I received a card in the mail from AT&T Wireless, my cellular company, saying that they’re sending me a Sony Ericsson T226 to replace my T68i free of charge. I thought “gee, that’s cool”. Turns out that it’s not really cool at all. The new phone has fewer features (no Bluetooth!). The advantage offered is better reception. A number of people commented that they switched to T-Mobile and happily got better reception and a better phone. I think I’ll call AT&T and see if they can offer me a better phone than the T226.
Technology
The article John Kerry’s Waffles - If you don’t like the Democratic nominee’s views, just wait a week. describes a variety of issues on which Kerry’s past statements and voting records contradict what he currently says. On the one hand, I think people should be allowed to change their minds about things, and some of the issues mentioned date back to the ’80s. On the other, some amount of consistency in recent times would certainly be welcome.
There’s the saying that the known devil is better than the unknown one. I’m not so sure that this applies to this election (witness the fairly significant “anyone but Bush” movement).
Politics
Worth1000 has a great PhotoShop contest to create real life versions of Far Side cartoons. Some really nifty ones in there.
Random
Famed crypotographer and CS geek Avi Rubin wrote a fascinating essay about his day as an election judge. Rubin has been very critical of the security surrounding e-voting systems, and Diebold’s systems in particular. He was a judge in a precinct using Diebold systems. He concluded that while some attacks he was concerned about are not possible, the potential for massive fraud is still far too great and is a real threat to our democracy.
Politics
Now that I’m using my Mac at least as much as my PC at home, a cross-platform sound editor seems like a good thing. Not having to buy one seems like a good thing, too. Audacity is a free, open source, sound editor that works on both the Mac and Windows. On Windows, I’ve already got Sound Forge, so I don’t know how likely it is that I’ll use Audicity there. Just depends on how easy/stable/featureful it is.
Music
Former WorldCom (MCI) CFO Scott Sullivan has pleaded guilty to the criminal charges against him that were involved in the $11 billion accounting game they played. Additionally, Attorney General John Ashcroft is to Announce Charges Against Ex-WorldCom CEO, Bernie Ebbers. Ebbers has generally claimed innocence in all of this, so we’ll see in court how much knowledge he actually had of all of this. It’s hard to imagine a CEO not knowing about $11 billion in misdirected accounting. I worked for WorldCom for a couple of years, after WorldCom acquired ANS from AOL.
Money
I don’t play many games, but I’ve spent a lot of time with GTA3 and Vice City. So, the announcement of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is quite exciting! Hopefully, come October 19th, I’ll be able to scrape up a little time to play!
Random
I’m subscribed to FactCheck.org’s email subscription list, so I receive their updates when they come up. Mozilla had caught them as spam for some reason (I wish the filter would tell me which words triggered this, but I guess the point of Bayesian filtering is to keep the details out of sight). I have just caught up with them. Lots of good stuff, and they certainly do seem balanced, finding fault with statements from Kerry and Bush both.
It’s a real shame that politics requires a site like FactCheck, but it’s great that the site is there!
Politics
It turns out that there’s no need for me to ever write up a good defense of the “you’re not going to need it” strategy, because Charles Miller has already done so. Sure, nothing applies 100% of the time, but more often than not I think that YAGNI is the right strategy to use.
Software Development
