Plaidophile

I just spent a rather annoying time with a T-Mobile CSR attempting to get some clarification on why my account would be subject to an ETF if I were to convert it from monthly to prepaid.

Timeline of events:

2001: got my first cellphone on Voicestream, liked them, liked T-Mobile even better when they bought Voicestream out
2008: iPhone siren song got too strong, switched to AT&T with an unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone.
2009: Eventually gave up on AT&T, decided to never use them again and switched back to T-Mobile (via a pay-as-you-go service).
2011: Still on T-Mobile's prepaid, had an increasingly frustrating experience with the lack of integration between prepaid and some of their services.
August 2011: Switched to Virgin Mobile. Had a terrible experience all around (both with quality of service and billing problems)
November 2011: Switched back to T-Mobile. Purchased an LG Optimus 2X with a monthly installment plan (no discount or subsidy to the device).
July 2012: Upgraded to a Galaxy Nexus, bought unsubsidized directly from Google.
August 2012: Moved to Seattle, had terrible coverage, started using a VoIP provider with my home Internet connection, T-Mobile minute usage dropped to practically nothing.
February 2013: Applied a corporate discount to my account to mitigate some of the expensive suckiness. This reset my contract term to 24 months.
April 2013: Paid off the remaining payments on the installment plan, contacted T-Mobile support to make a service change and, while I had the CSR's attention, asked about switching to a discounted prepaid rate, in light of their announcement of doing away with contracts entirely and a coworker finding a much lower non-contract rate plan that suited my needs much better. Thus, this chat transcript (which I have also submitted to The Consumerist).
???: Going to switch to another provider that doesn't keep on jerking loyal customers around. Probably Ting.

So, a few years ago I made some remixes of other peoples' youtube videos, as a sort of slice-of-life thing. Many of the videos were about peoples' difficulty with other people on the Internet, or their views of politics, and so on. I was just doing an artsy thing.

The service is great, but holy crap are the renters here idiots.

So, as I've mentioned in the past, I've been living a mostly Google-service-free life for the last year or so. I do my own email and calendar hosting on LiNode, I use DuckDuckGo for search, and I use Tiny Tiny RSS hosted on Dreamhost for my RSS feeds. (And Dreamhost in general for my webhosting, although I might move some of that over to the LiNode or get an EC2 instance or something.)

However, I still quite like Android, and so I still need a GMail account for its user account (for app purchases and such), and while I have that I also have Google Voice for my phone number, which I figure is fairly benign since I don't keep my address book on Google's servers and so far they haven't done anything to monetize my voicemails.

Once upon a time I worked for a VoIP startup in Albuquerque. Everything was based on standard technologies, namely SIP for call routing and various DNS-based things for endpoint lookup. In the VoIP landscape, most providers do something similar. But not Google.

Google Voice provides two forms of call termination:

1. Routing your calls over the POTS network using a call gateway (which is expensive)
2. Routing your calls over the Internet (which is cheap) using the Jingle protocol (which is non-standard)

Android itself supports SIP dialing and termination. If you have a traditional SIP account, such as with Vonage, 8x8, or any of the thousands of VoIP services out there, then you can use Internet bandwidth for your call routing, natively and built-in to the Android OS. But Google Voice — Google's own service, made by the same people who make Android — does not support SIP. Instead it uses Jingle, which is a protocol intended for establishing voice calls via XMPP. (Incidentally, most existing IM networks, such as AIM, use SIP for their call routing as well.) Android has no built-in support for Jingle.

SIP also allows you to have multiple endpoints connected to a single account; if a call comes in, then all connected endpoints will ring and any of them can answer the call. Jingle, however, has the same limitation as XMPP, in that incoming messages only go to one connected endpoint, and the rules by which it decides which one gets it are byzantine, opaque, and generally not very useful.

Where this is going for me is that I have fairly spotty cellphone reception in the two places I sit most often: my recording studio, and my office. However, I have great Internet coverage there. So, one of my coworkers pointed me to an app called GrooVe IP, a Jingle client for Android. It has a few rough edges, but it works well enough. However, it doesn't work too well if you have Google Voice set to forward to both your cellphone and your Jingle client, because both of them ring and the phone gets confused. Fortunately, GrooVe also makes GrooVe Forwarder, which you can use to turn the cellphone forwarding on and off based on GrooVe IP's availability. So, that works pretty okay.

