (S3). I can wrap my head around S3 pretty easily and there’s no shortage of the canonical example of “remote backups“. For me, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was a bit more puzzling and I didn’t really understand what it would be used for. That all changed now that I listed to a recent Technometria episode on IT Conversations with Jeff Barr and Doug Kaye. This is a great show which includes Jeff reviewing the Amazon web services and Doug explaining how…