This weekend is packing packing packing. As a full-time software developer telecommuter, I have accumulated oodles of random IT equipment over the years (hey, you never know when you’re going to need spare parts!). I was packing up my office today — including The Parts Closet. It was like a trip into the past. Here’s a fun partial list of things that I found in TPC:

• A surprising number of Palm Products:
  • 7 palm styluses
  • A full pack (minus 1) of palm m100 protector stickers
  • Palm m100
  • Palm Treo
  • Palm Clie
  • Palm 1MB RAM (yes, megabyte) upgrade
• 239 CDs (yes way!!):
  • Many Windows XP
  • Many Microsoft Works
  • Many Dell reinstall CDs
  • 1 copy of Windows Millenium
  • 4 AOL CDs (some as old as AOL 5.0)
  • Oodles of drivers and “you just bought some IT equipment, so we feel compelled to give you a CD with other random stuff on it” CDs
• A USB smartcard reader (circa 2001)
• A 10mb nic with a BNC connector
• 3 laptop floppy drives
• 13 floppy disks
• A microtape answering machine
• 3 different DSL modems
• 15 IDE hard drives that I haven’t yet erased and am therefore too paranoid to throw away:
  • The smallest was 9.2GB
  • The largest was 60GB
  • 5 were unmarked; I don’t know what size they were
• 3 analog phones
• 5 parallel printer cables (one extra long)
• 3 PS2 keyboards
• 14 conference/trade show bags (an I distinctly remember throwing/giving away at least a dozen or so a few years ago — man, those things just creep up on you!)

Ah… good times.

(Oh, and I found a whole box of pictures from undergrad/grad school. Some of you should be afraid. Be very afraid.)

Kudos to the Bowman Field, Louisville, KY driver’s license center!

One of the things Gmail does is maintain a rolling 30-day window on your spam. That is, when Gmail identifies spam, they move it to your spam folder. When that spam is 30 days old, it’s automatically deleted. Simple.

Just because I’m a curious guy, I periodically like to calculate my “spams per hour” rate (sph) — an average of how many spams I received every hour for the past 30 days. The calculation is simple: number of spams in my Gmail spam folder divided by 24 divided by 30. Or, for the mathematically inclined, “x / (24 * 30)”.

My sph sometimes varies wildly; I have seen it as low as 2 and as high as 12. Today, my sph is 3.71. Just a few days ago it was over 6.

Consider that to make a change from 6 to 3.71 reflects a fairly large difference in the total number of spams:

• 6 sph = 4,230 spams
• 3.71 sph = 2,671 spams

Seeing large fluctuations like this usually means that some kind of “spam event” has occurred within the last 30 days. For example, I have a decrease of ~1,500 spams compared to earlier this week; it’s possible that some spammer got knocked off the net (or filtered) or otherwise stopped sending. It’s also possible that my address fell the spammer lists that were active over the last 30 days.

But the optimist in me prefers to think it was the former. ;-)

When my sph reached 12 a few months ago (8,640 spams in my folder), it was a fairly dramatic ramp-up — the spammers must have been redoubling their efforts to send out huge volumes of mails and/or figured out some clever trick to avoid server-side blocking. The fall off was equally dramatic; IIRC, within the span of 1-2 days, my sph fell to 2 or 3.

In recent news on the home front…

• My Blackberry Bold spontaneously reboots at least once a week. It’s a little annoying. On my way home from a trip recently, I turned my BB off like a good boy while on a flight. When I got to the destination airport, I turned my Bold back on and it refused to turn on wifi. Very strange. I had to take-the-battery-out-reboot to make wifi work again. I’m still pretty happy with my Bold, but these kinds of things are a little annoying.
• KK recently started kindergarten. They seem to be adapting well.
• Notre Dame had their first football game yesterday vs. Nevada and they properly stomped them. Crushed. Squashed. Flattened. It was nice. Hopefully, the Irish can keep up this level of performance throughout the season.
• Combining the two above items, on Saturday morning before the ND game, I had the following conversation with my daughters:
  • Me: “Do you girls know what’s on TV today?”
  • KK: <mysterious looks>
  • Me: “Notre Dame football is on today! It’s the first game of the season!”
  • Kaitlyn: “I hope Notre Dame loses”
  • Me: “What?!”
  • Tracy (from the next room): “What did your daughter just say?!”
  • Kathryn: “I hope Louisville wins!”
  • Kaitlyn: “Go Cards!”
  • Tracy and I commit seppaku (while we blame this outburst on going to Kindergarten with many other Louisville natives/fans, clearly we have failed as Fightin’ Irish parents. We will need to kick up the propaganda several notches).

This is the admission wrist strap to the posh dining room where Tracy and I watched the Kentucky Oaks race last Friday. Gotta love it.

