Hump day +1
Mar 16th, 2006 by Jason
(or is it TGIF – 1?)
Jason and I made a Krispy Kreme run for the other jurors on the trial that he’s on. In the process of talking to the awesome lady who was helping us (who appeared just to be a regular worker), she told us that she’s been working there for twenty-two years. “They take real good care of me here.” Apparently! I’m assuming she’s talking about her stock options. 
The electrical problem in the kitchen (which had me near tears of frustration several times this week) turned out to be something amazingly easy to fix — once I realized that there was another outlet on the circuit that I was unaware of. If that hadn’t been the case, we would have had to rip into the ceiling drywall (which we just had fixed / re-popcorned a few months ago), and the thought of that made my stomach turn. Thank god for friends like Andy and Tony who kept insisting that the problem had to be with another outlet somewhere. Tony said I should receive my junior electronics card by mail in the next week or two.
.
Saw an interesting bumper sticker today:
Dear God: Why do you allow so much violence in our schools. Signed, a concerned student.
Dear Concerned Student: I’m not allowed in your schools. Signed, God.
Grrr.
Been playing around this week with the Verizon Treo 700 and T-Mobile MDA Windows Mobile 5 phones. Both are quite awesome. If I could get Verizon’s service (they have 850mhz coverage in this area, so their signal penetrates buildings better, plus their EVDO data service (400-700kbps) really makes the Treo fly!) on the T-Mobile MDA, then I’d be a pig in shit. My sausage-like fingers don’t fly very well on the Treo’s keyboard. 
Hmmm. I can take that phone off your hands. I have T-Mobile. I could play with it for you. . .
Carol
yes I quite liked the Treo. If only there was a way to combine the two that would be perfect. The verizon version of the t-mobile phone is ok, except for that damn antenna on it. Yes as if I havent bitched about that enough as it is…..
The only thing that keeps me from leaving T-Mobile for Verizon is that I can use my v600 in Mexico, Central and South America and Europe . As of the last time I checked Verizon was not supported outside the US.
I don’t even have to worry about using it outside of the city, let alone the country! Yeesh, you people that GET vacations.
Tolo, you can retire 5 years early with all of the vacation/sick time you’ve accumulated.
Either that, or they could cash you out and you could buy a space ship or something.
John, yeah, Verizon roams in very few places. Do you really travel out of the country a lot?
Scott, our works VZW rep is getting us a loaner 6700. w00t ..
Tolo, the T-Mobile loaner is only for another week, otherwise I’d ship it out to you to play with!!!!
I stopped ‘getting’ any vacation hours nearly 2 years ago – so I’m stuck at the limit of 240 hours. They won’t let me cash it out. I just stopped accruing it. If I was hourly, I could get away with getting paid for it by taking weekdays off, and working weekend days instead, but since I’m exempt, I just get nothing, AND get to work the weekend days.
Yea.. I try to leave the country atleast once a year.. When I was married we traveled out of the country a lot, her family was in the UK .
Using my mobile on vacation in mexico was cheaper than paying the jacked up rates from the hotels land line.
Jason,
With the MDA, does it do wi-fi properly? Can you use it with any open or closed access point, or only with T-Mobile hot spots? How big of a brick is it?
MDA sorta does WiFi properly. It’s B/G capable, but T-Mobile disabled the G for some reason. No worry, it only takes 5 seconds (and a registry edit) to turn the G back on. I’ve had no problems using it at home on our WiFi networks.
It’s an EDGE-enabled device, so if you mostly stick to “mobile” versions of web sites, it’s pretty quick with those when you’re not using WiFi.
Size wise, it’s the smallest Pocket PC I’ve ever seen.
Scott and I are going to look at the Verizon’s 6700, which is their version of the MDA. The EVDO data speed is addicting. Click a link and the page loads almost instantly!
If you don’t mind me asking, how much are you paying for service. We’ve been paying under $20 per phone for so long, it’s kind of hard to get used to the idea of paying $100 per phone for service (that’s what it came to when I used the Verizon website to figure the price.)
Wow, $20 with T-Mobile’s cheap. Are guys on their least expensive family plan, or does UMA get a corp discount?
