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Motorola Droid: How to delete a bluetooth device

This was the first issue I hit with my Droid phone, and I hadn’t even left the Verizon store parking lot.  I was trying to pair the phone with my car’s built-in bluetooth hands-free, and the car’s phone pairing process crashed before it finished, leaving the phone thinking it was paired and the car not.  I decided to delete the device from the phone’s list, thinking I would start over.  But there seemed to be no way to remove the device from the list.  I went back into the store and asked them, and they couldn’t figure it out either and wound up just putting the phone through a reset (not really an inconvenience, since it was a brand new device with nothing loaded on it yet).

I figured there must have been a better way, and there is.  Here’s how.

  1. From the main screen, press the Menu button and choose Settings.
  2. Select Wireless & networks, then Bluetooth settings.
  3. Scroll down to the device you want to delete.  Press and hold until a popup menu comes up.
  4. Choose Unpair.  This will make the status change from “Paired but not connected” to “Pair with this device.”
  5. Reboot the Droid.  When it comes back up, the bluetooth device will be gone from the list.

That last step was what messed me up.  I couldn’t understand why the entry remained in the list, and there was no explicit “delete” option.  Apparently rebooting removes the unpaired device.

Selling empty boxes

I was having this conversation with a friend a couple of weeks ago, about the “ambulance chasers for Jesus” thing, and we got off onto a tangent about my opinions of clergy, selling fake hope to people in crisis.  He said I was being too hard on them, because many of them genuinely believe what they’re telling people, so I can only condemn them if I am correct about religion being a crock.  “That’s only valid if we assume you’re right.”  “Well, of course,” I told him.  “Duh!”  We had a good chuckle over it.  But then I went into more detail about why I still think it’s a fair criticism.

If a merchant sells you a box purporting to contain something useful, and it turns out to be an empty box, do you blame the manufacturer completely and let the merchant off the hook?  Or does the merchant have an obligation to know what’s in the box before he sells it?  I maintain that the merchant has that responsibility, and if he doesn’t honor it, then he shares the blame for defrauding his customers.  And I think that’s the situation with a lot of purveyors of religion.  They don’t analyze the arguments against religion, at least not honestly; to the extent that they think about those things at all, they only do it looking for ways to deny them.  This is not intellectual honesty; it’s rationalization in favor of a preconceived notion.  It’s deliberately not looking in the box.

This is not surprising, considering how people get “called” to the clergy.    They come into it already believing it, and follow courses of study that deliberately avoid challenging it.  They don’t look in the box; in fact, the religions explicitly discourage them from looking in the box.  It’s a virtue to avoid looking in the box.  That’s “faith.”

So if one of the tenets of the religion is to find “merchants” who will sell the “product” without examining it, and those merchants believe this makes them moral – or “holy” – then this is obvious unscrupulous behavior and deserves criticism and scorn.  And the scale of this con job does not excuse it.

Sears must die

When I was a kid, Sears was a respected retailer.  You could get anything at Sears: shoes, clothes, underwear, tires, toys, guns, radio parts, major and minor appliances, furnaces, musical instruments, lawnmowers, tools, anything.  They didn’t make this stuff themselves; most of it was made for them and private-branded.  But you could count on them to stand behind what they sold.  If you bought Craftsman hand tools, for example, they were made in USA and guaranteed for life.  Break one and they’d replace it, no questions asked.  “Satisfaction Guaranteed” was written over the door when you walked in; you can still see it in older stores.  The merchandise may not have been the absolute best, the fashions not the coolest, but the stuff was a solid value and you could rely on the store.

Now Sears is owned by KMart, Craftsman tools are mostly made in China like everything else, and the stores are struggling.  Customer service is a thing of the past.  Sears and KMart have both been run into the ground by penny-pinching upper management who won’t invest in the stores and won’t do what it takes to win customer loyalty in a tough retail market.  They can’t compete at the low end of the market; Wal-Mart owns that.  One step up from Wal-Mart is Target, and they can’t compete with that either.  Sears has Target prices (or higher) and Wal-Mart service, and the stores look worse than either of them.  KMart is struggling with this too, but it’s really hurting Sears more, because they have less of an identity now.

What makes me think of this is my recent experience with Sears product support.

