Archive for July, 2007

Cell Phone Companies

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

You know, there’s a reason people hate phone companies in general and cellphone companies in particular. I had a similar problem being billed for $200 for 15 minutes of conversation from Mexico by AT&T a few years ago. Here is the guy’s homepage and his original complaint.

I have a caveat emptor to top them all. I purchased an iPhone on opening day to use in lieu of a cumbersome laptop while traveling in Ireland and England for two weeks in early July. AT&T promises “easy, affordable, and convenient plans” in their advertising… turns out I got two out of three.

On the way to the airport, I activated the per-use international roaming data plan – the only one offered to me. The rep quoted me $.005 per KB but did not disclose what that would translate to in layman’s language (i.e., X amount per e-mail, X amount per web page, etc.). I’m a web developer as part of my career and I couldn’t even tell you how many KB the average web page is, no less a text message to my son, an e-mail with a photo to my mother, or a quick check of Google Maps. That’s part one of the trap. However, I now pay $40 per month for unlimited data usage on the iPhone, so really — how much could it be? $100 at the most, right?

Keep reading.

As we know, the iPhone can’t be unlocked to use a European provider’s SIM card for more reasonable rates while traveling. There’s part two of the trap.

To be safe, I went online to My Account at AT&T a couple days into the trip and again a week later and was told “usage data is currently unavailable”… and that’s part three. I had no way of knowing specific usage data until I received my bill over the last weekend.

A bill for $3000.

Two weeks of travel with sporadic AT&T EDGE network usage off and on mixed with wifi when available… $3000.

Doing some research, I learned this morning that AT&T offers unlimited international data usage at $70 per month to its Blackberry customers.

Here’s my bottom line: I want this same usage plan to be made available to iPhone customers and to be applied retroactively to my account.

Billing phone reps offered me a $400 “courtesy credit” on the $3000 charge if I would agree to sign up for a $300 per year international data plan with a max of 20MB per month. (I’m not planning any international travel for a while anyway, but 20MB would be burned in a day or two of average use – they must be kidding.) I have until August 14th to resolve this or all my family’s phones (including my wife’s business line) get disconnected. Obviously, there’s no way I can pay $3000 for something so egregiously wrong.

I’m writing you in the hope that the exposure of my story might force AT&T’s hand in admitting they have an inadequate solution in place for international iPhone users, that they’ve discriminated against the iPhone in favor of the Blackberry, that they failed to adequately disclose the exorbitant nature of their rate plan, that they kept me in the dark about my usage specifics until it was too late to modify them, and that by disallowing unlocking to use a European provider’s SIM with more reasonable rates, I was trapped without knowing it until that $3000 “gotcha” came knocking at my door.

Thanks for your time, and please do not hesitate to contact me (dave@3rdeyedesign.com) with any further questions.

———-
UPDATE, 12:18PM PT: Dave says, “AT&T just called and agreed to waive all charges due to the ‘miscommunication.’ I think they have a customer for life now.”

July Birthdays

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

Happy Birthday to the two July birthdays: Uncle Christopher Steussy on the 29th and Cousin David Steussy on the 27th. After you have kids, all family relations are defined by how THEY should see things, not how people are actually related to you. Must make things confusing …

I remember being in Canada in 1982 when I got the phone call from Nic that David had been born. The parents, Chris and I were on a cross-Canada trip at the time. Nic had called our room since the hotel had two Steussy rooms and the receptionist chose ours at random. It was quite early. I said, “Great”, and went back to sleep. We told the parents (whom the message was truly intended for) over breakfast a couple of hours later.

My belated, but heartfelt, apologies over that delay 25 years ago.

Family Update

Saturday, July 28th, 2007




Christopher phoned in this morning with his update – he is still on Fire Island in New York. Everyone is having fun. Today was the first day he’d even looked at email in a week. Vacation, as it were.

So, let’s bring you up to date on the rest of us.

