A Child Of Atom

I would desperately love to have something like Techshop in my area of the world. A cooperative center that has major manufacturing tools available for use by their members. CNC Routers, welding equipment, industrial sewing machines, laser cutters, even a 3-D printer! New York City has a ton of cool stuff, and is great in just about every way imaginable but it is areas like this where it falls down, mainly because no one can afford to rent the floor space needed to house it.

Yes, I plan to pre-order it. I probably will have by the time you read this. I wish it had just a touch more memory, but it has enough to hold all the music I currently own, so maybe that ain't so bad. The real draw here is the internet, anyone who knows me knows that I REALLY like being connected and this will allow that anywhere that there is wi-fi and in NYC, that's every city park. Not to mention every open network that I can find, which is quite a few. So pretty. So sleek. So THIN! Want, want, want! I am craving this object in a serious way.

In another "Only in New York" moment this afternoon I witnessed one of the strangest exchanges I've ever seen. Sitting on the subway a stereotypically dressed black teenager sat down beside me. The train was just a little crowded and there was a fairly flamboyant gay guy standing in front of us. Both of them had their iPods out and were watching video of some sort. From the corner of my eye I tried to get a glimpse of what the black guy was watching, but I couldn't so I just went back to my book. He must have caught me trying to peek because he nudged me with his elbow and turned the iPod so that I could clearly see. There on the tiny screen was an orgy. He was watching porn. I just nodded and waved him off, like people living in the city learn to do with so many different people. Apparently though he wasn't satisfied with my dismissal. He reached up and tapped the arm of the guy in front of us, looking to share with him as well. When the gay guy looked at the screen he laughed and held up a finger in the motion for "wait a second." He fiddled with his won iPod for a bit until he found what he was looking for and then turned his own iPod to both of us (I couldn't pretend that I wasn't looking at this point) so that we could see the screen. There on his screen was a similar scene to the one he had been shown, only with all men. The black guy laughed and nodded his head and both of them went back to their own videos, satisfied with their exchange.

I repeat, only in NY.

Even though my best friend tells me that my posts about my phone problems are boring I feel the need to keep you updated since I started it in the first place.

I bought a new phone... step one. It is Bluetooth, and Edge capable. I'm told by the Cingular sales people that tri or quad mode phones don't make that much difference in reception but that sometimes the brand name does, and that I should go for a Nokia for better reception, so that is settled too.

I spent a day or two hunting down the modem script online, since neither Cingular, nor Nokia officially support Macs, of course. After I had all that, I sat down to try and make my first connection... to discover that my laptop is NOT Bluetooth. It is compatible, and has all the drivers pre-installed, but not the necessary hardware. So... off to the Apple store.

So, now I have a Bluetooth dongle, and I have succesfully paired my phone, (maybe all this is boring... gah... I had NO idea what any of this meant a week ago). However everytime I try and connect to the internet the phone drops the pairing, and disconnects me.

My next step is to spend all day Monday at the Genius Bar, hopefully they will be able to help me with all this. After all they supposedly designed their computers to do this.

Hopefully my next update to this story will be posted via my cell.

I have spent the better part of my free time in the last two days researching internet connectivity through my laptop and my cell phone. First off, does it have to be this hard? I mean, seriously Cingular... could you have hidden the information that I needed a little MORE efficiently please? It seriously took me a dozen or more well phrased google searches to even begin to get anywhere, and the pages that I needed from Cingular I found linked off of other sites. When I tried searching for them directly on their website I got nothing. According to them the pages are not available.

The whole thing comes down to a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that it IS possible, and relatively easy. Even better was the news that it is particularly easy on a Mac, mainly because of iSync, which PCs obviously lack (HA! More vindication for Mac users). Even better is that if I have a Bluetooth enabled phone I can do it wirelessly.

After another exhaustive round of web searches, which again yielded little or no information from "official" sources, but rather from news groups and message boards and the like, I began to see the bad side of the equation. It seems that there are at least 5, possibly more, types of interfaces between cellular and net technology. Cingular uses two of these: GSM and EDGE. From what I can understand a laptop and a GSM phone will yield net speeds of about 20 or 30Kbps, slower than the first dial up modem that I ever had. EDGE has the potential to get me up to 300Kbps. My phone is only capable of GSM connections. I also discovered that I might be able to get a stronger cell signal if I had a tri-mode or quad-band cell phone. Basically these phones can operate on 3 or 4 frequencies, and would search out the available ones. My current phone is dual-mode, which means of course that it only receives on 2 frequencies. My current phone also does not have Bluetooth capabilities, so I would have to be tethered to my laptop with a wire. (Can you see where all this is going?) So the bad news is that for OPTIMAL connectivity, I should probably buy a new phone. My current phone is only about 8 months old, so there is no way that they would upgrade me. I'll have to pay full price for it if I buy it.

Further bad news is that all the phones that fit these three requirements, EDGE capable, Bluetooth compatible, and tri or quad mode, are UGLY. They are all bulky, square, ugly contraptions that I will not want to lug around in my pocket when I get back to the city.

So I'm left with the dilemma of whether or not this is really necessary and advisable. I have researched all of this with an exhaustiveness that I would not have considered possible three days ago, and I have more acronyms and abbreviations and techno-babble in my head now that anyone outside of a physics lab should need to know. the next few days will tell the tale. As you can probably guess though, I am leaning pretty heavily towards a yes on all this. I just can't see myself being that disconnected for that long.