ATT doesn't believe their own hype. ATT has been bragging that it has had 1 million signups for information about the new Apple iPhone, as if that can be translated into a given number of potential sales. That must have been put out there for Wall Street, cause now they're cooking up plans to sell this Consumer item to businesses. Story here. Too bad the experts say thats a nonstarter.

Another ATT/Cingular screwup I signup in a Cingular store on April 13 for an upgrade from dsl pro to dsl elite, which would put me at a possible 6 mbps download speed, and it was scheduled for April 16. April 16 came and went, and no upgrade, and ATT has no record of a service order for such upgrade.

Swiss Cheese: Cingular's published maps of 3G (equivalent to cheapest dsl speeds if you're lucky), are to say the least overly optimistic, showing 100% coverage in areas with very discontinuous non contiguous coverage, for which the fine print has enough weasel words to cover them. See the Houston Map here, Fine print follows:

Map may include areas served by unaffiliated carriers, and may depict their licensed area rather than an approximation of their coverage. Actual coverage area may differ substantially from map graphics, and coverage may be affected by such things as terrain, weather, foliage, buildings and other construction, signal strength, customer equipment and other factors. Cingular does not guarantee coverage.

As I predicted: The price cutting on Vista has begun. Office Depot is offering a $40 rebate.
By fall you'll get a free Microsoft Money with your Vista, or better.

Followup: April 22 - The Office Depot rebate sale is over. But then Microsoft has its own sales now. See here.

AT&T problem with their Unity Plan sales on the Web reported here 3 weeks ago, continues.

The iPhone will appear on time ! - Apple has pushed back the scheduled debut of OS X 10.5 so it can bring the iPhone out on time. Story here.
Too bad Cingular's internal marketing folks will likely repeat the effort they made for the Motorola iTunes phone, which sold 1% of the volume of the Motorola's V3 phone. Old story here. It's worse than that now. Cingular gives away those iTunes phones for free now with new 2 year contract, as opposed to the $599.99 they want to get for the 8 Gig iPhone.
My prediction: Big initial sales spike, which will fall off VERY QUICKLY due to poor Cingular support of the phone.
For $399.99 (after rebate) one can now get a Cingular 8525 Windows Mobile phone, with slide out keyboard. Too bad it has the non-intuitive Windows Mobile 5.0 Operating System, which acts like it was designed by committee, having menus pop from different places for each different function.
Cingular is having a hard time enforcing its desire to charge $39.99/month for a data plan for that phone when its' web site only wants to sell a $19.99 plan. This phone however does have 3G capability, lacking in the iPhone and for $9.99 a month one can add a GPS program.

Just (hopefully) resolved more grief with Cingular. I think they've
merged too many companies too fast and don't have knowledgable folks in the right places in their Systems Department.

In January 2005 they were confident of merging the then Cingular Network with the ATT Wireless network by Dec 2006, but 4 months later, still a long way to go.

I also remember their outage last August which convinces me they route all their long distance calls through Bothell Washington for monitoring by the N.S.A.

A $300 Apple Computer ! - Just as TiVo units have been "hacked" (it's just a Linux box after all), the new Apple iTV has also now been hacked (It's just an Intel Mac after all).

Serious computer database problem at the new AT&T :
I go online drilling through a "Cingular.com" website, to see the new AT&T Unity Plan and it tells me my legacy SBC line (20 years old) of 713-xxx-yyyy is not recognized as an AT&T line. Such issues with the computer database the website ties into will:

1. Generate many, many needless support calls.
2. Guarantee to lose AT&T Unity plan sales.
3. Cause grief for Unity Plan participants, and possibly generate lawsuits when folks get
charged for calls promised to be free.

and if it today after the Unity Plan has been in existence many weeks AT&T still doesn't know which phone lines are its own it has major database problems.

Not that I'd ever get the Unity Plan. I can make all the long distance calls I need with my Cingular cell phone, so converting my $13 (base price) land line to a $40 (base price) plan to qualify isn't going to happen. Indeed if AT&T ever keeps its promises to the FCC (made as a condition of being allowed to merge with Bell South) and sells "stand-alone" (or "naked") dsl, I'd have almost zero reason to retain a landline.

Time to upgrade to 802.11n With prices dropping on 802.11n equipment it was time to upgrade my home network. Went with DLink equipment for four reasons.
1. It's worked well for me in the 802.11g paradigm.
2. Its less than half the price of Apple hardware.
3. Apple doesn't provide 802.11n hardware for PCs.
4. Dlink hardware was on sale at Office Depot, who also
accepted a $10 off Office Max coupon.
Would've been very easy but I had to go through two steps.
1. First set up as 802.11g network with new hardware.
2. Change over to 802.11n, and convert from WEP encryption to WPA encryption.
My legacy 802.11g Linksys Bridges, and Belkin PC card (in my Macintosh "Pismo")
all talked nicely to the new Dlink after reconfiguring them for WPA. I haven't been
able to identify an 802.11n PC card for the Macintosh laptop that would work;
it'd need to use a Broadcom chipset as Apple does for 802.11n.

