Or is it at&t now? Assuming nobody puts a stop to it, AT&T is buying out BellSouth. For those not paying attention, that means that of the 7 Bells resulting from the original AT&T split, 4 of them are back under the long distance company, and Verizon has the rest except for Qwest having the old USWest. I guess 3 is better than 1 at least, although the bundling the local lines with other things is worse in my opinion than covering larger areas.
Of course that also means that BellSouth won't be complaining about dropping the Cingular name anymore either. Back in November when SBC bought AT&T and changed their name, they said they'd change from Cingular back to AT&T as a brand. Of course with their campaign to move to Cingular and claiming it's better, everyone wondered how long it'd be before they actually tried it. Of course BellSouth owned 40% and was pissed but couldn't do much about it. Now that's out of the picture, but everyone still seems to agree it's a bad idea (last part of article).
It'll be interesting to see what all this happening does to the customer bases. It seems a lot of Cingular customers had no clue that the company eventually plans to change the name again. They're also still losing ground on customers. Add on top of that the new warnings about off network use and in at least one case I know telling people they have a month to switch to another company because the account is costing them too much. Then the big northeast outage tonight... Hopefully that's not going back to their old pre-merger history of not being able to keep the network running. I've been saying for a while that Cingular needs to really improve, primarily to become a competitor with Verizon on something other than cost. Once that happens both companies should improve for customers. Hopefully that'll happen sooner than later, although all this buying companies can't be good for the cash they could be dumping into network upgrades.
Over the past two weekends I've watched the three movie Robert Rodriguez series of El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. It's a very good series in my opinion, despite the change in actors between the first two. If you're looking for something that's actually believable look elsewhere, but if you just want entertaining action movies they're awesome. The closest comparison to other modern movies is probably Kill Bill. The last one has tons of subtle funny details, which I think the first ones lack only because of budget concerns. They all are good movies even independently, but I recommend them as a series.
Since I don't know how many of you watch my links pages/feeds, and many of you may be interested in this, some guy pieced together video from Eternal Sunshine, Garden State, and Lost in Translation along with the song Let Go to "test" that his setup was working together properly. He called it Eternal Garden Translation, and I'd say it's rather good for a test. He has some other videos up with interesting editing-based stuff.
Update 3/30 per Brent's comment below, the video has been moved. Link above and video below have been updated, the old link if anyone cares.
"Socially, there is very little difference between a multitude of people all having their own private aural experiences and a multitude of people stoned out of their gourds."
So said Mark Crispin Miller in a NYT article on Audio Spotlight. That quote seems to fit almost better with digital music players and cell phones in our society though.
As for the technology it's cool, but unfortunately all I ever seen are articles talking about how cool it can be. It looks like some places are starting to use it, and I think it'll be good if it catches on. I think the biggest challenge will be that people outside the path will have no idea of the audio, and won't naturally quiet down. So the audio inside the areas will be loud to compensate, and it'll be annoying walking through any stray beams (or past storefronts with it).
So apparently sometime early this morning the server that hosts this site along with several others became unable to allocate memory. I'm not sure of the cause, other than after I forced a reboot of my box it came back (around 11:30CST). The load on my box was nothing but the host load was high. Host load dropped to medium but is back to high, and my load is still low. So I'm thinking it's not me, and I just got hit as an unfortunate side effect. I've tweaked a couple things which will hopefully allow the system to run a bit better under load, but I'm not sure it'll help with heavy external interactions. Sorry if your site was affected, and now you know why.
Port Security. Anyone up for a movie night? I think the last time I saw that was like 5 years ago.
It's Adam Baldwin's birthday tomorrow. Also Ralph Nader's (I did indeed spell that with an i at first if you're curious, if you don't get why, don't worry about it). Looks like decent company.
So last night I get my semi-regular collection of mail sent to me at not-my-address, and glance through it. Mostly credit card offers as usual. I get no credit card offers at my address anymore, presumably due to the opt-out. I decided to actually look through them as I was curious as to what would drive them to send out offers not qualified on a credit report. Apparently they believe I'm a small business owner running a successful small business with a variant on my name. Never mind that there's no paperwork backing up any sort of business. Of course the offers are usually platinum too - guess that doesn't mean much in the way of cards these days either.
Also referred to as a mystery blob. Apparently the sidewalks in an area were over 100 degrees F (air temp in the 60s), and there was a black tar-like substance coming out of openings in the ground. It reminds me of this.
Today was bring the church announcement bulletin into Chipotle (or actually just the "coupon" part), and get a free burrito (or other entrée) day. Couldn't argue with that, especially as I was debating it anyways. The line of course was out the door since it seems the entire church went, but it was free lunch. Well, other than the buying a drink to chip in a bit to support them doing cool stuff like that. Chipotle seems to go way beyond what I've seen other local restaurants do to, with stuff like this and the annual hunger awareness days and stuff. They must realize that goodwill to people makes up for all the free food they give away.
In the words of Rotach when he pointed it out to everyone during announcements, "Some may call it advertising; I call it free lunch."
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
