Eric Bergen

In perfect timing with my unable to assess risk series a family wants to have plastic pen tops banned because their teenage son died choking on one. Banned. Really? You want to ban something because out of the millions of plastic pen tops your child was the one unlucky one that choked on one? Insane. I understand you’re upset and you want to get revenge for your sons death. First you can’t take revenge on an inanimate object. It won’t make you feel any better. Second there are millions if not billions of these caps floating around and one person has died. They may get plastic pen tops banned but I bet the will still drive while talking on a cellphone.

We have some wonderful people fueling the fire too. His school has banned the pen tops. I’m sure a few hundred people get these caught in their mouth every year. Now one _one_ kid has died and they should be banned? Before we get pen tops banned let’s focus on cellphones, swimming pools, and bad parents.

During my life I have seen the level of fear in our society rise almost out of control. We have really lost the ability to assess risk. I’m going to attempt to realign the fears in our society back on a logical course. One of the many things that I think we should be afraid of that we currently aren’t is cellphones.

Sure people are worried about cellphones causing cancer. For the most part this doesn’t cause much stir because it’s out of sight out of mind (except the cancer in your brain). I’m not worried about my cellphone or the cancer it may be causing. I’m not worried about my cellphone at all. I’m worried about other people’s cellphones and when they use them.

I’ve been commuting in the bay area for a little over 2 years now. Part of that time my commute was about 5 miles of highway and the rest was about 20 miles of highway. It wasn’t a long commute but it was long enough for me to gather enough data to prove a point.

Most people cannot drive and talk on the phone at the same time. Every time I say this someone pipes up and says “I drive just fine while on my phone!”. Fine then, you aren’t in the ‘most’. Even though I bet at least half of the people that say they drive just fine really don’t they just think they do because they’re paying too much attention to their phone to realize they’re running people off the road.

These days parents are paranoid about their kids safety when riding bikes. Kids ride around these days wearing more padding and armor than our soldiers in WWII. Yet parents are perfectly ok with inattentive driving caused by talking on a cellphone. They happily yak away while driving putting their kids lives at risk. What’s worse parents, your kid hitting a fire hydrant at 4mph with no pads or you slamming into a semi at 80 because you couldn’t hang up the phone?

Nine out of ten times when I see someone swerving or looking like they are having difficulty driving and I pass them it’s because they’re on the phone. We have been paranoid about drunk driving and click-it or ticket for years. Let’s get some legislation out there for cell phones. It should work like this. The first time you get pulled over for inattentive driving from being on a cellphone the cop takes away your phone. You get it mailed back to you a few days later. The second time you get caught you get your phone taken away until you get a special device installed in your car. That device would require that you plug your phone into it in order to operate your car and your phone won’t be operable while in the device.

We managed to function as a society for years without the need for phones while driving. Most people that have phones can wait 20 minutes to return a call instead of answering it while driving. If you can’t then you should really take a look at your life. Your phone owns you.

[Update: 10/15/07 I forgot to add that when commuting to work a few months ago a guy in front of me ran into a construction road cone which flipped it up into the air causing me and the car behind me to swerve. The guy was swerving really bad so I passed him as soon as I could. What was he doing? Looking down at a cellphone texting people. Yes, texting in a construction zone. That guy should have his phone taken away]

When I first moved to down town Mountain View the person at the leasing office spent about 15 minutes trying to convince me that DSL/Cable availability wasn’t an issue because Google was going to provide free internet to all of Mountain View. I tried to explain that WiFi wasn’t good enough because I routinely ssh into servers across the country thus ping time is critical. My initial assumptions about Google WiFi have been proven right over the past two years. Unless you’re aligned with Google just right it doesn’t work. I’ve tried from in buildings, in parkings lots all around town my conclusion is that it’s a compete and total failure.

I’m willing to give them a few more months to get it working in downtown mountain view. What I can’t forgive is the fact that they can’t get it working from their own campus. I’m at Google HQ building 43 right now for the MySQL Meetup and I can see an SSID for Google WiFi from my laptop but I can’t connect to it long enough to even authenticate through wifi.google.com. To me a good way to promote your free wifi service is to have it readily available on your campus.

I’ll continue the hunt for a google wifi “hotspot” in down town mountain view but don’t hold your breath.

….caps lock key. today is international caps lock day. i’m not going to link anywhere because i don’t want this disease to continue to spread. continuing the recent negative-nancy theme of my blog i’m voting to put a stop to this shit too. as part of my protest this blog entry will be in lower case. i’m very happy today to say that i don’t have a caps lock key. the designers of my keyboard of champions ditched that useless annoyance and replaced it with control. yes folks, my keyboard may be small and cute but control is where it won’t torque my wrist out of it’s socket just to change desktops.

talk like a pirate day is bad enough. now not only are people declaring bullshit months but they are declaring bullshit days as well. at least talk like a pirate day is somewhat creative. this is just stupid.

Declaring a month is when a group of people/company whatever says that it’s national something month. Some are non profit ‘poetry month’, ‘violence awareness month’, and ‘breast cancer awareness month’. Others are purely profit driven. Domino’s national pizza month is a great example of this. Way to try to ride the coat tails of black history month on that one Domino’s, you pricks. I’m ok with black history month and cancer awareness month (not breast cancer but all kinds of cancer). I think we’re almost to the point where black history month can be taken back to a week or two but it doesn’t really bother me. What bothers me is all the others. The copy cats that are trying to gain more awareness of themselves by declaring a month. These people can die in fire.

