Directly Emailing AT&T Customer Service
This tidbit of information took me a ridiculous amount of time to find. The email form in AT&T's account dashboard is completely non-operational for me, and the phone agents weren't able to resolve my issue. Trying to find a direct support email address was tough, but it does exist. If, for any reason, you ever need to directly email AT&T Customer Care, you can do so at ATTCustomerCare@att.com. You can also try tweeting at them.
Doba vs. Mirrored Closet Doors
Doba, my friend's cat, loves to antagonize mirrors. Needless to say, my closet doors are fascinating to him.
(His name comes from a child's mispronunciation of "Bhudda.")
There is a 60% chance I may be a prophet.
This is a dialog from a dream I had last night. I woke myself and wrote it down verbatim immediately after dreaming it, because even in my sleep-deprived state I knew it would be funny later.
Me: The culture of celebrity worship in the U.S. is disgusting. Most celebrities are simultaneously loathsome and pitiable. Like Gollum.
Shapeless Stranger: I actually met Lindsay Lohan once in an alley outside a club, and she was really great! I asked her how she felt about always being in the public eye, but she seemed to think that it was more important to scream profanities and accusations at a nearby fire escape, then vomit on my shoe. Great gal!
Final Days in Scotland
Today we visited Cramond Island, just outside of Edinburgh in the Firth of Forth. Fantastic site, with a really neat history. We also explored Inchcolm Island and the associated 12th century abbey. Very cool stuff.
Ongoing Adventures in Edinburgh
This will be my ongoing Edinburgh album. I'll add photos as I take them throughout my stay.
- Posted from Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Touchdown in Edinburgh
New apartment. Yeah, it's an okay place, I guess.
Hopefully people will get to see it in person fairly soon.
- Posted from Covington, KY
Fascinating (and Disconcerting) Excerpts from The Age Of Facebook
The long awaited book about the first few years of Facebook is almost over. You can pre-order David Kirckpatrick’s The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World for the Kindle here and in hardcover here.I would summarize the best parts for you but, really, the whole thing is the best part. Kirkpatrick clearly got very deep access to Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs, as well as relevant outsiders. He details Mark’s constant need to fend off venture capitalists and suitors, the raucous early days of the company (including a lawsuit by a very angry owner of a trashed house), and a whole lot more. Much of this has never been written about before.
Excerpt 1: The Early Days
In the first week of his sophomore year at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg cobbled together an internet software program he called Course Match. The idea was to help students pick classes based on who else was taking them. If a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well. Hundreds of students immediately started using it.
His next project, in October, he called Facemash. Its purpose: figure out who was the hottest person on campus. He invited users to compare two different faces of the same sex and say which one was hotter. A journal he kept at the time, which for some reason he posted along with the software, suggests Zuckerberg got into this jag while upset about a girl. “______ is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off her,” he wrote, adding, “I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie.” By the time the program launched, he had dropped the idea of also comparing students to farm animals. “Another Beck’s is in order,” Zuckerberg wrote as he continued his Facemash chronicles. By the time he returned to his room from a meeting the next day, his laptop was so bogged down with Facemash users that it was freezing up.
When he launched Facebook the following February (initially called thefacebook.com), it was a rudimentary site, but flirting on Facebook quickly became a sort of art form. One feature — the poke — made doing so absurdly easy. Poking was a particular fascination in those days, even among the supposedly sophisticated students of Harvard. What did a poke mean? Its indeterminate message was one of its appeals. Zuckerberg posted an insouciant answer on the site: “We thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose… So mess around with it, because you’re not getting an explanation from us.”
This inside look at the early days of the world's largest and most connected social network, an excerpt from a new book by David Kirkpatrick, is both fascinating and frightening. The tales of amateurishness and immaturity, while a part of college-startup culture, are rather disconcerting when one remembers that this company has one of the largest and most valuable data-mines on a majority one of the most valuable consumer demographics.
I can only hope that Facebook's business face has gotten a bit more serious. They are, after all, playing with other peoples' fire.
Read the rest of the post over at Techcrunch.
