I’ve had Top Gun SSH for my Treo installed for a while now, but it always looked bad because I needed to install the right term entries, whatever that was. I finally figured that out today.

The easiest way is to just get the latest mater list and update all of them into my local account. I think if I were to run this as root, it would update the entries /usr/share, but I’m not feeling that brave.

In the end, it came down to this:

wget http://catb.org/~esr/terminfo/termtypes.ti.gz
gunzip termtypes.ti.gz
tic termtypes.ti
rm termtypes.ti

That’s it. Then I run ‘screen’ once I log in and I can be mobile AND dangerous.

Throat feeling scratchy … feeling a little hot … slight headache … I might be getting sick.

Oh well, it could be an excuse to stay home, get a Jamba Juice and catch up on TiVo. Last year I was sick at Thanksgiving, which totally sucked. Flying while sick sucks. Trying to eat turkey while sick sucked.

I figure I’m gonna get good and sick at least once a year, so bring it on and let’s get over with it. Now where’s my Advil Cold and Sinus?

“You know when you have a really ugly baby and you just want to throw it off a cliff?”

– Nameless person who will never babysit my theoretical children

Well, I’m physically home I think, but mentally, I think I’m somewhere over the Rockies. I’ve got that surreal feeling that I always get when I spend the day flying. What time is it? Should I eat or just go to bed?

We had a good Thanksgiving x 2 again this year and got to spend a lot of time relaxing in NH. Our flight was overbooked, so we volunteered to take a later flight and got $400 on Delta as compensation. Woo hoo! The flights were a little delayed, but we made it. We were greeted with a lot of rain in San Francisco.

Amusing thing I saw on the jetway boarding one of our flights: There were some ear protectors for the guys that work on the ground. One side was labelled “What?” and the other said “Huh?”

‘Homeless Island’ is kind of like Survivor, but instead of food rewards, the reward is heroin. The San Francisco Chronicle is doing a very revealing 5-part series on the homeless problem in SF.

Where does mouse gunk come from? You know, that crusty stuff that accumlates on the contacts underneath the ball. Is it dust, skin, or something even more sinister? I’m not sure I really want to know the answer to this question.

Today is our first day at the new Yahoo building. There was much controversy about who was going to move across the street. Personally, I don’t care. The buildings look nearly identical inside.

Some first impressions:

– Something’s weird with the floor. My monitor is constantly bouncing.
– I have a window cube now, which is nice, but my cube needs to be reconfigured so my back isn’t to the window and I don’t get all the glare on my monitor.
– My commute is about 30 seconds shorter. Woo hoo!
– I got a full-sized parking spot very close to the building. That never happened at the old building.
– My cell phone appears to get better reception here.
– The conference room computers look new, which mean they may actually work. Wow.
– The conference rooms on the first floor are named after Gilligan’s Island castaways: “Ginger, Maryann, SS Minnow, etc’.
– The second floor rooms are “in” names like “competent”, “appropriate” and even “conitent”. I’ve got to think of a work arrangement that will avoid sentences like “I’m in ‘compentent’.”
– The third floor rooms are named after remote places like Siberia, Pluto, and Timbuktu. No, we’re not bitter!
– There are these weird mogul-like things in the courtyard lawn. This is what happens when architects run out of ideas.

This is definitely not going to be a productive day.

Well, not by name, but yesterday I participated in the world’s largest group yodel. Not that I can yodel really, but I can move my mouth and pretend to, just like in church.

The event was sponsored by Yahoo as some promotional thing. It was actually quite a bit of fun. They lured employees, family and friends with promises of free beer, a t-shirt, some free entertainment and a chance to win an iPod. Sadly I did not win the iPod.

They had all kinds of media there and the mayor of Sunnyvale, so I think they had to make sure they would break the previous Guinness record of 937. They had thousands of buttons printed up with “I broke the record on them”, then the execs upped the ante with promises to work the cafeteria for the day if we did it. At 4 pm the COO got on the intercom system (which I didn’t even know we had) and told everyone to stop working and go yodel.

There sure were a lot of people there. 1773 to be exact which was enough to break the record as long as it’s certified by the Guinness people. That must be one strange job to maintain those records.

