Total snark encased in the warm, cheesy burrito goodness of customer service language:

“Anyway, I’ve got to get back to work. Aside from this million dollar international tort, and the no-recourse lien on my property filed by the ‘executor of the court’, is there anything else I can help you with?”

From the second chapter of this righteous post, most of which is about rocking hard on a totally different axis.

I get to sling more than the average tech worker’s share of English-language kung fu, and that’s fun, but sometimes I could definitely stand to know more relevant law.  Also, it’d be nice to get spec’d out for (paid) argument on a wider range of topics.

I mentioned this inclination to the missus last night, and she made a good point, which is that we’re scheduled to start creating some additional humans over the next couple years…and that’s cool…

I sort of took that at face value, and didn’t draw any further conclusions, but the subtext (probably the text, as she’s not one to beat around the bush) was that I should be home in the evenings instead of at night school for four years, and I should make the most of my current professional trajectory.

On the other hand, I can do my current job from home.  Also, four years of night school and $100k or so sounds (to me) like a really small price to pay to turn a software/proto-business outlook into a software/proto-business/legal outlook.  Like, it’s harder to imagine that guy not affording a private aircraft that’ll do 200 knots cruise someday, or getting pwned by a perfect storm of weird tech market forces.

The Suffolk website says that to apply for Fall of ‘09, one should take the LSAT no later than February.  I’m just saying, that’s what the website says.

toll roads vs. surface roads; car vs. scooter; work vs. not

Just got ticketed for speeding. Sunday, 11:59am, beautiful day at the beginning of springtime. On my way to the office, of course. Been taking surface roads recently to save $1.25 in pike tolls, using some extra gas but not $1.25 worth. This little event, however, obliterates a lower-bound of 160 decisions not to take the pike. That’s without counting the extra gas to take surface roads, or how this will affect my insurance.

I almost always take the pike home, so that’s 160 days. At 5 days a week, that’s 32 weeks. At 6 days a week, it’s still just over half a year assuming zero vacation.

On a scooter:
I wouldn’t be speeding,
I’d be using about a quarter as much gas, and
I’d be paying zero insurance.

Pretty compelling until winter rolls around in a few months, for a few months.

Workaholism vs. not:
Work certainly contributed to my being on the way to the freakin’ office this morning. I’m pretty sure that related stress also contributed to my tendency to drive faster. It might even have a bit to do with buying a torquey car, but I didn’t need much help there. But even including the rising cost of gas (both in ++$/gal and –mpg), the rising cost of (my) insurance, and the cost of this ticket, I’m definitely coming out ahead.

Conclusion: I should keep working like a sonofabitch, but I should get an EZPass transponder and take the pike to work.

[link]

People are flipping out because Apple is no longer accepting cash for iPhone purchases, and limiting customers to two iPhones per purchase.

For the uninitiated, this comes on the heels of reports that many of the iPhones sold were subsequently unlocked and used on carriers other than AT&T. And they don’t need to guess; there’s some number of iPhones sold and some much smaller number of AT&T “iPhone data plan” subscriptions on the books, so AT&T’s losses are both immediately quantifiable and pretty significant. Anyway, by limiting purchases to personal checks or credit cards, Apple can map individual iPhones (by IMEI, a unique identification code inside every modern cell phone) onto the people who paid for them. Likewise, when AT&T starts up a new iPhone data plan, they register the IMEI of the phone associated with the plan. So the theory is, if you buy an iPhone then unlock it and use it on another GSM network (like T-Mobile), Apple or AT&T will be able to find you and mete out some negative consequence.

1. Raise your hand if you were going to pay cash for an iPhone, or planning to buy more than two at a time. Yeah. Thought not.
2. When you sign an exclusivity agreement with a gigantic partner, and there are a) incentives for actually caring about that playing out in practice, and b) perhaps far greater incentives for making it look to your partner like you care, then by all means feel free to play armchair quarterback. This solution is way cheaper to implement, and fewer implications to consumers, than getting into a game of cat and mouse with the reverse-engineering/unlocking community. In other words, Apple is keeping up appearances for their business partner, while looking the other way engineering-wise.
3. The best thing for Apple is for people to complain about this, because it adds some credibility to the idea that fewer iPhones will end up on other networks.
4. What, realistically, do you expect AT&T or Apple to do if they catch you using an iPhone on T-Mobile?

This (hopefully) concludes my own purposeless ranting for the day. By the end of today, I resolve to do music stuff, at home, on a computer that is currently under my desk at the office.