The Tree’s paying for my service, although I’m thinking about moving Jason2 over to Verizon and sporting the difference between his T-Mobile bill and the new Verizon bill for him. Being able to tether his PowerBook with a 6700 to get EVDO speeds while at work would be worth it.
Yeah, it is cheap – it’s an old old pre-t-mobile, pre-voicestream plan that we got through a sales person that pitched to OHSU employees. It’s not a family plan, other than the first incoming minute is free (and for us almost all incoming calls are less than a minute.) T-mobile to T-mobile’s are just 10 cents a minute. And we only have 75 ‘base’ minutes, but it doesn’t matter. We’d never in a million years use 3000 minutes in a month.
But I covet that MDA. Cell phone. PDA, with keyboard. (My kids don’t call, they send text messages instead.) Web surfing. Have you loaded Vindigo on it? That’s one of my favorite PocketPC apps.
PRE-Voicestream? Wow. On HowardForums (in the T-Mobile area), some folks talk about the Voicestream era, but nobody’s ever mentioned of life before that. heh
It sucks that you’re getting such a great deal because to move from that to today’s rates WITH a data plan tacked on is a huge increase in your monthly bill. I guess if you’re just using your WiFi networks + text messaging (and could live w/o a GPRS/EDGE data plan), you could use the MDA on the same plan you’re on now, but I don’t know if T-Mobile corp. stores will sell the devices without the plan. TGFE (ebay). 
Haven’t loaded the Vindigo client on it. I’ll try that tonight and see how it works.
I’m a recovering Windows Mobile device user. Last year I had the i-mate JAM (which is basically the MDA, minus the pull-out keyboard). It cost $600 and had to be imported from the UK because no US carriers had plans to touch it. I didn’t even bat an eye at that price. WTF was I thinking?
I’m glad I’m over that phase now. I’m also glad that US carriers are *finally* getting the latest WM phones. Now if RIM would just release Blackberry Connect, I could actually carry a WM phone around as my main device!
I think she was thinking of something else… We started with Tele-Go phones, which were a really cool idea, you had a base station at home, and when you came home it re-routed your cell phone calls to your home phone number, and your cell phone switched to being a cordless telephone. Battery life wasn’t great, but other than that it was really cool. GTE bought them and killed it off. Then Verizon bought GTE. The Verizon service was so horrible that we switched to VoiceStream. I still have one of the inaugural full sized VoiceStream smartcards with a picture of Mt. Hood on it somewhere. (When your SIM was actually the size of a credit card and you had to slide the whole thing into your phone.)
Ahhh, yes. Telgo. They were cool.
But what I really want is a smart phone/pda. And the MDA looks like it might be the perfect one (that exists today – nothing at all was good enough, before), if VoiceStream will just let us add-on the Full internet to our existing account.
I don’t think T-Mobile will let you add new services to grandfathered plans, but you can try.
I’m shooting for this:
https://sprint.p.delivery.net/m/p/sprint/EPC/epclanding.asp
Sprint has a version of the MDA that looks like Verizons. If I can find someone to sign me up for that plan, I can get 500 minutes + unlimited data for $30/month + taxes.
(crosses fingers)
Jason,
I hereby declare that YOU, yes YOU, need to apply for a job at Sprint!
We ALL want the discount.
Carol
I’ve been able to add small services in the past, and they do let us upgrade our phones at a small discount once a year. I thought it was funny last time when the guy asked if I was sure I wanted to commit to another 12 months of my $14.99/month plan.
Actually, it’s the Apple store that Jason2 or I need a part-time job at.
I pulled the trigger (x2) on the Sprint SERO deal.
Had to pay full-price for the PPC-6700 ($450 … doah!), but the monthly service is $30.00 (per line) and includes:
500 anytime minutes
free nights/weekends
free Sprint M2M calls
unlimited EVDO data
Technically you’re not supposed to tether with the 6700 (i.e. use it as a modem for your laptop .. Sprint calls that PAM [phone as modem]) on the SERO plans, but from what I’ve read on the forums, the 6700 doesn’t support a feature called NAI, which is what Sprint uses to detect tethering, so it appears that you can tether away “under the radar”.
If anyone else not currently on Sprint or Nextel is interested, I can shoot your contact info over to the Sprint employee that helped me and he can call you to answer any questions/set it up.
Wow, I’m digging these 6700 holsters:
http://www.seidioonline.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=238