I also decided for various reasons that it'd be nice to have a landline going through Google Voice, which is possible because of the OBi110, which will connect to Google Voice accounts, and also provides its own call routing mesh (which, as it turns out, sucks horribly). Unfortunately, it connects to Google Voice via Jingle. Which only supports a single endpoint at any given time. And you have no control over whether the OBi box or GrooVe IP gets priority.

So right now my choices are:

1. Use the OBi exclusively at home, and my work phone number at work, and just not use GrooVe IP at all (and be stuck with suboptimal but available devices)
2. Use GrooVe IP + GrooVe Forwarder on my cellphone, and return (or write off) the OBi and cordless phone I got to work with it (I was originally just going to use my AE90 with it, but I'm not sure the OBi can produce enough voltage to trigger the ringer, and anyway it turns out the OBi requires a touch-tone phone for initial setup — and of course pulse dialing won't work with it, not that I expected/needed it to)
3. Sign up for a VoIP service, connect the OBi (which also supports SIP) to that, and pay an extra $7+/month for the ability to have a backup phone at home (and add it as a Google Voice POTS endpoint)
4. Hope really hard that Google comes to their senses and adds actual SIP support to Google Voice and then have everything Just Work (ha ha who am I kidding that'll never happen, have you seen what they've done to IMAP and NNTP?)
5. Sign up for actual POTS service, use the OBi in its intended capacity as a proprietary-calls-to-POTS termination device (which in turn allows me to roll my own limited version of Google Voice, essentially), be sure that my AE90 will work, and pay $14+/month for what just amounts to 911 access

Right now I'm mostly leaning towards option 2, because it works (mostly) and isn't terrible (mostly).

So, my TV only came with a stupid "magic" remote which uses a gestural mouse and is painful to use. LG does a good job of making it hard to tell which of their standard remotes works with their TVs. And I wanted a universal remote that would work with everything; the universal remote which came with my stereo is quite good but, unfortunately, doesn't support the particular LG remote codes I need, either. So I paid way too much money for a Logitech Harmony One.

After spending a couple hours trying to get it to work reasonably I think I've beaten it into submission, but it was still bad enough that I decided to send a not-so-polite suggestion to Logitech support:

There is absolutely nothing intuitive or well-designed about this piece of crap web application thing. It's not even due to it being a web application, it's just that I don't think that the people who wrote the software have ever actually tried using it.

It would be really nice if you could just configure your devices based on what they're connected to (like, PS3 is connected to the A/V receiver on the HDMI2 port, A/V receiver is connected to the TV on the TV's HDMI1 port) rather than having to do a fiddly configuration of every port every single time you want to set up an activity.

It would be nice if you could skip the wizard crap, and just say which devices you want on and in which modes, and if you could see all the stuff about an activity or device at a glance instead of having it broken up into a dozen different pages.

It would be really nice if it didn't consider an Apple TV to be the same as a full media PC with keyboard, mouse, monitor, and gaming.

It would be exceptional if the button configuration for an activity could have groups of buttons set based on the defaults for one of the devices.

As it stands, the Harmony configuration software is CRAP, and it would also be really nice if there were just some XML-based format that users could use to create a configuration with an external tool. Allowing for third-party configuration would be a really good thing in this case.

Your wizards suck. Your UI sucks. The only reason I went with the Harmony is there don't seem to be any other learning remotes on the market anymore. I'm regretting paying this much for a nice device that's configured with such a badly-written piece of crap.

Your UI designers are bad and you should feel bad.

Was this abrasive enough?

This was something to be discussed in private. I regret what few things I've said in public about it. I realize that I've made many mistakes in how I've dealt with many things. I was only trying to do the right thing for everyone but I couldn't handle the stresses involved and it blew up in my face. But what is being said about me in public has only a kernel of truth, wrapped up in an avalanche of distorted opinions and speculation-stated-as-truth.

This past year has been very hard for me and I hate that an already-unpleasant situation has turned into something that's made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and has brought back all of the health issues which I thought I'd finally put behind me.

I wish that private discussion could simply remain private. I am not purposefully trying to involve others in this.

