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February 3 can’t come soon enough! #Verizon #iPhone (Taken with instagram)

What Your Computer Does While You Wait : Gustavo Duarte →

Perl and Nuclear Weapons Don't Mix - The Perl Journal, Winter 1997 →

My commanding officer said that this was for organizing and categorizing the forty gigabytes of text data NORAD wants put on its intranet, and I believed him, until I found out that he was making monthly trips to Cisco headquarters in San Jose. Turns out that my scanning software has secretly been installed on a large percentage of Cisco routers, so that the DoD could keep tabs on potential espionage suspects.

Op-Ed Columnist - Taking bin Laden’s Side - NYTimes.com →

Why do so many Republicans find strip clubs appropriate for the ground zero neighborhood but object to a house of worship? Are lap dances more sanctified than an earnest effort to promote peace?

AT&T – Taking Suck To A Whole New Level

Edit (8/26/2010): My account has gone to collections and there is no end in sight. They’re still trying to get with the store where all of this took place and “figure out exactly what happened.” I’m about a week away from getting a lawyer.

Once upon a time I was a somewhat-happy AT&T customer. I didn’t particularly enjoy paying over $100 a month for service but that is the sacrifice one makes to have the iPhone with a plan that doesn’t limit you.

Before moving to San Francisco I was with AT&T for six years. When I moved here in 2008 I quickly discovered that not only did I not have service at my place of residence but service in the city as a whole was pretty much non-existant. I couldn’t drop AT&T fast enough, considering the price I was paying for service. Hello Sprint.

For two years now I’ve been a happy Sprint customer, having done a cross-country trip and all-around great service in the city I can’t complain; not to mention service is also $40 cheaper for the same plan I had with AT&T.

Now, to the good stuff.

I recently spent the summer back East. When the iPhone 4 was announced, I had to have it and quickly pre-ordered it online. That’s a whole different debacle in itself dealing with the shipping address vs billing address. I ended up having to cancel that pre-order since the only option was to have the phone shipped to my address in San Francisco, an address that I wouldn’t be back to for another month.

A week later when the corporate AT&T stores received the phone for purchase, I made my way to the store bright and early (6 AM). I stood in line for around 4 hours and barely made the cut off (they completely sold out with the 4th customer behind me).

To expedite the whole process the employees of the store were handling new customers by starting the process of opening the account etc. before actually bringing the iPhone out and activating it. During this process they notified me that they had just sold their last 16GB model but still had a few 32GB models left. I pondered about this for a moment and decided that I couldn’t justify paying $100 more for space that I would never use and decided that I would just wait.

After spending another five minutes with the employee canceling the order, I left disgruntled but satisfied with having the willpower to save the $100. Fast forward a month later I return to San Francisco and have this waiting in the mail:

Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently I am past due $213.65 for an account I never had. The gentleman that canceled my order obviously did something wrong and I was penalized with an early termination fee, a fee for an account that I never fully opened. An account to which a device was never actually activated on.

As things stand right now, I’m about a week away from this going to collections.

I called AT&T immediately after discovering this and spent two hours navigating phone trees and talking to person after person until reaching the right authority who can handle such a screw up.

My “account” is now being handled by their investigation department to figure out “exactly what happened,” as they like to delicately put it. While they’re busy trying to figure out their own screw up I’m left with the real problem, my credit. If this does indeed go to collections, AT&T .. I will come at you with guns blazing; I have a lawyer that is very thirsty for such a case.

It’s disheartening as I was just a few weeks away from heading to an AT&T store here in San Francisco to purchase the new iPhone, no way now. I will hold out for however long it takes for the iPhone to make its way to another U.S. carrier, no phone is worth making the ultimate sacrifice, AT&T.

"Fostering hope succumbs to cultivation of motive and virtuous defiance – maintain relevance with yourself, and happiness will come to pass. Laden with jubilance one frolics in the moment, because it.. is all that you have."

Which Version of Kohana Should I Use? →

A spectacular wiki that focuses on helping you choose which branch of Kohana you should use for your project.

Marco.org: iPhone multitasking and background updating →

Someone from Bad Robot's take on the Lost finale →

The Genius in Apple's Vertical Platform - steve's blog →