Thank you Bill Gates: So I want to scan in a document so I can email it to someone; I was going to insert it in an MS Word document. Then my MS Word decided not to run. So I got out my Install CD for Office 2003, and "Repaired" my Office 2003. Apparently it just reinstalled it, as when it finished, I needed to reinstall 11 patches, updates and security fixes for Office 2003.

Rattling Cingulars' (The New AT&T) Cage:
Finally worked my way up to a Vice President; and got satisfaction for
Cingular sending txt message SPAM to an account that had txt messaging
deactivated.

They went through many iterations.

First the CSRs said it was an Administrative Message.

Then the head of the "Office of the President" said it was a Marketing
Message.

Today the VP called it an accident and proved to me they were sorry.

Cingular plays semantic games: "I think I've never seen a SPAM message we can't call an administrative message" they might say. Yesterday, despite having txt messaging disabled for my account, Cingular SPAMed my cell phone with a txt message SPAM promoting txt and photo messaging. I called to complain, and they're worse than Lily Tomlin now; just total arrogance.

Upgrading an HR20-700 DirecTv unit:

Trivial to add Hard Drive Space to this DVR, just use the eSATA port on the rear.
Only gotcha, is the unit transfers to using ONLY that new external drive, so all your
settings for what to record, and all your previous recordings become unavailable.
They're all still there on built in hard drive, so one could reboot with new hard drive
removed to get back to old recordings, but for now no transfer mechanism between drives.

It was all so trivial. I had a spare Hitachi 500 Gig SATA 150 drive,
It was an OEM drive on my MacPro, now replaced by SATA 300 drives.

I used Macintosh Disk Manager to make the drive one partition of
"Free Space". The drive was then mounted in a Nexstar-3 External Drive
Enclosure with eSATA interface; bought at Frys. The HR20-700 is
powered off. The eSATA drive is plugged into the HR20, and then
powered on; THEN the HR20 is powered up; after about 10 minutes;
voila; the HR20 is now using the 500 Gig Drive instead of its original
300 Gigger.

One could also use the now available (but still pricey) 750 Gig Hard
Drives, or an even pricier eSATA RAID drive of larger capacity; I
learned that from reading some Discussion group which said the HR20
only supports SATA 150.

DirecTv Plus HD Dvr : I got one delivered this past weekend, with a new larger dish with 5 LNB and receiving both Ka and Ku band, it receives Mpeg4 signals from DirecTv, so it spot beams local stations in HD. The DVR is not a TiVo, so it took some edumaction, as its quite different. But for every nice Feature it lacks that TiVo has, it has some others that TiVo lacks. DirecTv is promising that with the launch of two more satellites this summer, they will carry many more National HD channels. One of the nice features of this unit is the RF capable remote. Upon setup it downloaded firmware upgrade 012a, which apparently corrected many of the recording bugs.
Only real downer was grief that DirecTech caused with an incorrect work order.

More on Vista Launch Event : Lots of food and drinks, plenty of ball point pens, t-shirts or Post-It pads from Vendors with displays. Most had drawings for a Zune. Perhaps MS threw it in after charging so much to let them co-sponsor the event and have a booth. Almost seemed like it was Drawing: First Prize - Zune, Second prize - Two Zunes.

Then the Free software. NOT AT ALL AS PROMISED. Office 2007 - Not provided. A link to download a 2 month trial copy (in 2 pieces even), which if you remembered to use the "Promotion Code (Activation Code) supplied, rather than the one emailed with the download link, you would have a permanent copy of Office Professional 2007. One minor glitch after that grief, if you installed it with the "Pre-release" Vista supplied, Office refused to install security updates, saying "Can not install update, you're running a Beta of Vista, would you like to Upgrade?" At full retail price of course. I declined, and instead Installed Office 2007 on my XP partition, but Office 2007 failed to run after the final reboot, but decided to behave after a 2nd undocumented reboot, and even authenticated with no hitch despite having been already installed once.

So I'm posting here and telephoning and emailing to Microsoft complaining about not providing the promised goodies for attending the Launch Event (did you know that in Excel 2007 you can take a column of data and sort it - from highest to lowest value? Such was the valuable information presented by Microsoft).

Vista will wait : Microsoft didn't produce a 180 day licensed copy of Vista at their "Launch" event as promised, so I'm sticking with XP SP2, which running IE 6 when I have to use IE is so much better than the buggy resource hog of IE 7.

Windows Vista on an Intel Macintosh? : I've been runing Vista Release Candidate 2 on my Intel MacPro with not too many problems; so I was interested to read reports of others using the Released Retail version of Vista on the MacPro. One such experience is here . Conclusion: It runs fine under Bootcamp, not so fine under Parallels.

Keep your PC System secure : I find out about this great Security site that will give your PC a free scan. Http://secunia.com download Java if necessary, and then scan. I found out that my freshly installed Flash player, version 9.0.16.0; wasn't current and some exploits could make me vulnerable, so now I have version 9.0.28.0

Apple gets snarky? Great new TV commercial. See it here. It makes the same point I made many Oct. 9 last year about Vista's "security". Vista asks for verification for seemingly EVERYTHING, which when users get annoyed at that will cause them to turn it off, leaving Vista insecure, as Apple suggests, or blindly clicking "Allow" for everything as I feared will happen.

An earlier commercial, also fully grounded in the truth, apparently got Bill Gates' goat. See that one here.