Dan-dan. Biggest news is the most recent doctor visit. His left side is growing faster than his right side (hemihypertrophy). The difference has been smaller at some times, larger at others. Right now, while the difference is somewhat noticeable in his face and arms, it is clear in his legs. His left leg both has more girth and 2.5cm more in length than the right leg.

The orthopedist has told us that there is no danger of permanent problems with Dan-dan’s development right now, but that if by age 11 the problem is this significant or more, several small surgeries will be needed to correct the size difference. Dan-dan continues to see two specialists at three to six month intervals to keep a watch on him.

Camilla. Continues to grow and mature. She is constantly channeling her inner Aunt Cally, as she stubbornly insists on doing things her way, usually meaning doing them herself (choosing clothes, dressing, eating, getting in the car). She hasn’t tried to run anyone else’s life yet, but we figure it’s only a matter of time.

Gabi. The pregnancy continues. All is normal here at the beginning of the eighth month. Her belly is large, she has less energy and suddenly everything seems too hot. She likes feeling the little boy inside her, but it takes a lot out of her.

Ed. Is working hard. The busy part of the season traditionally starts in August, and everything is ready. At last count, Apogee had over 350 contractors fully logged into our system (people who have worked for us at one time or another, successfully finished a project and been paid). Most are translators, along with graphic artists, writers and editors. Things are bound to get interesting this year.

Temecula is having an average summer, not nearly as hot as last year. The housing collapse in the area has, surprisingly, largely passed us by. There are nearby neighborhoods where as many as ten percent of the houses are in foreclosure, but our little clutch of homes has been spared so far.

Those are the major points. I’ll continue with the minutiae of events in this blog. Keep a watch here for our big events, particular the arrival of the new little boy sometime in late September.

Where’s Christopher?

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

So, the question at the moment: Where’s Christopher? And where are his travel pictures that we want to see?

Where's Christopher?

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

So, the question at the moment: Where’s Christopher? And where are his travel pictures that we want to see?

Two Readings

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

One thing about blogs on the Internet – I get a lot more interesting feedback on books (past and future) than I did before. Two of them from this morning:

Four or six draught animals were needed to pull a coach and they had to be changed every 6 to 12 miles, depending on the condition of the roads. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the stagecoaches which traveled the route. Those horses in turn required an army of coachmen, postillions, guards, grooms, ostlers and stable-boys to keep them running. As a coach could carry no more than ten passengers, fares were correspondingly high and out of reach of the mass of the population. A journey from Augsburg to Innsbruck by stagecoach, although little more than 60 miles as the crow flies, would have cost an unskilled laborer more than a month’s wages just for the fare.

This is from The Pursuit of Glory, Europe 1648-1815. I’ve already seen three reviews of this book, and it is the very next one on my reading list.

The following is an older article on Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye by John Scalzi.

I never got Holden Caulfield anyway. This partially due to having my own reading tastes bend towards science fiction as a teen rather than the genre of Alienated Teen Literature, of which Catcher is, of course, the classic. If you were going to give me a teenage hero, give me Heinlein’s Starman Jones: He traveled the galaxy and memorized entire books of log tables and became Captain of a starship (for procedural reasons, granted). All Holden did was bitch, bitch, bitch. Put Holden at the controls of a starship and he’d implode from stress. Not my hero, thanks.

Fact is, I liked neither Holden nor the book. One can recognize the book has a certain literary merit without needing to like the thing, of course. But it’s more to the point to say that Holden has a certain fundamental passivity that I dislike — the desire for people and things to be different without the accompanying acceptance of personal responsibility to effect those changes. To go back to Heinlein and his juvy novels, his teenage characters are not very big on internal lives, but they’re also the sort who go out, do things, fail, do things again, and eventually get it right. Holden merely wishes, ultimately a man of inaction. He’s a failure — a particularly attractive failure if you’re of a certain age and disposition, admittedly, but a failure nonetheless. I remember reading the book as a teen and being irritated with Holden for that reason; I couldn’t see why he required any sympathy from me, or why I should empathize with him.

