Out of Cheese

Exactly a year and a half ago I described my search for a new cell phone. I ended up buying a Samsung A500, and I’ve been happy with it. The interface is usable, it works fine, and it fits into my pocket nicely without getting too terribly scratched.

But now I’ve moved, and my phone doesn’t get any reception at the new place. That’s not entirely accurate — it gets reception, but not on Sprint’s network. How Sprint manages to have no reception right in the middle of Santa Clara is beyond me, but they just don’t have it. Other networks are terrific, though — when my phone switches to roaming it gets four or five bars. If Sprint gave me free roaming, I’d be set. Unfortunately they don’t, so it’s time to switch from Sprint to someone else. That’s the easy part. The hard part is switching phones.

Unlike a lot of engineers I’ve known, I’m not a gadget geek. I don’t care about most of the features in any cell phone. I need to be able to make calls, save names and numbers, and set the phone to vibrate. I also have to be able to keep the phone in my pocket without getting its main screen scratched. I don’t care about Internet access, camera phones, games, ring tones, text messaging, or anything else along those lines.

But there’s one complication. My Palm IIIx is finally dying. I’d sort of like to replace it. All I use it for, though, is writing brief notes — reminders to myself, appointments, or directions to wherever I’m going. I’d use the address book if it synched with Mac OS X’s Address Book, but the synchronization process is too inconvenient so I don’t bother.

The easy solution here is to get a Treo 600. The reviews of it are pretty good, I can switch to AT&T (which gets great reception both at work and at home), and it seems to provide the features I’m looking for. But it costs $250. I already spent over $100 a year and a half ago for a phone that I typically use two or three times a week at most. Even at Amazon’s heavily discounted rate, it’s hard to convince myself to spend $250 on another phone, even if it could replace my Palm Pilot. And I’m not sure I like the keyboard. I tried to use one today at a local AT&T Wireless store and kept mistyping things because the keys were too small.

I’m not sure there are any good alternatives, though. Maybe I just need to convince myself to spend the money for the Treo. I just wish I could feel confident that I’d get $250 of value out of it.

Why does the last 10% of moving take 90% of the time?

A few days back, I mentioned that I’m moving in a few days. And a few months back, I mentioned that I was probably going to ADHOC this year. Actually, I did more than think about going — I signed up to give a talk about advanced debugging techniques on Mac OS X.

If you use NetNewsWire, have the "highlight differences" preference enabled, and read the ADHOC weblog, you might’ve noticed a change in the Confirmed Sessions list last week. Namely, I dropped off of it. Not only am I not speaking; I’m not attending ADHOC at all.

When I decided to go to the conference, I knew I’d be moving this summer, but I didn’t know when. One thing led to another, and I realized last week that if I went to ADHOC I’d essentially only have this Saturday to move before our lease is up on the 26th. One day just doesn’t cut it, particularly if anything goes wrong. Rather than risk having my furniture out the street with nowhere to go or anything else along those lines, I decided to back out of ADHOC.

Fortunately, the conference organizers have been terrific about it. (One actually has an even worse moving conflict with ADHOC than I do. I feel really sorry for him.) In exchange for them being so nice about it, I’ve promised to show up and give a talk next year. So there’s at least one name on the ADHOC 2005 speakers list already.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Southwest will be adding direct flights between Philadelphia and Oakland starting October 31st. I’m very excited. It’ll soon be a lot less expensive to go home.

I watched Jeopardy! for the first time in a few years tonight. Normally when I start to see articles about someone winning lots of money on the show I’m content to read them and move on, but not this time. The champion at the moment is Ken Jennings, who as of tonight’s show has won 29 shows in a row and just a bit less than $1 million. Ken was also a member of BYU’s quiz bowl team in the late 90’s. I was a member of Stanford’s team at the time, and we played BYU at least five or six times a year. I wasn’t particularly good, but I had a lot of fun, at least until silly bickering on my part and others on Stanford’s team prompted me to leave quiz bowl and spend more of my time programming.

