I’m living in the future

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One of my molars was almost all filling on the top, so a crown was required. Instead of ordering out, the dentist just did a 3d scan of my teeth and made me a new tooth while I sat enthralled, staring at the machine next to my chair like a 5 year old boy watching a construction site… or like a nerd watching a cnc mill carve a tooth out of ceramic.



I now have a brand-new tooth topper and I can’t tell it apart from the teeth I made myself (though it took me more like forty years to make mine).

Is nothing more entertaining than irony?

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imageLast night some enterprising spammer started sending mail to a distribution list (DL) at Microsoft. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue since most DLs don’t accept mail from addresses outside the company. Older DLs, however, often haven’t had this setting turned on. Now, there’s nothing especially remarkable about spam email, but when it occurs with a large DL, it arms one of the most entertaining corporate behaviors… the "me too" mail bomb.

There a few things you can do when getting an unwanted email:

  1. Delete it, move on
  2. Contact the DL owner, ask them to fix the issue
  3. Point out the problem by sending a mail to everyone on the alias

The first option is easy, but unsatisfying for most. The second option is effective, but requires work (and work is hard). The third option is useless, since most everyone else on the DL is in the same boat as you.

While it’s useless, the third option, when it happens on a big DL, is also frequently hilarious.

Here’s the basic sequence of events:

  1. Someone sends an off topic mail to a large alias
  2. Other members of the alias reply-all to the mail to commiserate, or offer a helpful solution
    And then the fun starts
  3. A different set of alias members get upset about the off topic mail, and they reply-all… telling people not to reply-all

Once a DL reaches a critical size it will have a good cross section of the employee population. This is important because you need enough personality types to play the roles in the three steps above. I’d really like to know the threshold for list size… but the alias last night was plenty big.

The spam mails last night were sent to a mail list with over 28 thousand employees.

Sure, I wasted some time watching the mails go by. But they were all small, I knew I didn’t have to do any work, and best of all, I got to read statements like this:

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Yes. All of those mails were sent with reply all. That tickles my funny bone and jabs my irony spleen.

I made a box!

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Exciting stuff, right?
It’s my prototype for my new office built-ins.
Now I’m ready for the real thing, just needs to be a bit bigger. I have the layout all planned out on the wall… it reminds me of a cell-shaded video game. The wood is all out in the garage waiting for me, shelf brackets should arrive this week… the end is so close.

Thanks a lot AT&T

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It seems that whenever cell phone provider customer satisfaction reports comes out, AT&T rates at or near the bottom of the heap. The thing is, I’ve actually had very few complaints about AT&T. I rarely have dropped calls, call quality is just fine and I can always get a friendly support person on the line if I have a question about my service.

This, however, irks me: they keep sending me "helpful" e-mails suggesting I could save money by signing up for a $30/month text messaging plan.

Sure, it seems logical that a plan would save me money. I have no text messaging plan so I pay the premium, per-text message fee for SMS messages of 20 cents per text sent or received. For a SMS addict that could quickly rack up a bunch of charges and bloat your bill.

Thing is, we’re not heavy SMS users. Last month Paula and I spent a whopping $4.40 on text messages (and that was a busy month).

Hey AT&T, there is two possible outcomes to send a message like this to your customers:

  1. They’ll just trust that you’re correct and honest and fork over an extra $30 a month and might not figure out that they’re getting screwed.
  2. They’ll do the math (either ahead of time like I did, or after the fact) and realize that you’re trying to screw them, at which point they’ll instantly become less satisfied with AT&T.

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I used to be someone who thought AT&T was a decent cell provider. This type of dick move has turned me into a customer who simply tolerates AT&T and will probably jump ship as soon as my contract runs out.

Yay, a ceiling!

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WP_000383Well, part of a ceiling.

What started out as a simple matter of pulling up some carpet and scrapping off a popcorn ceiling exploded into months of demolition and reconstruction on my new home office. Tonight was a milestone… the room has started looking like a room once again.

New Year’s day meant a three day weekend for us, so we spent most of the weekend in my new office putting up the ceiling. The time we didn’t spend working was spent at home depot buying the stuff we forgot the previous ten times we were there. No amount of planning will ever prevent the return trip it seems. On the plus side, Greg in tools is now so fond of me that he’s making me the god father of his next unborn child.

DSC_3693New ceiling? We hadn’t intended on replacing the ceiling, it just kind of worked out that way. The previous owners, in their infinite wisdom, elected to paint over the popcorn ceiling. Normally it would be a quick job to scrape that ugly crap off, but once it’s been painted in pace, you’re pretty much left with two options: 1) tear down the ceiling or, 2) leave the popcorn up and gouge out your eyes with a grapefruit spoon spare yourself the continuous assault from the supreme ugliness of your ceiling. We debated it, but settled on tearing out the ceiling.

Turns out that taking a pry bar to your house is really quite satisfying. Paula was forced to take away my tools before I moved onto other rooms in the house.

This remodeling adventure hasn’t been nearly as well documented as our San Jose bathroom remodel, I’m trying to do a recap for myself so I can remember for next time (I have the level of project optimism that can only come from a memory as short as… you know… uh… one of those things with really short memories).

tl;dr: we tore crap out, and put different crap back

Paula and I are currently sharing a very spacious office. While we don’t get on each other’s nerves, we don’t really have enough space to also do hobby things (Paula likes to sew, I like to make a mess). Since we have two guest bedrooms and rarely have guests we elected to convert one bedroom into an office for me.

The room had three main issues: popcorn ceiling, ugly texture on the walls and an old carpet we suspect had been soiled in the past by more than one dog. The plan was simple: tear out the carpet, seal the concrete floor, scrape the popcorn ceiling and skim coat the walls. Simple stuff.

WP_000385The carpet padding was glued to the concrete floor. Easy enough to rip up the bulk of it, but it took a gallon and a half of Goof-Off to get the concrete clean. Luckily Home Depot does sell 1 gallon cans of the stuff. Also lucky: Home Depot sells heavy duty masks just one aisle over from the one gallon cans of liquid "good god! get all of the purple spiders off me!"

Better remodeling through chemistry.

The project hasn’t been all off-the-rails, however, the walls and wiring both went about as expected. We did have to lower our expectations a bit after coming to the painful realization that we weren’t going to be able to plaster our walls as well or as quickly as professionals. Turns out that no matter how many You Tube videos we watched, they wouldn’t make up for or combined lack of experience. Our walls aren’t the smooth finish we wanted, but we’ve accepted the upgrade from dated texture to "hey, that doesn’t look half bad". Lowering expectations does have a wonderful morale benefit. Perhaps I should try that at work too.

There’s still a ton of work to be done, but we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.