How I Work: Addendum

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

I’m not the only one who has experienced this change. From Wired Magazine:

Wired: Do you have a wireless connection like EV-DO so you can check your email while you’re in the car?

Martha Stewart: I have this. [Points to BlackBerry.] I’m constantly in touch. Sometimes it’s good; sometimes it’s bad.

Wired: There are downsides to everything.

Stewart: I think we are insane. I used to get 120 to 140 phone calls a day. And now rarely does the phone ring — other than a few archaic friends who call me — because of the BlackBerry.

Wired: That’s nice, though. You can reply at your convenience.

Stewart: No, I think it’s awful. My daughter emails me. When your daughter starts to email you instead of talk to you… It’s horrible. You cannot forget human communication.

Dawn: NASA’s Mission to the Asteroids

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007



This comes under the heading of: “I really should have known more about this.”

In September, Dawn will launch toward the asteroid belt. Running on an ion engine, it will have the ability to maneuver into orbit around Vesta, stay there for over a year, then blast off to Ceres and place itself into orbit there.

There are several reasons to love this mission. First of all, the target. I’ve always been interested in the asteroids. It seems to me that while landing on Mars may well be psychologically important, there probably isn’t anything there worth going to. Getting in and out of that gravity well completely defeats the purpose of doing anything useful (as opposed to pure scientific work).

The asteroids, on the other hand, have a negligible gravity well. It is easy to approach them, do your business, than leave again. No atmosphere, no heavy braking, no need to carry or create propellants to lift off again. If you are looking for an economical way of exploring and exploiting our solar system, the place to start is the asteroids.

Vesta is the second largest asteroid, with a diameter of 330 miles – Ceres is the largest at 570 miles. Both are made of different stuff. Indeed, the material making up Vesta is so unique it has been possible to trace meteorites on Earth to it.

The second reason to love the mission is the whole concept of an ion drive. Dawn shoots out a very small stream of particles accelerated to a fantastic speed to keep a constant, very small level of propulsion. With an extremely high specific impulse, the ion engine essentially turns electricity directly into motive force. Perfect for a deep space rocket.

Back in 1992, when I was working in Moscow for Apple, we had the occasion (usually several times a week) to call for a gathering in one place or other. On a particularly cold and snowy night, one of us had located a new bar that actually made realistic margaritas located just outside of the Kropotkinskaya Metro Station – a truly unique pleasure at the time.

At the gathering were three of the four western Apple officers, a couple of Russian friends and colleagues, and a stranger who showed up a couple of times that winter. I don’t remember his name, but he was in his mid-twenties, a little pudgy, and a recent graduate from Tulane with a degree in space policy. He was NASA’s local Moscow rep.

After a couple of margaritas, my science-fiction-inspired youth couldn’t resist peppering him with question after question about what he was doing. After a couple of dozen questions, he finally said, “So let me tell you what I really do here. It’s not that interesting. The Soviet space program isn’t like NASA. There is no central governing body. There are, and were, lots of independent little groups, all doing one thing or another. Some of them are well integrated with the others, most of them aren’t.

“My job is to go through the files…” (physical files, since even the space program wasn’t really computerized) “…find things that are interesting and fax them to my bosses. Then they’ll look them over and say, ‘Yeah, no big deal.’ ‘We knew about that.’ ‘So what?’

“Just once I sent them something and they said, ‘They have a WHAT? Buy one, and send it over here.'” He didn’t tell us what that thing was he’d found. Even with all of the margaritas (I think he’d had three, and clearly wasn’t used to them), he kept quiet about that.

A couple of years after that, I started seeing reports of an ion drive that the Soviets had had since early in their program. Its discovery by the West, as documented here, clearly puts it in the same time sequence as our little party on a very, very cold Moscow night fifteen years ago.

Dawn: NASA's Mission to the Asteroids

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007



This comes under the heading of: “I really should have known more about this.”

In September, Dawn will launch toward the asteroid belt. Running on an ion engine, it will have the ability to maneuver into orbit around Vesta, stay there for over a year, then blast off to Ceres and place itself into orbit there.

