Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

For the last two weeks, I’ve been going back and forth in my mind about whether to stay with Verizon for my cell service or not. Mind you, I’ve still got about six months left in my contract, but I’m seriously tempted to leave them.

You see, my trusty RAZR V3C has been acting flaky recently. It doesn’t let me answer calls sometimes. It doesn’t always notify me of new voicemail messages or text messages. On occasion some (or all) of the keys refuse to work. Etc., etc., etc.

It has been long enough, though, that I can take advantage of their offer to let you get a $100 discount on a phone if you sign your soul over to Satan and extend your contract by one or two years. So, earlier this month I started looking to see if there was something I wanted to replace ye olde RAZR with.

Well, first of all, you can’t get a new RAZR from Verizon any more. Not that I would have been especially happy with that, given the RAZR’s amazing ability to deactivate its ringer after any random object in my pocket bumps the buttons on the outside. I’ve missed countless calls from my wife (and business calls too) because of that little issue.

Next problem … I do want a phone that supports Bluetooth, because I bought a Bluetooth headset, and it’s quite handy at times. That rules out about half the phones.

Of the remaining phones, the majority look like some martian tricorder off of a bad Star Trek ripoff. No thank you.

There are some nice phones in the “smart phone” category, but they are expensive (not to mention, I just panned smartphones a couple of months ago and got myself a separate PDA). Oh yeah … and they are a bit more expensive.

If I went that route, I could get a Blackberry … but I just bought a couple of Win Mobile apps (plus Missing Sync for Win Mobile so I could sync the blasted thing with my Mac), so I’d be throwing that stuff away more or less.

There are some Palm phones, but I’m not going there. Sorry Palm, you lost. Give me a ring when you get your act together … assuming you ever do.

Then there are the Windows Mobile phones. I could get a cheaper one with Win Mobile 5, but I’ve heard that it’s approximately as stable as Win 95 Rev A. Nope. Don’t want that.

The Win Mobile 6 phones are all on the pricier end.

Sigh.

Well, there is the new Verizon iClone Voyager, which actually looks pretty nifty, and will hit the market soon.

Yes, I did say that. Yes, I am a Mac user. Now, I highly doubt it’s as useful as the iPhone, but it would get the job done … and it does have one nifty feature … the full QWERTY keyboard and additional screen you get when you open the little booger up. But again … I lose the investment in the Win Mobile software.

Or … I could switch to AT&T. They still have the RAZR (I assume with its silly auto-off ringer “feature”), along with some cheaper smart phones with Win Mobile 6, and even a couple of nice looking cheaper phones with Bluetooth. Oh yeah, and they don’t cripple their bluetooth phones like the ignorant goons at Verizon.

And … I could use their rollover minutes in such a way as to effectively save myself about $40/month in fees. Right now I keep my Verizon contract at way more minutes than I usually use because every time I change it, my contract is extended by one year from the date I make the change … and about four months out of the year, I need almost all the minutes (or more) that I get in my current plan when I’m traveling.

Oooh … and once the iPhone becomes stable and established, and I lose my animosity towards smart phones (which may happen sooner than I expect) I could just switch to one.

On the down side, if I jump to AT&T now, I’d have to eat about $135 in early termination fees from Verizon. On the other hand, my RAZR might not live to see the new year, and I’d have to replace it if I stick with Verizon … which means buying one outright, or taking their “new every two” ripoff.

Or I could pawn the contract off on some unsuspecting person.

And … I have to admit, Verizon’s coverage really is great. It’s the one redeeming quality about the outfit.

Decisions, decisions …

Note: Even if I drop Verizon for my cell coverage, I’m going to keep their Broadband Access program. It really rocks. Now I can work from pretty much anywhere, with a workably fast net connection …

Last week I decided to join the 21st century along with thousands of my closest friends who have messages from their AOL Instant Messenger accounts forwarded to their cell phones.

I just disabled it.

I thought it would be nice to have people be able to send me messages when I wasn’t online at my computer. Turns out I was wrong.

For whatever reason, the AIM service doesn’t seem to keep up with whether I’m actually online or not. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve sent me a message when my status showed I was online, only to have it change to “mobile online” (or whatever they call it) as soon as they sent the message, and vice-versa.

The end result is that I generally wake up in the morning with a bunch of text messages, and I then have to go through them, which isn’t either fun or easy.

If I’m actually out and get a legit message, there’s then the matter of responding to them. Sending a text message in reply is out, since composing a message on the numeric keypad is about as much fun as teaching a cat to fetch the paper, but not nearly as fulfilling. Or, I could just call them, and we could talk that way.

Since I’ve found myself calling the people who message me in almost every case, and since they probably are near a real phone or their cell phone, I’ve decided to take AIM out of the equation.

Good riddance, AIM forwarding! In this case, I’m going to be a Luddite and head back into my 20th century cave to hide.

For any of you die-hards who insist on sending a text message to me, you can use the email-to-SMS gateway.

Once upon a time, there was a guy who thought he was going to maintain a personal blog as well as a business blog. However, he never, ever, ever posted anything on the business blog, and seemed to sometimes sporadically post on the personal blog.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the personal blog was hosted on a domain that had been registered once upon a time when he wanted to start a business focusing on web design (rather than development) … the very nifty strych9design.com domain. But somehow, a personal blog hosted on ’strych9design.com’ just didn’t feel right. It didn’t even match the focus of the blog.

So one day, in a fit of madness, he decided to register four-eight-four.org, and rename his blog … and (gasp) have work-ish and personal-ish stuff there.

He figured it was appropriate, since his business is officially “Four-Eight-Four Software Works, LLC” … it’s sort-of related to the business, but not completely, hence the .org.

So what’s with this “four-eight-four” stuff?

Well, you see, it’s a railroading term. A locomotive of the 4-8-4 type has four leading wheels (on two axles), eight driving wheels (on four axles) and two trailing wheels (you guessed it, on two axles). A fine example of this particular classification is the Norfolk & Western J Class … one of my favorite locomotives of all time.

So there you have it. Maybe I’ll get back to regular posting now.