in an iPod world

Bye, Bye Verizon and Hello to Comcast

I have been waiting for Verizon's FIOS service to come to my house for some time. The idea of having 20Mbps service was very tempting. First, I called them last October, 2007 as I received a lot of unsolicited calls and mail to get FIOS at our home. They sent their engineer who found that there was no fiber cable in our neighbor. He was puzzled and frustrated, and said "someone head is going to roll tomorrow. You will trucks out here, digging and laying the cable in a day or two. You should really call and complain about it." Well, I decided not to. I have better things to do.

In late December, I noticed finally Verizon people digging our neighbor burying cable under the ground. When that work was done, I thought I would give them a call. I was told that "we would love to take your order now, but you will not get our HDTV service, since we are out of stock for HD receiver." When I asked them when I will receive HD receivers, they had no answer. So, I decided to wait further.

About a week ago, I finally decided that it is time to pull the trigger and called Verizon one more time. They gladly scheduled an appointment for installation and I received about 5-6 phone calls reminding me about the appointment. I decided that I would work at home, waiting for the Verizon engineer. Of course, I scheduled my Comcast Cable TV to be discontinued beginning today. The guy finally came and he was a very pleasant person. But, after an hour or so, and many phone calls, he told me the bad news. To my surprise, it was the same reason. There is no fiber in my neighbor yet. I asked him about the work that they did in front of my house -- they dug the ground and put the conduit, but did not put the cable through it. So, I was back to square one. The guy and his foreman apologized and said the same thing. Call Verizon and complain. So, I called this time and asked for an immediate action plus one-year free service. But, so far, nothing has happened yet.

Then, I had to call Comcast to cancel my cancel order. The guy that I spoke to persuaded me to completely switch over to Comcast, including our phone lines. So I did. No more waiting for Verizon to put the fiber in my front yard. No more cancelled appointment. No more waiting. I am getting Comcast Triple play. So, bye bye Verizon and hello to Comcast.

Connecting with Facebook

I am posting this message from my Facebook account. Just to see how it works.

And, it does not work very well. The same posting appears a number of times.

designing (for) the invisibles

This is a short piece I wrote for the Positive Design Workshop. It is the based on the idea of overtone in music and tries to apply it in the context of digital city design.

• Download the PDF file.

Default

I have written few short articles on design and plan on continuing to write them. Some of them have been published as a book chapter, and some of them are just written for workshops. The first one that I posting is written for Managing as Designing Dialogue series that we had between the Weatherhead School of Management and Cleveland Institute of Art. We selected several words that resonate with both management and design communities and for each topic we had one speaker from each school. I spoke about "default." My counterpart was Jurgen Faust from CIA.

• Download PDF File

positive design workshop

I am in Monterrey, Mexico to attend Positive Design Workshop. One idea that resonates with me is "Design by all for all."

One Week with MacBook Air

I received my MacBook Air about a week ago and I am very happy with it. I no longer carry my old MacBook Pro. Instead, I carry my new MBA and iPod Touch. I am waiting for my portable hard disk that will go with it. 64GB just isn't big enough.

It is incredibly light. Keyboard is just perfect. The only thing is that when it gets hot, it makes pretty bad fan noise. I thought if I get one with a solid state hard disk, there wouldn't be any moving parts. Apparently, there is one. I wonder if one can design noiseless fan.