Unlocked / Unsubsidized Phone 4TW!

So I had the OG Droid for the last two+ years. About 3 weeks ago the touch screen started flaking out and quickly became useless. The only way I could use the phone was to be lucky enough to register a click on the AirDroid icon and then send/receive text messages through a webpage. Even when I received phone calls phantom screen clicks would disconnect the call. Funny how we put so much breakable technology on a product (phone) that when things get realz it no longer serves it's basic purpose.

So its time for a new phone! And I see the new google flagship, the Galaxy Nexus is soon to be released on Verizon. Ok, I tells myself, I can wait a week, get this phone and be movin' on up to the east side to an apartment in the sky. Well, if you're a super nerd you'd know that the Verizon release was delayed and delayed. To be fair, they never officially announced a release data, so technically they never delayed it. But to be real, Verizon knew the sort of Mountain Dew educed nerd-froth this news would stir up. So, with no real release date in site I start looking at alternatives, and one alternative being buying an unlocked phone from Europe and jumping over to a CDMA network (AT&T or T-Mobile). But what are the costs?

Number time:
Galaxy Nexus w/2-year Verizon Contract: $300
Galaxy Nexus CDMA Unlocked: $750

Cheapest Verizon Plan: $80 -- 450 minutes $40, 1000 txt messages $10, 2GB data $30
Comparable T-Mobile No Contract Plan: $60 -- unlimited talk, txt, 2GB data
Walmart (sigh) T-Mobile Special: $30 -- 100 minutes talk, unlimited txt, 5GB data

So wait, what? Walmart Special? You can actually get it from T-Mobile's website as well. But first, lets compare the comparable plans with the assumption you'd use the T-Mobile plan for two years as well.

Verizon: $2,220 = $300 + ( $80 x 24 )
T-Mobile: $2,190 = $750 + ( $60 x 24 )

So no real happy times. Truth be told though, the T-Mobile data rates aren't capped, but thats when the start THROTTLING your bandwidth. There is a $50 a month plan that throttles after 100MB, but would save you $240.

Walmart Special: $1,470 = $750 + ( $30 x 24 )

BOOTS UPSIDE YO HEAD! And actually, it's $1,500. Ok, so to get the plan you need to have a new activation AKA buy a new phone. So I bought the cheapest - a $30 flip phone which my roommate Willis is giving to his parents. Second caveat, you get a new phone number. That said, getting drunk-dialed from Natalie Portman can get old. Sike, it'd never get old. And if you read this Natalie, why don't you return my letters?

So I end up saving a good chunk of change at the expense of having to associate with Walmart, change my number, and going with T-Mobile. And really, my current Verizon bill is $100 a month for unlimited blah blah (which I don't use), and since I'm lazy that's probably what I would have ended up paying had they released the Galaxy Nexus on time, so that would have been $2,700 vs $1,500.

My only gripe with T-Mobile is I live in a rowhome, so no good reception in the house. But GrooVe IP says "That little guy? I wouldn't worry about that little guy"

Amazon Kindle Customer Service -- Best Ever?

Nope not being sarcastic. Over the weekend the top inch of my kindle screen froze. Restarting the kindle did nothing. It was kind of like a burn in. Annoying. So I did some google searches and I surmised that 1. kindle is hosed and 2. kindle support service is the worst thing since trying to converse with Sarah Palin. So, annoyed, I just left it broken.

Here I am a few days later and I figure mneh, might as well call them. First, amazon's kindle support site has a thing where you enter your number and hit a button and then call you right away. Nerd sweet! An automated message comes up - wait time less than a minute. 5 seconds later a dude is like "hey whats up man" and I'm all like "my thing is broke" and he's all like "we'll send a new one, be there tomorrow" and I'm like "nice, its 6pm here". The whole conversation took under 3 minutes, I'll have a new kindle tomorrow, they'll be sending me a return shipping label for my broken one and I have a month to return it.

Best customer service ever? Possibly. Why were all those people complaining? I guess amazon used to suck at customer service or those people are the retards who you get stuck behind the line at subway and they demand their sub to be remade 7 times because it wasn't made right. While they're talking on their phone.

Oh yeah, USAA has awesome customer service too. Comcast does not (thats where the subway sandwich people work).

The Most Awesome Funeral (for cheap!)

According to the world wide web of internets, the average funeral in the U.S. costs between $6,000 and $11,000. Thats a lot of money. And pretty lame really. Thats not going to get you a sweet marble building or statue or phallus or anything.

But you know what costs a lot less, and is a lot more awesome? A sky burial. But you can't be lame and just leave your body anywhere. So, if you were to ship a 150lbs body to Thimphu, Bhutan (probably the closest place to Tibet UPS delivers to) it'd cost you a little over $1,500. So then I assume you could hire a Sherpa for a grand or two. And presto, for between $2,500 and $3,500 you get to be buried in one of the most awesome places in the world in one of the most awesome ways.

