Recently in Telecommunications Category

Today, I ended my BlackBerry data plan.

With a kid on the way, a two-income household becoming a single-income household, and trying to move toward a more balanced online/offline life, I cut the cord.

My job doesn't require me to be able to respond to an e-mail within 10 minutes no matter when or where I happen to exist in time. I've been slowly converting my personal e-mail system from "always-on-sometimes-responding" to something closer to Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero". In short, check e-mail less often, but when you do, do something with your e-mail. Why should we keep an e-mail in our inbox for days, looking at it multiple times a day?

There's no reason. An inbox should be just that, a box of incoming items. Once we see an item, it's no longer incoming. The message should be processed--replied to, archived, added to calendar or task list, whatever.

Adding to the e-mail side, I use my iPod Touch for keeping my calendar and task list on the road. Since I rarely have someone else add events to my calendar, syncing only when I'm in WiFi range is acceptable.

Now, start taking bets on how long until I go insane without the Internet everywhere.

A brief post related to Facebook's latest vote for governance.

The vote would be binding if 30% of active users, defined as those who logged onto the website in the last 30 days, voted. In this case, 60 million people needed to vote.

At the end of voting, it didn't hit the 1-million mark.

This is a no-brainer on why this happened: there was virtually zero advertisement of the vote. I'm a techy guy and I'm on Facebook quite a bit. I logon most mornings to wish friends happy birthday if nothing else.

The only way I knew about the vote was from reading the Facebook blog outside of Facebook.

Why didn't Facebook have one of their header-notices that they add anytime they want to get everyone's attention? Why not a Facebook message to everyone active in the last 30 days?

This seems to be that Facebook did not want this vote to be successful. Now, they can respond "we tried!" and that be that.

They should launch a new voting period and actually promote it.

I got this in my e-mail twenty-four hours ago. Can anyone tell me how this is "news", but less "breaking news"?

from CNN Breaking News <BreakingNews@mail.cnn.com> to textbreakingnews@ema3lsv06.turner.com date Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:18 AM subject CNN Breaking News

-- Ashton Kutcher is first to reach 1 million followers in Twitter contest with CNN.

>+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta follows a mother, a son, a daughter and a
husband -- each an addict -- on a journey through recovery and
relapse. Watch "Addiction: Life on the Edge," Saturday and Sunday
8 p.m. ET, only on CNN. http://www.cnn.com/onair
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Microsoft's support for Windows XP Home Edition has ended, only eight years after release. You can still pay for support for another five years, but nothing from Microsoft. Who actually asks Microsoft for support anyhow?

For those who upgraded to Vista, you have until 2012 to jump over to Windows 7... or 8... or whatever it'll be at that point.

Here's something I noticed for the first time today.
Notice the "Add a Google document" link. When you click on it, this appears:
It lists all of your Google documents. I do not see this on my Google Account, but only on my Google Apps accounts (both Education Edition and Standard Edition).

A horrible accident occurred today in Phoenix, AZ. CNN reports that two news helicopters crashed while covering a police chase. Four people, a pilot and a photographer from each news station, were killed in the accident. No one on the ground was killed.

The CNN story quotes a Phoenix official stating that the suspect in the police chase will probably be held responsible for their deaths.

My question is should that guy be held responsible? Sure, I'll grant, that if he hadn't led police on a chase, there would have been zero chance of the accident occurring. However, is it his fault that two helicopters covering his actions came into contact with each other? Throw the book at him for everything else, but is this really his fault?

That being questioned, it is still a sad accident. Let's keep the four and their families in our prayers.

I am not sick. I am feeling fine. No fever. No headache. I am not a PC-elitist. While I've never personally owned an Apple product, I worked on them at school from Grade 4 through 12 plus a little more through the UT education program. In high school, I completed a multimedia major spending two of the four years working exclusively on a Macintosh.

Unless you're a volunteer for the European Space Agency's simulated mission to Mars and have been completely unaware of the world around you, you know that Apple released their first cell phone, the iPhone, last Friday.

I was impressed by the commercials and the videos on the iPhone website. The visual voicemail feature is very cool by allowing you to view a list of voicemails, similar to a list of e-mails, on your iPhone's screen. No more pressing 7 to delete or 9 to save! The integrated Google Maps applet looked sweet as well, even though there is no GPS option.

With all that and more, I decided to spend part of my July 4th holiday at the Apple Store at The Domain in Austin to play with one.

After playing with it for just shy of an hour, I conclude that I do not want one. Let's run down a few reasons why not.

• To dial a phone number, it appears you have to make two "clicks". From the home screen, click Phone. Then click Dialpad. Only then can you dial a phone number as usual. While the phone is becoming more and more a multifunctional device and being able to make a call is only one of the features, I think a shortcut on the home screen directly to the dialpad is needed.