I am so sick of the Internet and its echo chamber effect, especially when it comes down to half-remembered who-said-what stuff that's been cherry-picked, taken out of context, and distorted under the fog of anger and frustration. We clearly have very different memories of what happened, and just shouting in each others' directions via blog entries is doing nobody any favors.

10/10, 6:53 PM And the situation is over with so let's just all move on. Thanks.

So I rebooted my laptop into Windows for the first time in months, hoping to play Black Mesa Source. It came up, but everything was degraded, all my system tray icons were missing or broken, I was unable to configure it to Wi-Fi, and there was a "This copy of Windows is not genuiune" warning in the corner of the screen (which is probably why the rest of it was there). I went to try to activate it, but since I couldn't get online (because one of the systray icons that was removed was my Wi-Fi settings and I didn't feel like tunneling through the billions of different ways of configuring networking in Control Panel which are all maddening and broken and stupid in different ways) I decided to try the phone activation. Which was of course a very slow and obnoxious process, because there were warnings about how long the wait would be if I needed tech support, then overly-verbose instructions about how to enter the goddamn "installation ID" key, and then every single time I entered a group of 6 digits it stopped to prompt me for the next one with a different tone of voice and long-winded explanation of what to do next each time. Finally I got through it all, and then the number it read back to me for the activation went through the same sort of thing. Finally I got my Windows activated, and then rebooted, and then got Wi-Fi working, and then I kept getting a buttload of error messages from Steam that were covered over by other Steam dialogs and I just got sick of it and rebooted back into Linux.

Wake me up when Black Mesa Source is out for the Mac.

Dear email marketing teams:

Why is it that you can get me on your mailing list the instant I've made a purchase in your store, but it takes two weeks to remove me from it?

Keep in mind that I was already a customer, and when you added me to the list there was no opt-in for the marketing materials.

I don't want your goddamn marketing materials, and all you're doing by continuing to send it to me in this "just in case" period is making me never want to shop with you ever again.

It reeks of desperation. Stop it.

(Latest offender: Guitar Center)

So, this temporary housing is driving me nuts.

Meanwhile, I am putting in an offer on a condo that I really like. (It's a registered historical landmark!)

Unfortunately, my place back in SF won't be on the market until Thursday (thanks, realtor who told me things would move a lot faster than they actually are), and after that it'll take who knows how long for offers to come in, and after that it'll take who knows how long for it to close. Kerri (my realtor in Seattle) is telling me that it'll be at least a month after any offers come in before they can close, and those would come after the open house on the 26th, so that means I'm stuck here until at least September 26 (because I can't close on a property in Seattle until my property in San Francisco also closes). Or maybe it can be moved up with a bridge loan. I'm not sure if I can afford to pay essentially three mortgages (SF mortgage, Seattle mortgage, bridge loan) at once though. I'll ask the loan broker here what works, I suppose.

Anyway I'm pretty frustrated with my realtor back in San Francisco; he told me things would move at a certain rate, but then didn't keep me appraised of things that would potentially delay it until it was too late for me to do anything about it (for example, he decided more painting was necessary than we'd agreed to and that pushed things back a few days, and then the stager wanted to be paid up-front, which she didn't tell me even when I'd met her when I was moving out; I could have sent her a check as soon as she sent me the quote instead of having to do a wire transfer a few days after she said that she hadn't started yet because she hadn't been paid, and of course the stager made it really difficult for me to get her wire transfer details too because she is a total corn flake). Then when I moved like crazy to get things moving as fast as I could, he still dragged his feet at getting it going. I'm pretty disappointed in him.

At least I finally start work tomorrow so I'll have something to do other than being driven crazy by this terrible temporary housing or wishing I had the energy to work on the music app I want to work on. (Of course the basic idea behind the music app is well-explored, but it's the big-picture stuff that I really want to do! But I can't do the big-picture stuff without the basic part of it. And nobody seems to just have a componentized thing for the basic part. Not that the basic part would be that hard to implement, but I'm lazy.)

Last November 4 I got an ambulance ride due to another major panic attack combined with a bowel impaction. The drivers didn't really treat it like an emergency and just acted like a really crappy taxi ride, as always. I'd have been better off just having the friends who were staying with me drive me there. Or just finding a way of calming down before it got to the point that I felt I needed medical attention.