I have three garage doors.  The local Sears Hardware (another random Sears stab at a vague market) was closing down when I moved into this house, and I bought three Sears Craftsman garage door openers at clearance price.  Not discontinued models, just on sale because the store was closing.  The Sears door openers have been made by Chamberlain since the dawn of time, and they have a pretty good reputation for reliability.  They worked just fine for three years and then, one day, they all lost their range simultaneously.  I had been accustomed to opening the door from half a block away, but suddenly to get any door to open, I had to be right in front of it, and even then it was flaky.  Every door and every transmitter was affected.  I knew it must be a radio interference problem, but I didn’t know what to do to track it down.  So I contacted Sears customer support for advice on how to do that.  This was their reply:

We regret you are experiencing difficulties with your garage door openers.  Unfortunately, we are unable to provide the information you have requested.

Our product support specialists are not certified technicians and do not have the expertise to answer technical repair question. We recommend that you review the troubleshooting guide of your owner’s manual.

Completely useless advice.  “Go away, read the manual, don’t bother us.”  Of course, I had already read the manual, and it says nothing about this problem.  So I replied back, asking how I might contact a “certified technician” who actually would know the answers to perfectly reasonable technical questions.  Their response:

We apologize for the difficulties you have encountered, searching for information for your garage door opener.

Sears offers a great website where you can ask expert technical questions, search for answers from other homeowners, find product manuals and trouble shooting guides. All of this and other great advice and ideas can be found at www.managemyhome.com!

Again, it’s “go find the answer for yourself, don’t ask us.”  This one also suggests that I should ask other customers for help.  I didn’t know that was their responsibility.  You learn something new every day, I guess.

So Sears was useless for this.  They sell the product, but they don’t feel any particular obligation to know anything about it.  I took a flyer and called Chamberlain directly – and in ten minutes, I had the troubleshooting procedure I needed to solve the problem, from a helpful, well-informed Chamberlain tech who was glad to assist me even though my products were out of warranty and not Chamberlain-branded.

This raises the question, why bother involving Sears in this transaction next time?  I could have bought Chamberlain-branded versions from Lowes or Home Depot, and I wouldn’t have wasted any time trying to get the kind of customer assistance that Sears is now too lazy to offer; I’d have called Chamberlain directly and been on the right track a lot quicker.

I wish this were an isolated incident, but it clearly isn’t.  Chamberlain gets these calls so routinely that they have the Sears model numbers in their system for their support team.  And in the larger picture, Sears has a widely known reputation now for carelessness in customer support and order fulfillment.  People routinely have orders canceled randomly, things they’ve already paid for turning up out of stock, and basic customer service requirements unfulfilled.  It’s an ordeal to shop with them.  They still want to sell stuff, they just don’t want to do the things that make customers want to come back.  So why go there?

I’ll bet that’s another question their support staff can’t answer.

I forgot how to write

No, this isn’t an explanation for the long posting intervals, nor is it an excuse for deficiencies in the posts I do make.  I can still string sentences together and express myself in type.  And I can still make readable marks on paper with a pen or pencil.

But I seem to have at least partly lost the skill of handwriting in cursive.

When I was in early elementary school, I was a year younger than my classmates, and I wasn’t really physically ready when they switched us from printing to cursive.  I was terrible at it; I didn’t have the coordination yet, and I never really learned it well.  So all through grade school, I got poor grades in penmanship.  My dad bought special pens and pencils designed to force the fingers into the correct grip, and made me copy pages out of books.  This resulted in hand cramps, but no improvement.

Then, when I entered junior high school (that’s 7th grade, 11 years old) my very first elective class (and I do mean first; it was the first class of the day as well as the first one I was enrolled in) was drafting, AKA mechanical drawing.

Back in those days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we had no computers.  Drafting was done at slanted wooden tables, on thick paper with hard pencils sharpened to fine points, using compasses and protractors and triangular-profiled rulers.  Not only did we have to draw accurately, we had to print accurately, using precise block capitals.  The teacher, Mr. Arafat, was a petty tyrant who brooked no slackers.  Misbehaving boys (it was all boys in those days; the girls were off learning how to cook and sew and type) were sentenced to hold a piece of paper against the chalkboard with their noses for the remainder of the class, or kneel on one of the triangular rulers, or similar punishment.  The punishment for misshapen letters was also severe; each letter drawn wrong on an assignment earned you the task of drawing that letter correctly one hundred times, and if you drew it wrong any of those one hundred times, it didn’t count and you had to start over.

