Never been one to let the carrier drop

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So, I’m rather unhappy with Sprint at the moment.

A few weeks ago, during a trip to CA, I somehow cracked the display on my 897 LTE. I didn’t do anything unusually abusive to it, I just set it down on a dresser and it spiderwebbed.

I called sprint, who said they could replace the display/digitizer for $150. Since I know the part is about $100, this sounded reasonable, so I took the device to them for repair.

They attempted a repair, and somehow managed to destroy the motherboard. The phone would just reboot cycle endlessly. They also managed to destroy – beyond any repair, not just filesystem damaged but chip totally useless, a 16G SD card with a bunch of useful data on it.

They gave me a refurbished phone in replacement, and I went about my business.

The first thing I discovered about the refurb phone is the camera wouldn’t focus. This suggested to me that it had been exposed to a transient shock of truly large proportions. The second thing I noticed is that every few days, it would hang in a very unusual way. The heartbeat light would continue to pulse green, but the phone would not respond to the power button.. nor, indeed, any other interrupts (i.e. USB, phone calls, etc). Sadly, the phone has no reset button and has a internal battery, so every time it did this, I had to take it to sprint to be power cycled. The first time, I explained to them that A: It was a refurb and likely had experienced a large G-shock at some point and B: they were not equipped to do component-level repairs on phones, as I saw no hot air guns, no magnefiers, no lights, no DSOs, none of the tools one would need to do such things – hence, they could not possibly fix it, so please give me a replacement. They refused, saying they would only replace it if the failure occured in their shop.

Well, after coming in three times to have it power cycled, they finally admitted, yep, we can’t fix it, yep, it’s broken. However, it would take them 1-2 !weeks! to get a replacement.

I asked about buying a identical device. None in stock. They had two floor models, but it’s against sprint policy to sell those. So I bought a vastly less powerful LG to use while they fix my phone. At retail price because I’m not eligable for a discounted device for another two months.

Now, I’ve been a sprint customer for 12.5 years. However, when my contract expires, I will be finding another wireless service provider. I *know* they all suck. But there has to be one that sucks less than this. Their ‘Total equipment protection’ is useless, because they give you refurb phones that have faults with them! I doubt if Sprint has *anywhere* that’s equipped to do repairs on the tiny surface-mount-and-metal-cans assembly of a modern cell-phone, so what they should do whenever a phone shows up with a reported intermittent fault is recycle it, because there’s no way they can fix it. But instead they send it back out the door to some unsuspecting customer who will then have to figure out A: what’s wrong with it and B: whether they can live with that.

P.S. Motorola, shame on you for not putting a reset button on a device powered by a internal battery. Computers crash. It’s a fact. I will admit that prior to sprint destroying my first 897 LTE it had never crashed in a way that I couldn’t get back from, but that’s still no excuse for doing something so boneheaded.
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In my previous post, I explained a few things about my views surrounding money.. now I’m going to do a stream-of-consciousness on people with a high (>$10 million) net worth.

Please note this is based on my current understanding of the reality model I’m experiencing, which may be flawed.

We have a fixed amount of capitol in the system. We add too it sometimes, but not very much nor very fast, because whenever we add a lot, a bunch of people not in possession of all the facts think it means the capitol is worth less, instead of realizing that it’s because we’re actually generating wealth out of thin air all the time – new ideas, new intellectual property, new ways of getting things done – and new children who will grow up to create and build more wealth. Because we’re becoming more wealthy in real-world things, we need to print more money to match, or things are gonna break.

Because we have a fixed amount of capitol, it’s important to *keep it moving*. If it stops in one computer register (i.e. some billionare’s bank account or a stock in the market), it’s no longer a available resource in the system for facilitating getting things done. People can’t pay wages with money they don’t have. In addition, the value of money sitting in a bank account beyond a person’s conceivable personal needs is *negative*, because the reduced amount of money floating around ‘live’, migrating, making transactions happen will result in less of those transactions occuring and those transactions often generate value. (Think of the inventor who doesn’t have enough money for a lab vs. the one who does). Holding onto money beyond your personal needs *reduces it’s value* by a real-world, food-and-drink-and-housing-and-entertainment definition of value.

TL:DR=People are making decisions based on dollars when they should be considering the real value – concrete and steel and the like – involved.

I’m not really sure how to write this, so I’m just going to do a stream of conciousness writing and hopefully it will capture some of the ideas I have.

