Squirrel, please!
Hilarious Sony PSP ad…
Archive for March, 2006
Activating the new toy, er, phone
Got my new Nokia 6682 last night in the mail. Sweet. Now, to get it activated so I can slap that bad-ass Yahoo! Go on it…
The instructions that came in the box, are, no surprise, only valid if you are a new customer, not if the phone is an upgrade. Of course, they don’t mention that anywhere in the materials. Why they explicitly ship you this instruction sheet if it is certain not to work in your situation, is a mystery to me.
The real instructions come in email, which is fine. They say to visit a page at the Cingular site, so I do. Nice! I fill in all the info, click submit to activate… wait… wait… and end up with a new page, at the url https://www.cingular.com/activations/upgrade_select?noError=Y (notice the “noError=Y”, which is definitely something only a developer would do), and the following text:
Page Not Found
Sorry, there is no Cingular.com page matching your request. It is possible you typed the address incorrectly, or that the page no longer exists.
You may find what you are looking for in the Sitemap
Sweet, so activating a phone gives a 404 basically? With “noError=Y”. I like it! Classic Cingular. Just to push my luck, I tried hitting ‘back’ and resubmitting the form… same thing. Maybe the phone’s actually activated?? Doesn’t seem like it. I still get “SIM card failed registration” on the phone. OK, on to the “call their 800 number” method. I do that, which actually turns out to be pretty painless, as it’s a full IVR system, and no human interaction or hold time was required. It claims turn off the device, wait 20 minutes, turn it on and it’ll work within 5 minutes. OK, I’m game… dammit, now I don’t even want to wait 20 minutes, because the install of the Nokia suite of software on the PC, is asking me to connect the phone! Patience has never been one of my strong suits. OK, 20 minutes passed, and it’s on the network, yay! Now, just slog through the usual batch of Windows warning dialogs to install the Nokia drivers… remind myself how nontechnical people would be completely lost at this point, going through the New Hardware Wizard 6 times…
Cingular even seems to have added the MEdia Net unlimited (stupid name) to my account already. Let the packets flow! I’ll take away 1 evil point for turning around that provisioning quickly.
More info on Yahoo! Go shortly…
I think my new UPS sucks.
So I bought a UPS at Fry’s the other night (ironically, at the same time the power was going out at my house!) for the RAID box in the garage. None of the sub-$100 UPSes seemed to have official support for Linux from a software standpoint, and obviously that’s a big deal since I want it to shutdown cleanly in the case of power failure. I also wanted line conditioning, as the outlet I’m plugged into is right next to the washer and dryer, and although it’s likely a different circuit (haven’t tested this yet though), I’m sure when the dryer kicks on it could cause voltage fluctuation nearby.
So anyhow, it seems $70 was about the cheapest for line conditioning, and I didn’t want to spend much more, because I don’t care about lots of sustained wattage–after all, this is just a mostly-idly headless Athlon XP, and that’s it; I don’t want a giant UPS just to keep it running long enough to safely power down in the really rare occasion we have an outage (so far we’ve only had one in the 15 months we’ve lived in this unit.) I ended up buying the Belkin F6C550-AVR with USB connectivity. It’s got a nice form factor, reasonable power capacity, and votage conditioning. I figured, there’s gotta be a opensource driver/daemon for the monitoring of this baby, right? Certainly there must be standard protocols these things speak, if not straight ASCII… wrong.
It turns out, the UPS landscape is a fractitious, highly proprietary place. Basically NO company makes one with a simple serial ASCII protocol, it’s all binary (well, OK I can understand that), unpublished (for shame), and inconsistent. There are some projects for opensource support of monitoring various devices, the best of which seems to be NUT (Network UPS Tools), partially funded by one of the enterprise UPS players (short tutorial on NUT with Fedora here.) But the Belkin support is pretty slim, and it doesn’t look like the one I bought even has much monitorability beyond “hey, the power’s about to go out” and “my battery’s dead”. This just won’t do. I was about to pack it up and head back to Fry’s, but decided I really could use another UPS for the Tivo etc., anyhow, and I don’t care about the monitoring aspect for that (ok, also the box is kind of heavy and I didn’t want to go through Fry’s Return Line of Hell–in other words, the tactic works–they’ve helped convince me to keep it to avoid the hassle of the return process. Damn you, Fry’s!)
This time I’m going to be smarter about it and do more research up front, like I usually do. I just didn’t think UPSes would be (could be!) that big a deal to get support for. The NUT folks have a compatibility chart, so I think I’ll try to pick something from the intersection of that list and upcoming / current deals on Techbargains. Feh!
The Amazing Race 9: Brokeback Edition
OK, seriously, it seems like almost every team on the new season of The Amazing Race is gay. Or gayish. NTTAWWT, it just seems strange to me. I usually root for the “recognized minority” team, and so far the African-American couple looks like a contender, so I’ll stick with them at least for a while. My second favorite is usually the token old folks team, but the ones this year are so freakin’ whiny and incompetent I can’t get behind them–and almost no one else seems able to wind up behind them either. I actually think the surf bums are running well. If last season taught us anything (besides Never Do Another Family Edition Because It’s Lame), it’s that a positive attitude and brawn go a long way in the race. These guys, so far, have both on their side.
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