January 2007

There were 56 posts published in January 2007 (this is page 5 of 6).

Net10 Update

Thought I’d give y’all an update on my switch to Net10 for cellphone service. I’ve literally spent over 4 painful hours on their tech support line but everything is now settled and working.

Why did it take 4 hours? An MVNO like Net10 uses a hosting cellphone company’s network and voicemail (in Net10’s case, Cingular). The MVNO provides all the customer handholding itself. To minimize costs, Net10 of course oursources its front-line support to Belize. To gain even greater savings, Net10 uses VoIP links to Belize. Thus, when one calls their support, you have network latency issues, dropped packets, AND a cultural barrier in addition to the language barrier.

The folks on the other end are polite and are as professional as they could be. Gosh darn it, they really do seem to want to help. Unfortunately, the bad connections and cultural divide are hurdles just too high to overcome. When you provide information to them, they repeat it back to you digit by unending digit. Providing them a twenty-digit IMEI number (in other words, the phone’s serial number) is an exercise in insanity.

I also hear them say “I’m waiting for my system” quite a lot. At first I played along and assumed their call center had sucky Internet connectivity. After my last call, though, I realized the agent is simply plugging my complaint into an internal search engine and the wait is for the result. I’ll tell you more about that call in a moment.

I ordered a refurbished Motorola V171 from their website for $50. It’s a great deal: phone plus 300 minutes for 50 bucks. My only beef was the phone didn’t seem loud enough for driving around in my noisy Honda CR-V. I called them back and got an RMA for the phone. They quickly had a postage-paid box shipped to my house and a new phone in my hands, only it wasn’t the phone I asked for. It was another V171 when I asked to try a Nokia phone. The rep had noted my call as “phone defective,” rather than actually listening to what I was asking. The mighty search-engine strikes again! Fortunately, I found that I’d only thought I’d turned the phone’s volume all the way up but it still had a few notches to go. When I upped the volume everything was golden.

For a while I had two cellphones. To avoid paying outrageous forwarding fees to $print, I put an “extended absence” message on that phone’s voicemail, directing callers to my Net10 phone. I then went about the issue of porting my old number to my new phone.

Here’s where the fun really began. On November 30th I spent another one of my hours talking to the Net10 rep to get this porting done. They put in the paperwork and told me I’d be getting a new SIM card for the port (which also entails reprogramming all your phone book entries, by the way). The only problem is, Sprint ported the number and Net10 never sent me my SIM card. Callers to my old number were sent to hyperspace while I wondered when my “any day now” SIM card would arrive.

Time marched on. Lives were born and lost. Planet Earth sailed farther around the sun. I got sick of waiting and burned another hour on the phone. “It has already been mailed,” yada yada yada. Give them a few more days.

Kelly goes through the porting routine herself. When her card doesn’t arrive as promised, she lets the rep have a piece of her mind. Somehow she gets a native English speaker on the line. The next day, her new SIM card is in her hands. While she’s on the line with the clueful rep, she helpfully has them ship a new card out to me, too. Saturday before Christmas was the promised arrival day.

Of course that didn’t happen. The day after Christmas the card finally arrived. Finally I had all the parts to do the port. Another frustrating telephonic visit to Belize and I had my familiar cellphone number on my new phone. All seemed good, right?

Wrong. The new SIM card had no voicemail number programmed into it so I didn’t know how to retrieve my messages.

Friday was my last communication with my friends in Belize. After reading and rereading the zillion-digit IMEI number and explaining at least four times that I simply needed to know which number to dial to retrieve voice mail, I heard the clueless rep begin reading the script for resetting the voicemail password. WTF?!?

“I’m sorry,” I said politely but curtly. “I don’t think you’ll be able to help me. Goodbye.” I hung up the phone before strongly considering hurling it across the room.

Here’s when I finally got wise. Net10 is owned by TracFone, a Miami-based company. Their letterhead has their corporate number on it, which can also be used for support. I called it and got a cheerful American voice on the first ring. In another moment, I was speaking with an American tech who not only corrected all the problems introduced by her Belize counterparts, she waited on the line while she hustled the Cingular rep through the process of setting up my voicemail. Only when she had verified the voicemail was working did she let me go, and by this time it was closing on 6 PM on a Friday. In other words, their internal support did an outstanding job, in contrast to their well-meaning but hopeless outsourced call center.