• I have a broken SD card reader. So I ordered a new one off the internet (about $20). Less than 24 hours later, I found that I had another working SD card reader upstairs in a pile of spare parts. Doh!
• Brian passed his PhD. defense. w00t! That’s Dr. Mr. Brian, to you.
• Tivo caught A Knight’s Tale the other day. Eh. I give it a zero (sympathy), which exactly fits the situation (I made no effort to catch the movie; Tivo caught it by chance).
• I saw Body of Lies last night. Enjoyable, but dark. Perhaps even somewhat accurate. Shrug. 7.5 minutes.
• I also saw The Dark Knight somewhat recently. Wow, the Joker had a fantastic performance. Excellent flick; 20 minutes.
• The 2 weeks before the Kentucky Derby are the busiest of the year for Louisville.
  • We tried to go to the balloon race last weekend, but it was delayed 3 times due to high winds, and we therefore missed the actual race.
  • We took the munchkins to the Pegasus Parade (a Derby-themed parade in downtown Louisville) this past week. Good stuff. Downtown Louisville is more or less in the landing pattern of the Louisville airport; we could see private jet after private jet after private jet in the landing pattern — presumably for the Derby.
  • Tracy got tickets to the Kentucy Oaks race through work (Oaks = the race that all the Louisville locals go to; Derby = the day after the Oaks, the race that all the tourists go to). We saw a bunch of other GE people and generally had a great time.
  • Pictures and a movie of both the Pegasus parade and the Oaks Day are here:
    • http://gallery.me.com/jsquyres#100676
    • http://gallery.me.com/jsquyres#100668&bgcolor=black&view=grid
  • My Blackberry performed terribly at Churchill Downs while we were at the Oaks. Granted, there were nearly 150k people there, probably just about all of them trying to use their phones as well, but others seemed to have no problems getting and placing phone calls. My BB couldn’t place any calls (every single call resulted in “Call Failed”), and it randomly rebooted at least 4 times during the day (I saw it reboot twice, and twice I saw typical slowness / “optimizing index” behavior that happens after a reboot).

With all those stars in it, how could it be so bad? I give it (at least) 15 feet.

By “died,” I mean that the horizontal / vertical scrolling button wheel thingy on the top finally quit working. I’ve read lots about this on the net — I knew it was just a matter of time before mine stopped working. From having cleaned on many trackball mice, I can see how gunk just accumulates in the mechanism and that is probably what makes it stop working. Shrug.

I got a cheapie optical Logitech scroll mouse to replace it. Works fine.

In other Mac news, Anna A. face-dialed me with her iPhone the other day (meaning: it’s like pocket dialing, but with your face. She was on another call, holding the phone up to her ear and talking, and her face pushed enough buttons on the iPhone to call me. Awesome. ☺ )

I suspect that it was off seeing the world, sowing its wild oats, getting into trouble, etc. (perhaps a mid-life crisis?). Or perhaps it was off wherever socks go. Maybe it didn’t like the fruity drinks wherever it went.

Shrug.

Regardless, it’s home now. We’ve reconciled, and have mostly moved on beyond this incident (although the “rebuilding trust” therapy will continue for a while).

My wife has a Blackberry Curve, so I’ve been able to compare the two models pretty closely. For my needs, I’m much happier with the Bold. It’s a little bigger and thinner — meaning that it has a bigger and brighter screen (IMHO). The keys feel a bit more natural to me, too. And the GUI on the Bold is definitely more “modern”.

Of course, within two weeks of receipt, I put my Blackberry through the laundry. DOH! And I did it the day before I left for a week-long trip. Yoinks. It was quite painful to be traveling and not have a phone. So I had to buy another one. Yuck. :-( But I finally got my replacement, and I’m being much more careful with it…

PROS:

• It’s much more reliable; I haven’t seen it randomly reboot, for example.
  • UPDATE: I’ve now seen plenty of random reboots…
• The interface is much more modern (which is really a subjective point, but I still like it much better than the Crapjack interface) and is much more internally consistent than the Crapjack interface
• Easy things are easy on the Blackberry. I don’t feel like looking up my old entry, but it was many, many clicks just to send a text message on my Crapjack. From the start screen, it’s 2 clicks and trackball 2 rolls (excluding typing characters to type the name of the person I want to SMS) to send a text message (or call or MMS or email). Much better.
• There are keyboard shorcuts in the email index screen. For example, you can jump to the top of the index, bottom of the index, to the previous/next day, etc. You don’t have to scroll scroll scrooollll to get to where you want to go.
• There’s a Google Mobile app that works on the Blackberry (it didn’t work at all on the Crapjack because of weird Java issues). I love getting both my work and home email on one device.

CONS

• There’s no way to lock the keypad. It’ll “lock” the device, but then any keypress will start entering the device password.
  • UPDATE: Holding down the “mute” button on the top will lock the device. Handy.
• It appears that the Blackberry Enterprise service installs some software on the back-end Exchange server that monitors your INBOX. Any time a message arrives or changes state (e.g., you reply to a message), it deletes the message, processes it, and then puts it back in your INBOX. Some of the processing includes making every message be a multipart-mine message — it adds an HTML-ified version of every plain-text message, for example. This is highly annoying to me for two reasons:
  • I receive my work email via IMAP on the OS X Mail application. Apparently, Mail is fast enough to see the message before the Blackberry service deletes it. So a mail will arrive, appear in my INBOX, then disappear, and then re-appear. Very annoying, because it changes focus, “blinks” the index pane, etc.
  • I send and receive mostly plain text email (because I am a programmer and communicate mostly with other programmers). Since the Blackberry service adds an HTML version of the mail to each message, the Apple Mail application assumes that you want to see the HTML version (there’s no way to tell it “I prefer the plain text mail”). So I’ve effectively lost the ability to see plain text mails. Arrgh!

