Convert two AT&T lines to FamilyTalk plan

https://www.wireless.att.com/answer-center/main.jsp?t=solutionTab&ft=searchTab&ps=solutionPanels&locale=&_dyncharset=UTF-8&solutionId=KB66040

Hopefully this link will work for at least awhile, as I still haven’t seen success yet.

What an excruciatingly-painful web site..

Streams versus Pages

http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/

At first glance this quick article, which is more of an op-ed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed) piece really, seems like filler. Nebulous musings on the Internet that pass for news when there is none. The main point will be somewhat self-evident to the target audience.

However I appreciate what the author has done here. He’s recognized a big trend, and isolated it just a little from the background of other things that are trending. He’s teased it out. And it’s not just fluff, there are quotes and facts and links. Even though it is short, I find that refreshing. It feels balanced, like eating a great salad rather than the scalloped potatoes you’d get from some of the reference services.

I found his advice at the end very helpful. I have been trying to keep ahead of the Facebook stream, the Twitter stream, the RSS stream, as in, read everything in my stream. The revelation that it’s going to be impossible, is hard to take, but I can see it’s truth. I will need to first relax and let some stuff go by, and then find a way to filter the streams for the items that are most important to me.

VMware Tools now comes with VMware Player

I try to keep the version of VMware player I use to run virtual machines up to date. However it's been a couple of months. Just got the most recent version, and as soon as I went to boot my Windows XP virtual machine, up pops a dialog to install VMware Tools! If you know what VMware Tools is (yes that's "is" rather than "are", it's a product) you know why this is exciting. If you don't you probably shouldn't read this as it will put you to sleep.

VMware Tools is like the option pack for VMware. Sure you can run without it, but you're jones-ing. Here's the best example. You're stuck with Windows default VGA video driver without Tools, meaning really low quality display properties and performance.

Up until recently, and I haven't been able to find an announcement on this on their website, you had to purchase at least VMware workstation to get it. The free VMware Player did not come with it. They must have finally seen that all these other free VM hosts (Microsoft Virtual PC, Virtual Box, etc.) were looking better than VMware because of it.

I had scoured the web trying to find a legal way to use VMware Tools with no luck. This is a total bonus, thank you VMware!

Is un-funding Nasa short-sighted?

When and if man truly "reaches the stars", and by that I mean is able to garner and consume non-Earth resources (and no, capturing the sunlight that falls on the Earth doesn't count, nor does mining asteroids), will the total wealth (in the "human economy") increase, especially in such a way as to make some of our current non-trivial problems of no import? Or is there some ameliorating effect whereby total wealth is fixed, even in a non-closed system? 

The discovery of "the new world" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World) seems like a relevant and useful analog. Certainly the initial costs of discovery and startup were paid back in spades. Whole countries (and plenty of individuals as well) got rich. It would not be stretching the analogy to say that all of the equity, goods, and services produced by the United States alone in it's whole history are net new value to the empires of Europe. 

But we can't be so hasty. Is Europe better off, on the whole, and in orders of magnitude dictated by this windfall of epic proportions? Bashing countries  is not in scope for this essay. And there are enough other vectors of intervening history so as to invalidate any detailed comparison. Suffice it to say that they did not all live "happily ever after".

So are we to conclude that investing in our long-term future is a bad idea? Going back to the New World, history teaches us over and over that even though literally doubling the size of our known and reachable universe is not a sure-fire prescription for the end of all human suffering, it does tend to lead to "progress" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress). Progress is not the same thing as ending starvation. It's an important component of resolving these big issues however.

The truth is, our nature makes solving these big problems hard. And that won't go away just because we find a new "unlimited free energy source" for example. I'm going to leave this open-ended, because I've got the question, not the answer. However I'll add one last thing, which is a favorite opinion of mine I like to think about, and a wider principle undergirding my argument here. And that is a principle I see demonstrated over and over again in the short history of our current technology acceleration. Here I will express it as, most likely, the myriad of crushing problems that we have no doubt directly created through our own ignorance, pride, and avarice, will not and cannot be fixed by anything currently at hand. However even though they should certainly easily and utterly destroy us, there's a very good chance that we'll come up with something else soon, that will allow us to easily circumvent them and continue on (to the next chapter, which will be the same as the last but bigger). I can put this much more succinctly, and perhaps I should have at first. And that is, our capacity for creativity appears to just barely outrun our capacity for stupidity, at least so far.

AT&T and Apple coincidence?

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/07/atandt-moves-up-iphone-upgrade-eligibility-on-eve-of-wwdc-keynote/

Anybody else find it weird that AT&T is moving up eligibility dates?

Clearly this benefits Apple, as one of the biggest groups of iPhone buyers are previous iPhone buyers. In fact I was unable to get a 3GS last year because of eligibility dates and thus decided to skip it entirely.

However note that this costs AT&T big bucks, bucks that are already counted and spent. They subsidize the cost of smartphones by charging extra across the required two-year plan. It’s like a loan. When they move up eligibility dates it’s like just forgiving the rest of the payments on a loan. And are we talking about for millions of people here? Hundreds of thousands?

Why would they do this? Give up their own money, to make Apple more money? Immediately I think of the iPad data plan they decided to stop offering one month after the 3G iPad came out, despite all the press around the plan. Could there have been a back-room deal here?