So where does that leave me? It was a lot of pain to get here, but I’m now satisfied with my service. I love not paying for my phone when I’m not using it, I can carry minutes over for a whole year, and if something fancier catches my eye I have no draconian contracts locking me in. I can think of little reason to call Net10’s support department again now that things are set up, so the earlier bumps don’t really concern me. Especially now that I know which number to call.

This MVNO stuff is frontier-type stuff. It can be frustrating and bewildering. If you know what you’re doing, though, you can get the same service coverage and features that you’re using now for a fraction of the cost. To me that’s worth a little bit of trouble.

Highlights of 2006 Number 6: Take My Kodachrome, Please!

I’ve rediscovered a passion of mine long left dormant. It’s photography, and digital photography is what’s inspired me. Sure, we’ve had a digital camera (a Canon Powershot S50) for years now. While I enjoyed its compact size and resolution, its fixed lens was uninspiring and the shutter delay made capturing the moment a frustrating experience.

The big break came when my employer sent me to Australia for two weeks. I couldn’t go without taking pictures, nor could I leave the family without a means of taking pictures. We finally agreed to get a Nikon D50 to augment our Canon Powershot. In an ironic twist, the Powershot mysteriously stopped working a few weeks later.

I have fallen in love with the D50. It takes beautiful pictures so quickly that snapping the shutter is like a hit of crack: you just can’t stop! I take my camera with me practically whereever I go, looking for that once-in-a-lifetime shot.

I took two weeks’ worth of beautiful pictures in Austalia, although it resulted in an altercation I still don’t fully understand. I toted it to Holland a month later. Finally I could share the beauty of my travels with the folks at home.

I shot wondrous pictures at the America’s Sail event in Beaufort this spring. I arrived the day before most ship tours but landed quite a few pictures of the host of honor, Beaufort’s own privateer, Horatio Sinbad. Which reminds me that I owe him some pictures . . .

I took my camera to Artsplosure this summer, too, little knowing it would result in controversy. As we were finishing up our tour, I heard a Squirrel Nut Zippers song playing at a nearby stage and snapped some pictures of the Maxwell/Mosher band warming up. In my blog entry I made note of how N & O music critic David Menconi’s recent story about the band’s breakup made them sound like . . . well, dicks. Well, the bandmates surf the net with the best of them and zeroed in on my blog, unloading on me with their side of the story. Either I touched a big nerve or the guys were looking for a place to vent. Or both, who knows? Once the lead had stopped flying I was left a bit bewildered at it all but was happy to provide a forum for their side. My blog still gets a ton of hits for that entry, so much so that I disabled comments. Menconi’s blog entry still links to my site as an example of the bad blood among the former Zippers.

I took my camera to our family beach vacation. In spite of the comical scene of herding the Turner clan around the beach for a few family pictures, I got two job offers from spectators to shoot pictures for them. I took one of them up on their offer the next day. I turned 15 minutes and 100 pictures into a handful of cash and some unforgettable mementos of a family’s beach visit.

Seeing the pictures of the Raleigh Flickr group have inspired me to take my photography much more seriously. As a fine musical instrument inspires a musician to play better music, so does a fine camera inspire a photographic artist.

Highlights of 2006 Number 7: Health

In 2006 I began to take my own health and well-being more seriously than before. I’ve not exactly been leading a reckless lifestyle! Just that now I want to feel good all the time.

I’ve traditionally been averse to going to the doctor unless I was really sick. Now I don’t wait. Some infrequent but annoying health issues have driven me back to the doctor when in the past I would have toughed it out. Overall I feel great.

This spring saw me engage in a stretch of continuous exercise that I’d not had in a while. When it began to get light enough in the mornings, I would get up early and ride 5-6 miles around the greenways near my house. I would ride at least twice a week, sometimes more, and kept it up right until it got dark again in the mornings. It felt great to look up at the sun rising right in the middle of my ride. It was safe riding on the roads, too, at that time of day. It’s usually too early for drivers to be yapping on their cellphones.

I saw most of the same faces on the greenway path; people whom I’d look forward to seeing and miss when I didn’t. I also dodged a menagere of killer deer and assassin rabbits, who always waited until the last second to jump in front of me. And I lived to tell about it, something the rabbits may not be able to claim now that hawks have moved into the neighborhood.

On weekends, sometimes the whole family would join in. Nothing gets you in shape faster than doing the routine you always do but dragging 100 pounds behind you!