Hopefully, the above Exchange integration item can be fixed in the not-distant future (unfortunately, I’m not holding my breath — there have been reports of Blackberry doing this for several years). Other than that, though, I’m pretty happy with my new device.

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

I’m speechless.

It’s a bit nicer than GC and much more Google-like (its UI is similar to — although not exactly like — Gmail). Some random notes:

• I lost my custom ring-tone that is played to callers. Bonk.
• GV transcribes voice mails and SMS/emails them to you. Surprisingly handy.
• SMS to my GV phone number now works. Woot!
• …but there’s complications with SMS.
  • I like to have my home phone, work phone, and work cell hooked up to GV for the whole “single number reach” thing (stealing a term from Cisco’s VOIP solution)
  • But since my work phone also has single number reach (paired with my work cell), if someone calls my GV number, then my cell phone effectively rings twice (once because GV is calling it, and once because my Cisco work phone is calling it) — which results in Badness
  • So if I disable my work cell in GV, then my work cell rings once (yay), but then SMS doesn’t work (bonk)

What would be great for GV would be if you could have a cell phone registered that does not receive calls but does receive SMS messages. This would be great for me, and I can imagine that others might want that as well (but probably for different reasons).

I also tried to use my GV phone number to activate a Google App Engine account recently and it didn’t work. I.e.,

• Google Voice is taunting me. I’ve been a GrandCentral user for quite a while (over a year?). Supposedly, GC users were going to be upgraded to GV before the public availability of GV. As such, I’ve been waiting for my GC account to be upgraded to GV. I login every few days and check my messages. It still says “Your account will soon be available for upgrade to Google Voice. Thank you for your patience.” Sigh. Even John S., who got his GC account after I got mine, has been upgraded to GV. But not so for me. “Thank you for your patience.”
• I’ve co-hosted a bunch of podcasts recently. The series is entitled “Research, Computing, and Engineering.” It’s hosted by Brock P., an HPC system administrator at a large midwestern university (I won’t mention his affiliation because he’s been careful to keep the university out of it, so that we’re a bit more free to do whatever we want). The topics have been able HPC and related subjects; it’s been pretty fun so far talking to a bunch of different people from different kinds of projects. We do a taping about once every 2 weeks.
• I was on a pair of panels at the OpenFabrics Sonoma 2009 Workshop a few weeks ago. The first panel was on MPI/OpenFabrics topics; the second panel was on challenges of OFED adoption.
• Open MPI had a brilliant April Fool’s announcement. I might have had a little hand in it. ☺
• I swear we’ve done more research on which Kindergarden our munchkins will attend next year and Tracy and I did for choosing a college (combined). Whew.
• PLPA v1.3 was released recently. Yay.
• Yes, Cisco (the company I work for) is now selling servers. But it’s actually much more than that — lots of companies just sell servers. See the marketing web pages for all the details.

As probably was to be expected, I did not get a call back from my previous call to XM support (despite promises from the helpful XM rep that I spoke to). So I called again today and sat on hold for 30+ minutes. I finally got a rep who re-activated my radio on the spot. He also gave me a month’s worth of credit for my lost time and to cover the rest of my existing subscription that should have been on my account. He also signed me up for 2 more years on my office radio (which is what I tried to do over a week ago).

Why on earth couldn’t the other XM reps that I talked to do that? Why did I have to be offline for over a week? Extremely frustrating / disappointing. ☹

I have to return my old Blackjack to Cisco for erasing and recycling. Sadness (I cannot just throw it off a roof — or perhaps something even more creative — that would have been happiness).

XM still hasn’t fixed my second radio yet — no XM radio at work since last Friday. More sadness.

XM promised me on Sunday that they would call me back about my second radio, but they hadn’t yet. So I called them today. After sitting on hold for 30+ minutes, I finally got a very friendly and helpful representative. She unfortunately could not do anything to help my second radio not working (apparently it was deactivated off my account — I have no idea why), so she promised — very earnestly — that she would bump this to her supervisor and try very hard to get him to call me back today. I do believe she was honest and genuinely trying to help (and she was actually quite apologetic and sympathetic), but I got the same speech on Sunday. So we’ll see what happens.

Perhaps because she felt bad for me, she bumped me up to a “lifetime” subscription for the Honda-built-in XM radio in our minivan. It was only a few $ more than what I had just paid to renew it for 3 years anyway, so it was a good deal. Let’s hope XM stays in business long enough to make that worthwhile! ☺