First of all, I have concluded that some of what the department of defense does is in essence a entitlement for people who like to hurt people. So, if you are one of those madly anti-entitlement people, you really should be upset about the DoD. There’s no way that we need the level of military technology we have. It’s a gift for the DoD contractors, pure and simple. Nor do we pay the actual people who put their lives on the line very well – so it’s not even a entitlement for the group of people who one could argue deserve it for putting themselves in harm’s way in the interest of implementing the decisions of our government. It’s pork for the people who want to make a bigger bomb, a better rifle, a larger aircraft carrier, even though we already have a vastly larger army than anyone who would conceivably want to pick a fight with us.

Now I must mention in all fairness that the DoD is not all bad. My father worked there for a while, and every project he ever chose to share with me that he had chosen to support was one that generated value for the human race, that made us all richer. But people who make bombs, and guns, are making tools for destroying value.

Beyond that, however, I think that our culture has a very sick idea about money. We think it’s worth something – that it’s more important than people. Money is our tool, but instead of us using it it has come to use us.

Money is not value. Value is what money buys – and what we want. No sane person really wants money – they want value. You can’t eat dollars, and they’d make a lousy house – but dollars buy food and shelter, which you can eat and live in. However, money can’t *accurately* abstract value, for a whole host of reasons:

1) Some types of value are forever and infinite. Once a great book is penned, or a song or movie is laid down on tape, that content is now ours, now and forever. With our current level of technology, distributing and copying it cost fractions of a penny. Using money to try and pay for that content is having a finite resource (dollars) try to chase a infinite one (content). In terms of real value – things like great movies and works of art and automation that works and whatnot – the human race is far, far, far wealthier than it ever has been. In terms of minds and hands to create amazing things, the human race is wealthy indeed. But the amount of money in the world has not kept pace with our wealth, and things in the economic world are coming unglued because of it.

2) Some types of value can be destroyed, but we do not attempt to match that with money. When a war happens, we should really take a bunch of money, and burn it, because we’re destroying the value that it represents. (Although, for some wars – WWII, for example – we also need to mint a bunch more for the scientific discoveries that were made by necessity to cope with the war). In a recent war, we burned one of the oldest libraries on the planet.. that ought to be a huge pile of bills thrown on a bonfire somewhere.

3) Some types of value are multiplicative – that is, they create other value. Automation is a great example. Once discovered, automation is in category #1, but it also enables us to get more resources for less man-hours. This makes us all wealthier, but it can also make that wealth inaccessible to the people who just lost their job to a perl script

We need to make sure we – and especially our children – see money not as value, but as a symbol that represents value – and understand that it can only work properly if it accurately maps to the amount of value our race has. (And probably not even then! ;-)). Deciding not to give health care to people – live minds and hands that create the value money is based on – because of our debt – is in essence increasing our debt. We’re destroying real value by letting those people suffer and die, and we ought to be destroying money to match the loss of value that results.

Whenever a hardworking immigrant walks “illegally” over our borders, our nation becomes wealthier by the value that person can create, be it fixin’ cars or pickin’ strawberries.. and we ought to be printing money to match. Whenever someone leaves, we ought to be burning money to match the loss of their creative power and energy.

What’s most important is that the people making decisions.. the presidents, and kings, and governers, and senators.. understand that money isn’t value, but a symbol that abstracts it. Whenever we make a decision that reduces the amount of value in the world in order to increase the amount of money in it, we are demonstrating stupidity on a colossal scale, and the tool is using us instead of us using the tool.

What scares me is that NO WHERE in the recent government budget discussions did I hear anyone talk about this! And I see many people – mostly conservatives – who seem to be under the delusion that the money *is* the value, and use this argument to justify treating their neighbors and friends horribly for the sake of dollars. This to me is the ultimate in fiscal irresponsibility – letting the tool use you, instead of you using the tool.

Similarly, I see liberals who think that enough money can somehow will a resource that’s scarce into existence, without having to come up with some way to get it. While I talk about giving everyone everything, I do in fact have concrete plans (more on this later) on how we would do that. But I have heard liberals talk about shutting down all oil pipelines – right now – without considering how we would then get food given that our transit network runs on oil.

For some of my evolving thoughts beyond this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?cat=13

For more about this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346

NOTE: If you got here via http://valuenotmoney.sheer.us, please note that is a series of essays – please follow the link at http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346 for the next one.

Happy birthday, 8088!

I use this a lot when writing a simple perl script that I want to take args like –flag and –database=this and –comment=”This is a comment with spaces”

while($arg = shift) { 
        if(($s1,$s2) = $arg =~ /–(.*)=(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $s2 = $a if(($a) = $s2 =~ /^\”(.*)\”$/);

                $arg{$l1} = $s2;

        } elsif(($s1) = $arg =~ /–(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $arg{$l1} = 1;

        }

}

Stick it in the top of the script, and you can then just use

if($arg{‘flag’}) {

}

$comment = $arg{‘comment’};

and so on and so forth.

