It is of course, no surprise to anybody how totally our local Cable Company, Charter Communications, sucks ass. In the past couple of years, we’ve discussed the absolute lameness of their HD-DVR, how their regular DVR drove Kirk & Kassia away from TV completely, as well as the amazing difficulty their customers have getting their technicians to show up for scheduled appointments

So here’s the deal: since last Thursday, nearly all of my digital cable channels are out. No HBO, no BBC America or Sundance, no ESPN HD. For whatever reason, the HD versions of our six local channels, as well as all of the analog channels like Sci-Fi, are still coming in.

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Sure, I could be like the rest of the blogosphere and comment upon Microsoft’s attempted slurping up of Yahoo! If it goes through, it no doubt has ramifications for every single man, woman and child with a computer that accesses the internets.

But that’s not important right now. What is important is that NASA has decided — for the first time ever — to beam a song into space.

And even more important: they’ve chosen the wrong song. Whatever will the aliens think?

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I was fairly young when some unsuspecting adult thought it would be a good idea to explain to me that I could always get the current time by dialing POPCORN.

I proceeded to abuse that information by dialing the number every five minutes to find out what time it was — among other things. I figured if the Time Lady was so all knowing about the time of day, she might have the answers to other questions as well. What can I say, I was young and Google hadn’t been invented yet.

I never did get any other answers from the Time Lady. She stuck to the time with a zen-like focus. In retrospect I think she might have what we now call “obsessive compulsive”.

Over the years I lost track of the Time Lady. Recently there hasn’t been much need to call her. In fact, I was sort of surprised to discover that she was still around and giving out the time to anyone who called — but not for much longer.

This week AT&T announced that the Time Lady’s time has run out. After September, California residents will no longer be able to pick up the phone and dial the time. AT&T is discontinuing the service, citing failing equipment, the need for additional phone numbers, and, presumably, a general lack of use, as reasons.

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The iPhone has been out for a little over a week, and I broke down and purchased one while I was on vacation. And while this is hardly a scientific breakdown of the iPhone — there are zillions of those out there — here are some things I’ve noticed about it in the first week or so of actual everyday use.

• The widely anticipated shortage has not materialized. It looks like if you want an iPhone, you can get one. Check eBay, and you can tell how the people who thought that they would make a Playstation-like killing aren’t doing so hot. Nobody is biting at their “Buy it Now” prices of $900 and above.

  This seems to indicate two things: the demand is not as intense as people though and/or Apple has done a pretty good job in keeping the pipeline open. It’s probably a combination of the two, as illustrated by the story of how I stumbled into purchasing mine in the first place . . .

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Cheating! That’s what I like, and it’s what I’m going to do right now. Three months back when I was still writing about Second Life, I tangented on the subject of text-messaging:

Hell, when I first heard about text-messaging, I scoffed. Scoffed, I tell you! I even remember whennish and whereabouts I was: walking down the Embarcadero in 2000 with my supervisor at CNET, a fellow who was much more on top of cutting-edge technology than myself. He was telling me about something called text-messaging, which was either just introduced in American or was about to be, but was all the rage overseas. I was five stubborn years away from even considering a cell phone, and text-messaging sounded like the most impractical thing ever. Words on a cell phone screen? And typing them via the number pad? Puh-leeze. As if.

The obvious punchline is that I’m now a text-messaging addict. A junkie. A filthy carpal-thumbed 160-character whore, I am. I got my first cell phone in October 2005 for use during a well-intended if poorly-attended book tour. (If you ever want to read to six rows of empty folding chairs near the Canadian border, drive to Bellingham, Washington. Builds character.) Empirically speaking I would still be alive right now, but emotionally I suspect the trip would have killed me if not for text-messaging. Waking up to messages from my girlfriend Vash made waking up seem worth the effort at all, and furiously thumbtyping back and forth with a friend during a particularly rough patch somewhere between Portland and Seattle was an excellent outlet.

Damn, quoting myself like that was all meta ‘n shit, wasn’t it? And certainly not narcissistic. It’s all true, though, and the ensuing quarter of a year has done nothing to diminish my love of the textiness.

A lot of people call it impersonal. I think it’s like any other form of communication: it’s as personal as you care to make it. Some of the coldest, most meaningless conversations I’ve ever had have been face to face, and I’ve been known to get teary standing on a streetcorner clutching my vaguely communicator-esque phone, SMSing away. (Last Saturday night around half past ten at Church and Market in San Francisco, dressed in black, long blonde pigtails, smeary eyeliner? That was me.) Language is too powerful to be entirely stymied just because it’s on a screen 1.25″ wide and 1.5″ tall. If they have a personal context, the word no can be devastating or yes uplifting or vice versa no matter how they’re conveyed.

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OK, sure, everybody is all anticipatory for Apple’s upcoming iPhone, which is set to conquer the world in a few short weeks. And why not? It’s essentially got everything: web, email, text, music, and it runs fracking OS X, to boot. And yet, it’s not even out yet and Nokia has gone and potentially trumped it.

Because Nokia is adding a true killer app to one of their upcoming phones: the Lightning Detector!

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A lot of hay was made yesterday about a wide-reaching survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. For example, one of the things that got serious play was that about half of the people out there still don’t live their lives around high-tech products.

Instead, I guess, they are living their lives around such mundane things as their jobs, their churches, their families and so forth. Then the survey broke down the actual users into sub-groups, and explained various things about the sub-groups. It was all very interesting and informative, and then I got to the very end . . .

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In what seems like just seconds after the announcement of Apple’s iPhone and its pretty icon-filled UI, clones of that UI have already appeared as skins for devices which — unlike the iPhone — have the advantage of actually currently existing.

Skins appeared for Windows Mobile devices and the Palm Treo, and one of the skins is called the “iPhony,” about which, ha! Apple, of course, has no stomach for jokes — even good ones like “iPhony,” hee! — and has wasted no time sending out cease-and-desist letters..

Am I the only person who enjoys the irony of Apple instigating legal action over people instacloning the look of a product when it currently doesn’t even own the name of that particular product?? After all, Cisco could come out with their iPhone tomorrow, you never know!

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SATURDAY
MY APARTMENT

“NOOOOOO!!!!” I screamed into the phone, loud enough that the poor Third Customer Service Rep from The Cable Company probably didn’t need his phone to hear it in Bangalore. But it was nearing 10:30 Saturday morning and I’d just been on anger-building hold for 20 minutes (”Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received”).

“I WILL NOT RESCHEDULE MY APPOINTMENT!!! THIS IS YOURRRRR ISSUE!! YOU NEED TO FIX IT!!” Technically, it really wasn’t the Third Customer Service Rep’s issue, it’s just that he got stuck with me just as my asshole-o-meter had gone to 11. I was trembling with righteous fury, storming around my apartment with the cell phone jammed in my ear. I was as angry as I have ever been, and that’s really saying something.

“Please hold, sir, while I try to see what I can do.”

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I am probably going to get kicked out the United States for saying this, but I think private companies are the worst possible stewards of our information infrastructure. Our household was without DSL for five days. Five days. If you’re a writer who works mainly on the Internet, communicates via email with 95% of friends and family, and, well, enjoys and prefers reading online publications, five days is ridiculously long.

While I believe everyone on the customer service food chain for our telephone company was sincere in their desire to do something, overall, the response was abysmal. I’m sorry, but if you’re going to outsource your support to India, stop with the scripts already and give the call center staff some ability to actually resolve problems. It isn’t the off-shoring that is the problem: it is the resultant frustration because problems aren’t being resolved. Five days is too long for any utility to be out of commission, barring a major natural disaster.

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