DigitalHobbit

Last week I’ve had a real unfortunate experience with AT&T: Our phone line (which includes DSL) was down for a whole 4 days, from Monday morning to Friday morning. This is by far the most severe outage I have ever experienced, and suffice to say I am extremely annoyed with AT&T’s ineptitude, and their obvious lack of concern for their customers. I first reported the problem Monday morning at 10AM, but it took them until the next day before they even sent someone out there. And after that, it took them another 3 days to determine that during a recent maintenance at a node in the phone line they had incorrectly connected our line. Part of the problem seems to be that they are apparently working with 3rd party contractors to perform much of the actual maintenance work, which adds another layer of inefficiency on top of an already messed up company…

I have mostly been lucky with my phone / DSL service for the past few years (up until we moved to San Mateo last year), but this was the third outage in only 6 months (the first one lasted about a day, the second one a few hours). This seems absolutely unacceptable for a technology that should be mature by now…

We will be moving to Palo Alto in about a month, which means that it’s time to pick a new provider for our phone, TV, and Internet services. Last week’s outage combined with the recent bad press about the fact that AT&T is willing to spy on their customers on behalf of the NSA, RIAA, and MPAA simplifies my choice by eliminating AT&T from the list of contenders. I still need to pick between Comcast, RCA, and perhaps other options, but at least I won’t have to be an AT&T customer any more (OK, that’s unfortunately only half true: I am still using their mobile service. Perhaps I should consider switching to Spring or Verizon when my contract is up…).

Well, whining about our frustrating rental house hunt experience yesterday must have helped somehow. It turns out that the person who got the last place we applied for decided to pass on it and move to Japan instead. The property manager just called me back to offer us the place, and we’ll be signing the lease tomorrow. Yay!

A while ago we decided to move to the Peninsula, preferably somewhere around San Mateo where I work, or surrounding areas like Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, or Burlingame. We’ll be selling our house and renting for the time being, as I’m not all that confident about the real estate market – at least in the short term. But for some reason things are proving to be a bit more difficult than we were expecting. First of all it is of course hard to find the right place (and I admit that we’re quite picky in that regard). Still, in the past month or so we have filled out 4 rental applications. Unfortunately we have not been successful in either of these cases… I’m not sure what we’re doing wrong. Our credit is excellent and we should have a pretty strong application. Maybe this is simply due to the large amount of competition. Now that interest rates have been rising, it seems like more people that might otherwise consider buying decide to rent, and this trend will probably continue.

Anyway, if you know any good home hunting strategies or have any suggestions for improving our chances to land a place, please let me know. In either case, please wish me luck.

We recently moved back from the suburbs into San Francisco proper, but our new house is a little smaller than the old one. In particular, there is a lot less counter space than we are used to in the kitchen, which means that things very quickly fill up if we are not careful, at which point it becomes almost impossible to even think about activities such as cooking or simply making a sandwich.

The only way to conquer this situation is to always empty the dishwasher as soon as it is clean, which then allows us to immediately put dirty dishes into the dishwasher, rather than allowing them to pile up on the counters. Of course, this requires a fair amount of discipline…

Yesterday evening was another of those days (maybe because it was the end of an exhausting work week) where we were too tired to immediately put away the clean dishes, which meant that the first dirty dishes landed on the counters. Once some crap has started to pile up on the counters, the inhibition to add additional crap is a lot less, and from that point on it just goes downhill. Now, cleaning everything up becomes a major effort, which is therefore postponed for as long as possible… At the end of the evening, the counters are full of dirty dishes, garbage, food leftovers, etc.

This morning I realized that this is exactly the same issue as in the Broken Windows theory that the Pragmatic Programmers Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt describe in their book and on their website. I guess it is one of those cases where the same problems manifest themselves in software development as well as in real life.