augustjackson dot net

Mega kudos to Mike for helping me figure out the solution to the link problem. To help with the bad spelling thing I have been editing my entries in Word and then posting them into Moveable Type. Curly quotes were the death of my links.

I have no idea what the cause is of the funky links in yesterday’s post on the iPod economy. Moveable Type seems to be pre-pending the links I’ve included in my post with the URL for the originating web page or somesuch. If you’re reall jonesing to follow the links I’ve included you can always choose the copy link command from your contextual menu, past the funky URL into your browser location bar and trim off the funky elements. It is at least pretty clear what my intended URL is.

I guess as the day goes on today and if I make some posts we’ll see if that’s still happening. If it’s still happening I’ll put out the call for help. In the interim, any insight is most welcome.

It’s been years that my friends Gene, Mike, Jet and others have been bothering me to finally buckle down and get a blog. But I’ve always been the one to avoid the trend until it’s not clear whether or not the trend might have already passed by me. So, March 2004 seems about the right time for me to finally get a blog! Thanks to Mike Kim I’ve now finally got the blog space in place for going on two weeks now. Then of course my problem is that I need to find the bloody time to even write the thing. So, finally with a weekend here at home for a change I have a moment to do just that.

This past week work took me to New York City for two days. To anybody who knows my work situation they’ll know travel is something that is certainly not new for me. It’s just two weeks since I finally came home from five consecutive weeks of travel. A short little trip to New York was a nice change from the long and distant trips I’ve been making. Here’s to more of that.

One of the fun things about the trip is that I got to play with my new phone. Last weekend I jumped at the chance to buy a Nokia 8260, which AT&T Wireless had finally offered for sale. This is the phone for which I have been waiting, complete with a camera, Bluetooth, support for the high-speed EDGE data protocol and my joyous return to the Nokia user interface. It beats the daylights out of the Sony Ericsson T68i I was using, and sure as hell beats the Sony Ericcson T226 AT&T Wireless tried to foist on me to replace the T68i. I managed to get a decent picture of the Chrystler Building and Grand Central.

Overall I really like the phone. There are a few minor issues that I have, most likely things I just haven’t found to change the preferences and options. One is that when I go to write a new SMS I have to choose an option to clear the screen of the last one that I sent. Second problem is that when an image is sent to the phone via SMS or a ringtone is downloaded the process by choosing the folder in which to save it is not exactly straightforward.

So I had to sign up for two more years with AT&T Wireless to get a slightly better price on the phone. Lucky them, because they were seriously hanging by a thread these past few months. As somebody who travels internationally for business I can have some pretty hefty monthly bills– such that I think I’m justified in saying that they should treat me extra nice. Well, these past few months they haven’t. I’ve received telemarketing calls from them on my mobile that were obviously originated from offshore by agents that didn’t do very well in their cultural training classes. Secondly their bill payment system failed to accept a bill payment I made on three occasions such that they deactivated my service while I was on a business trip, and one of the agents I was dealing with to get the issue sorted had the nerve to tell me that it was my fault the payment didn’t go through (three times). Finally, they sent me that crappy Sony Ericcson T226 to replace my T68i and tried to pass it off as their “generosity.” Never mind that the phone had less functionality than the one it was intented to replace and is a piece of crap. Luckily the 8260 saved the day for them, because I was getting ready to bolt.