Rant on Evan Hoffman

Frustrations with the iPhone, from an Apple admirer

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:44:46 +0000

I got my first “smart” phone, a BlackBerry Pearl, in 2007. I got it from LetsTalk.com for $0.00 with a 2-year AT&T contract. It was EDGE-only - no 3G - and certainly had a lot of problems, but I loved it. At some point the ball fell out of it and it became unusable. The iPhone 3G was out by that time and I ended up getting my wife an iPhone 3G for Mother’s Day in 2009 and one for myself a few weeks later. I pretty much fell in love with the iPhone, and my concern about the on-screen keyboard was negated by having a real web browser after suffering with Blackberry’s for so long. And 3G was an amazing step up from EDGE speeds.

Tall Ships - Greenport, NY - May 26, 2012

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 21:48:00 +0000

We decided to go to the Tall Ships festival in Greenport a couple of weeks ago, and I found a deal the LIRR was running where the cost of a round-trip train ticket & admission to the ships cost $10.50, whereas buying the admission ticket alone cost around $15. Plus, this way we could park in Riverhead and not have to worry about parking in Greenport during a fair. Seemed like a great idea.

Compellent "future proof?" Not so much.

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:39:33 +0000

So, I’ve written about Compellent a few times from a price perspective, mostly on the disk side. I was recently contacted by our vendor with quotes for two new Compellent controllers. “What’s this all about?” I asked. “Why don’t we have a call with Compellent to discuss?” he replied. I rolled my eyes a little but figured it was worth hearing them out, since our Compellent SAN is at the heart of our infrastructure.

Verizon stood me up

Sun, 15 May 2011 12:00:51 +0000

Several weeks ago, I scheduled the FiOS install for 5/14/2011 and they said it would be between 8am and 5pm. I got confirmation emails (welcome to FiOS) and a confirmation call on 5/12. I waited all day yesterday for Verizon to show, and they never did. I called at 11:58 AM and gave my order number to see if they could tell me roughly what time the tech would be here, since I didn’t want to sit around all day if the tech wouldn’t be there until 4 PM. They couldn’t. They said we were still scheduled for today, between 8 and 5. I asked if they could call the tech scheduled to do the installation and see when he thought he’d get here and I was told they couldn’t.

Does anybody think the USA's current healthcare system isn't awful? Why?

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:16:51 +0000

A crazy late-night rant about the stupid health insurance system in the USA.

I'm pissed.

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:10:41 +0000

Learned something today that pissed me off. Makes me wish I had an anonymous blog so I could actually bitch about it.

I'm pissed.

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:10:41 +0000

Learned something today that pissed me off. Makes me wish I had an anonymous blog so I could actually bitch about it.

One reason I hate iTunes.

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:04:43 +0000

I’ve always hated iTunes. It’s a huge pile of bloatware and it’s slow as poo. It’s like 100 mb or more for an mp3 player. I remember winamp playing mp3s when it was a 500k download. Anyway.

I keep all my music on a Linux machine running samba. This way it’s available to every machine in the house. When I had Winamp on all my machines this was wonderful. But now that I’m forced into iTunes (thanks to having an iPhone), it turns out to be a major pain. In iTunes I unchecked the box for “let iTunes keep my libary organized” to prevent it from copying the entire library to each computer’s local disk. Initially adding my library of ~4000 tracks to iTunes takes over an hour (100 mbit wire) - it would take about 5 minutes in Winamp, even reading the ID3 tags for each track as it was added (rather than lazily as the song was played).

A less insidious way to use Facebook?

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:58:19 +0000

I deactivated my Facebook account a couple of months ago. I just kind of got tired of seeing silly updates from friends and “friends” - people I’d friended but wasn’t really friends with. I was also frustrated by the privacy implications of using such a service: you tell it about yourself, you tell it about who you know and how you know them, you keep adding more information about you and your friends to its huge brain that it’s free to use or abuse however it wants.

Oh, Compellent... again with the disk prices.

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:57:04 +0000

Time to expand the SAN again.

I planned and budgeted for this this year but it still pisses me off. Look, I realize these guys have to make money, but the bottom line is they’re charging over $1.40/GB for SATA storage. There are 7200 RPM 2TB SATA drives on Amazon and Newegg ranging in price from $130 to $220. That’s as low as $0.065/GB. There was even a 2TB WD “Green” drive (sub-7200 RPM, I think 5900 RPM) on Slickdeals today for $99. That’s 5 cents per gig.

