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.

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.

Stopped by the Velour Rope

For maybe the first time in my life I tried to stand in line for a new product release. And I was thoroughly rebuffed.

T-Mobile's Web site has been dreadfully slow all day. Even their usually clued-in and cheerful customer service staff sound frazzled and not entirely together with it. It must be tough to be popular (but, folks, did you ever consider a little extra provisioning?).

But, I have no phone.

I called to find out why I was being charged USD 299 instead of USD 179 for it. I had been given a hint by JJ: it had to be no less than about 18 months since my last phone upgrade. Well, in fact, I've suffered through this awful RAZR for a few years now...

Oh wait. In April 2007, Kathi and I got new phones. I didn't like mine, so I returned it. I was assured this would reset my upgrade clock.

Well, it didn't. That is, their records show that I bought and returned the phone, and they agree that this resets the clock, and they know I'm eligible for the deeper discount...but they can't set the bit in their system. So my agent suggests I wait until October 22, the date it becomes available to the masses, at which point they can give me the appropriate discount.

In practical terms this makes almost no difference, because the phone doesn't ship until October 22 anyway. Plus, their Web site suggests that the data plan you have to buy takes effect immediately—i.e., you pay for the plan without a phone to use it. Clever.

Because I've never actually engaged in technolust before, I was tempted to plonk down the extra USD 120 anyway. I would have, if I felt charitable towards T-Mobile. But I feel especially uncharitable today because I've lost over half an hour to their site design. This is because there's a point at which, before it confirms your order, it asks you to re-confirm your identity by entering either your SSN or your DOB. I didn't notice the “or”, which is in the typical tiny T-Mobile font size, and entered both. The imbicile who implemented the site saw it fit to reject such users. (Why did this cost me half an hour? Because T-Mobile has both my wife's records and mine on the account, and sometimes wants my information and sometimes hers, so I had to run through every combination...and while I was at it, I also tried out every combination with and without the leading zeroes. On a day when their servers were glacial when they weren't timing out.)

Welcome to the big leagues, T-Mobile. Now get your act together.

Dan Quayle's Secret Occupation

In Yahoo's translation service (formerly Alta Vista's Babel Fish), enter

tomate

and ask for translation from Portuguese to English. It responds with

tomatoe

Given that this problem does not occur when translating from, say, Spanish to English, it suggests that Babel Fish has a separate vocabulary for each pair of languages, rather than an intermediate semantic representation. This would also explain why the set of X-to-Y pairs is fixed.

Google Translate doesn't suffer from this problem. They allow a free choice of source and target languages. From what I can tell, the superior technology they employ to solve this translation problem is to avoid translating anything at all. (Seriously, whether it's their HTML parser or their core translation routine—I haven't invested time to investigate, and I suspect it's the former to blame—their “translator” routinely returns the input unchanged as output.)

Dutch Mountain → Kenyan Mountain?

Nicholas Leong has a dream: to turn Kenyans from Eldoret into professional bicyclists. Since they already vaporize marathon runners in their wake, this is a fairly natural next step. To make his point, he's recruited two riders to climb L'Alpe d'Huez and, hopefully, come close to the record time for the climb. It's a quixotic effort of the kind we'll look back on years later and ask, “Duh! Why didn't someone do that sooner?” So, good on you, Nicholas, and good luck, Zakayo and Mwangi. You'll roast my time, that's for sure.

The Functional Functionary

L.K. Advani is pretty close to my least favorite Indian politician, even after his recent softening. Who would have thought I could find common cause with such a man? And yet, this image, embedded in this article in The Economist, shows him sitting pensively while looming over his left shoulder is...a great big lambda!

It looks a lot closer to the (ugly) Haskell lambda than the (elegant) PLT Scheme lambda. It figures that Advani would have poor taste, and would pick a fundamentalist language.

The What Medal?

It's common in popular writing to use the Nobel Prize as a moniker for acts of genius, usually in a sarcastic way (“that certainly won't earn him a Nobel prize”). So it was with some shock that I saw an article today in the magazine CFO.com (aimed, naturally, at Chief Financial Officers) the following paragraph:

When it comes to rating the technological progress of office equipment, the telephone probably runs a close second to the stapler. Walk in to almost any place of business and you'll see the same rectangular boxes companies have been using for years. The only change has been a proliferation of blinking lights. If this qualifies as advanced technology, then the inventor of Lite-Brite deserves a Fields medal.

Curiously, I could have sworn that the print version (which I leafed through at a restaurant) said “Fields medal”, but the on-line version says “Fields metal”.

I realize financial folks are often quants, but it's still a curious reference.

They're Baaack!

You know summer is over and the Fall semester is in the air when you pass a group of what appear to be Brown students, intensly hunched over around a table, and overhear one of them say:

What I'm wondering is, how long do you have to look before you find an ideology?

Playing to Stereotypes

I was walking around Harvard Square today when I saw a beggar seated on the ground, cardboard placard in front of him, facing the Harvard gates. Something about him looked immediately familiar, though I knew I had no reason to know him. In a second, it registered. He was wearing a Brown (University) t-shirt.

Putting Overheating Computers to Work

For lunch today, I picked up a salad, bread and butter from Au Bon Pain. As usual, the butter was frozen solid: utterly unsuitable for spreading. I flipped over my OQO (pocket-sized laptop) and put the butter on it. Four minutes later, it was of perfect consistency.