Join An Evil Empire?

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I have pondered switching mobile carriers for a while. I have always ended up staying with T-Mobile. I have had them for almost 4 years and all in all they have been ok. But besides being cheap, and offering GSM they don’t have that much going for them. Well except nice customer service. That is a plus but for the once a year I call is it worth all the other trade offs? They offer the worst phones. Their high speed data plans may be cheap but they are really slow.

I have been eying the HP iPaq 6515 Windows Mobile phone for a while. Cingular offers it. It has a nice size screen and a keyboard. It is larger than my Treo 650 but the larger screen is REALLY nice. I saw it in the store today on my day off of shopping. I was originally not going to switch but I was surprised to find they had the iPaq in stock (they didn’t several other times I went to the store trying to take a look at it). I was impressed with the screen size, and the fact that the whole unit was not much bigger than the Treo even thought it was wider.

To make a long story short I made an semi impulse buy and am on my way to switching mobile carriers to Cingular. Now I have 30 days to see if I like the phone and the service, but for now I am switching. I will pay almost double for the data plan I had, but I am also (in theory) more than doubling the speed of the wireless data. The plan I am moving to is almost identical to what I had. 900 minutes vs the 1000 that T-Mobile gave me for the same price. The advantage is that I get roll over minutes now. Some months I use allot of minutes but others I almost never use any, so now I can roll over unused minutes to the next month.

I am going on a trip tomorrow so I will give the phone and service a real trial. More news later.

Oh and as for the title of the post I think most large telecom companies are evil. I love them, and use them all the time, but when something goes wrong you are at there mercy. You are in a contract that you cannot get out of, they can be very evil. But at least it is an evil you know!

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Party Weekend Roundup

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This weekend was a busy one. I had my cousin Merric’s Bar Mitzvah yesterday. I rode out the Jersey with my sister and Morgan. For a 3 year old Morgan was so good during the service. She played with her stickers and was generally quiet. After services we drove to the party. I had a good time. I had a few drinks, and ate allot. I saw tons of cousins that I never see. After a party like this it becomes apparent why I don’t see some of them. On the other hand there are always a few of them that I wonder why I don’t get together with more.

Morgan and my cousin’s Arrielle and Cerina were dancing like crazy. They were all so cute together. My 5 year old cousin Jonathan only wanted to play with with the girl in the red dress (aka Morgan). it was very cute.

I didn’t dance, since I am not into that unless I am very drunk. But the food was really good. We where invited back to the after party at my cousins house, but my dad was tired and his back hurt. So we headed home. Since my nieces birthday party was today in Queens I stayed at my parents Saturday night. The trip from South Jersey wasn’t so bad, but my dad and I ended up waiting for my mom and sister at my sisters building since they had to stop and ended up going a different way that had some traffic. The rest of the night was uneventful.

This morning I got up early and went to breakfast with my dad. From there we went to cosco to pick up the birthday cake. Morgan’s party was at a gymnastics place. 15 running and screaming 3 year olds was not my thing, but for a kids party it was nice. I got to video morgan and friends doing some really funny stuff.

I got a lift back home from Carrie’s father in law. It was nice not having to take the train back. We are all meeting at Loren and Andrew’s place later for dinner. Since their place is just 2 stops on the train from my place I am not complaining. Overall it has been a good (if not tiring) weekend so far.

A Day Off

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I am taking Monday off. I have tons of days in my bank, and I am nearing the max I can keep, so instead of loosing them I will take a day and just relax. I haven’t been sleeping well, so hopefully I can sleep in tomorrow. Not much planned on the agenda. I want to research some new mutual funds, and then maybe upgrade or build a new DVR computer. I am not sure if I can get all the components I need for the DVR so I may just work on the investment stuff. Either way I plan on doing no work. Of course that I usually end up doing some.

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Offsite Meeting

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I spent the morning with a potential vendor discussing network designs and Call Manager configurations. It was very productive, but I am always backlogged when I spend half a day or a day out of the office. I spent the afternoon catching up on paper work while most of my team went to the data center to mount a new core switch we are trying to deploy.

