All I want is my Nexus One, that’s it!

So here is the story. Google brought out this really kick butt new phone, the Nexus One; the thing is amazing sweet! I want it, so I start talking with Liz and finally convince her it is time to upgrade phones, maybe even plans.

Thursday April 8th

We are Tmobile customers already. Our contracts are over. We are free players in the cellphone world. So we head down to the local Tmobile Retail Store and look at phones. I am well aware that the Nexus One can only be purchased from Google, and that you have to have an individual rate plan to purchase the phone at a discount.

So I tell the guy at the retail store, and I am assured time and time again that I will be able to do all this and so we go ahead and purchase the phone for Liz, and break the plan to individual plans so I can go home and purchase a Nexus One. The purchase of Liz’ phone is all that happened that evening. We were told there was a system error, no one seems to know why, and that it would take 24 hours to fix it. Assuming 24 hrs is a short time to wait we went home happy with Liz’ new phone.

Friday April 9th

24 hrs later I have waited, heard nothing, so I call Tmobile customer care to find out what is going on. They inform me there is still an error in the system when trying to switch the plans and that it will take up to 72 hours to fix the problem. I am high on a cloud for my Nexus, so I can wait another weekend.

Monday April 12th

72 hours have passed, I call Tmobile. The news is the same, there is an error and they will put in a 72 hour ticket. I should be able to get my Nexus One by Thursday.

Thursday April 15th

72 hours have passed, I call Tmobile. Again the news that the error is happening, no one seems to know what is going on. I am told that I will get a phone call within 2 hrs and all will be fine and I can have my Nexus One.

No one ever called.

Friday April 16th

24hrs after the last call with Tmobile I call back, and demand an answer. I will admit the young lady who tried to help this time really seemed to try. She offered a alternate route of switching from my grandfathered family plan to a new family plan, and then to break the lines into individual plans. No dice, but a worthy effort.

The young lady then begins to break my heart, my Nexus One may have to wait up to a month, because a trouble ticket can take up to a FULL BILLING CYCLE to be resolved… what?!

The Red Rises

Sitting here before you, I am livid! I don’t know how to control myself, except to say Tmobile had better fix this, they had better fix is now, or I will be a happy Verizon, Sprint, or AT&T customer by the end of the month. I will return the Moto Cliq my wife just bought and I will take my contracts elsewhere.

This is absolutely ridiculous! To tell a customer that they can’t change their plan, they can’t get a new phone, they can’t even change the rate plan to a higher plan is insane! To lie to a customer not once, twice or three times but four or more in absolutely absurd! To think that Tmobile has a good service record (and to be fair they did in my mind until this week).

Figure It Out, NOW!

I am sure there are no Tmobile goons reading this blog, because I have low readership, but I hope the world gets to them before my fists do. I am out for blood (or a Nexus One).

So they cool kids over at Automattic have done it again. They have produced a new product, with a great name that will do great things. What great things? How about protect your entire blog (or site) that is built on WordPress. Not just the content, but the plugins and everything else. Here is what VaultPress.com has to say about it:

VaultPress is the only restoration service built on the Automattic grid that reliably serves over 10 million WordPress.com blogs and 250 million monthly visitors.

VaultPress protects more than just your content. VaultPress understands the complete WordPress environment. This means your plugins, dashboard, themes, comments, and even your post revisions are all safeguarded and ready to be restored.

They plan to charge $15/month (give or take) but right now you can apply for your golden ticket at VaultPress.com, which will get you access to the service for free while they are still testing things out.

The golden passes are being handed out at random, so head over and sign up!

Hey everyone, it is time to #hackUTOS again!

What is #hackUTOS?

UTOS has been sponsoring Open Source technologies in Utah for years now. This is a chance for all the members (and potential members) to come out meet some of the UTOS hackers including herlo, utahcon, and DexterTheDragon.

We will be hacking on ConMan, the Open Source Conference Management system used by UTOSC! This is a great chance for you to participate, learn,teach, and get credit toward attending the conference for a discounted price!

When is #hackUTOS?

We will be meeting Tuesday March 9th, 2010 at 7:00PM MST.

Where is #hackUTOS?

Online

Along with meeting in person (details below) you can find us online in IRC. We are on the Freenode network in #utos-dev

IRL

Since the meeting place worked out well last time we will be meeting again at the Salt Lake Coffee Connection.

Located at:

1588 South State Street, Salt Lake City, UT 84115

The Salt Lake Coffee Connection is a really great place to meet. They have a great internet connection (provided by our good friends at Xmission), awesome drinks (check out the Dirty Chai!) and good food! The prices are good, and internet access is included with all purchases.

What Language?