It’s interesting to note that Ken, while good, probably wouldn’t have won a vote at the time for the best player in the country. He was in the top rank, to be sure, but there were a few others who could outplay him. That said, in quiz bowl, any reasonably good team can beat a top-notch team given the right questions and a bit of luck. It’s entirely possible that on one of my and my teammates’ luckier days, we managed to eke out a victory over BYU’s A team. (Actually, Stanford’s A team was well-matched with BYU’s A team at the time, but I only played on Stanford’s A team when we didn’t have enough other players.) If only I could find a record of one of those wins, I could say that I’ve beaten the all-time Jeopardy champion in a game of knowledge!

Jokes aside, I wish Ken the absolute best of luck, and I’m really happy for him. He and his teammates at BYU were always among the nicest people in quiz bowl. Also, he’s a member of the staff at NAQT, a quiz bowl organization that started while I was on Stanford’s team. (I was the tournament director for the first NAQT West Coast Sectional tournament.) NAQT has done terrific things for quiz bowl nationally. If some of Ken’s winnings allow him to spend more time on NAQT or to support NAQT’s work, that’s terrific for quiz bowl.

Almost exactly a year and a half ago, I moved from Redmond to San Jose. I roomed with Ruby, whom I knew from college, and we found an apartment in Willow Glen that was theoretically halfway between her job at Sacred Heart Community Service and mine at Apple.

We learned eventually that Archstone Willow Glen, while pretty, wasn’t exactly ideal. It’s expensive and management isn’t terribly responsive. (Actually, I could rant about management for a while, but I won’t bother.) Also, while we’re just a few minutes away from Sacred Heart, it can take me as long as 45 minutes to get to Apple during rush hour, and the drive home takes me through the harrowing 280-87 merge.

Next month Ruby starts law school at UC Davis. She’s therefore moving up to Davis in a couple of weeks, and I’m moving to Santa Clara on Saturday. I’m renting an adorable little townhouse just a few minutes from Apple (just off Homestead a little south of Lawrence, if you know the area).

Though living with Ruby has been a lot of fun, I’m really looking forward to moving. I’ll be a lot closer to work, and I’ll finally have a place that’s just like my own little house. I even have a tiny backyard, so I’ll have to figure out how to make plants grow. (Good thing I happen to know an excellent plant biologist, right?)

At the same time, moving is always stressful. I haven’t gotten nearly as much done at work recently as I usually do, partially because I’ve had so many other things on my mind. I’m currently trying to figure out just how to fit various things into boxes before movers show up on Saturday morning (and hoping that they do show up, don’t break too many things, etc.). The new place isn’t officially mine until Friday and we don’t have to move out of our current apartment until the 26th, so I’m hoping to just have the movers move big things and I’ll move books, clothes, etc. on my own time. I’m used to having movers pack for me, but I’m also used to having companies pay for my move. This time I’m moving on my own budget, so I’m the one doing the packing. If only books were lighter….

Sha Sha was promoted this week. Congrats! But this isn’t about her. She found out about the promotion because her new title showed up in Outlook as a friend was looking her up in the address book.

I wonder if it’s possible to set up Exchange and Outlook to never display titles. Titles in many technology companies should be pointless. Ideally you’d care far more about someone’s ideas than his or her title, but when you see the title and realize that they’re a Senior Architect and you’re a Junior Tester, you’re unlikely to criticize them and they’re not likely to listen to you. That’s one thing I really like about Apple. Apple folks out there…what’s my title? Can you find it? I don’t think I can find yours. Maybe my title is available in some obscure internal application somewhere, but it’s certainly not available where anyone would see it on a regular basis. That’s part of why I’m much more comfortable with mailing some random engineer at Apple and asking them a question than I was at Microsoft. At Apple, we’re all engineers. At Microsoft, I knew I was at the bottom of the totem pole, and whoever I was writing to would know that, too.

It’s conceivable that I’m really the only one who pays any attention to titles in this way. It just seems, though, that if you make titles all but invisible in the first place, nobody can pay them much attention at all.

Andrew Pontious notes that all of the cool kids are congregating in Cupertino. Welcome to Apple, Andrew!

Sorry I haven’t posted anything lately. I do have a lot to write about; hopefully I can find the time. I just finished a terrific July 4th weekend, with Adrienne up here visiting. I don’t have time to write about all of it now, but here’s a picture of the two of us at Arch Rock in Point Reyes on the 4th:

One of the other two hikers there at the time mentioned that Adrienne and I look like we’re siblings. I guess we do, but we aren’t, of course….