i *finally* got my upgrade order placed. it was a pain:it went on sale online-only at midnight last night. Verizon annoyingly only made it available to *new* customers, not existing customers like me. their site slowed to a crawl with all the traffic, i got a lot of webserver errors, and lots of inconsistent messaging like “buy it now!” links that led to promotion pages you couldn’t order from.this morning i managed to get the Q in my upgrade cart, but it didn’t have options for me to keep my existing voice/data plan. another dead-end.so i called VZW (*611) and the nice lady tried to order it for me but it wasn’t available to her. i guess her “group” (whatever it was) wasn’t allowed to do it. she transferred me to a telesales guy who was ultimately able to place the order.it’s pretty amazing how blatantly incompetent some companies are when you get a peek into their operations. not surprisingly it’s usually your phone or cable company, the ones without competition.
6/1 Update: those mother f’ers. i worked from home today to receive the fedex package, but apparently it wasn’t picked up last night. so now it’s not coming until tomorrow. =( don’t they realize how *important* this is???
tonight’s the night - the motorola q smartphone goes on sale at verizon at midnight. it’s a treo-killer that i think will eventually become even more ubiquitous than treo’s are now. originally announced over a year ago, the launch seems to have delayed for some reason or another. now, the nerds are frothing at the mouth to get it.
i wasn’t interested at first, but my 1-yr old samsung i730 is getting a little long in the tooth and i think it’s time to put it out to the great ebay pasture in the sky. the q is pretty reasonably priced ($199 2/yr agreement, $249 1/yr agreement) so i can probably even save money on the trade. so eat me.now i’m trolling the forums at sites like qusers.com and eagerly reading threads of first-reports like “Just ordered the Q!!!!” (to which everyone asks “how? when? where?”) and “Got Mine!” (to which everyone asks “how? when? where?”). there’s lots of speculation about which is really the fastest way to get your hands on it - ordering online, by phone, or in stores. we shall see.
sadly, i’ve been caught up in this ritual for a long time now. back in ‘96 i was frothing over the newly introduced palm pilot. just like today, i read similar first-reports in online forums. one guy reported that the CompUSA near me(!) had 1 left in stock. i promptly got up, walked out of work, drove down and asked for it…the sales guy had no idea what a ‘pilot’ was, then pulled out the box from behind the counter and said “is this it?” and i was like “YESSSSSS”.
on Saturday we checked out the darwin exhibit at the museum of natural history, at my urging (someone’s gotta bring the culture). i dug the amazing human story behind the theory. how a kid who loved observing beetles eventually got the chance to sail to the galapagos, and using just a magnifying glass and other basic tools managed to catalog thousands of species. and then from “just that”, spent the rest of his life collaborating with others and piecing together the theory of evolution…culminating in the small task of proclaiming that creationism is wrong and that humans come from apes. 
alas, the day will more likely be remembered as the time my baby bought MAX at Brookstone. max is a $200 top-of-the-line jackhammer/body massager that is now amo’s best friend. though it was an impulse buy, it’s a good one (plus there’s a 2-month trial period). it was a close call between max and the iSqueez.
regular expressions: a standard notation for defining patterns in text. there are standard operators that mean different things. the most common is ‘*’ which looks for �0 to many occurences of any character�. so �*.txt� looks for any filename that ends in �.txt.�
we actually use this a lot at work, having to manipulate files from various sources and process them into something usable for us.
programmers use it to validate web page form elements. e.g. a valid zip code in a format like 10012 (optionally 10012-1014) looks like:
^[0-9]{5}(-[0-9]{4})?$
pretty cool.
against better judgement, i installed the 2007 Microsoft Office System Beta 2 on my thinkpad. it’s free, and stays active until Feb ‘07 (can that be right?). technically i shouldn’t be installing unstable software on my work machine, but whatever…i want to play with the new features. so far all i can see it it’s got a frilly blue bubble-gummy UI - standard microsoft stuff.