I do a lot of good thinking while riding. Sometimes I come up with innovative new product ideas.

Since its gotten dark in the mornings I haven’t been out. I miss it. My resting heart rate was in the 50s, prompting nurses to ask if I was an athlete. My heart rate is still in the low 60s and my blood pressure is good (122/70) but I don’t feel the same energy as I did when I was riding. I’d like to put myself into shape for riding one of the long local bike rides, like the MS 150.

I will rededicate myself to cycling (and other exercise) in 2007. This may be the year Kelly gets certified in scuba (and I get recertified).

Google’s Foothold in Chapel Hill

Looks like the mystery is now solved about the Google plane being spotted at RDU last year. Google has bought a Chapel Hill start-up called Skia.

It’s amazing how quiet this acquisition has been in the year since it occured. I guess when you’re a search engine company, you are well aware that what you say and write gets archived somewhere.

Kudos to Fred Stutzman for his work in putting the final pieces together. Continue reading →

Reading Meters

I spent one day out of the recent holidays taking measurements of our electric power usage at near-hourly intervals. This involved going outside and walking around to the meter to read whatever number was flashing at the time. While I got good data, obviously it isn’t convenient to step outside all the time. (And before you say it, yes I’m a hopeless geek. Deal with it!)

I know the meter can be queried via from the street, so I did some research on how this works. Apparently the meter (an Itron Centron) transmits as a Part 15 (i.e., unlicensed) device on the 900MHz band. It uses spread-spectrum frequency hopping over 50 channels, a fact that makes it somewhat difficult (but not impossible) to zero in on the data stream. However, the channels are published and span 909.6 Mhz through 921.8 MHz, well within the range of my scanner.

Thus, my idea of Do It Yourself Meter Reading (also described here)may be possible, after all. I haven’t found any description of the data stream, nor if its encrypted, so I do not know what information is available nor how to decode it. One step at a time, though.

Interestingly enough, the frequencies the electric meters use are right in the middle of the amateur radio 33cm band. Being licensed operators, hams thus have priority on these frequencies. I wonder how long it will be before reports surface about interference on this band?

Success Using Cups With Openslug

Warning: multiple buzzwords ahead! I don’t call this category X-Geek for nothing! 🙂

I finally got my NSLU2 running CUPS with Openslug!

I had to install the CUPS packages from the Unslung distribution. Then the battle was the SSL-fu needed to generate a certificate, since CUPS likes to use HTTPS connections for doing admin stuff.

The final hurdle, which just was overcome this morning, was adding a USB printer kernel module. I downloaded the Openslug sources last night and compiled the kernel module. Adding it this morning to my NSLU2 was all CUPS needed to see the printer.

The very, very last hurdle (actually) was adding the printer’s PPD file, so CUPS knew how to print to it. I dug that out of the printer’s install CD and installed it with little effort.

I’ve now turned my $80 Linksys NSLU2 network-attached-storage (NAS) device into not just an NAS but also a USB print server. Plus I learned a little about embedded Linux in the process, which is the best part of all. I’ve discovered you really can have a full-featured Linux server for less than 100 bucks.

Now to decide how else I can add to its usefullness. I’ve heard of an iTunes-compatible server running on the NSLU2, so maybe I need to explore that next.

King George Claims Right To Open Mail Without Warrant

While everyone else was enjoying their holidays, the Grinch … er, George W. Bush decided to expand his powers yet again, this time claiming the right to open mail without a warrant. He asserted this right with one of his dubious signing statements upon the signing of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.

“The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

“You have to be concerned,” a senior U.S. official agreed. “It takes executive-branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known.”

Bush is acting like a spoiled brat who, when told by his parents to do something, says “that’s fine, but I’m going to do it my way, anyway.” Apparently the law does not apply to him. I’m not sure I really want to see the nation bogged down in another presidential impeachment, but someone, somewhere needs to hold this idiot accountable.

Come to think about it, isn’t that what the Supreme Court is supposed to be doing? Why isn’t it doing its job?

Massive Traffic Enforcement Effort on I-540

Watch your speed on the Outer Loop this afternoon. I counted at least 6 Raleigh Police cruisers pulling people over left and right on the westbound lanes west of U.S. 70. There were at least four unlucky drivers being ticketed as I drove by.

Buckle up and drive safely, y’all.

Jimmy V

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”

– Jim Valvano
Reynolds Coliseum
21 February 1993