ConMan is written in Python, using the Django framework. We run it on MySQL and SQLite databases.

Don’t know Python, or Django? Don’t worry, we are all open to helping you get started. Please realize we are here to mainly work on our project, we are happy to offer light support to get you up and running.

If you aren’t interested in working on ConMan bring your own Open Source project! We would love to have you in the house for some great co-working!

When I was attending high school, only 10-13 years ago, I remember learning cutting edge technologies like HTML, JavaScript, C, and Hypercard. We weren’t quite a networked school, in fact we only had 1 or 2 classrooms with internet access. I spent most of my time in the graphics lab working with Adobe Photoshop 3, and Pagemaker. I was running printing presses that were cutting edge too, they worked like over powered copiers. I designed, printed, cut, bonded, folder, and distributed every document, award, flier, etc. the school needed. We downloaded the newest in music technology the MP3. We were crazy tech savvy kids.

Shortly after I graduated from ITT Technical, a mere 3 years later, I remember hearing about kids being able to take the A+, CCNA, and some Microsoft certification test right in high school. I felt cheated. Cheated because I had just paid over $30,000 to some monkey who ran a school that wasted 3 years of my life giving me a paper that said I already knew a bunch of things kids were learning in high school.

Dark Corners

In the tech world there are two ways to learn anything. First, you can go to school and pay a ton of money to learn things from a book, and if you are lucky you will get to put the rubber to the road, at least a little and see how all this theory really works out in real life.

The second I call the Dark Corners. Most tech savvy folk when asked will tell you they prefer to work on their systems, programs, etc. in a lightly lit dark room, usually in the corner of a building. Somewhere that they can loose their crazy socially awkward side and get some real work done. My personal “Dark Corner” is in the basement, a common favorite.

The folks spending time in Dark Corners are learning by doing. They are plugging holes in firewalls as they are learning how they are exposed, and exploited. They are designing websites in HTML5 now because they want to have the advantage when the spec is standardized, and just to be sure they are covered they are working on XHTML2 as well.

These people in the Dark Corners are your geeks. They guys who would rather spend their evenings and weekends figuring out where their packets are going across the network, how they can better encrypt their computer’s data without losing everything when one of the drives in their RAID fails.

The folks in the Dark Corners are the doers, and they are the people who know the most, no questions asked.

Bright Futures

I am sure you are wondering the point of all of this, the bright future I am talking about is this:

http://newsltechhs.wordpress.com/

The New Salt Lake City “A Charter School Preparing Tomorrow’s Tech Progeny”. This is a charter school that is designed around the idea of having your kids be tech gurus! They will learn everything from the history of computing and punch cards, to the latest and greatest OO Programming, supporting and maintaining *nix servers, and even the Windows world.

a brand new charter high school in southern Salt Lake county/northern Utah county area, dedicated to preparing tomorrow’s software and network systems engineers

This is something I would have killed to attend when I was a kid.

Help Out

They are looking for support from the community in the way of Human Resources, Policy and Procedure, budgeting and more!

As this is something I would hope my kids would one day attend, you can believe I will be getting involved. I hope each of you will see the value of something like this in our community and culture and will give it your honest best effort to help it come to fruition.

Geeks unite! What a couple of weeks we have coming up, and things are going to be awesome! Here are some events I will be attending and I hope to see you all there!

Ignite Salt Lake

March 4th will mark the 4th Ignite event in Salt Lake City, at the State Room (21+). The event opens at 6:00PM.

As is tradition with Ignite there will be a building activity to start things off, this time the construction materials include twisty ties and 5,000 little green army men, that sounds like fun

Following the build they are going to have two session of 9 talks each, each talk lasting only 5 minutes.

The pace is fast and the talks sound interesting this go round:

• James Young – You sunk my Battleship!
• Jason Vance – 15 things to remember when dating in a post Apocalyptic Zombie Environment
• Matthias Shapiro & Jason Alderman – Mobile App Dev RAP BATTLE (this should be awesome!)
• DJ Waldo – Dude
• Kellen McAffee – How to tell your friends that you’ve seen a sasquatch

The event is free, and really fun. I encourage all (over 21) to attend this event, you will not be sorry.

Hostlers Model Train Festival

March 5th through the 7th will be the dates for the Hostlers Festival where over 8000 people will come to see the finest in model train setups.

The Hostlers were formed in 1988 and by 2004 had over 180 members! They specialize in all scale modeling, and love to spread the joy of model trains to all.

The event is $5 at the Union Station in Ogden. Hours are posted at http://www.hostlers.info/

Last year they had some really impressive setups and some excellent vendors. This show is a great one for taking the little ones too, they will love all the working models.

Also take time to go through the Utah State Railroad Museum while you are there.