I ended up at Dan’s with Jayson after work to upgrade the ram in his new iMac. We got dinner out of the deal and I also moved over his files from his old windows machine and setup his iPod on the iMac. Now I am iTired.

My scheduled trip to our Call Center for tomorrow is canceled. I didn’t want to chance the trip in the snow they predict. I will try to reschedule for sometime next week.

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Food, and Some Drink

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Nothing eventful at work to report today. I did start getting a minor head ache late in the day. Some alive took care of most of it. I ended up meeting up with John at Heartland Brewery for some food and drink. I owed him for helping me with my xbox. Jay showed up also. We had a nice time hanging out for a while. I didn’t drink much since I wasn’t feeling 100%. We had a good time and planned out our next poker get together.

RAM & a DVR

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I ordered a 1 Gig RAM upgrade for my new iMac. It finally arrived and I installed it today. It was actually pretty easy to do. I was happy about that. The machine is noticeably faster now. Especially when I have several apps open. With the original 512megs on board I noticed the system would freeze up when I was doing some intensive stuff this weekend. The added memory is a nice solution to my problem. Now all I need is more apps that are run on the intel chips natively.

I also got a new USB DVR adapter for my DVR machine. The goal is to have 2 tuners running on the same computer. Snapstream says it will work. The problem I have is that I have 2 different revisions of the same USB DVR hardware. One driver version works with one unit but not the other. When I get the second one to work the first one decides to stop working. I gave up after several hours of messing with the system. I am RMA’ing the unit and will probably just go out and buy a PCI tuner card. I didn’t want to do that, but in order to do what I want I will need one. I may also just move the DVR setup to my HP desktop since it is not doing much right now. Still pondering my options.

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Canceled Plans

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I was planning on going ice skating today. I like skating but don’t go very often, so I said yes when asked if I wanted to go. Then I woke up and it is 27 degrees out and really windy, so it is not the best weather for outdoor ice skating. Thankfully my friends I was going to go with thought the same thing and we canceled. Now I have nothing to do today. Not that I am complaining, but I must amuse myself at home today. I could clean the place? Or just watch TV? Not sure yet, but I already blew 2 hours writing and browsing the web…

Sort of Free Lunch

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Twice this week I went to lunch with Cisco or a Cisco VAR. Free food is nice, but nothing is really ever free! We need to get allot done with these people so they think it is nice to do it at lunch. They are right, and we did make allot of progress. We are trying to shop around a new integrator for our Voice systems. The first meeting was to talk with my Cisco rep about the current issues we have and what we want to do. The second meeting was to meet with an integrator and talk a bit about what we want and what they can offer. I think both meetings went well. The first impression of this new integrator was a good one. I still have to meet another integrator next week that we are looking at but I think this group had a good start.

I want to get all the leg work of this phone system design done now before we actually have a lease signed and the powers that be at my company are asking for us to move as soon as possible.

Canceled Plans

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I was planning on going ice skating today. I like skating but don’t go very often, so I said yes when asked if I wanted to go. Then I woke up and it is 27 degrees out and really windy, so it is not the best weather for outdoor ice skating. Thankfully my friends I was going to go with thought the same thing and we canceled. Now I have nothing to do today. Not that I am complaining, but I must amuse myself at home today. I could clean the place? Or just watch TV? Not sure yet, but I already blew 2 hours writing and browsing the web…

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Saturday Tinkering

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I went over to John’s today so he can tinker a bit with my xbox. It took a bit longer than expected but I had nothing going on. The only down side was he accidentally erased all my saved games on Halo 2.

We where going to goto dinner and maybe meet up with Jayson & Gretchen but he was tired after a work overnight so I ended up meeting up with Jayson & Gretchen on my own. We went to this nice bar / restaurant near their apartment. It was good. We sat around for hours drinking and talking. It was nice.

I took the bus back to 59th street and hopped a cab home. It was easier than waiting for the 7 train. Besides the cold, it was a quick trip.