Robocalls not appreciated.

According to a robocall we received yesterday, our school system has just found out they can automate the process of calling a sizable chunk (if not all) of the schoolchildren’s parents in the county to alert us about “important news.” And the chirpy message from our county superintendent of schools notes that we can expect to hear from them repeatedly in the future. I was less than impressed.

Now, I for one am happy that our school system thinks it’s worth their time (and our money) to keep us informed about current events that impact our kids’ school experience. However, they already provide numerous ways for us to receive this news, including email, websites, RSS feeds, as well as the standard news organizations around town. We take advantage of a number of those already, and it’s very helpful.

For example, I love the fact that on a cold, wintry morning, my wife doesn’t have to tune into the radio and listen to 10 minutes of blather to find out whether schools are closed for icy roads. Since I work from home, I’m up anyway, and I can use my Web browser to consult the local news site or the school web page to find out closing information, and then let her know. (Or she can do the same with her smartphone, without getting out of bed.)

What I don’t want is a 5:00am phone call that wakes the whole house, just to tell us schools are running late or closed. Nor do I want to be interrupted at work or dinner to hear that the school board has a public meeting next week. I can find these things out through email, which I read on my schedule, not the school system’s.

You’d think our school system would have learned from this area brouhaha, which got some national media coverage too, if I recall correctly.

Worse, neither the phone call, nor the copy of the same message via email (I told you we use their services already!) had details on whom to contact to opt out. They did provide the general phone number for the entire school superintendent’s office, which in my experience means calling and then being put on hold for some indeterminate length of time while someone is found who can get us removed from their system. No thank you! In this day and age it should be neither difficult, nor unreasonable, to provide an opt-out system that I can reach by email, or a Web page, or (gasp!) via the phone call itself.

So this morning I sent the following inquiry to the administrative assistant for our superintendent, and copied the superintendent, his assistant, and our district’s school board member:

Dear ______,

We’re happy to receive email notices from SCPS, but find automated phone calls intrusive, especially when we already take advantage of other ways to get information from the schools. Since the message below does not give details, can you tell me whom specifically I need to contact to request we not receive automated phone calls?

Commercial services usually provide opt-in measures for these sorts of services. While SCPS may be instituting this service as part of a mandate, or to meet a regulatory requirement, it would still behoove the school system to provide an automated or email-based opt-out solution.

We continue to appreciate the efforts of SCPS staff to keep us informed about important events and news.

(signature)

Hopefully that was cordial enough. We’re not tinfoil hat wearers in my house, we just like picking up the phone when it rings to find someone on the other end who’s (a) breathing, and (b) someone to whom we enjoy talking. What do you think? Am I being unreasonable?

Nominally back on the air.

I got the bare minimum of service back online, including my weblog, from a catastrophic HDD failure yesterday. That really threw a monkey wrench into my workday, I’m sorry to say! But thanks to a couple wonderful people including James Laska and Aristeu Rozanski, I’m back in business. Over the next week I guess I’ll see if I can’t use the opportunity to wangle this into a better overall server setup during my scant free time.

Because it wasn’t until the server died that I realized its backups were not ending up where I thought they were (yikes!), I have to reconstruct some of my old posts. Thankfully, a little Python and Google’s cache will probably suffice, although unless the lazyweb surprises me with something that doesn’t require as much work on my part, I’ll probably end up losing a few months’ worth of comments, which is sad because they were often very enjoyable to read. Please don’t take it personally if you see yours is gone — lost, but not forgotten!

I hope our contributors at the various FADs this weekend are enjoying themselves, and I’m looking forward to the FAD in Raleigh in a week or so. That will be the start of an incredibly packed month. After I return from four days in Raleigh, I’ll be home for about a day and a half; then heading to SELF in Clemson, SC over a weekend; then home again for a couple days until I go to Open Source Bridge in Portland, OR for about four and a half days; then a redeye back home, where I’ll be home for a day and a half before jetting out to Berlin for over a week, for LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin 2009.

Whew! By the time I’m home more or less for good, it will be June 29th and the month will have disappeared like a summer storm. July and August should be much less travel, thankfully. It’s only through the saintly patience of SupaWife that I can hope to come out of June 2009 alive and with all my various appendages intact.

The best laid plans, No. 73.

I was going to spend some time tonight writing a big warm and fuzzy blog post about looking forward to Fedora 10 and all the good times ahead. That would have been awesome.

Instead, it’s my sad duty to report that my spiffy little Dell XPS M1330 took its own life tonight somewhere between shutting down iptables and powering off. The screen turned white for no apparent reason, to which I thought, “Hm, that’s odd, haven’t seen that before.” Then my eyesight seemed to blur a bit and I looked at my glasses to see if they were smudged, and realized they were fine — it was actually “the magic smoke” escaping from the back of the laptop.

It did manage to power off, but the powering back on? Not so much.

However, the good folks at Dell were very responsive even at half-past midnight on Friday night. They will have a new laptop here in 7-21 days, and until then I suppose I can get along with my crappy home office desktop, IMAP, and a couple well-placed shell accounts. And I feel pretty confident in saying it had nothing to do with Fedora 10, which has been increasingly spectacular since after the Beta.