There are several reasons to love this mission. First of all, the target. I’ve always been interested in the asteroids. It seems to me that while landing on Mars may well be psychologically important, there probably isn’t anything there worth going to. Getting in and out of that gravity well completely defeats the purpose of doing anything useful (as opposed to pure scientific work).

The asteroids, on the other hand, have a negligible gravity well. It is easy to approach them, do your business, than leave again. No atmosphere, no heavy braking, no need to carry or create propellants to lift off again. If you are looking for an economical way of exploring and exploiting our solar system, the place to start is the asteroids.

Vesta is the second largest asteroid, with a diameter of 330 miles – Ceres is the largest at 570 miles. Both are made of different stuff. Indeed, the material making up Vesta is so unique it has been possible to trace meteorites on Earth to it.

The second reason to love the mission is the whole concept of an ion drive. Dawn shoots out a very small stream of particles accelerated to a fantastic speed to keep a constant, very small level of propulsion. With an extremely high specific impulse, the ion engine essentially turns electricity directly into motive force. Perfect for a deep space rocket.

Back in 1992, when I was working in Moscow for Apple, we had the occasion (usually several times a week) to call for a gathering in one place or other. On a particularly cold and snowy night, one of us had located a new bar that actually made realistic margaritas located just outside of the Kropotkinskaya Metro Station – a truly unique pleasure at the time.

At the gathering were three of the four western Apple officers, a couple of Russian friends and colleagues, and a stranger who showed up a couple of times that winter. I don’t remember his name, but he was in his mid-twenties, a little pudgy, and a recent graduate from Tulane with a degree in space policy. He was NASA’s local Moscow rep.

After a couple of margaritas, my science-fiction-inspired youth couldn’t resist peppering him with question after question about what he was doing. After a couple of dozen questions, he finally said, “So let me tell you what I really do here. It’s not that interesting. The Soviet space program isn’t like NASA. There is no central governing body. There are, and were, lots of independent little groups, all doing one thing or another. Some of them are well integrated with the others, most of them aren’t.

“My job is to go through the files…” (physical files, since even the space program wasn’t really computerized) “…find things that are interesting and fax them to my bosses. Then they’ll look them over and say, ‘Yeah, no big deal.’ ‘We knew about that.’ ‘So what?’

“Just once I sent them something and they said, ‘They have a WHAT? Buy one, and send it over here.'” He didn’t tell us what that thing was he’d found. Even with all of the margaritas (I think he’d had three, and clearly wasn’t used to them), he kept quiet about that.

A couple of years after that, I started seeing reports of an ion drive that the Soviets had had since early in their program. Its discovery by the West, as documented here, clearly puts it in the same time sequence as our little party on a very, very cold Moscow night fifteen years ago.

Brad DeLong

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

I lifted this entire article from Brad DeLong’s blog. Insightful.

After the Next Nuclear Fire…

In the early 1980s the U.S. NSA–or perhaps it was the Defense Department–loved to play games with Russian air defense. They would send probe planes in from the Pacific to fly over Siberia. And they would watch and listen: Where were the gaps in Russian sensor coverage? How far could U.S. planes penetrate before being spotted? What were Russian command-and-control procedures to intercept intruders? And so on, and so forth.

Then, one night, September 1, 1983, the pilot of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 to Seoul mispunched his destination coordinates into his autopilot, and sent his plane west of its proper course, over Siberia, where Russian fighters–confident that they had finally caught one of the American spyplane intruders napping–blew it and its hundreds of civilian passengers out of the sky. With some glee the Reagan administration claimed that the Russians had deliberately shot down a civilian airliner because they were barbarians and terrorists and wanted the world to know that they were barbarians and terrorists by handing the Reagan administration a propaganda victory. The Russians counterclaimed that the CIA had deliberately misprogrammed the autopilot of KAL 007 and monkeyed with its transponder in order to trick the Russians into shooting down a civilian airliner. What had actually happened was a mistake: radar operators, majors, colonels, and generals seeing what they expected to see–a U.S. spyplane intruding into Russian air space and, for once, not being alert enough to scoot out to sea before the defending fighters arrived.

