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Monthly Archives: June 2005
Whopper of a wireless bill
Got my Cingular Wireless bill today and it was a shocker – $179.80. Yikes! I was expecting some roaming charges from our Europe trip, but this…ouch!
It breaks down something like this:
- We have a $39.99 plan + $19.99 for an additional line + $25 for unlimited Internet on my Treo and then there’s all the stupid service charges, taxes, and fees that they always layer on top – right there, that accounts for $95. Damn, that’s a lot right there. Nicole is trying to talk me out of the unlimited Internet on my Treo – which sounds pretty rational, except for the fact that I’m a geek and what’s the fun of a Treo without Internet?
- About $38 of roaming charges from 29 minutes in Italy and Spain at $1.29/minute – the worst was a 7 minute call that cost us $9 (bringing us to a total so far of around $133). We could’ve saved on these roaming charges by purchasing and using an Italian SIM card, but we honestly didn’t expect to use enough minutes for it to make much of a difference.
- $46 of roaming charges for 2,334 KB of data access (my unlimited Internet is free in the U.S. but costs $0.02/KB abroad). There was one particular day where I used a lot of data trying to look up rental cars and credit card companies on the Internet for a friend who had a bit of an emergency(lost a credit card) – in retrospect, we should’ve made the drive into town and found an Internet cafe. There was also a point in the trip where I remember discovering, to my dismay, that XpressMail and/or VersaMail were auto-checking for mail at I-don’t-know-what-interval, which means that they could’ve been pulling lots of data while the phone was sitting in my pocket. Next time I travel, I’m going to make very sure that those auto-checks are all turned off.
- And that brings us to a grand total of around $180. Sigh…
Got XpressMail working again
For anyone who’s been following my struggles with getting XpressMail working again on my Treo 650 for the past week or so, I finally got it working again today.
More details at my little blog-within-a-blog here.
Y Tu Mamá También
Just got finished watching this on DVD. It’s essentially the story of two obnoxious horndog teenage boys trying to get it on with everything that moves – girlfriends, family, themselves. The obnoxiousness and sex made it sort of like a Spanish language version of “Kids” (which in my book is not a good thing) and the bizarre little narrations that introduced the characters was reminiscent of “Amelie” (although “Amelie” was a much more intriguing movie). The DVD also had a bonus short movie called “Me La Debes” (“You Owe Me One”), which also achieved a high debauchery density factor, but was a bit more clever (or maybe I just liked it better because it was short?)
Links
DiscountDeals.com
Yep, it’s another one of those sites that finds and aggregates deals (and presents an RSS feed too of course). I got an email from the CEO asking me to take a look at it and what do you know, the first time I looked at it, I saw a 60% discount on certificates from Restaurant.com and it just so happens that I have a gift certificate for them from my last birthday, so I will probably be trying that coupon code very soon… There are also tons of Dell coupon codes listed and we’ve been toying with getting a big old flat panel (LCD) to replace our clunky CRT’s…
Another nice thing about the site is that it clearly says “EXPIRED” next to the deals that are uhhh, expired. Maybe that’s standard practice with these sites, but I never noticed it with techbargains.com which is the one site that I check every now and then.
GtD internal mailing list
I’ve enjoyed exploring GtD, but I’ve found in the past that sometimes when I share my enthusiasm for next actions and what not with people, their eyes glaze over. Some people really take a liking to this stuff and some people don’t find it interesting at all. So I’ve wondered in the back of my mind for a while, how can I share my knowledge of GtD with people in my organization without beating them over the head with it and annoying people?
Luckily anybody in my organization can setup an internal mailing list very easily so that’s what I did. And then I announced it on some other peripherally related lists, so that interested folks could opt in if they wanted to and other folks could just ignore it. Perhaps a blog would’ve been an even better choice (it’s more hip at the very least), but this was easier and we’ll see how it works for the time being.
There are almost 50 folks subscribed at this point, which is better than I expected.
Something to consider doing if you want to share best practices with folks in your organization.
Links
Steve Jobs’ 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford
Pretty interesting and inspirational.
If I had to boil it down to the 10 seconds, I’d say it’s about doing what you love and living you life like every day is your last day.
But like a lot of things, distilling it down to the core removes all the nuances and color and makes it sound cliche, which really it is not. Go ahead and read it, especially if you know that doing what you love is the right thing to do, but you haven’t been doing it, for whatever reason.