Inside the mind of the Octopus. This is fascinating stuff.
There are adrenaline junkies and then there are these guys.
It’s noisy at work today. Video taken from my desk of remodeling work currently underway.
Over the past two days I have been trying unsuccessfully to give Apple and Verizon some of my money. You see I want an iPhone 4S, but I am not willing to pay full retail price for one.
As I understand things, your cell phone carrier (Verizon in my case) determines your upgrade eligibility based on a couple of factors: the timeliness in which you pay your bill and the size of your bill. If you have the minimum package and pay late every month you aren’t viewed favorably and likely won’t get any early upgrade option. If you always pay your bill on time, but don’t have the most expensive plan, you’ll get an early upgrade option, but it will only shave a few months off your two-year contract. Four months in my case. Presumably, if you always pay on time and have all the bells and whistles on your plan, then you get an even earlier upgrade date.
February 9th is only 101 days away, which isn’t terribly long in the greater scheme of things, but it would be nice to have a new toy now and avoid the wait.
Yesterday, while on a support call due to a hiccup in my phone’s idea of the correct time, I asked the representative if I could get an early upgrade date. He told me that I would have to go to the store, that they might be able to move me up 30, or even 60 days. 100 plus days isn’t 60, but I thought it was worth a shot. I drove over to the Verizon store in the afternoon to see what they would do for me.
Nothing, as it turns out. According to the sales guy I spoke with, only the store manager can authorize an early upgrade. The store manager only works Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm. Phooey. So this afternoon I left work a few minutes early and returned to the store, this time to see what the manager could do for me.
Nothing, as it turns out. The manager explained the the stores haven’t been able to authorize early upgrades for at least two years. When I tried to explain what I had been told on the phone, he said he doesn’t know why they tell people to go to the store; he isn’t able to give early upgrades.
So I call Verizon back and asked again about an early upgrade. I explained all that I had been through to the representative and he did some quick research at his end. He said that they could do an early upgrade to any of their other phones, but not to the Apple iPhones.
Huh.
He said that Apple “won’t let them”. At first I wanted to believe this was convenient finger pointing, away from Verizon and toward Apple. However, after thinking about it for a few minutes, I think I can understand why. When you are selling hotcakes faster than you can make them, you don’t sell them for $450 off.
All of which means, the only upgrade option available to me is to purchase an iPhone for full retail price, or $649. Spending an extra $450 for 100 days early access is pricy - $4.50 per day. I can wait. Probably not happily, but I can wait.
In the end it is hard for me to stay mad at either Apple or Verizon. They are making a product that I don’t need. I can live without an iPhone. In truth, I could live without a cell phone. That I am willing, along with millions of other people, to shell out $200 or $300 (or more) for a smartphone purchase and sign a two-year contract of $75 or more dollars per month, speaks volumes about the power of marketing and the ability of manufactures to generate desire and demand for their products.
In the meantime, I’ll count the days until February 9th, and at 12:01 am that day I’ll poke the purchase button on Apple’s site and order an iPhone 4S.
Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.
Twice a year, in the United States anyway, we change our clocks. Like many people I think this is a useless activity that only serves to confuse people and mess with their sleep patterns. As if setting our clocks ahead an hour each spring and back an hour each autumn for “daylight savings” wasn’t bad enough, recently we decided to change the dates when those two events occurred.
This morning my Verizon HTC Incredible decided that it was time to set the clock back an hour even though the official time change doesn’t occur until next Sunday morning. I have the phone set to automatically get the time from the cell tower, which means the issue is at Verizon’s end of the wire. Or air wave in this case.
I poked around on Google for any reports of this issue and, finding nothing, I went to the Verizon support page to see what I could find. Their page was less than helpful. As a last resort I called *611 and spoke to a representative. Well, in truth I called twice. The first time I followed, or tried to follow, the menu system to allow them to identify my issue. When that failed I hung up, called back and pressed zero over and over until I was transferred to a human.
After explaining my issue he asked me to run part of the phone configuration process. By doing this, he said, it would re-sync the phone with the cellular network. He said he’d call me back in a few minutes to see how things had gone.
After hanging up I called *228 on my phone, and selected option 2. The phone took about a minute to complete the task (complete with obnoxious background music). When that completed the time was still wrong. So I rebooted my phone, which corrected the time.
Caveats: I rooted my phone in June, and I am currently running Cyanogenmod 7.1 instead of the stock HTC Android. Whether the rooting or flashing caused the time issue I do not know. Also, I hadn’t thought to reboot my phone before calling Verizon, so I don’t know if that would have reset the time.
While I had the representative on the line I asked about my hardware update eligibility date. which is currently February 9, 2012. He couldn’t do anything about it, but he said that going to the store I might be able to get that moved ahead by 30 - 60 days. Which would allow me to get an iPhone 4S in December. Maybe I’ll practice my take-pity-on-me look and swing by there this afternoon and hope for a 102 day exception.
Certainly not the United States. Personally I like Switzerland’s and Hong Kong’s the best.
This is fascinating and very good on several levels simultaneously. The nerd in me loves the visualization - it intuitively makes sense. The musician in me (a specialized form of nerdery, I am learning) love the music and seeing it in a new light.
More information on Alexander Chen’s website. And a full screen visualization at baroque.me.
You have to admire the focus and intensity that he brings to this; it helps one to understand the force he must bring to the Free Software Foundation.
AppCode is a new Objective-C IDE from the same folks who make IntelliJ Idea. It’s enough to make me consider fiddling around with Objective-C for a while.