So, I recently found a fun bug in Windows 2012.

If you are attempting to add features like HTTP Activation, Application Server w/ IIS support, or other web-related features and roles to 2012 and you have shared hosting configuration enabled in IIS, they will fail with the extremely cryptic error code 0x800F0922. What you need to do is DISABLE shared configuration, install your features or roles, and then re-enable shared configuration. The WPI will tell you if you try to install something while shared config is enabled that you can’t do that, but the Add Features / Add Roles bits won’t.

When I worked at OnAir, I had a boss who will remain nameless (I’ll call him PHB) because this story is a bit embarrassing for him. We had been sent to PAIX in northern CA to install a Sun enterprise server 1000. After uncrating and racking it, we turned it on and watched as the boot console scrolled through various things, finally ending at a repeated attempt to BOOTP.

Now, at this point, I was all set to sit down at the keyboard and start hacking away at the firmware settings, because obviously the unit had no idea it had a hard drive, much less a operating system. However, PHB was utterly convinced that if we just waited long enough, the thing would boot. Really. Honest. He made me wait a hour, repeatedly telling me not to touch the keyboard.

I went to the hotel room that night and looked up the relevant page of the sun hardware guide. Then, the next day when we returned to the data center, I went straight to the machine, told it to list devices attached to it, then told it where it’s boot disk was. After which, no big surprise, it booted right up.

The thing that really annoyed me was that he wouldn’t listen to me, and I think the problem was, he had no idea what I was saying. Concepts like BOOTP and DHCP and network booting and boot device and whatnot were entirely foreign to him. So, when we got home, I printed out the sun firmware console guide and left a copy on his desk.

People have from time to time done this to me – I remember getting a copy of the Sendmail guide with a post-it saying “see page 53”, for example. I don’t remember ever being upset by it, and neither was he. However, it’s a lot trickier in a interactive face to face setting to figure out, how do I clue this guy in to the fact that he has no idea what I’m talking about and what he’s suggesting is never going to work – I’ve never figured out a really good answer.

I remember when I was at ASP repairing people’s houses, one woman’s water pump got hit by lightning. Now, in fact, all it had done is blown a hole in the metal piece that attached it to the feed pipe, but we didn’t know that. Anyway, we pooled up our ice cream money and bought her a pump (ASP disavowed all knowledge of anything relating to replacing a water pump), dug up her wellhead, and pulled out the old pump. I did some cut&splice&whatnot, and put the new pump where the old one was, and we lowered it back down. Of course, when the pump hit the top of the water, that was the end of lowering.

At this point, I made a suggestion. Let’s turn the power on to the pump, and it will lift water up the column and thereby pull itself down. However, the adults (I was about 16 at the time) decided that was too dangerous and radical, so instead they tried to force the pump into the hole.

Not suprisingly, this was not easy. In addition, grinding the pump’s power wiring against the side of the shaft cut the power wiring, and so once the pump was in place, it didn’t work. We pulled it back out, I patched the cut power wiring, and the second time it was decided we would try my way, which worked. (I bet it’s what all the installers do.)

Again, I don’t know what to do in situations like that. It’s obvious the other person is not in possession of all the facts, but it’s also obvious that they think I’m not either. I don’t want to say things that make them think I think they’re a moron, but I also don’t really want to sit and watch while they demonstrate why their technique is not going to work.

The other question, of course, is how to accept the reverse situation – when someone has to clue me in that my airspeed really shouldn’t be 110 knots at touchdown, or that .net console apps use a connection pool and so it really is okay to throw away a database connection after each query (well, it’s not the most optimized thing in the world to do, but it doesn’t involve reconnecting to the server) – without having my feelings be hurt by the fact that I’m apparently clueless.

As I get older I’m finding it easier and easier to accept being wrong without there being any judgement on my value as a person or my skills or anything being involved. This is sort of the opposite of what I would have expected to have happened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpS1_Z0SJeA

I also enjoyed their stint on the West Wing, which I recently saw for the first time. 😉

So, like many programmers of my generation, I grew up reading usenet posts like the Story of Mel. I had always assumed it was apocryphal, because the idea of a computer made by the Royal McBee typewriter company sounds unlikely.

Except that it’s all true. Here is the beast in question, complete with a lovely 50’s control panel that reminds me of a metal vacuum cleaner I had when I was young: LGP-30