If you own a company and your marketing team tries to declare a month for your product, fire them. Then kill yourself for hiring such a shitty marketing team. Having a worthy cause does not mean you get to declare a month for it. Months are limited we can’t be declaring them for random crap. Besides this whole month thing could backfire. Is violence awareness month about being aware of violence? What should I do when that’s over with? I know! I’ll beat the shit out of people that declare months! Better yet let’s all make the people declaring new months aware of violence by kicking the shit out of them!

Using the word ‘national’ doesn’t make it any more official. It’s not endorsed by the government, nobody cares, die in fire.

Now I’ve got myself so worked up that I can’t keep what I want to rant about straight in my brain. I should have been nicer to ‘violence awareness month’ but it just happend to be the first one that came up. This issue isn’t worth that kind of anger built up. I’m done.

I’m not the first person to run into this and I certainly won’t be the last. This is also already covered in: Bug #19093 I just want to say again how annoying it is that the default for show status is session instead of global. It bit me again yesterday. I ran show status and was confused because most of Com_* is 0 yet uptime was a few days. Then it hit like a brick to the face that I was working on 5.0 instead of 4.1 and the default for show status is session. I know the default has changed and it still bites me. This is going to cause people hours of confusion the first time they do what I just did.

If you want the default changed please go to Bug #19093 and add a comment.

I tried to write a post comparing different operating systems on desktop vs laptop. I also really hate starting blog posts and sentances with the word ‘I’ but I’m not backspacing this one because the keyboard delay is killing me. I’m not going to upgrade wordpress in hopes that they fixed the ‘fing delay! If it does you will get a post on mac vs linux, desktop vs laptop for development.

I woke up last friday and sat down at my computer much like I do every day. Only this day was different. My DSL was dead! After a bit of diagnostic work I found that my phone line was also dead. “Diagnostic work” means pulling a phone out of the closet to see if it has dial tone. Nothing but silence. So I went to work and was too busy friday to deal with it before going on vacation saturday. So today I finally get around to calling AT&T.

AT&T has one of those annoying voice call systems that try to require you to say what your problem is and they decide which option that most closely matches. I’m not sure who came up with this system but they should be shot. Anyone that couldn’t figure out the old multiple choice system has no business owning a phone. AT&T’s new system makes me feel very awkward. I can’t stand talking to a computer voice. In my desperation to find a way out of talking to the machine I found out that AT&T built in a way to use the old system, they just don’t tell you about it. If you press zero (or speaking garbled) a few times when the system answers you a question it will say

“I’m sorry let’s try this another way. I will give you a few options and you pick the one that sounds the best.”

Sweet! Thank god for that fallback or else I would have been very testy when talking to the operator after saying my phone number 3 times and picking 8 different options.
I still can’t figure out why they make people put in their phone number 3 different times then say it again to the operator when he/she answers the phone.
After getting an operator who then called the CO to do some diagnostics my land line rings. The operator said it was a loose jumper at the CO… Bastards…

It always takes me a few tries to get a good flow going on a blog entry. I also _hate_ touching my mouse. In my world every time I have to move my hand over and use my mouse it’s a delay in my work. I would really like to get one of those mice that tracks my eyeballs and uses a short cut key to click. Until then I will continue optimizing everything I do on my computer to use the mouse as little as possible. Back to the point while trying to get a good flow going on a blog entry I always end up writing a few sentences then deleting the last one. I do this by holding down the backspace key. When deleting a word or two I press the delete key the correct number of times but for more than two words I tend to hold down the delete key. In wordpress 1.5 and every other thing I use in my daily life when I let up off the backspace key the deleting stops. In wordpress 2.0 there is some funky jazz going on in the text box that causes the delete events to be slow and thus spool up. When I let up off the back space key innocent characters disappear from the text area. This is not only sad but very frustrating because I have changed my habits to move the mouse, highlight text and press the delete key once.
As I do with everything else on this blog I’m going to rant about the problem before going out and finding a solution. Ranting here first clears my head so I can stop being so upset and actually focus on the solution. Once I find it either (I wrote the word either 4 times. I picked up my mouse, highlighted the previous sentence past the word either and pressed the delete key. I then got upset at myself for acting out that bad habit, wrote the old sentence, held down the delete key, and destroyed most of the word either. I then rewrote it and tried to get the timing down, over shot and destroyed it again.) I will post a new entry or a little [Updated:] block will appear below this post. I’m not sure why I’m talking about my quirky writing habits but it’s been a long day and I feel guilty for not posting anything on here for a while. Not because I think people want to read what I write but because my writing gets worse if I don’t practice.

As I’m writing this my treo is mixing quite a beat. It’s not coming from it though, it’s coming through my stereo. Normally this happens only when I’m about to get a message. Tonight though it has gone on for more than a minute. The same beat over and over again.

This now on top of several other problems I have had. It has locked up twice. Also about half of the incoming calls fail. When someone calls I hear the call, I can answer it but I can’t hear the caller. When this happens I say “sorry I’ll call you back” and hang up. Then I call them back. Most of the people that call me have been “trained” to deal with this. I recently tried the firmware upgrade. No help. Next step call cingular.

I have been putting off calling cingular because every time I call a cell phone company (both cingular and verizon people have done this) I end up getting some goofy person that decides to unload their life story on me. The last time it was some bubbly chick asking me how it is to live in Northern California and telling me a very long winded story about some uncle with a house somewhere that wants her to move out. Meanwhile I take the phone away from my ear, stare at it awkwardly for 10 seconds then start listening again.

Goofy people. Anyway I can’t bash on the treo all that much. The touch screen, QWERTY keyboard and the ability to easily read sports news (wap.yahoo.com) anywhere I go is very handy.