• The touch screen is not designed for my fingers. I have smaller hands than most guys and I could not type on the iPhone to save my life. After an hour of trying, I could get through the word "Austin" with only one typo. Could I imagine typing a text message or an e-mail or anything else on this device? No. At least with other phones, there is tactile feedback to let the user know how far off their fingers are from the correct key. In this case, I really did not know what I was doing wrong.


• While I had read complaints about the AT&T EDGE network, which is slower than the latest 3G cellular networks—a reduced feature Apple blamed on wanting to conserve battery life—the saving point of the iPhone was the ability to connect to a WiFi network. While using the Apple Store's WiFi network, data services were still subpar. In some cases, the Maps never loaded or website images remain blank. Even on the Apple website, which is very graphics driven, all I saw was a black background for the first 30 seconds. Perhaps this is par for the course on mobile data services, WiFi or not, but compared to the commercials, it was very disappointing.


• Looking up items on the Map applet was difficult. In some cases, when little pushpins gave me the location of the local HEB grocery store, I was unable to click on the pushpins to learn more information about a particular location. When I made a search for Apple Store, suddenly I could click on any of the pushpins to learn more about that location. I tried multiple times without result. A saving point, however, is the driving directions feature. Each screen will display that particular driving action with a nice transition.


• The sensor alerting the software which way the iPhone was oriented seemed to only work if you held your phone up completely straight. At the 45 degree angle that I usually use my phones at, the sensor seemed confused and did not respond to my orientation shifts.

I did make a call on the little thing and well, that did go through successfully with normal quality.

In short, I think Apple did a great job with this device and it will raise the bar for cellular phones in the United States, however, I'll wait for the third or forth generation before adding it to my wishlist.

I'm not a huge Mac fan. I can handle my own on the system and used it as my primary education system when I was earning my multimedia (graphics design, desktop publishing, web design, etc) major while in high school. I remember the Macintosh operating system before it was known as "Mac OS", at least before version 7, as I remember upgrading to 7. The transition to Mac OS 8 was dandy as well. In short, I'm not a huge Mac fan, but I'm not anti-Apple.

I'm way behind in the iPod game. I don't own one, or any other mobile digital music device, but I've never been huge on always having music with me. I didn't know what podcasting was for quite some time since the name doesn't tell you anything, unless you're familar with the iPod and made the connection.

However, with discovering podcasts, the iPod is now very tempting. I have a whole set of NPR podcasts setup in iTunes as well as a few other favorites, including Paulist Father Dave Dwyer's Busted Halo. This is great! I can hear the story of the day on NPR with news and commentary whether or not I'm able to catch the live broadcast.

The only thing that could make it better is if I could take it with me in a form a bit easier than my full laptop.

I digress. I've been using iTunes to some degree since v. 6, so I'm new to the ballgame. I had previously used MusicMatch before college and mostly Windows Media Player over the past few years. iTunes was a bit of a jump as much of my ripped music was in WMA format and iTunes has to convert those files to mp3 or AAC to be useful.

Nevertheless, I jumped over to the iTunes game and recently upgraded to 7.0 and the shortly-released-thereafter 7.0.1.

I can't stand it now. It is slow and brings my laptop to a near halt. Sure, I could use more RAM but I figured 1 GB would be enough. Song playback is full of pops and crackles. When attempting to watch a downloaded TV episode on my roommate's computer, we were unable to get through five minutes of it without it becoming jerky and unwatchable.

Did they put too much into iTunes without ensuring everything can play together? How did some things, like sound playback, get worse?

I expect a basic level of quality for software and iTunes 7 fall short.

Lastly, why can't they put the iTunes store online as web-accessible? I'm online at a computer lab on campus, but would like to purchase a song to be downloaded when I get home. Shouldn't I be able to login, purchase a song using my iTunes account and be able to download it when I open iTunes at home?

Good news. The second SIM card, scheduled for delivery on June 5th, arrived on time, without fail and worked. I've been talking away ever since.

Without thinking about it, I left the first SIM card's tracking RSS feed in my RSS aggregator and went on with life. After the horror of a SIM card lost in transit slipped from my mind completely, I find a few new RSS items for my consideration.

The tracer, issued on 5/31/2006 for a package sent 5/25/2006 with a scheduled arrival date of 5/30/2005, found something. On 6/13/2006 at 10 a.m., UPS realized "An Incorrect Routing At A UPS Facility Caused This Delay;the Package Was Missorted At The Hub. It Has Been Rerouted To The Correct Destination Site". That hub appears to be Houston, TX. At 7 p.m., a location scan was made citing the package to be in Houston.

A couple of hours ago the package left Houston in route to San Antonio, and from there, I assume on to Austin.