Of course the Fedora Infrastructure team burst into action when they heard my sob story, and made sure I’d have something faster than the old hunk of junk desktop in my office on which to build the Fedora 10 release notes zero-day updates. Thanks guys, you rock hardest.

I guess I’ll have a little more relaxing Thanksgiving than I’d planned.

I think the worst part is that I’ve spent 9 months building up a nice, healthy covering of beautiful, colorful free software boosterism on my laptop’s lid, and I’ll have to kiss it all goodbye. Maybe the folks at Dell will get a kick out of it and give the lid a good home on one of their machines… Or maybe they’ll make a “mistake” and send the lid on a unit going to Redmond.

You’re going to need a bigger shovel.

Thanks to my friend Jesse for bringing this up last night at dinner.

In the middle of all the market mayhem here in the US, did you know that we now have a Pirate Czar? (Yarrr!) All thanks to the Pro-IP bill signed into law on Monday. Another “triumph” for the Bush administration.

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How I’ve missed your convoluted way of speaking.

Today I’m at the Red Hat Government Users and Developers Conference in Washington, D.C. As one would expect, the Ronald Reagan Trade Building has completely failed to deliver a working wireless connection without severely cracking the folds of my wallet. And of course I can’t live without connectivity, so here I am, $20 lighter.

I did get to say hello and have a quick conversation with Michael Tiemann before his opening keynote. But aside from that, a lot of people here today are not talking about “Should we?” or “Why?”, but rather, “How, and how fast?” The change of administration in the White House (whoever wins), coupled with uncertainty about budget futures given the current national financial crisis, are leading a lot of people to look at the “gateway drug” of open source — how does my agency spend less and achieve more with our IT dollars? And of course, Red Hat is there to show the way. Now it’s all about federal agencies having the foresight and courage to take the path out of darkness.

More than a footnote.

My wife alerted me last night to a terrible loss to the literary world — writer David Foster Wallace was found dead Friday night of an apparent suicide. DFW was already at 46 a giant of American literature and, even though he tended to the self-absorbed, his writing was passionate and magnetic. I always found his love of the footnote charming and amusing, even when it was distracting. I’m sad to think of all the wonderful books we’ll never see now.

The curse of four eyes.

Last week my daughter, who’s seven, went for a regular eye check up. As a result, yesterday we went to order her first pair of prescription eyeglasses. Two, actually — we assume she’ll lose one, since she doesn’t have to wear them for reading.

The optometrist told my wife, “Oh, her eyes look just like Paul’s.” And all I could say to Evie when I heard that was, “Oh gosh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

Editorial fail.

Given yesterday morning’s news, I was a little shocked to see this in today’s paper.

Who watches the watchmen?

In front of “The Dark Knight” last night was a teaser trailer for “Watchmen.” To quote another geeky staple, “I have a bad feeling about this.” The Smashing Pumpkins music didn’t rattle me — very often there’s temp track music used for teasers to drum up a certain kind of audience, and this is something to which the “300″ crowd would probably respond fairly well. The visuals look stunning, especially in that they seem to be extremely faithful to the original book, as worked well in “Sin City” and “300.” But I have grave misgivings about the screenplay after reading articles like this one.

The 1989 script by Sam Hamm — who, among other atrocities, was responsible for that year’s “Batman” script — was laughably bad. But David Hayter’s 2003 version was everything Hamm’s wasn’t: smart, sly, and ultimately moving like the original book. Some elements had to be condensed to fit a movie running time, of course. (I always wanted to see “Watchmen” done as a HBO miniseries, but I think the production costs would be prohibitive.) But the sensibility of the book was there in every page.

But if Alex Tse’s work is as bad as it’s made out to be in that article, I can only hope that the rewrites have eliminated the problem. It’s very possible that Tse attached the unnecessary chaff to distract clueless studio executives (is there another kind?), with the filmmakers fully intending to simply ignore or excise that material later, with the material being unharmed in the process. I’m pretty sure having to do that kind of double-dealing is fairly common in the moviemaking industry.

But it’s a slim spot on which to pin one’s hopes for a decent film, especially given the excessive use of slo-mo fight scenes I saw. I would like to see a more mature look at the story in a later trailer, emphasizing the mystery of the Comedian’s death and the troubled lives of the latter-day masked vigilantes, subtly weaving in the “Nostalgia” ads that were so effective in the book. Also troubling is the March release, meaning the studio could be hedging its bets to bury “Watchmen” if the executives in their limited imaginations can’t figure out a way to sell it. I do hear, though, that the studio is already looking at a greatly expanded DVD edition of the film, which might do it justice in the same manner as Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” benefited from its longer cut.

So all I’m saying is, the teaser looks visually impressive, but don’t get your hopes up too much at this point.

Next up, Jurisprudence for Dummies.

News flash: CSI to be entirely cast with morons. Because what could be better than trusting bedrock criminal investigative principles like the chain of evidence and scientific objectivity to COMPLETE IDIOTS?