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| Wednesday, July 12, 2006 |
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Tilting at silos 
| | My cell carrier used to be AT&T Wireless, but that got eaten by Cingular, so now it's Cingular. |
| | Dialog at the Cingular store: |
| | I want a phone that will work as a bridge over EDGE to the Net for my laptops. |
| | A Mac one and a Linux one. |
| | I know. But I'm hoping maybe we can work around that. They're just computers with Bluetooth and USB. Maybe there's something. |
| | You might be able to use a PCMCIA card, but none of those work with Macs. I have no idea about Linux. |
| | Well, there's the Samsung (something or other). That might do it. But I can't help you connect. |
| | Okay. Do you have any literature on this phone? |
| | You have to go to the Samsung website. |
| | Do you have Net access here? |
| | Yes, but we're only allowed to use our own website. |
| | Do you have any information about this phone on your website? |
| | Maybe, but we're not allowed to print anything out for customers. |
| | I don't know. There's a whole book full of things we're not allowed to do. |
| | I had a similar exchange later at a different Cingular store that I went to after failing to buy a non-iPod FM transmitter (preferably a Belkin TuneCast II like the one I recently lost) at CompUSA, because all they carry now are FM transmitters that jack into the proprietary connections on iPods. |
| | This Cingular store gave me the same story, but about a different phone. I decided to try not to hate Cingular at this point. They can't help being controlling and lame. And they have coverage all over the place, which is their main virtue. Maybe their only one. |
| | Then I went to the T-Mobile/Sprint booth at Costco, where the guy said he thought he could make something work, but it turned out that there wasn't enough coverage. I'll be at the beach in NC next week. Most of T-Mobile's coverage in NC is roaming without any bridging to the Net, he said. I forget what the story was for Sprint. I think I didn't like the phones anyway. I was killing time at that piont, while the Costco pharmacy failed for 1.5 hours to find the prescription I dropped off, and they lost. They finally found it, filled the prescription, and I went to a Verizon store. |
| | There they told me they could Make It Work, with either an LG phone or a Palm Treo 700p. So I got the Treo. I've been wanting to try one of those for a long time, anyway. |
| | I was there for two hours, trying to get stuff to work. Long story short, neither Verizon nor Palm support Mac or Linux for EVDO on the 700p. I could get the Mac to interact with the Net over bluetooth and GPRS, but it was slow as hell and constantly dropped connections. Plus, I still have GPRS on the old nearly-crapped-out Sony Ericsson T637 I've had for 2 years, and it works better than the Treo with Verizon. So, screw that. EVDO or nothing. |
| | If we can't make it work by the end of today, I'm taking it back and either getting a full refund or an EVDO card with an ordinary phone. If so, I'll probably need help with that, too. |
| | [Later...] Got it to work. See here and here. |
Hell, cont'd
| | At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he'd brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.... |
| | Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T. |
| | It's difficult to believe T. is really goneŠ I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T. was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the warŠ And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T. and so many other innocentsŠ |
| | I don't believe, with Lawrence, that there is nothing we could have done to prevent the current blood-bath and slide toward civil war. I still think it was doable under the right conditions. I hold Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush accountable for being unserious about a deadly serious business (and my own gullibility in not seeing their faults soon enough and in not being skeptical enough about cultural difference in the Middle East). We will never know what we might have achieved if we had had a halfway competent president and defense secretary. But we are where we are. And hope is currently a difficult thing to feel. |
| | Again I feel I must point out that security operation of the government is still not doing much to deal with the escalating violence. |
Even though I don't understand all of it,
Brian Oberkirch has a new blog:
Location, Relocation, Vocation
| | There's an old saying in real estate: your first offer is your best one. Isn't always. But, often enough to serve as a guide. |
| | Here's another one that has nothing to do with real estate, except for the fact that he's from Brooklyn, which does cut ice. This is it. I never bet against Jason. |
That's the nice part
Had to happen
| | Lost Mac Ads. Though I want one where a penguin comes in and barfs fish on their shoes or something. |
Arise, 'lings of Edge
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