This is a review on Premiere Communications and Consulting in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Morrisville).  We had to run some cables for our new office last year.  We chose Premiere Communications due to price and some case studies.  If Cisco uses them, they must be good, right? 

Big mistake. 

They are the worst contractor I've ever had to work with.  Maybe at one time they were good enough to cable for IT leaders, but certainly not any more. 

First, the attitude.  Their installers are schmucks.  All they do is complain about their long hours, how tough their job is, how much time it's going to take, how long they'll have to stay over, the cubicle companies didn't do something right for them, the weather, anything.  Seriously, guys.  I don't care. Not to be a jerk, but it's just not my problem.  I have things to do.  Stop complaining and do the job.

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AT&T sure hates the fact that their 3G coverage sucks and Verizon is pointing it out.  The latest ad (been out for a while, actually) says that only AT&T allows you to talk and download at the same time.  Big deal if you can't get 3G service!

I hate AT&T.  I have to have them for local phone service because I use DSL and their monopoly makes them the only game in town -- and a very expensive option at that.  Cable is better for internet, but Time Warner is even lower on the scale of "good companies" in my book.  Better of the two evils -- so AT&T wins.  Thankfully, my actual DSL provider is a local company (Portbridge) and they are very good.  It's still AT&T's loop and I have to have local phone service, but at least AT&T is getting the least money possible from me.  I hate monopolies. 

I thought deregulation was supposed to fix all this?

Of course not!  Deregulation never helps the consumer.  Well I've derailed from my original point.  So, in conclusion, fuck AT&T and fuck Time Warner!

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Am I the only one that thinks the Chia Obama is, at the very least, unclassy and, at the very worst, blatantly racist?

http://www.chiaobama.com/

The title says it all.  No matter what you think about his (admittedly bizarre) personal life, he was an absolute entertainment phenomenon.  There will never be another entertainer like him.  Thriller will always be one of my most prized albums in my collection of vinyl.

With this and the death of Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett, this has turned out to be a hell of a depressing week.  It can't end soon enough.

I just recently joined the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech).  They are a part of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which itself is a part of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

I had been toying around with the idea of joining a union for a long time.  I knew there were a lot of things happening in the technology world that only organized labor could properly deal with.  For example, outsourcing our jobs to countries where labor is cheaper and the stagnant wages we've seen since the tech bubble burst of 2001.  However, it just didn't seem like there was any option for me as a high tech worker.  I was actually quite envious of my blue collar brethren.

Then I discovered WashTech.  I thought it was awesome that Microsoft workers formed this union, but I just didn't see how that would directly benefit me, living in North Carolina, other than the national advocacy and lobbying they do.

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This is so freaking cool.  I hope they can adapt this technique to ears so I can I get super hearing!  http://gizmodo.com/5277456/stem-cell-contact-lenses-cure-blindness-in-less-than-a-month

Today I went out to eat lunch with my lovely wife.  At the table next to us were two businessmen who were discussing future plans for their business.  Of course, rather than using the word plan they kept using the word vision.  This isn't the first time I've heard this euphemism.  Marketing departments must stay awake late at night coming up with cute buzzwords to replace boring old words that everybody, you know, actually understands.  I think it's part of what keeps them employed.  I'm guess I'm not really one to talk because IT is also a department very famous for coming up with new complex words too, but at least it's not to replace perfectly fine existing words, it's usually just fancy acronyms for new technology.  I confused a manager the other day by saying KVM.  Either way, I'm sure it keeps us employed.  :-D

But, I digress…

I actually heard these two say things like, "we need to communicate our vision" and "can you explain your vision for this?"  The one that took the cake for me was, "Wow – that's a lot of vision."

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Today our house received a citation because we haven't mowed our lawn often enough.  Yes, seriously.  For some perspective, it's been a little less than two weeks since we mowed our front yard.  We've been getting  a ton of rain, so the grass is growing like crazy right now.

The inspector was super polite, so I have no hard feelings toward the city.  He said it was so borderline, that he had to measure it with a ruler and then found that we did, indeed, have a few blades of grass over eight inches of length.  I wonder if a subcommittee on grass blade length had to be formed by the city to determine this magic number.  lol

Anyway, it turns out the city itself doesn't really care, but we had a busybody neighbor report us, so they are obligated to investigate.  No doubt it was the same neighbor that complained to our HOA about our security camera near the front door when we installed it (which, btw, there is no city or HOA rule against having).

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Why is it acceptable that employment is a top-down dictatorship when government is a bottom-up democracy?  I've been thinking about this and I can't figure out why those two completely opposite approaches seem so unquestioningly compatible to basically everybody (myself included) in day-to-day life.

I keep reading from various sources (I know, weasel words) that the print media is dying (or already dead).  Other than for the purposes of nostalgia, why is this bad?  I can read any number of local, regional, national, or international news sources online from my home computer, work computer, and even my phone.  I think saving a few million trees every year is a good thing, don't you?

Part of the lamenting this change is not nostalgia, however.  There is a genuine concern that without a good print media, there will be no (or at least reduced)  investigate reports, government watchdogs, and checks on power.  This is supposedly due to the fact that print media has the funds necessary to follow-up on leads and develop in-depth stories.  Blogs, on the other hand, supposedly do not have these types of resources.  I disagree with this argument.  First, since 9/11/01, there has been little to none of that from the traditional media anyway!  Remember all those great stories busting open the fraud that was Sadam Hussein's glaring lack of any WMDs?  Yea, me either.  Second, there are blogs that do investigative stories, even if the quantity of investigations is less than a traditional media outlet.  This brings me to my third point: there are far more blogs than newspapers.  You do not need a single blog to do the work of a single newspaper.  A collection of a couple dozen blogs can and do perform as much reporting.  Plus, blogs cross-link and cross-pollinate, so the word gets out fast.  Not all blogs do this, yes.  However, I feel enough blogs are doing this and are doing a fine job replacing the dying print industry.

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