The Sublime Frustration of Convergence

I occasionally get cranky about converged communications channels - thing like merging Email and SMS or merging SMS and IM. For starters, I don't like how it tends to blur the "appropriate forms of address" lines for a given communications medium. While "RU ther" is almost OK in an SMS, it's less so in an IM and pretty much not tolerable in an Email. The other thing is, convergence means too many things jangling and, when there's errors, it's even worse.

Three times, today, I had convergence-related issues:

• Buddy calls me to thank me for his Christmas present. I, first, get an inbound call-notification on my laptop's GV/Hangouts browser-plugin. I answer on my cellphone as soon as it rings (hate trying to voice-chat via my laptop - also, see not about "too many things jangling") Just as I'm picking up the call on my cell, the VOIP line starts ringing ...and then continues to ring and ring while I'm starting my conversation on the cell. Wife comes up to find out why the hell the landline's ringing off the hook. I tell her "GV's being a butt". I'd yet to try to deal with the VOIP line as I'd noticed my cell's battery was down (apparently, I'd not snugly seated the charging plug, previously) and was tied to the wall by the (now seated) charging-cable. So she does us both a solid by tracking down a VOIP handset and terminating the errant ring-through.
• Boss tries to arrange an after-hours video call. "After hours" is about the only time everyone on my scattered team is available to talk since our "scattered" is across time-zones and, even those of us in the same time-zone are frequently working places where we can't do phone-calls (let alone video chats). His initial invitation to everyone had apparently gone awry, so he SMS'es me to ask if I'm available. I SMS back to affirm that I am. He states that he'll send out an invite to the video chat. The scheduled time for the call to start passes and still no email-invite. I assume it's gone into the Ether, so I SMS him again to ask what's up. He "dials" me into the video conference. This time, my cell rings before my browser starts jangling. I pick up on the cell and I'm in the video call. The cell isn't really stable for being on camera, so I'm a touch put out that what I'd *thought* was my cell ringing for a call was actually ringing for a video chat. My annoyance is subsequently eased when the invitation email finally arrives and I'm able to switch over to my laptop for the video-conference.
• While the video-call is going on, my messaging widget pops up a long-assed text message. It was from the customer-lead for one of the projects I work on. I reply with an SMS - failing to notice that the text message was actually a transcription delivered via the text messaging component of the messaging widget. Worse, he'd called from a land-line rather than his cell, so my SMS gets delivered to the Ether.

Actually, three and a half times...

While working on one of my projects, I encounter a mis-documented security-fix. I go to call one of my co-workers about it. Both he and I have ZRTP widgets on our cellphones and our phones each "know" that the other's phone is ZRTP-capable. When I got to hit the call button, my phone helpfully asks, "do you want this to be an encrypted call". I think, "sure - it's about a security-related documentation-bug, so why not do the call encrypted". His phone rings and rings with no answer. It occurs to me that the ZRTP widget actually doesn't dial to his VMail-enabled "number". So, I hang up, re-start the call and select "no" when asked if I want to encrypt the call. Eventually, the call rings through to his voicemail (DAMMIT). I leave a message for him to call me back.

An hour or so later, he IMs me to tell me that he got the call but the voicemail was garbled. Irony: the encrypted VOIP calls frequently have better sound-quality than the PSTN calls do.

Just convergence-annoyance all over the damned place, today.

I (Still) Love (Some) Spammers

How can you not be amused by a letter from "Peter McWealth" in you inbox?

Old Man of the Net

Ok, I realize that there's plenty of people out there who've been on the Internet longer than me. I mean, I really only started using it in 1989.

I'd hit an article through StumleUpon about the 100 oldest domains on the Internet. The first .com domains were registered in 1985. I've had my domain, xanthia.com, for quite a while, but couldn't remember exactly when I'd registered it. So, I hit up `whois`, right quick:

Domain Name: XANTHIA.COM
[...]
Updated Date: 11-sep-2009
Creation Date: 27-sep-1995
Expiration Date: 26-sep-2014

I set up my current, primary email address, back when I registered my domain. So, I've had the same primary email address since 1995 (over 15 years, now!) and just ten years less than the oldest .com domain names have existed.

As a side note, having an email address, that long, means that your address is in just about every spam-bot/address-harvester's email list. All I can say is, "thank god for anti-spam software".

NOT THAT BUTTON

I really think there should be mandatory training on correct use of the "Reply" and "Reply-all" buttons before giving people email access. Just because a message was sent to a group doesn't mean you need to reply to the entire group. We really don't need to see it, and, what's more we don't want to see it.

Gah.

I hate people.

The whole "Reply All" thing  was why, when I was last administering a corporate mail system, I put ACLs on distribution lists.

And, as you probably guessed, I hate chain letters and the like, too.

Hallmarks of SPAM

There are any number of attributes of an email that can tell you, within about half a second, that the contents are SPAM. It can be the from address. It can be the to address. It can be the subject line. It can be the greeting.

Today, I got one of those emails that begins with the greeting, "Hello: my dear"". Amusingly, this greeting was accompanied by an opening sentence that was trying to entice me into a "business opportunity."

I mean, even were the email legit, how serious could you take such a "business" missive if they start by calling you "Dear"?

I Like Outlook, But...

Ok, yeah, I said it: "I like Outlook". Me. A UNIX-guy and very much a non-fan of Microsoft. But, still, gotta appreciate when a tool's got useful features. OutLook's always had a fairly decent advanced search utility.

What gets me, though, is, as good as the functionality is, it almost seems like Microsoft doesn't want you to use it. While they continue to keep it in Outlook, it seems like with each succeeding release, Microsoft tries to make using the advanced search tool more and more difficult (to find). Each time I upgrade to a new version of Outlook, I have to play "find the find tool". And, each time, it feels like there's more and more hoops to jump through to get to it and to use it. Ugh.

At Least It's Not as Hard as It Used to Be

Nuking out Thunderbird profile directories is unfun to rebuild from. Now I gotta

• reinstall all my extensions
• reconfigure those extensions to what they were.
• reload all my calendars
• restore my address books
• rebuild my virtual identity mappings

At least with the calendars and address books, I had it all stored with my gmail stuff. So, it's just pointing it back at my Google accounts and re-synching.

Still... Sux0rz.

Please Don't Hit "Reply-All"

Why is it that, whenever someone sends a broadcast email, there's always the idiots that HAVE to hit the damned "reply all" button