I came out of that class with the ability to print in neat, regular block capitals.

We all did, but most of the boys swiftly forgot it.  I didn’t, though, because finally I had a way to write legibly for the first time since they had taken away our telephone-pole-sized beginner pencils in the third grade and handed out the Palmer cursive workbooks.  I abandoned the difficult and seemingly pointless cursive writing, and switched to block capitals, using smaller and larger versions of the same letter to indicate capitalization.  Occasionally I would encounter a teacher who would insist on cursive, but after trying to decipher a few assignments written in my illegible scrawling, they would quietly drop that requirement and I would revert to block caps again.

Thirty-seven years have gone by, and I still write that way.  People comment to me on my distinctive handwriting.  “You must be an architect.”  “Are you an engineer?”  Most guys get to adulthood with a mishmash of cursive and printing; thanks to Mr. Arafat and his classroom Napoleon complex, my handwriting is regular and even and ultra-legible.  Over the years I rationalized it to myself.  Some of the rationalizations are good questions, actually; for instance, why do we need to teach children four different ways of making every letter?  I’ll return to that question shortly.

This morning in the shower I was doodling on the fogged up glass, and I started writing random words in cursive with my finger – and I realized I have forgotten how. Not completely; I still know how to make the letters (though I wouldn’t bet my life on the capital Q or K being right).  But I have forgotten enough that I’m not sure how to join the letters any more.  How do you join a lowercase b and a to write banana?  I tried it a couple of different ways and it never looked quite right, or felt right.  How do you make the double m in summer?  It looked like a child’s doodle of an inchworm when I got done with it.  I felt foolish, but then I realized, I forgot this skill because I don’t need it, just like I no longer remember how to configure upper memory management in 16-bit operating systems.  It’s an obsolete skill.

For years I have been telling myself that cursive was unnecessary.  I made that argument to defend my own decision.  But nowadays I wonder if that’s become the right choice for everyone, not just for me.  Why waste time teaching children how to write letters four different ways when most of them will never hand-write a letter in their lives?  I can’t remember the last time I wrote a letter in longhand.  It used to be that a handwritten letter was a sign of care and personal attention.  Now it marks the sender as amateurish and technologically backward or deprived.  Everyone types and emails and texts; increasingly you don’t even need to print to paper any more.  I don’t miss it, and I’m not used to it; if I have to hand-write more than a few sentences, my hand cramps.  Who needs that?  Typing’s faster and clearer and easier to send to its destination.  Handwriting now is mainly for filling out the occasional form, writing post-it notes, and labeling objects.  Why do we need cursive for that?

Is it time to get rid of cursive?  Was I ahead of my time?  Or is there still a use for it?

Dell redeems themselves. Mostly.

I posted on Monday that my support call to Dell for my XPS m1330 laptop resulted in a commitment to come out for my “Next Day Onsite Service” possibly as late as a week later.  Here’s how it actually went down.

On Tuesday, I got a call from a man named Radu, a service technician working for Dell.  I think he is actually the employee of a third party firm, not Dell proper, but he informed me that he already had the new motherboard in his possession, and could he come by that day and install it?  Sure you can!  So, he showed up a few hours later, in a monster snowstorm, full of good humor and smiles, and proceeded to take the laptop apart at amazing speed, reassembling it with equal alacrity.

Unfortunately, it didn’t fix the problem.  I still had the weird rainbow screen.  He determined that the original phone support tech had misdiagnosed the problem, and ordered me a new display panel, plus a replacement for one of the access panels underneath that he’d noticed a truly minuscule crack in.  He then departed, promising to return as soon as the new parts arrived.

Wednesday arrived and I got a call from Radu.  The parts had not made it to the service center.  This clearly was not anyone’s fault at Dell or their service vendor, since we still had the monster snowstorm going on.  Nonetheless he was apologetic and told me Thursday would be the day.  On Thursday morning Radu called; he had the parts, could he come by and install them?  Sure you can!  He gave me a time window, noon to 2:00.  At 1:55 he called and said he would be there in about 15 minutes, apologizing for the delay, and true to his word he was there in 15 minutes.  He took the system apart again with the same amazing speed while we chatted about Linux and FreeBSD, put it back together, booted it successfully, shook my hand, and left.  He was even considerate enough to call Dell and get permission to leave the panel with me that he’d replaced, because that particular panel has the Windows license sticker on it, and even though the machine has never booted to Windows (nor will it, while I own it) still it’s good to have that in case I ever sell the laptop.

