No Open Blockers

I was making coffee earlier and I overheard my wife on the phone.

“English”
5 seconds later
“En-glish.”
5 seconds later
“ENGLISH”

It didn’t take long to figure out she was on the phone with her cell phone carrier. I won’t say which one, but let’s be honest, in the United States they are all pretty much equally bad.

That’s not the worst part. She then recited the phone number of the account she’s trying to work with. Recited, as in spoke out loud.

I’m not a user interface designer. I don’t claim to be. But I can’t find a single reason why someone would think it’s better for customers to speak the phone number rather than simply using the keypad like we’ve been doing for decades now.

Yes, voice recognition may be cool. But cool isn’t always the best option.

Not fully sure why they say MythTV is needed since it’s just using basic commands (unless I’m missing something here), but I’m totally going to do this for the next baby.

I had all summer to gradually start cleaning and packing to move in November. Naturally, I did nothing. I finally started to feel a sense of urgency when my wife threw down a to-do list on my desk. While I’d normally blow it off, she titled it “Phase 1″, which to be honest, scares the hell out of me for what’s in store in later phases.

So, I started in the depths of my office closet where I knew I’d come across some relics of computing past. What I hadn’t realized was just how much I’d find and how far back they go. Below are just a few of the ancient, dust-covered computing artifacts I came across:

• Two copies of Windows 98.
• One copy of Microsoft Works Suite 2001. Unopened; I think it was part of a restore package for an old laptop.
• A copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3. At least I wasn’t a complete Windows whore back in the day.
• Four “spare” keyboards (so far) not counting the one I already use to bait my daughter away from my real keyboards.
• An external Iomega Zip Drive and a few disks. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it sports a cool 100MB disk size at a time when floppies and modems ruled the day.
• A 500W ATX power supply. This is actually pretty new. It came with a case I bought but I needed something more powerful. The real question is why I kept it around.
• A Palm V. Amazingly, the screen isn’t shattered.
• A SCSI hard drive of unmarked size that I haven’t got a clue what it may contain.
• At least 25 ethernet cables of assorted sizes. I have no idea how the hell I came to own so many, it’s like the reproduce or something.
• Five laptop bags. I think every time I quit a job, I’ve take the laptop bag as a trophy.
• A 12 foot keyboard extension cable. No idea where it came from, but one has to question the practicality of a keyboard extension so long that you couldn’t possibly see what you were doing on the screen.
• Assembly instructions for a desk I got rid of three years ago.

And the worst of all?

• One copy of Windows Me.

This is all just in the office closet. I have yet to venture into the attic. If I find an external modem up there I’m gonna lose my mind. I really should save some of this stuff and set up a small monument to computing history in my new office.