Friday, November 14, 2008

Project Beansprout Successful

Our star is born. We're delighted to inform you of the arrival of Tara Shriram Fisler. The baby is well, the mother is recovering, and the father is trying to not get in the way.

For photographs, and for our AFQ (Anticipated Frequent Questions) on various naming issues, please see the Web page (natch).

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Stumbling at the Door

Update:

I ordered my G1 about a week ago. Google said it would be available on the 10th. There was no mail delivery yesterday; it arrived in the mail today (12th). Good.

I try to connect. It won't connect. After 10 minutes with customer service we discover it's because Google has failed to activate my data plan. Customer service agrees it's pretty dumb to sell a phone that requires a data plan without one. She thinks someone forgot to hit “Save”.

I'm slightly confused because, a day after I placed the order, I got a text message from Google informing me of the plan change. Anyway.

Incidentally, without the data plan working, you cannot use the phone at all. Period.

So, I have the phone in a completely non-functional state.

I ask whether I can connect using my home WiFi. After a few rounds with the rep, it becomes clear she has no idea whatsoever what the question really means; additional questions about this yield increasingly garbled answers.

Along the way, she lets slip that yesterday, apparently no Android phones were working at all. But she reassures me that at least they're all working again today.

I am not reassured.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Happiness is...

...a bike ride in the fall. A slight mist, perfect temperature, glowing trees, and a carpet of leaves. Post-ride, after wiping the water, sand, and organic muck off my bike, I was still left with tires wrapped in the glory of autumn.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Thursday, October 16, 2008

The G Stands for Goodbye

Over the past few weeks I've been getting progressively worse connection quality from Google Mail (GMail). Then, as of yesterday morning, about 24 hours ago, it stopped working entirely, giving me a 502 error.

Now, this isn't the first time GMail has gone AWOL. About two years ago, I had GMail disappear for one day, then two, then three...and then it came back for a few hours, then disappeared again for about three more days, for a total of nearly a week. I even wrote to some high-ups I know at Google, but to no avail.

But those were presumably growing pains. This one is a bit harder to take. Especially when the error message says to try again in 30 seconds, but their support site says it's expected to be out until about 6pm Pacific time today—that would be a total of eighteen hours of outage.

Maybe you're stretching a bit too thin, Google.