MIA, AT&T, and a Horror Story

I know, I know.  I've once again been MIA for quite some time.  I have much better excuses this time, though.  This time it includes more than me just being lazy.

First, my grandmother died a few weeks ago.  Between living at the hospital for a couple days, and then all of the craziness that followed, that put me off the grid for about a week.  Since then, I've just been trying desperately to catch back up with everything.  Before that happened, things at work were going at just the right pace where I could work and not worry about deadlines.  Now, though, I'm still about a week or two behind.  It's amazing how things will snowball like that.  Missing a week suddenly puts you behind three.  So I've been working a ton lately, and that usually means that when I get home it's either late or I have no desire to do anything but vege.  All of that, though, means that not only have I not really had time to write, but I've also not had time to read.  There were a couple of things that would catch my eye, but they're all considerably old news now.  Oh well.

Since most topics I was going to mention have pretty much come and gone, I'll just briefly touch on a couple.  Both about AT&T.  First, if you follow those links in the last sentence, you'll see the story about AT&T's new terms of service that basically said that they could disconnect you as a customer if you said things that were critical of the company.  While that does seem a bit absurd, I honestly would not doubt AT&T to do it.  The second article, though, is where they retracted on that, and said they never meant it to mean that they'd actually disconnect someone for being critical.  Yeah, right. 
The other item about AT&T hits close to home.  I started doing some searching to find out just why telecom companies are allowed to have exclusive deals with apartment and condo communities.  This really pisses me off that they do that (like pisses me off more than you can even imagine).  Well in the course of my searching, I found a fairly recent post about the FCC looking into prohibiting these exclusive deals.  One of the chief proponents of barring such contracts?  AT&T.  I feel a bit dirty, but I am actually rooting for AT&T here.  Ironically, AT&T thinks that if they get these contracts banned that they'll sign up more customers, all the while I'm going to jump ship from them first chance that comes along.  Companies with cheaper, better service provide for my area, but I can't get them because my complex has a contract with AT&T.  Oh, wait, not all of my complex, just half of my complex.  If I were living in the building across from mine, I wouldn't have this problem.

I'll close with a horror story that will make you just angry and saddened at the same time.  Go check out this post on this lady's blog, and then read in order all of the ones after it.  Yes, it's a number of posts.  Yes, it's worth the read.  Here's the gist of it: Concerned parents take baby to doctor, hospital calls CPS, CPS takes away baby from non-abusive parents.  The lady is actually a friend of a friend, so she's vouched for and isn't writing BS.  Check it out, it's just crazy.

RSS Bankruptcy

A trend that came about quite a while back was to declare "email bankruptcy." Merlin Mann has written about it a few times, and debates its actual usefulness. I'm not here to talk about email bankruptcy, though, right now I'm all about RSS bankruptcy. As you may have noticed, I've been MIA for the last seven days or so. This is our busy time at work, so I haven't read anything while here, and after work I've just been swamped with other stuff. Add in there the holiday, and I haven't had time to read anything, let alone write a post. So I'm thinking that I just need to clear all of the items in my Reader and start over. I've got thousands of items out there that I'd love to read, but it simply isn't feasible to do that. Unfortunately, this is the week that would have been filled with iPhone reviews, and I would have enjoyed reading them (after all, how else can I legitimately bash on the device). So, I apologize for the void, hopefully next week will be better.

Something for a Rainy Day

I got to thinking, and figured that it would be a good idea to keep some sort of backlog of things that I write so that on weeks that I’m just super busy I’ll still have something to put up here. The problem is that so much of what I want to write is about something that is a current event. Also, I have this odd complex where if I don’t write about something right away, then I lose my thoughts on it, and forget what I was going to say. If I do go back and take a stab at it, I usually don’t come up with something that is nearly as witty or interesting as the first thing that I had. I’ve tried taking notes to use for later, but that doesn’t always work. Also, I feel compelled to keep up with the current things (remember my obsession with new information?), and that doesn’t go well with keeping things in a backlog. Granted, there are a few rants that I have that I can use. Again, though, I tend to not go off on things unless I’ve somehow been prompted by something else. Oh well, we will see. I know that I said I read the article that said not to be too upset about not posting often, I also don’t like to have days of just emptiness. Especially when I’ve got so many friends that are bored at work and rely on me to keep them entertained…

Black and White and Read All Over

I never did get around to making a second post yesterday. It was a fairly busy day at work, and I was too distracted when I got home to write. That was basically what happened this weekend too. To give you an idea of just how unproductive I was this weekend, let me tell you some numbers. I read an average of about 200 or so articles a day. That is about a sixth of what someone like Robert Scobble does, but then again that is his job. Here are the numbers of what I read from last Friday to yesterday.
Friday: 214
Saturday: 73
Sunday: 0
Monday: 320

As you can see, this weekend was pretty barren. I also had to make up for most of what I missed on Sunday yesterday. Having to read more just meant that I had less time to actually write about what I read. Fear not, though, I saved a handful of things from yesterday that I’ll hopefully get to share today.