The sinister side of Google's Picasa face tagging

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:34:53 +0000

So, let me start by saying that I love Picasa, Google’s photo organization tool. It automatically finds new photos as you add them to your hard drive. It lets you crop pictures, remove red-eye, adjust colors and make a few other basic edits that cover probably 95% of what most people need to do when editing photos. It lets you select a few photos from your library and email them to anyone with just a couple of clicks. It also integrates with Google Earth and Google Maps to show you on a map where a particular photo was taken (for those unaware, GPS-enabled cameras, including many mobile phone cameras [e.g., iPhone] embed your GPS coordinates within the EXIF metadata of the photo, so any person, program or website with access to the image will know the location at which it was taken).

The sinister side of Google's Picasa face tagging

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:34:53 +0000

Vonage iPhone App Calls Facebook Friends Free, So What?

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:59:58 +0000

Lots of outlets seem to have picked up the story about the new Vonage iPhone app that lets you call your Facebook friends free. I don’t understand why this is even newsworthy. There are a bunch of free VOIP apps for iPhone already, with Skype being the one that comes to mind first. But a couple of other things have me scratching my head about this story:

AT&T doesn’t offer the unlimited data plan for iPhone anymore, so this “free” call could end up being pretty expensive over 3G.
If you’re making a call to another friend with the iPhone app, then your friend probably has an iPhone. They’re also probably also on AT&T, so a regular voice call to them would be free anyway. So just call them?

This might make more sense to me if your friend is outside the US, or they come out with a similar app for other platforms, but even then… so what? Free VOIP calls aren’t new. Is it just the Facebook tie-in? I don’t get the buzz. Maybe it’s because I have 5,000 rollover minutes with AT&T.

Microsoft Office 2007's awful user interface

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:48:49 +0000

Office 2007 is pretty old by now, and I know much has been written on the move from a “normal” looking app to the “Ribbon” UI. I personally hate the change and feel Microsoft just changed the UI as a way to make the application look “different” so that people will look at it and go “oooh, shiny!” and not feel as bad about being forced into another $400 upgrade of a word processor. Sure, Excel’s row limit was finally raised beyond 64k, and I’m sure there were some other tweaks, but .docx? .xlsx? Yet more file formats, ensuring most businesses will feel compelled to upgrade. If your clients are upgrading, you’re going to have to.

Microsoft Office 2007's awful user interface

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:48:49 +0000

I may never buy a Windows computer again

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:16:41 +0000

I guess it’s not really a fair comparison since I’m running 32-bit Windows XP, but it strikes me as mildly retarded how much better my stupid $350 Mac Mini performs than my ~$1000 desktop. The Mac has a Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz CPU with 1 gig ram and an 80 gig HD, running 10.5.6 (or something). My desktop is a 3.0 GHz Wolfdale with 4 gigs ram and a 1 TB 7200 RPM sata drive. The Mac isn’t super speedy but it seems more responsive in everything except iTunes, and that’s probably due to all the MP3s being served off my ancient Linux box (over G wireless). Actually, I still completely detest iTunes, and think Winamp is about the perfect MP3 player. But anyway, the stuff you can do “for free” on a Mac is pretty amazing. I haven’t played with iMovie or a bunch of the other programs yet, but even just Expose is pretty remarkable.

The SAN Scam

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:03:11 +0000

It’s time to buy some more disks for the SAN we have at work. The SAN is made by Compellent and we’ve had it for a year and it’s been great. One of the selling points was the ability to add disks however we wanted - one at a time is possible, which apparently isn’t the case with other SAN products. The one we looked at from LeftHand expanded by purchasing entire nodes, so the incremental cost was pretty high. Compellent seemed to have a higher initial cost but cheaper incrementally.

Evan's Semi-complete Aimster Saga

Sun, 02 Sep 2001 05:33:37 +0000

The following was written by me in my Slashdot journal on September 02, 2001. I have not edited it since then except for formatting. This is long and rambling and will likely have parts that make no sense. I just finished writing it at 5:33 am right now Sunday morning, so that is my excuse. What’s yours?

In September 2000 I was gearing up to return to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to begin my senior year. To say I wasn’t looking forward to it would be an understatement. I had two courses left in my Computer Science major: Theory of Computation and the “culminating experience,” a course that I guess takes the place of a senior thesis. The most theoretical aspects of Computer Science have never interested me, and since I know that I will never have a use for the vast majority of them. To graduate I still needed to take 8 more classes and none of the offerings were terribly appealing. For the fall term I enrolled in Theory of computation, an econ class, and a government class (the standard courseload is 3 classes). I wasn’t terribly thrilled with any of my classes.