So, I have a working laptop, on Thursday and not next Monday as I’d feared.  I cannot say enough about Radu’s professionalism, courtesy, and customer service skills.  Is it all good?  Well, mostly it is.  The only fly in the ointment is the original Dell phone support tech’s misdiagnosis of the issue, which cost me the two extra days.  But the service I received otherwise makes me inclined to let that slide.  It’s too bad Dell put my hackles up by telling me it might take a week, but I’m glad it didn’t.

So, thank you, Radu.  You repaired not only my laptop, but Dell’s reputation too.

Next time, just send a card

Mocking another church sign today:

JESUS!  GOD’S VALENTINE TO YOU

Remember the Peanuts kids comparing notes after each house they went to on Halloween?  “I got a candy bar!”  “I got gum!”  And poor Charlie Brown: “I got a rock.”  I’m imagining the same sort of scene, except with people comparing Valentine’s Day gifts.  “I got flowers!”  “I got chocolates!  What’d you get?”  “uhhh… I got a flayed dead hippie with holes in his hands.”

Some gift, huh?  “Look, I killed a guy to show how much I love you!”  Um, gee.  A card would have been fine.  Really.

Oh well, at least he didn’t do it to impress Jodie Foster.  As far as we know.

168-hour days at Dell

Last night I turned on my Dell XPS laptop to a rude surprise.  Instead of the normal Dell logo followed by bootup screens, I got a black screen that slowly grew a weird streaky rainbow of colors, then abruptly blacked out again and stayed that way.  I could hear Ubuntu booting, and see the lights come on for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.  But no video. Reboot, and again, same and same.

Well, crap.

So, I went looking on the Dell support website, and to my amazement, I found the machine is still under warranty and will be until fall 2011.  I had forgotten I’d bought a 3-year care package with Next Day Onsite Service.  Sa-weet!  And to make matters even better, that package includes 24-hour support.  Double sa-weet!  1:30 in the morning, I called them up and got a warranty support tech who was quite efficient, though a bit difficult to understand through his unplaceable accent.  We did a little diagnosis with an external monitor and determined it was the video “card” (actually motherboard video support) that had failed, not the panel.  So they’re replacing my motherboard.

All good so far, but you have to know Dell would find a way to trip themselves up and ruin it somehow, and they did.

Apparently “Next Day Onsite Service” can take up to a week to happen.

They allow themselves three business days to ship the part to the field technicians, and another day for the technician to call you and set up an appointment, which can then be the following day after the call.  So, in my case, I called them on Monday morning.  They have until Thursday to get the part to the field.  If they take the full time, the tech has a day to call me; if he calls me on Friday, the earliest appointment would be next business day, or next Monday.  One full week.

Now, granted, I don’t know if it will actually take that long.  And I understand the need to ship a part.  But still, when you sign up for “Next Day Onsite Service,” no reasonable person would think that actually means “a week later.”  I expect they should overnight the part to the field (or keep it in stock), call me the day it arrives to set up an appointment, and be there the next day – which in this case should be Wednesday, not next Monday.

Let’s see how long it actually takes.

My ride’s here

Time to mock another church sign.

JESUS!  DON’T LEAVE EARTH WITHOUT HIM

This, for those who don’t remember, is a takeoff on the American Express slogan “Don’t leave home without it.”  The church that put this up should check their facts first, of course, because since the financial meltdown American Express has been exactly the card you should leave at home – unless being a stranded traveler with a credit card that’s been unexpectedly shut down appeals to you.  But that wasn’t the first thing that popped to mind when I saw that sign.  It was Jesus, wandering around aimless and dejected because once again, he missed his ride.  “Hey, wait… I was supposed to go with you!  What do you mean you’re leaving?  No wait… hold on a second… ah crap, it happened again!  Everybody keeps ditching me.  Is it my breath?”

Pop psych and the trivialization of grief

People cry at funerals.

This is so obvious that it really doesn’t need any pointing out.  But I’ve been having conversations with people about why we do that, and the more I hear about the current way of explaining it, the more offended I get at what I see as trivializing of grief.