Every other month since then I've gotten the same bill from the San Fransico fire department, in the amount of $1786, with the message, "San Francisco Fire Department provided you emergency medical services on the above mentioned service date. At this time, we have not yet obtained insurance information. If you have insurance or participate in any program which will pay for these services, please complete and sign the reverse side of this bill and return in the enclosed envelope."

Of course, every time I've gotten that bill I've immediately returned with my insurance information, and the last few times I've also enclosed a letter stating that this is the Nth time that I've done such, and I have never gotten any response from my insurance regarding eligibility which indicates that they never actually submitted the claim.

On Monday I guess I need to just call them on the phone and see what the hell is going on here. I really don't need this hanging over my head like everything else. (But I'm also not willing to just pay the whole $1786 myself. I can afford it, sure, but there's several matters of principle at work here.)

Thanks to the recent spate of websites' password hash lists getting leaked and a lot of my internal shame over the fact that phpBB2 still uses unsalted md5 for its auth, I finally got around to fixing phpBB2 to salt its damn passwords. It's shameful how many PHP apps don't use the built-in crypt() function and just use md5() [WARNING: many of the comments on that page show a DANGEROUS lack of understanding of how this works!] instead - because people just don't understand security (even though this is stuff that's been known since the 1940s or something). It's stupid.

Anyway, I debated either replacing it with crypt() and requiring everyone to change their password, or just wrapping the existing md5 values up in a crypt and making all future passwords a crypt(md5($password)) instead, and the latter won out.

If (like me) you're running an old phpBB2 instance and don't want to upgrade to phpBB3, I've provided a handy guide for doing this yourself.

So, quite some time ago, I did a remix of a YouTube user's video (warning: NSFW language). Recently it was flagged as a copyright infringement. Not from the original user whose video was remixed, but from "AdRev for Rights Holder." Their claim is that it makes unlicensed use of "Mark Allan Dunn-Flashpoint Drum," which I have never heard of before.

The actual remix is composed solely of the audio track of the original YouTube video, loops I made, and stock loops from the Apple Logic Studio royalty-free collection. If Mark Allan Dunn-Flashpoint Drum is part of that, it is only because it was in the Logic Studio collection. The only drum loop actually being used is the "2-Step Flux Beat 02" loop from Logic, and I suspect that is what they are claiming to be "Flashpoint Drum." Of course, I cannot actually find any evidence online for what "Flashpoint Drum" might actually be, so I cna't verify this.

The "respond to dispute" page gave no option for "this video does not contain the disputed content." The closest match to the situation was, "I have a license for the content." So, I selected that option, and stated that the only drum loop in the project was taken from the Apple Logic Studio royalty-free loops collection. This dispute was, of course, rejected.

Does anyone have any idea what the hell "Flashpoint Drum" is, who this "Mark Allan Dunn" guy is, and why "AdRev for Rights Holder" is making predatory copyright claims against videos that don't include that actual content? I can't find any information about "Mark Allan Dunn" online, or anything about "Flashpoint Drum," and I can't help but think that this is a case of some overeager law firm claiming copyright over other peoples' work and then issuing predatory copyright claims against things that legally use that third-party work.

Anyone have any advice? For now my video is still up, but I have no idea if that will remain the case, and of course Google is treating everything like a black hole and gives me absolutely no further opportunity to dispute the claim or talk to someone who might have any idea of what's going on.

Apparently it looks like AdRev for Rights Holder means that the person who has raised the erroneous copyright claim can in fact make money off of my remix, so even though I had no plans to monetize it myself, it means that other people can, and that's just not fair. If anyone should get any money off of it, it should be skoalrebel (the guy in the video) and not someone who just happened to have a drum loop that sounded similar enough to the one I used!

Looks like this is also a pretty common problem, because of the way that YouTube does its copyright fingerprinting, apparently. There are other threads about it on Google's forums, without any responses from Google, of course.

As always the small, independent content creators are getting shafted by the big media conglomerates who have bent the world to their will.

As always, the last 10% of the project ends up taking 90% of the time. Also, quite a lot more money involved too — I'm not even going to total it up because holy cow. (Let's just say that I'm certain that I've spent more on this kitchen update than I paid for my car.)

