So, I just picked one of these up for my kid, and now I think I’ve gotta get one for myself.

What does everyone else think? Is the iPod Video the way to go or is there some other player that I’ve overlooked?

Had a bit of trouble sleeping … Channel surfing while putzing around on the net when I happened to come across ‘Hackers’ starting on SciFi…

Hackers always gets me feeling a bit nostalgic … Back when it first came out, we (“the Scene”) all laughed about it. The pretty colors and graphics as they hacked … The ease with which they cracked systems and moved around the networks they penetrated.

A trip down memory lane was in order and started with a Google for “6.5536″ – Amazed, that after all these years, that number just came to me without having to think twice. A magic number back in the day – the frequency of the crystal that turned a plain old Radio Shack touch tone phone dialer into an endless supply of quarters and nickels — not to mention the 300% return I got for each one of these thing I made for random others…

Whenever I trip down memory lane I always end up thinking of this:

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…

Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950′s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world…
Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…

Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me… Or feels threatened by me… Or thinks I’m a smart ass… Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found.

“This is it… this is where I belong…”

I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

+++The Mentor+++

I first read it back in the mid-80′s and had an immediate connection to it.

In some ways it still rings true today. I guess it’s true … People never really change.

I’ve found recent keyboards, for the past decade anyway, pretty damn uninteresting. Sure, many have added “ergonomics” and scroll buttons, and application keys… But overall they’re nothing special and I’ve rarely seen anyone take advantage of most of the new features.

The last keyboard, that saw major market distribution, that I’ve really liked and still have is the old Gateway Anykey.

This thing is 100% remappable and programable. It’s totally OS Independent (everything is actually in the keyboard) so it works as well on a Linux box as it does on a Wintel machine.

Why this didn’t become the standard for keyboards everywhere, I will never understand. Even Gateway stopped shipping it after a couple of years.

Enter the Optimus Keyboard.

The Optimus has been in the rumor mill for quite some time – all the big “blogs” have talked about it in the past, but it has yet to materialize.

Much like my favorite old keyboard, the AnyKey, this one is fully programmable. It even looks to have taken some layout ques from the old AnyKey, with both vertical and horizontal function keys.

But what makes this the coolest keyboard ever? Every key on this keyboard is a stand alone OLED display.

Now, rumors surfacing that it’ll be released on February 1st.

With a little luck, our friends over at GeekExtreme will have a review of this sometime in the near future.

Ok, so I’ve been using a SE P900 for quite some time now, and I’m ready for a change. The P990 is the obvious upgrade, but since they haven’t released it yet, and it’ll probably cost $800 in the states, I think this W810 might be my next phone.

The W810 combines a Mobile Phone, Walkman MP3/Media Player and a 2 Megapix digital camera. The only thing I don’t love about this is the size of the memory stick. At 512meg, it’ll require a bunch of swapping and sorting everytime my mood changes.

A recent topic of debate for me and many of my friends has been outsourcing customer service jobs to India. I’ll start right off and tell you that I’m on the “pro” side of this argument although most of those I talk to are not.

In the beginning – calling customer service just to get re-routed to somewhere in India or Bangladesh was a pain in the ass. I freely admit that I’ve had more than one bad experience when dealing with these outsourced call centers. But then again – I’ve had more than one bad experience when dealing with US based call centers. In fact, I’ve only had a couple of good experiences when working with customer service centers located in the States.

See, everyone wants to rip on overseas call centers because of two reasons. One, it’s taking away jobs from Americans, and Two, that damn accent.

Lets rip apart the language difference. At first, yes – many of the call center employees were absolutly HORRIBLE – but, for the most part, this is no longer the issue.

In the past 2 months, I’ve been on the phone with a minimum of 20 different call center employees – about half of those were located here in the states and the other half somewhere overseas.

Of the 10 or so calls that involved overseas operators, I only had trouble understanding one, and in that case I simply told them I was having a hard time understanding their accent and asked that someone else help me – No problem, a few seconds later I was talking to someone that spoke near-perfect english.

Of the 10 calls that involved US based operators I had 3 problem calls – I could not understand a THING they were saying, and on two of these calls, when I asked to speak to someone different, the operator took offense and the call ended up being escalated to a supervisor after much frustration.*

There ya have it. At least in my recent experience, the accent problem isn’t much of a problem at all.

Now, lets address the Jobs issue. Everyone is bitching about the jobs going to India while they’re having a hard time finding jobs here in the states. I’m sorry to say – But tough shit.

The reality is pretty straight forward. Just because the jobs are going overseas doesn’t mean they’re being taken away from qualified individuals here in the States. The harsh reality is people here in the US think they deserve to be paid well for jobs they’re not qualified to do. Corporate America has finally decided to take a stand against this type of hiring Americans for the sake of creating jobs and have started hiring qualified individuals that will work for a justifiable wage.

Most of the Americans that argue against outsourcing to India are not educated enough to know what they’re talking about. Most people think that answering a phone at a call center is just like being a general operator – reading a screen and answering questions – but the reality is they need to be educated enough to answer questions and troubleshoot issues that aren’t ‘by the book’ problems.

I think the biggest problem most people have when they deal with customer service isn’t an accent or language issue, but rather an issue of intelligence. They don’t get the answers they need because the person on the other end of the line simply doesn’t know the answer.

Many will argue that we should just educate employees better… But why? Why should American business’ spend the money to educate people on how to do their jobs? I mean, would you hire an uneducated carpenter at the going rate, then spend extra money to educate them on the proper use of a hammer and nails? I don’t think so! You’d hire someone that knows what they’re doing, save a lot of money, and get a job thats done right.

The situation here is no different – If a company like Dell decided to start hiring people here in the States rather than outsourcing, one of two things would happen … 1) You’d call tech support or customer service about that laptop you just ordered and get some idiot who couldn’t answer your questions, get thrown into the hold queue and end up frustrated that you’ve wasted half your day on the phone, or 2) You would have just paid double for your laptop, or not been able to afford it at all because the cost of educating and staffing Americans just got passed down to you.

One way or another, people have to start understanding that they need to get educated and make their own opportunities or someone else will. You don’t get something for nothing, and nobody that’s living the American dream is doing so because it was handed to them. They’re there because they worked hard to get there. If the have-nots in our country don’t take that to heart, the American dream may soon be the Indian, Phillipino or Hungarian dream.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what set me off on this little rant; I had the BEST customer service phone call today. A call that ended up at a Bangladesh call center. My questions were answered by a young lady that spoke perfect English, was amazingly polite, knew everything about the product I was calling about and ended the conversation by bringing her supervisor on the line just to make sure everything was handled to my satisfaction. Exceptional customer service.

The HeartStart Home DefibrillatorDoes this scare the EVER LOVIN’ SHIT out of anyone but me?
Ya think maybe they should add a few additional steps to this?

Perhaps step 1 should read: Make sure the motherfucker you’re about to send a few hundred amps of juice through doesn’t have a pulse or heartbeat!

Movable type – every pretentious fuck out there seems to be using it for their music-movie-literature-culture snob blog, so I finally broke down and installed it to see what makes it so damn fantastic.

Truth is this stuff is absolute, unadulterated, down-home-country shit designed by a couple of folks that know how to market manure to the seemingly endless masses of pseudo intellectual lemmings that can’t waste a few minutes to research the less-cool options availble to them.

I really don’t understand it’s popularity. I’ve been poking and proding this thing for the past hour and I just don’t see any reason to use it, much less pay for it.