Creating a document in Pages on the iPad

Well I just typed my first significant document in Pages, the Apple word processor, on the iPad. It worked surprisingly well! The formatting options were intuitive. Once I turned the device to landscape, I found I could type at full speed as long as I looked at the keyboard. The excellent auto-correction made up for any inaccuracies resulting from the lack of actual keyboard buttons. Amazing! I wouldn't want to do any copying (where having to look at the original document would make it hard to watch the virtual keyboard). I imagine positioning the iPad is important to ergonomics. I am using a music stand, which provides a lot of support and flexibility.

Things got ugly when I went to transfer the device to my Windows laptop via iTunes however. I went ahead and performed a wired sync. I could not find the document. So I looked in iTunes, and saw that under the Apps tab there is a File Sharing section, with a list of Apps and Documents. Clicking on the Pages app did not bring up any related documents. I went back to the iPad, and found an Export option, and chose to export to PDF. Going back to iTunes, I then saw my document in the list. So I clicked the Save To button, and saved the PDF to the desktop. However when I went to view the document in Adobe Reader, I got a message that the embedded font could not be expanded, and the document looked very similar to Braille when viewed. A bunch of dots in a rows where the words should be. In short a lot of work with a poor result.

AT&T data plans – the other shoe drops

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/columns/murphys_law_downloading_att_koolaid_25_month

A couple of days ago I commented on how AT&T’s announced changes to data plans were a total violation of customer trust ( http://iponderus.com/2010/06/at-bait-and-switch-on-ipad-data-plan.html ) because the iPad was promised and promoted with a certain attractive data plan which they are dropping after the iPad has been out only a month. What they are doing should be illegal under some kind of deceptive advertising law.

Anyhow today I’ll try to hold it down on that topic long enough to mention the nightmare the rest of the AT&T data plan changes are going to bring to us. I can’t believe so many folks are congratulating AT&T on saving us $5/month! People, when has AT&T ever cared about your wallet?? Well this is about your wallet for sure, but it’s about making it lighter, not heavier! Read the linked column from MaximumPC. The iPad is a content consumer. It is going to eat data like no one has ever seen. Sure you are using 200mb/month today. That’s for checking your email. Wanna take a guess how much data you’ll be using next year watching hi-def movies?

This move is nothing more or less than the beginning of an industry-wide shift to tiered data plans, which have been threatened and telegraphed for several years now. The owners of the data pipes have no intention of letting content owners get rich while they play the livery-man. They are going to soak us royally for that rich content that is coming. Note how much each extra Gig is. That’s what’s known as a stupid-tax.

AT&T bait and switch on iPad data plan

• http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=17991&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=30854&mapcode=financial|Wireless
• http://blogs.forrester.com/charles_golvin/10-06-02-atts_revamped_data_pricing_more_about_tomorrow_today
• http://mashable.com/2010/06/02/att-kills-ipad-unlimited-data-plan/

The 3G iPad has literally been out a month (since 4/30/2010). The big draw of the 3G iPad (over the wifi iPad) was AT&T promised an unlimited data plan for $30/mo. Today they announced that they are going back on that promise, and switching the data plan to 2G for $25/mo. Each additional Gig costs $10.

AT&T argues that most people (98%) don’t use over 2Gig of data a month. And probably that was true up to the day the 3G iPad launched. Given that the iPad is a content consumption device, it is going to use a lot of data. Free streaming of Netflix movies is a good example. I wonder what that one month of 3G iPads on their network showed them? I wonder what percentage of 3G iPads used more than 2Gig?

The reason why I bought one of the 3G instead of the wifi iPads was exactly because of this data plan. To change it so soon is a clear breach of promise. Steve Jobs stood on stage and touted this plan as a key selling point for the iPad.

I found out about this this thanks to Jeff Jarvis,  http://twitter.com/jeffjarvis .

iPad innovation

Here’s one really cool thing I have noticed about the iPad. It seems like no big deal, but it is so helpful. And it’s one of those things that nobody would ever think of, but everyone should.

If wherever you are perching the iPad (a dock or stand, etc.) does not accommodate the charging cable, just simply turn the iPad so that the cable is up, and the top of the iPad is down. The screen should rotate with the changes so that it stays readable, and most apps should be readable as well. Simple, yet genius. This is why people are so fiercely loyal to Apple.

Google Voice not intercepting voicemail for iPhone

· http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=06b28869a293df1b&hl=en

· http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=56a6385ce48d6e5d&hl=en

· http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=1cb861553cb65a33&hl=en

· http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=0d3905d1eabcb546&hl=en

· http://www.knowyourcell.com/apple/apple-iphone-3g/iphone-3g-guides/479280/how_to_set_up_google_voice_voicemail_on_the_iphone_3g.html

· http://www.clicksandbits.com/2009/03/21/forward-iphone-to-google-voice/

I’ve had a problem ever since I got the iPhone, whereby sometimes voicemail ended up at Google Voice where I wanted it, but sometimes AT&T intervened, and callers were greeted with a message that I had not set up my mailbox, which I hadn’t. I figured it had something to do with whether the phone was on the network, out of network, powered off, etc. As I have Google Voice answering for two phones potential complications were doubled.

I don’t remember if this problem extends back as far as GrandCentral days. However at some point GrandCentral/Google Voice did something about this. They added some functionality in the Voice settings which walks you through forwarding Voicemail only to Google Voice. So now it doesn’t matter whose voicemail wins the race, they all point to Google Voice. I expect this will be quite a boon for my interpersonal relationships.