My kitchen is almost done being rebuilt. So I'd might as well write up why it took a kitchen rebuild to get a working dishwasher again.

So I just got a gigantic (thousands of dollars) bill for my CT scan a month ago, with an "uninsured discount." This means that Sutter's billing department has most likely either forgotten to bill my insurance, lost the information outright, or made a stupid data-entry error which has caused them to believe that my insurance isn't valid. Either way, this is going to be another giant headache that takes another fucking year to take care of. All for a test that found nothing.

And this is why I should just stop caring about my health.

I was using 5ite.com as a cheap VPS for my email hosting. Over the several months that I was using them, I was constantly plagued with frequent outages, and my uptime was nowhere close to the guaranteed 99.9%. No matter how much I complained about this, they did nothing to rectify said guarantee. Often they would go down for a whole day at a time and not respond to any customer emails or even say what was going on via Twitter, nor would they provide any information afterwards.

This morning was the last straw, however; there was another protracted outage yesterday, and when I opened a ticket their response was that they were undergoing "emergency maintenance." Today my server came back up, but lo and behold, the file permissions were all completely broken; it looked like they had done a hamfisted system restore because everything was owned by root:root. User files, temp files, device inodes, everything. So of course, very little of the system actually worked.

Fortunately, I happened to have a backup from several hours before the outage, and was able to restore all my files. To LiNode, where I am setting up e-snail.us anew.

It'll take a while for DNS to propagate for the new mail.e-snail.us address, but hopefully when it does I can hit the ground running with a working email system, modulo the likelihood that I've forgotten to migrate some config files or SSL certs or whatever.

I had to reinstall Windows XP on my netbook, and of course it's asking for the product key, which I am supposed to enter from the 'certificate of authenticity' that is attached to the bottom of the laptop. Attached specifically to where the computer gets REALLY HOT, and the label has a thermal 'feature' that makes it turn black if it's heated up.

Time to just use TinyXP instead.

It wasn't enough that their best phone (the Motorola Triumph) had a terrible touchscreen and problems with battery life.

It wasn't enough that, despite it being an unlimited-access pay-as-you-go service, they didn't allow forwarding to third-party voicemail providers, and didn't provide any decent application-based voicemail of their own.

It wasn't enough that the data service was slow and the voice service horrible.

It wasn't enough that they never updated the phone to anything even remotely recent Android-wise, and never released the kernel source allowing the modding community to take it into their own hands.

It wasn't enough that they didn't anticipate that my expiring credit card would cause a problem and prompted me to update it instead of freezing my service when I was out in the middle of nowhere and needed to get in touch with people, and didn't give me any way of finding out what had happened until I got home.

What really pushed me over the edge is that they remotely disabled all of my phone administration applications (Astro File Manager, Gingerbreak, Superuser) and limited my access to my own filesystem.

(Of course, all the stuff above didn't help either.)

These are the sorts of things that bug me:

1. iPhone (the first model)
2. iPhone 3G (the second model)
3. iPhone 3GS (the third model)
4. iPhone 4 (the fourth model)
5. iPhone 4S (the fifth model)

So if the next redesign is iPhone 5, then that retroactively makes the iPhone 4's name pretty silly. But if they call it iPhone 6, everyone who doesn't have a sense of history will be upset.

Speaking of history, I'm glad that Apple finally has a device (the new Nano) that does all of the fun pedometer/run timing/achievements/etc. stuff that my Sony Ericsson W580 did four years ago. Maybe I'll upgrade. (I probably won't.)

So I was doing a Google search and the damn thing started pointing me to the "+You" button like it was the end of the world if I didn't click on it. So I clicked on it, just to make it shut up, and signed up for Google+ again from my one and only GMail account (that I have only for my Android phone and YouTube account at this point). I figured I'd make a token effort at filling out a profile and adding suggestions to my circles, and at least reconnect to the Song Fight friends on there.

It was, of course, taking those suggestions from my email address book, and after all the people in my address book who are already on Google+, it also asked me to add/invite everyone else in it too. And then it kept on making suggestions on the feed sidebar. The top two suggestions were myself (via the name and email address that had gotten banned to begin with), and my grandfather, who as previous readers of this blog know died a bit over a year ago.

There was no way to opt out of this.

Stay classy, Google.