The modern theory, with us in the popular understanding since about the 1970s, goes like this: You’re sad when someone dies because you’re feeling sorry for yourself – sorry that they won’t be in your life any more, sorry because you’ll miss them.  You can’t logically be sorry for the dead person, because that person is gone and there’s no one to be sorry for (or they’re in the afterlife and not gone, so there’s no reason to be sorry, if that’s your belief).  So you must actually be sorry for you.

I think that is a huge load of self-centered self-help-book crap.

When I have dealt with the death of someone I knew, I felt sad and sorry for the person who died.  It never had anything to do with my own loss; I can get along on my own, that’s just how things are.  I was sad that that person didn’t get the chance to live out his or her life, missed out on things, got cut short.  Sad for the person, not for myself.  And yes, I know that the person is gone and there’s no one there to feel sorry for.  I know that consciously, anyway.  But for a while, when someone dies, you feel different about it.  It takes a while to adjust to the person not being there any more, and during that time you’re going to emotionally react as if they were not gone, because your emotional state hasn’t adjusted yet.  How long is it before you stop unconsciously expecting the dead person to walk in the door?  Certainly that lasts a lot longer than it takes to have a funeral.  So even though you know consciously that the person is gone, your emotional sadness and sympathy for that person still seem to have an object.

The idea that sadness over a dead person is all based in selfishness, that we are only sad because of how that person’s death negatively affects us, takes one of the more noble and powerful human traits – empathy – and just wipes it out of consideration like a dry eraser on a whiteboard.  It reduces empathy and genuine compassion for others to the self-centered whining of a child who has dropped her ice cream cone on the sidewalk.  It cheapens us, paints us as small and mean and petty to the core.  I think we’re better than that; not all the time, but sometimes, and more often at those times.

You might think this is all just conjecture, but I have two pieces of evidence in favor of my position: tearjerker movies and media tragedies, especially those involving children.  People watch a tearjerker and cry when someone dies.  Even grown men can be brought to tears if the movie is skillfully done.  So where do these tears come from?  The popular explanation that we cry for our own loss has no answer for the tearjerker movie.  Not only is the dead movie character someone you’re not going to miss in your real life, it’s not even a real person at all. Similarly, when the news reports some child dead or missing, people are moved to sympathetic reactions in droves.  For what?  If grief were purely selfish, why would thousands of people care about a dead child whom they had never met and will never miss?

This has bothered me for a long time, ever since someone tried to explain away my grief over a dead friend this way in 1982.  It offended me then and it offends me now, and I’ve had a long time to think about it in the intervening years.  Every time I hear it, I want to retort: How dare you trivialize my sadness that way?  How dare you try to take away one of the bonds that make us human, and replace it with glib Oprah self-esteem nonsense?  Maybe you’re self-absorbed enough to make someone else’s death all about you, but not everyone can be so shallow.  So speak for yourself and leave me out of it.

In case you’re wondering after reading this, no one close to me has recently died.  But some people are getting close to it, so it’s been on my mind.

Windows partisans get touchy

Two days ago I posted a fairly innocuous bit of self-analysis, looking at the change in my own attitudes about the cost of software over the last few years of being a Linux user.  It’s critical of the Windows ecosystem, and to a lesser extent the Mac ecosystem, but it’s pretty mild criticism as I go.  I’ve written far harsher posts on that subject.  But for some reason this one is attracting some fairly vitriolic Windows defenders in the comments section.  One guy came in from the link on tuxmachines.org; I don’t know how the others found me.  But this particular article seemed to bring out some strong defensive reactions, including some categorical exaggerations or outright falsehoods: There is free software OR good software; all apps run better under Windows; Windows is more stable than Linux; and so forth.  These people are riled up.

Why is this?  I can think of three possible reasons:

  1. The issue of high cost is a sore spot with Windows users, and they feel a psychological need to defend it.
  2. Windows partisans see this particular post (wrongly) as an argument that one should use Linux only because it’s free, and think this position is vulnerable to attack.
  3. Sheer coincidence that I just happened to get a few extra pissed-off drive-by commenters this time.

I’m not sure which if any of these is the correct explanation.  But it certainly seems to have hit a nerve.

Update: Comments are now closed on this post and the one that preceded it.  This is to prevent myself from continuing to argue to no further effect.  I regret that I allowed myself to be drawn into the argument in the first place.  You may interpret this lack of self-control as a character flaw if you choose; draw whatever conclusions you like.

Update 02/01/2010: Now that things have cooled down, I’m reopening the comments.