In the late 1980s, the U.S. sent its warships into the Persian Gulf to protect Saudi and Kuwaiti tankers against Iranian attack. Saudi and Kuwaiti oil earned dollars that paid for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to fight its bloody war against Khomeini’s Iran in what the carter and Reagan administrations approved of and encouraged as appropriate payback for the outrage against international law and diplomatic practice committed by Khomeini and company’s seizure of hostages from the diplomats at the American embassy in Tehran. This time it was the turn of the Americans–the sailors on the “robo-cruiser” Vincennes–to shoot down a fully-loaded civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655 on its regularly-scheduled run in its regularly-scheduled flight path at its regularly-scheduled time across the Persian Gulf from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. Once again what happened was a mistake: sailors seeing an airliner flying straight and level as a hostile bomber dropping in altitude and preparing to fire its missiles. The records of the Vincennes’ instruments show no signals that would suggest a bomber was detected, while they do record detecting a civilian IFF signal.

Boys who don’t think too fast and aren’t too smart at processing information playing with deadly toys. Testosterone-poisoned devil-apes using not rocks and fists to demonstrate some bizarre concept of reproductive fitness but using buttons and missiles instead. And, increasingly, testosterone-crazed devil apes playing with nuclear weapons.

We are highly likely to lose a city to nuclear fire over the next half-century. Some not-too-smart major will see what he expects to see, or some god-maddened colonel will think he has received a holy command, or some ignorant general will believe that the logic of deterrence is failing but that the situation can be rescued if he strikes first. Tehran or Delhi or Islamabad or Pyongyang or Tel Aviv or Paris or London or Moscow or Beijing or Washington or some other city will become a sea of radioactive glass. With luck we will only lose one city, because the people ruled by the guilty government and military will immediately rise up and tear their politicians, bureaucrats, and commanders limb-from-limb before sending all possible aid to the wounded and the dying. But don’t count on it. We are likely to lose more than one city. As Bill Clinton is supposed to have said: if North Korea were to use a nuclear weapon against the United States, an hour later there won’t be a North Korea.

Perhaps there won’t be a use of nuclear weapons in the next half century. Every human household has the potential to use deadly force against its immediate neighbors, yet very few disputes over dog waste or storm runoff escalate to murder. Can’t countries, like people, all just get along (for the most part, that is)? There is a problem, however: leaders of countries are not average people: imagine a neighborhood of Ariel Sharons living next to the Saddam Husseins living next to the as-Sabah family living next to the Assad compound, with the Mubarrak and Hashemite families across the street wishing that they lived in a very different neighborhood.

Let’s look on the bright side: the aftermath of the first post-Nagasaki use of nuclear weapons to kill humans will be a moment of maximum political plasticity: a moment when swift global action in the heat of the moment can create institutions to govern the world. What then should be done? If we argue and debate in the aftermath of nuclear fire, we will lose a unique opportunity to shape events so that there will be no second post-Nagasaki use of nuclear weapons. We should have our arguments and debates now, so that we will know what to do when the moment strikes.

I propose the following plan for the aftermath of the horror: That non-great powers be bribed to abandon their nuclear weapons–they are a source of danger rather than an aid to defense. That great powers put their nuclear weapons under the joint control of their own militaries and of the United Nations Strategic Forces–with each of the two having the technical means to disarm and prevent use. That the great powers return us to the system of international relations toward which George H. W. Bush was working in 1989-1993: that the command and blessing of the United Nations Security Council be the only justification for any form of cross-border military adventure, and that the Secretary General raise, maintain, and deploy sufficient deadly armed force to make that principle stick.

But, I believe, it is much less important that we adopt this plan than that we have a plan for what we will do in the aftermath of a human city’s next meeting with the siblings of Fat Man and Little Boy. What should that plan be?