You can't fix stupid

This post has nothing to do with wireless.

Somewhere, out there on the Internet, is a stupid family.  Quelle surprise, non?  Tell us something we don't know, you say.  But this is no ordinary stupid family.

Many years ago (back when the Internet was powered by steam engines which ran on barrels of kerosene) I signed up for a Yahoo account.  I chose my username based on a nickname given to me by a friend, and one I had used for my circa 1996 "homepage" which was a sophomoric collection of links, graphics, and sounds used to stake my claim to a corner of the nascent Internet.  Unfortunately my Yahoo username happens to be the last name of a stupid family.  I'll refer to them as "The Stupids". 

A few years later I started getting junk mail at my Yahoo address from a variety of sources; car dealerships, online car broker services, etc.  Apparently the Mama Stupid wanted to buy a new car, and had given my Yahoo address as hers.  The emails had a lot of information about Mama Stupid; her name, street address, phone, etc.  The amount of junk mail became painful, over a dozen messages a day; I had to activate a filter in Yahoo Mail to look for keywords and dump them straight to Trash.  10 years later, if I look in my Yahoo Mail trash folder, there are still car dealerships trying to contact Mama Stupid.

Papa Stupid has done likewise.  I've received over the years email from online shopping, stock brokers, get-rich-quick scammers, insurance brokers, magazine publishers, requests for donations, links to photos of newly-arrived Baby Stupid.  Again; I get a LOT of personal info on the Stupids from this.  A while back Mama Stupid decided she needed some spice in her life, so she signed up for an online casual fling hook-up service.  (I'm not kidding.)  She (I) started getting email from middle-aged men looking for some "Afternoon Delight", complete with photos intended to "sell the product" if you get my meaning.  Icanhazeyebleach?

In many cases I get requests to confirm my address for an account on whatever system the Stupids have tried to sign up for, I can then reset the password and basically do as I please.  Most of the time I change the password and then close the account. 

I've watched the Stupids build a family.  Their son (Stupid Junior) started out years ago using my Yahoo address as his "parental permission" email to sign up for online games.  As time's gone on I've watched his game interests evolve into more mature themes. Once he hits puberty I fully expect a lot of porn site account confirmation emails.  Their oldest daughter Missy Stupid just went to college in Florida.  I got some pictures from Disneyworld.  She looks happy.

You can imagine the amount of spam I receive because of the Stupids.  I've given up using Yahoo for email, simply because 99% of what I get is spam caused by the Stupids inability to figure out that lastname@something.com doesn't automatically route to their house.  I've been tempted to close the account, but in some bizarre way I feel like I need to continue.  What will happen next?  Will Papa Stupid have a midlife crisis and go looking for a red sports car?  Will Missy Stupid get knocked up and have to come home from college?  It's like my own private soap opera.

Pacificon 2010 Wrap Up

This past weekend the Mount Diablo Amateur Radio Club hosted ARRL Pacificon at the San Ramon Marriott.  I was glad to see the event back this year, after last year's debacle which forced the organizers to move the event to Reno in conjunction with EMCOMM West.

This year's event was well-attended.  There were some great presentations, I got a chance to see some folks I don't often see, and I was given the chance to speak twice; including delivering the final keynote on Sunday.

I promised several people that I would post my presentations, so here they are:

   Weak Signal HF with JT65A

   Ham Radio Must Die!

Dog pile on the rabbit (if by "rabbit" you mean the iPhone 4 antenna)

Update: Ruben was fine.  He transmuted his contentious encounter with The Steve into a decade-long stint at Apple, then left to take a C-level role at Keyssa.  Good for him.

I woke up this morning to find a link on Drudge to a Bloomberg article entitled "Apple Engineer Told Jobs iPhone Antenna Might Cut Calls..."  As it turns out the engineer in question was Ruben Caballero, a co-worker of mine at Tropian back in the late 90's.  (Trivia: Many of the iPhone team's key engineers are ex-Tropian, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.) 

Later in the day Cult Of Mac offered up some comments on Ruben and the iPhone antenna issue from my former schoolmate and Tropian co-founder Earl (mistakenly named "Ed" in the article) McCune.  Blogs such as Huff Post, Engadget, etc have also picked up on the story.  I also note with great dismay that New York Senator "Chuckles" Schumer has decided to make Apple's business his own.  Doesn't he have better things to do, like spending more of our tax dollars and worrying about getting re-elected?  I digress...

I feel bad for Ruben that his "15 minutes of fame" will likely bring him a great deal of unwanted attention.  Ruben's a great engineer who doesn't deserve to have a double-barreled "Wrath of Jobs" pointed at his nose.  I really hope that Apple doesn't scapegoat him on this.  Ruben's the kind of guy who would spoken up if he saw a problem, and in doing so unfortunately may wind up taking a fall to cover up the idiocy of an over-zealous marketing department which placed too much faith in their industrial designers and too little in the wisdom of their RF engineers. 

I had a similar experience at Verifone in 1998 prior to joining Tropian.  We were in the process of starting to build their Omni 3000-series handheld payment terminals.  The marketing director and the lead industrial designer were having themselves a little bromance, which resulted in the marketing director taking everything the industrial designer said as the Word of God -- including his insistence that the Omni 3000 needed to not have an external antenna.  At the time, mass-production printed antennas were still laboratory experiments and about four years from being commercially viable.  The ID insisted that the device could not have any case protrusions, and my insistence that this would be impossible in production fell on deaf ears.  It's worth noting that the Omni 3750 launched in 2004 -- two years after printed antennas became commercially viable and six years after I told them they were smoking bananas. 

I wish Ruben the best and hope he comes out of this unscathed.  As for Apple: I've been saying for years that it was just a matter of time before they transmuted their success into hubris and ultimately failure.  It's sad when marketing idealism runs headlong into the brick-wall of physics.  It's tragic when good people get hurt by the shrapnel of that collision.