An Open Letter To AT&T

Dear AT&T:

To fill you in on where I’m coming from regarding the iPhone 3G S upgrade that you state I have to wait until December 12th to get without paying in full for the phone:

I’m a purchaser of the original iPhone, I didn’t wait in line the first day but I got it the first weekend it was available. I ditched my previous carrier of several years that I was perfectly happy with to get your service as the exclusive carrier for the iPhone. I paid $200 to cancel that contract on top of the $500 I paid for the phone (unsubsidized).

Happy with your wireless service and seeing your new uVerse service available in my area I switched from Comcast to AT&T for my internet, television and phone. My wireless bill is combined with that bill.

I was in line the first day the iPhone 3G came out. That phone was subsidized but I had to extend my contract which I happily did as I was pleased with your service.

I have been pleased with my service aside from a couple of dead spots (all carriers have their dead spots) and have been an evangelist for AT&T and its wireless and uVerse services as providing me good service and value.

Because of me, and people like me, who are using the iPhone and extolling its virtues to others (I know of several people I convinced to get one) you’re able to sell more contracts to go along with all those phones. Market data clearly indicates AT&T has reaped great windfalls from the iPhone having sold over one million of them on the first weekend of the iPhone 3G release alone.

How do you reward me for being an early adopter of your service, paying good money for your services and advocating it to others? You tell me I have to pay $600 for the new iPhone unless I want to wait until December 12.

I don’t expect you to fully subsidize my next iPhone but you could at least come up with a nominal charge to keep me satisfied with your service.

I hear you’re in negotiations with Apple regarding your exclusivity agreement for the iPhone. I wonder how many of us you will be keeping having stuck it to us on the iPhone 3G S if say, Verizon is added as a carrier for the iPhone. I also wonder how long it will take me to call Comcast and get them to cut me a good deal to switch from uVerse.

You alone can answer that question.

Daily Herald | Palatine school plans to expand

Daily Herald | Palatine school plans to expand

As many of you are aware my son attends New Connections Academy in Palatine, it has turned his life and his educational experiences around. There is no other school like it in the area that I’m aware of that specializes in programs for kids who suffer from autism but are high-functioning or have Asperger’s Syndrome.

This is also a great example of where a privately run program has stepped in to fill a void not being filled by the public schools. It’s a well-run facility with an incredible staff making differences in the lives of these kids every day. I’m glad to see more kids will be able to benefit from this program instead of trying to be placed in a program not designed for their disability. Too many times HFA and AS kids are being placed in ED (formerly “BD”) classrooms where they fall under bad influences (think of a child with HFA or AS as a giant button waiting to be pushed by a child with emotional issues). Or they get put in an LOP or similar classroom with students with more profound learning disabilities where they get bored and cause problems.

As the demand for these programs increases they will continue to expand. So if you have a child who suffers from HFA or AS I encourage you to insist on a placement that fits your child’s disability. It is your child’s right under IDEA to be placed in a such a program — the fit that is right for your child not the fit that is right for the school district. There is no greater advocate for your child than you, it’s up to you to insist on the proper placement so I encourage you to go into your next IEP meeting prepared and with the facts on what’s right for your child. By simply going along with a placement that may not be right for your child you aren’t doing him any favors and you’re ensuring there isn’t enough demand for programs like New Connections Academy.

The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit

Great video and article about Apple’s penetration into the business world. Macs have always been popular in education and Apple’s attractive, desirable, feature-filled products were why we ended up awarding them the contract for the new Magee computers. It appears that corporations are starting to see the same thing.

The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit

Autism Cases Up Even With Vaccine Change

The Associated Press: Autism Cases Up Even With Vaccine Change

I’m not very active in the Autism activist groups because to be honest with you I’ve always found the families of those with autism to be a splintered and factional group. One group that has consistently led to division within the community and nearly cost us the Combating Autism Act (CAA), which President Bush just signed full funding for, is the group that believes thimerosal is the cause of autism. This group, by and large, is so militant and divisive in its beliefs that it drags the rest of the community down.

Hopefully that camp has been dealt a death blow with this study. I’m sure there will be some hard-liners that won’t accept this but I’m also hopeful more and more research will come along that will put this issue to bed. It needs to go away and I have firmly believed that thimerosal has no causal relationship with autism.

