Isotropic is …
... my personal blog.
Unless otherwise indicated, anything I write here is simply my personal, probably ill-formed, opinion and does not represent the views, beliefs, positions, or opinions of any other person or entity.
Category Archives: Life-Society
15 Oct 2009
Dogfooding, sabotage, or just system failure?
System Failure? According to Roz Ho (a Microsoft VP) at t-mobile.com/sidekick (10/15/2009 1:00 AM PDT): We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. [...] We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure [...]
10 Oct 2009
More on losing your stuff
Just got a text message from T-Mobile linking to this: Sidekick customers, during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power. [...] Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – [...]
05 Oct 2009
You are their product
Brian Hurt explains why corporate media does apparently non-sensical things and is losing audience. You see, he [Paul Graham, here] assumes that the customers of the media are their readers and/or viewers- that, by buying a New York Times, he is (one of) their customer(s). That the Newspapers are in the business of selling information [...]
03 Oct 2009
Sidekicks out planet-wide
My Sidekick 3 has been in two-dots mode since yesterday, which means I only have voice and SMS (text) services; the data network is down hard (no web, email, IM, etc.). I didn’t pay much attention at first, since this does happen occasionally, but not for this long. You’d think that someone would send out [...]
02 Oct 2009
MS smacks MS deadline
I originally posted about this in June. If you’re gonna make a claim, you have until October 16th. Follow the WJTV link for details. “Mississippi residents have until Oct. 16 to submit claims under the state’s settlement of a lawsuit with Microsoft.” –WJTV, “Mississippi-Microsoft Deadline” h/t: WJTV (Twitter)
27 Sep 2009
Food Police
William Saletan of Slate has a good rant about the food police, spurred by a proposed tax on sweetened soft drinks. In my case, the provocation is partly scientific and partly libertarian. But mostly, it’s a shift in the slippery slope. One of my basic rules is that slippery slopes run both ways. Some of [...]
27 Sep 2009
Losing your stuff
I didn’t imagine that my “Back. Up. Your. Stuff.” post, where I said “This is just a friendly reminder that you really should consider what you’re gonna do if any of those sites shut down or for some other reason become inaccessible.“, would have validation so soon. The Rocky Mountain Bank sent confidential information on [...]
19 Sep 2009
A dark and stormy night
I’m pretty good at that “willing suspension of disbelief” thing, being able to fall down a rabbit hole into a world where the laws of physics (and physiology) don’t quite work right, cause and effect are capriciously violated, people miss the obvious and interact in ways that, in the real world, would have me slowly [...]
19 Sep 2009
Frugalista Fandango
I don’t know the Jackson Frugalista. In fact, I’d never heard of her until early this morning when a tweet saying “a Jackson blogger is getting beat up on by some lawyers” caught my eye. Since I’m also a Jackson blogger, my curiosity was piqued. Why is she being “beat up on”? You can read [...]
17 Sep 2009
Liberate your stuff
Google introduced the “Data Liberation Front” a couple days after my “Delete your stuff” and “Back. Up. Your. Stuff.” posts. The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we [...]
