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It is raining…. again. It has been raining in Bakersfield for weeks. If I had wanted to deal with this type of weather I would have moved to the Pacific Northwest.

One of the best things about Bakersfield is its incredibly mild winters. Most days are in the upper 50’s with a gorgeous blue sky and lots of sunshine. It is that sunshine that I miss. The great winters are the reward that nature gives us for spending the summer trying not to melt. It seems like Mother Nature is screwing us on our deal.

Aliciana learned a valuable lesson today, which was that big companies only care about the customer while it is in there interest to do so. She spent all morning on the phone with Customer Service at Cingular and ended up being told to stick her problems where the sun don’t shine.

She had applied for two $50 rebates when we got our new phone. One rebate was for recycling our old phone and the other was a promotion. When we got our new phone, we also got a large envelope to send the old phone back to them in. We called to see what the story was and the girl on the phone said all we had to do is stick the old phone in the mailer and mail it. We also filled out the promotional rebate form, attached the needed bar codes and a DNA sample, and mailed it as well. At that point, we felt pretty good, thinking we would be getting $100 in the mail.

Well, it has been months since then and still no money. We did receive a letter stating there was a problem with our rebate so Aliciana gave Cingular another call. They said that with the old phone we should have sent a form, which they failed to provide us, and some magic bar codes. Unfortunately, that magic bar code was attached to the other rebate. They had no explanation on why we weren’t told this the first time we had called when we received the unexpected envelope. We were also informed that we could only receive one $50 rebate, since that is all we had spent on the phone. So, at that point, she said there was nothing we could do without the bar code and we were screwed out of $50.

Next Aliciana decided to inquire about the other rebate, thinking at least we could get one $50 check. The whole reason for upgrading the phone was largely because the phone would be free, after rebate and with a one-year contract. We were contract free before. Unfortunately for us, that second $50 rebate had magically disappeared and we were told to go screw ourselves. Aliciana got so made that she hung up on the girl.

I think the one-year contract we got tied into with the new phone is responsible for Cingular’s degraded customer service. They use to bend over backward for us when we were without a contract and could leave them whenever we felt like. Now, being locked into a one-year contract for a phone that has ended up not being free, they seem to not care that it is their fault the rebate went missing and we were never given the proper forms. No one at Cingular seems to want to do the right thing and just give us the damn rebate we deserve. We now will definitely be switching providers in one year, but somehow I doubt that will effect their bottom line. Maybe everyone who reads this blog will also consider switching from Cingular?

All today our new cell phone has not been allowing incoming or outgoing calls. Aliciana and a lady at the Cingular store spent most of today on hold while trying to contact someone at tech support with a brain. Finally, the tech monkeys decided that they are really backlogged and it will take a while for the magic number to get to where it needs to so that the cell towers can find our phone. Cingular must be using the carrier pigeon network protocol to distribute the cell phone data. Hopefully tomorrow we can find the correct voodoo incantation to allow the phone to connect.

The US Patent Office really needs to be redesigned. Over the last few years it seems they have been giving the most obvious patents away. A patent is suppose to only be awarded for an idea that is both new and novel, but these days it seems you can patent almost anything, even if you didn’t invent it.

The computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964 to be used along with one of his other inventions, the windows based graphical user interface. He was awarded a patent for his computer mouse, US Patent #3541541, which was both new and
novel, and was also an amazing invention at a time when all computing was done on text based interfaces or punch cards. Ironically, he was not given a patent on his windows based interface because the US Patent Office didn’t award patents for software at the time.

Now, jump 40 years into the future, and Microsoft has just been awarded a patent on clicking the mouse buttons. Specifically, on April 27, 2004 they were granted US Patent #6727830. Their patent covers having a device, like a computer, do different things depending on if a button is single clicked, held down for a certain amount of time, or double clicked. Douglas Engelbart’s original mouse had 3 buttons on it, obviously for clicking to get the computer to do things. If people have been double clicking mouse buttons since the 1960’s, then where is the new and novel idea? Even worse, will Microsoft use this patent to cause everyone who uses a mouse to pay them money? Will people using other operating systems, such as Apple Macs or Linux, not be allowed to use their mouse buttons?

Anyone who has used a computer mouse knows you click the buttons to do things. Double click on an icon to launch a program. Click and drag on a solitaire card to move it. Click and drag on some text to highlight it. All of these uses have been around since the invention of the mouse. Now, according to the US Patent Office, Microsoft owns these ideas. This is just one example of the patents office dropping the ball. They have given other obvious patents away, such as pop-up windows, one-click shopping, and paying with a credit card online.

Something needs to be done to create more oversight to the patent process and to encourage people with technical backgrounds to get involved in awarding patents. If something isn’t done soon, such simple patents will suffocate real innovation with lawsuits and royalty demands. In the meantime, I think I will try to patent the keyboard.

Yesterday, while Aliciana and I were opening up some bank accounts and we were chatting with the bank representative, she was telling us how she had just bought a new Dell computer and it had already gotten a virus. Then, she went on to tell us that she had talked to the Dell support staff and they told her the virus has ruined the computer and she needed to buy another new one!!! This brings me to the #1 computer myth I hear: “A virus killed my computer and I need to buy a new one”. Computer viruses, as yucky as they are, will not ruin your computer hardware. You should not buy a new computer when you get a virus. They will ruin all the software on the computer if they are nasty enough, so you may need to completely wipe the computer clean and start over. This means doing a full format on the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system and all the software.

If the bank lady’s story is accurate, it is horrible that the Dell support would try to sell her an additional computer. While the Dell support people usually don’t know more about computers than the people calling them, to try to sell the lady a new computer instead of offering to have her ship them the one she had just bought so they can fix it, is just plain wrong. The moral of this story is that viruses will not hurt your hardware, don’t trust Dell support, and always run an up-to-date virus scanner. Or even better, run Linux.

According to this article on CNet, Microsoft has formed a “High Performance Computing” team to try and build a version of Windows to run on supercomputers currently dominated by Linux. Modern supercomputers are not the room sized machines of the past but instead are made up of thousands of servers all tightly networked together to function as a single machine. Microsoft doesn’t like that Linux seems to be the favorite choice for software running the world’s fastest computers, such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Thunder supercomputer, the second fastest computer on earth. Now that Microsoft is trying to throw their hat in the ring, get ready for some amazing results, like thousands of computers grinding to a crawl and crashing at the exact same time.

While getting this blog ready for prime time I decided to check out what it looked like under Microsoft Internet Explorer. You see, being that I run Linux, I use Mozilla and it’s children (Netscape, Epiphany, Galeon) exclusively. So, I booted up my old laptop to Windows (which only exists for Aliciana’s accounting assignments) and took a look. Of course, it looked like crap. Internet Explorer refuses to follow Internet standards and render web pages the way they should be rendered. Their fonts are sized wrong, they don’t interpret CSS correctly, and the page layout is usually incorrect. All Windows users: Please go download Netscape or Mozilla and see the web the way it was meant to be seen. You will not be disappointed. You can even email me and I will help you get it installed.