With this out of the way hopefully the community can work on the other splintering faction — the “cure” camp versus the “treatment” camp. To me I agree that much more research is needed into the cause(s) of autism and I think the CAA gives new hope for that. However, I think it’s far more important we work on identifying children suffering from autism earlier than we currently are as current research shows those children make far better progress. Additionally we need to focus on how we teach these children. I’m a very lucky man, my son is in a program at New Connections Academy completely oriented towards educating children with “high functioning” autism and Asperger’s Syndrome, there are many families with sons (and it is startling just how many of them are boys versus girls) who don’t have that type of education available to them. Something definitely needs to be done to better educate the kids on the spectrum and offer those educational services to the vast number of kids we are currently missing.

Hopefully the great thimerosal scare is over and we can move on to many more important issues surrounding autism.

AOL News Viral Video Ad

If you’ve spent any time at all on YouTube or following other viral videos then you will be spewing your beverage through your nose in the direction of your keyboard a few seconds into this ad from AOL News (I still can’t stand AOL for the most part though!).

Apple — What An OS Upgrade Is Supposed To Be

This past Friday afternoon the boy and I hopped in the car and we drove down to the brand new Apple Store in Deer Park so that I could pick up the latest version of the Macintosh operating system dubbed Mac OS X Leopard (that would be “oh es ten Leopard” for the uninitiated).

The debut was set for 6 PM and we arrived at about 5:45 at which point the line was I’d say about 100 people long stretching all the way south from the store and just ready to curve around the corner. What was strange for me was the collection of different types of people that were there for the debut. Most of the time you would think that people waiting in line for the debut of a computer operating system would be mostly a collection of geeks like me. This was simply surreal. You had everything from Yuppies with their mochas to some kids from Stevenson High School. You had families as well, I had my son and the man behind me had a couple of his young kids with him. The folks in the line were as random a cross-section of people as you would expect just about anywhere else.

The doors opened up at 6 and the line moved really fast. We snagged our free Leopard t-shirts at the door and I got in line to pick up a copy while Aidan went and picked out his game as a reward for being good at school this week (Zoo Tycoon 2 by the way). The line at the counter went pretty fast and while waiting it was real tough to decide which version to get. No, this isn’t like Microsoft with 10 different versions with different features crippled in the OS. The decision for me was whether to get a single edition or a family pack (since we now have 3 Macs in the house) which allows you to install Leopard on up to 5 Macs in your home (what a novel concept).

At this point I was bitten by some of my old Windows habits. Before getting my first iPod and then shortly thereafter becoming a Mac enthusiast I was a major Windows geek and had hand-built my previous 5 PCs. Every Windows user knows, it was trumpeted from the heights when Vista came out, an upgrade to Windows usually means you have to upgrade your PC otherwise it will likely run slower before because that much more as been added to the OS. This has been the case for every Windows upgrade I’ve ever done. So although I did the Tiger upgrade before on my Mac that was just my Mac. Now I have to worry about my mom’s iMac and my son’s iBook. I was concerned it would run slower than Tiger and whether they really needed the upgrade or not. So, I got the single version and I get an education discount from Apple since I’m on the school board (one of the few forms of “compensation” I get for the many hours I put in there!).

So with Leopard and Zoo Tycoon 2 in hand we returned home and I immediately cracked open the package to start the installation on my year and a half old MacBook Pro — the first Mac to transition to Intel. Then the shockers began. First, the upgrade took about 45 minutes. In that time Leopard backed up my Tiger system so I could revert if need be and did the Leopard install, all behind the scenes since I just went with the express installation route. Then I fired it up and the true shocker ensued, everything runs faster. I mean it, I’m no sucker for these upgrades where your mind tricks you into thinking things run faster. I’m telling you everything from boot to opening Safari or Mail or any other task I’ve done thousands of times on Tiger runs faster. The system just pops, it is definitely noticeable. The final shocker — everything worked. I had a program or two that had to be updated but no searching for drivers or changing this or that to get it to work everything worked perfectly and I was doing one of my online singing gigs within an hour after doing the install.

There has been all of two snags that I have hit, the first being Apple has changed how the system accesses the hard drive that is connected to my Airport Extreme Base Station router. It’s no longer using the Airport Disk utility which is a good idea. What’s not a good idea is it doesn’t automatically mount the drive anymore, a few folks have complained about this in the Apple forums so I know it’s not just me. I’m sure they will come out with a fix for that shortly.