This must have had some serious promotional value to the company. Let’s say the average Yahoo makes $50/hour and there were 1700 employees there for a half-hour. That’s $50 * 1700 / 2 = $85,000 plus all the setup, t-shirts and other event-related costs probably made it over $100,000. In any case, Terry Semel looked relieved when the Mayor of Sunnyvale annouced the total.

Tyler Marie Ware was there and she has quite a voice for an 8-year-old. They also showed the commercial that she was in as part of her prize for winning the competition.

Wylie Gustafson led the yodel (who seems to have made amends with Yahoo) with an answer and response, but I’m not sure that we really had everybody continuously yodeling for one minute. I guess it was good enough for them.

Apparently it was on the local tv news last night and I expect more news to appear.

It was a good bit of fun and if nothing else, it made for something to write about in my blog. 🙂

Update: My Dad found a bigger picture and I’m in it! See if you can find Waldo.

I got this email from Sprint (my cell phone carrier), suddenly thanking me for being a customer and explaining how much better they’ll be in the future.

Methinks they’re a bit worried about number portability kicking in next week.

—

Dear Jeff,

I want to thank you for choosing Sprint. It is our commitment to provide our valued customers with the best in wireless communication and I want to personally reaffirm that your satisfaction is our number-one priority.

You’ll see our commitment to your satisfaction in our ongoing dedication to expanding the Sprint Nationwide PCS Network. We have already invested over $17 billion to build and expand our network. But we’ve taken your feedback seriously, and we know that there is still room to improve. We are building 1,700 new cell towers this year, so you’ll be able to connect whenever you like and experience improved coverage within homes and buildings.

You’ll also notice improvements in customer service. Now it’s easier than ever before to get your questions answered the first time you contact us, with faster access to a PCS Customer Solutions Specialist.

We look forward to continuing to serve you. Again, I thank you for choosing Sprint.

Sincerely,
Len Lauer
President
PCS Division of Sprint

I really hate my answering machine. It’s the type of device you can’t really try out in the store and you have no idea how well it will work until you get it home.

Ours has a particularly bad interface for indicating when it has messages – it flashes a light. The light flashes faster when there are new messages, but I can never remember how fast that is, so I can’t tell if I have new messages or not.

It’s digital and has this really annoying voice that speaks 3 complete sentences before it actually starts playing the messages. To delete a message, you hit the delete button while the message is playing. Unfortunately, there is no confirmation given when you’ve deleted a message. If you hit delete when no message is playing, it deletes all the mesages, making it interesting when trying to delete the last message.

I don’t really want to buy another answering machine because I hate the device to begin with. I can never remember how to listen to my messages remotely or what the magic keys are to replay or delete a message from my phone.

The problem is the very limited interface of this throwaway device. What I want instead is a system that uses interfaces I’m familar with and use every day, like email and the web.

I want a service (or program I can run on my Mac at home) that will take my calls, record them, and then email them to me. Yes, email. Send me a little sound file that I can listen to whenever I want and speed up or slow down. I can save them just like email.

The email would also be accompanied by a website where I could browse messages, review callerID history. I would also be able to browse this site on my Treo instead of messing around with trying to translate phone digits into commands.

This may be asking too much, but it would be nice of the system could actually use voice recognition to translate the message into text. After all, I can read a lot faster than I can listen and some people tend to ramble. I hate trying to write down phone numbers from messages though. Something in my brain doesn’t quite work right and I can’t remember 7 numbers long enough to write them down.

When I worked at Microsoft, I tested a system that would email your messages to you. It was really cool. That was 5 years ago. Surely this is possible now.

I’m looking at VOCP, but I’m doubtful that I’ll be able to get it to work on my G4. PhoneValet is in the right direction, but doesn’t answer calls. Plus, I don’t think the built-in modem is caller-id or voice-capable. Damn. I once bought a Supra Voice-capable modem specifically to try to kill my answering machine, but I don’t think I ever got it working.

Hi Apple, in your quest to create the ultimate media hub, how about creating iPhone? You’ve added builtin faxing into Panther, it should be easy, right? You could integrate it in with the whole iLife suite – AddressBook is a no brainer, but you could do other cool things like Dial-a-Song with iTunes and Macintalk. Please?