Firebox and new IPs

Trixie trixie bastards. So we gots some static ip's that are chillin behind our Firebox. The firebox itself has a dedicated ip.

0800 - Everything is working.
0830 - 1030 - Movin servers to new lo-cal.
1030 - 1100 - Reassign machine ips and tweak firebox.
1100 - 1930 - Not a god damn thing works.

So here is what we knew during this time:
- All machines could go out to the internets
- All servers were serving up their wares
- Internal pinging worked, outgoing pings worked
- 1 ip, behind the firebox on a drop, could be reached from external internets
- NONE of the simple firebox -> forward to machine from external sources worked
- All newly assigned ips worked, you could connect a server directly to the outside and bam
- Firebox logs showed incoming requests, denied, can't find destination
- All destinations were clearly mapped. No trickery. Come in on external ip xyz and forward to internal abc
- a trace route would die on the failing ips would die after the isp hop

So why? ARP CACHING!!!! Dirty, dirty, dirty girl. So what happened was this: We got assigned new ips. One went to the firebox and the rest behind it. The firebox was aggressive and broadcast saying "yo, here I be." The rest, chilling behind the firebox, did not. So, our isp was not able to properly route these requests.
The fix? Set every machine or ip on the open to the world to let it broadcast, then toss it back behind the firebox like a fat chick. ARP cache fixed.

This is why I'm not a network guy. This crap is lame. NullPointerExceptions are much easier. Or so I hear, since I've never had one.

Comcast offers 50 Mbps...for an hour and a half a month.

Let me preface this by saying I hate comcast. They don't show up for apointments, don't respond to emails, and just all around suck. Problem is they don't have any competition where I live (oh please FiOS...please!!).

So Comcast has been running ads on tv around here lately offering service with up to 50 Mbps for $99 a month. But this made me think of a few years back when people accused Comcast of throttling their speeds, which Comcast denied and eventually conceded "yeah maybe but but... 9/11... AMERICA... Terrorists!". Anyway, that'll never pan out because Comcast spends more on lobbyist than you or I do, but I digress.

So what meaningful came from the throttling incident? Well, as of Oct 1 2008 Comcast limits your monthly incoming traffic to 250 GB per second. But whats get me is this, you can pay extra to get 50 Mb per second, but only get 250 Gb a month. 1 Gb = 1024 Mb, so, if you were to sit on some traffic that heavy, you'd run up your limit in 85.33 minutes. Stupid Comcast.

cl.exe results in mspdb80.dll was not found error

cl is the Visual C++ Compiler that comes with Visual Studio. So today I needed to compile me some C code. Ok, lets do this. Path not found. Easy enough, add C:\Dev\Tools\VisualStudio\VC\bin to my path. "mspdb80.dll was not found" error. Bullocks.

Most of the internet chatter was about running vcvars32(which calls vsvars32) or vcvarsall which SHOULD HAVE set the environment variables, but did not. Maybe it was a bad install or maybe maybe maybe. Too much work. Don't need another rabbit hole.

So all you need to do is set another path var to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\VsaEnv (or wherever your mspdb80.dll is located). In like Flynn.

So you wanna use cl? To sum it up set two new path vars
C:\{visual-studio}\VC\bin
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\VsaEnv

Vignette, Ahh Poor Vignette

Man. I really don't like configuring and implementing COTS software. Its usually sold to someone who thinks it'll solve problems A, B and C when in fact they're only real problem is X. And they spent half a million. Or more. A lot more.

Well, I had the privilege of vomiting for 6 months working with Vignette products (although, I'll admit it was work). Now, Vignette products aren't terrible. At one time they could have been called cutting edge. Too bad that time was circa 1993. And the coding concepts are good. The code isn't. God no. The code is the definition of spaghetti code. See, Vignette bought up a lot of little chunks of code and then tried to play God. The kind of God that made the Platypus. And they did.

So, what made me have these flashbacks? Two things. First, my co-worked pointed out to me a few weeks back that someone had actually purchased Vignette. Oh boy. If you own stock in OpenText...hmm. If their intention is to 'cherry-pick' through Vignettes code they might as well have purchased a JDK 1.0 for dummies book and gone through the code in the accompanying cd. Then they should have gone looking for code in a dumpster behind a Taco Bell. But eh, at least they didn't buy AOL.

But thats not what rubs me. What really did it is again today I got another spam mail from Vignettes Education Services. From which I've already tried to unsubscribe. Months ago. See, I got a similar email a while back which prompted me to hit the handy unsubscribe link at the bottom. That tried to send an email to unsubscribe_me@marketing.vignette.com, which of course is an invalid email address. So I sent an email to their general support saying essentially 'wtf mate'. The lady said she unsubscribed me. Which I believed. Until today. And yes, the unsubscribe link in the email is still set to unsubscribe_me@marketing.vignette.com.