The other is with my M-Audio Firewire 410 audio interface and yet another case of it needing retirement. I’ve been getting some audio bugs and I’m sure they haven’t put out a driver for Leopard yet although M-Audio has announced they will. To be honest this is M-Audio’s problem as this driver has always been buggy and a pain. I like its features but I’m at wit’s end with it, I see a Presonus device replacing it in the near future.

So my decision in the line to just get a single version ended up costing me about $60 or so since it’s clear to me I can immediately put Leopard on my other Macs with no worries. I’ll try to purge the Windows habits for good when the next version of OS X comes out. Kudos to Apple for another great release, I love many of the new features (hooray for Stacks!!!) and am looking forward to discovering them all.

Trade Grossman In

I’m sick of Rex Grossman, I’m sorry, really sick now. If you read my Super Bowl blog post you already know I’m not a big fan. But I’ve really had it now. Here’s why.

Every campaign in the NFL should be predicated on winning the Super Bowl, at least when you have a defense like the Bears do. The Bears defense is so good, Hester is so incredible, they keep them in every single game regardless of the opponent. In the past two weeks the Bears D has shut down two of the best running backs in the league. Shut them down! So how do we reward that defense? We trot the bumbling, stumbling, fumbling Rex Grossman out there.

All the Bears need is a quarterback who is serviceable, who can move the offense a bit, not do anything spectacular and make a few plays. The Bears have two of those type of quarterbacks on the bench right now. Let me put it this way, if the Bears were a person when it comes to Grossman they would be the aging, balding, middle-aged guy that insists he needs to buy a roadster to somehow compensate for his follicular issues. Sure, roadsters are fun but they have many issues (only two seats, leaking roofs, cold in the winter, propensity to be annihilated in collisions, etc). So the Bears make the same stupid decision, the insane decision when you look at it, to throw the guy who has the potential for brilliance out on the field. What they are doing though is ignoring the plethora of times he hurts this team with his shoddy play.

More or less the Bears are trotting the BMW Z4 out there when all they need is a Honda Accord. Sure, the Accord isn’t the most flashy car, it won’t blow anyone’s doors off but it does its job and delivers you comfortably to your destination with a minimum of trouble. That’s what the Bears need right now, a quarterback that does his job and doesn’t hurt the Bears if they expect to drive back to the Super Bowl.

The Bears lost a game they could have won with a decent quarterback in San Diego. They were a few fortunate calls away from being in real trouble this week at home against a rebuilding Kansas City team. In fact, but for the outstanding play of the defense saving Grossman’s bacon again and again as well as the contributions of the human highlight reel, Devin Hester, they should have lost that game. That’s just plain scary. When you’re depending on your defense to beat the Kansas City Chiefs at Soldier Field then you are in a world of hurt. Lovie, please, wake up.

“Shooter” Was The Real Deal

Sad news came out today that Rod Beck, the lock solid closer of the 1998 Cubs that won the wild card after a one game playoff at the end of the season, has passed away. If you’re a guy like me you always liked a guy like Rod Beck, known by his nickname “Shooter”. He had the ambiance of an everyday Joe who just so happened to make it to the big leagues. He was the type of guy that caters to the boyhood dreams of baseball stardom that just about any man who played baseball as a kid has had. He was just that down to earth and genuine.

He had the appearance of an old school closer — the odd facial hair, the intense gaze, the mammoth frame from which he hurled the ball. But that Rod Beck had a hard time living up to the real Rod Beck — a down to earth and modest man from what everyone who has known him has said. In 2003 when he was trying to make a comeback with the Iowa Cubs he would park his RV outside the stadium and invite anyone, fans included, to come join him for a beer and to sit and talk about baseball.

Old school, we will not see his like again.

In this day and age of multi-million dollar contracts, marketing, agents, licensing and a dollar sign attached to virtually everything that is baseball Rod Beck was an anachronism. His teammates have spoken about how he’s been in the clubhouse with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other — just sitting back, talking about the game, and passing on what he had learned.

The Cubs disappointed me with how quickly they rid themselves of Shooter. Despite his problems I always felt the guy deserved more than what he got from the organization. He was a class act, a memorable Cub among many memorable Cubs and baseball just feels a bit more disconnected now that the Shooter is gone.

Rest in peace Rod, we’ll miss you.