Rants

Sometimes you just have to roll your eyes at phone company stupidity. I'm thinking of the sort of thing like when AT&T started sending huge 45 page itemized bills to iPhone customers even though they had an unlimited data plan.

This month's "Where Did We Hide the Clue?" award goes to Sprint PCS.

I use Sprint PCS for my mobile phone service. Sprint recently moved to a new portal and forced me to re-register. Nearly an entire month after creating a new login, I got an email from Sprint with an RTF-formatted word processing attachment saying:

I've had to teach myself Java for my current contract. You may be surprised to find that with all the code I sling, I've not done any Java development up until now. Java is popular for enterprise application development, and I haven't done a lot of work in that space before.

I usually like learning new languages. I'm not enjoying Java at all. It's verbose and wordy, like a pedantic little schoolkid. It's like the snubby-nosed scissors of programming languages.

If you want to know what's so wrong with the movie business today, go look at somebody who is doing it right. That's easy here in Austin, because we're home to the Original Alamo Draft House theaters.

My wife and I frequently go to Sunday night movies. The town is quiet and it's easy to get in. That is, it's easy unless you are trying to go to our neighborhood theater, the Alamo Village. For the past couple of months, every time we've gone to a Sunday movie the show has sold out. Even when we went to a Sunday evening showing of The Departed many weeks into the release, every seat was taken.

Here is the world's smallest personality test:

You are sitting in a restaurant. A call comes in on your mobile phone. Do you:

1. Silence the phone and return the call after dinner.
2. Excuse yourself from the table to take the call.
3. Answer it and say you'll call back after dining.
4. Answer it and talk away.

Okay, pencils down. Let's score your results.