I went downtown yeserday with my friend Jeff to check out mobile phones. Jeff was looking for a high-speed data plan & a new phone, and I was looking at potentially upgrading to some sort of smartphone.

Sprint — This was the first place we went, because Jeff had heard that Sprint had the best wireless data network. The store was large, but it felt disoranized, and the yellow Sprint logo panels were UGLY. Points added for having working examples of most of the phones they sold. Points deducted for not having anyone offer to help up the whole time we were there.

T-mobile was next. A salesperson met us as we entered the small store. She seemed to have no idea what Jeff was talking about with respect to a wireless data card until I pointed to it on a list of their equipment offerings. Even then she didn’t know much, and didn’t get help from the other salespeople. So, points off for poorly educated salespeople. More points off because most of most of the phones were non-working dummies, and because the few working models they had were in poor repair, or weren’t charged up (like their trademark Sidekick).

Verizon didn’t have many real working phones, plus they had a lot of mobile media crap, which I personally hate. Service was decent, someone met us as we entered and offered us help, which we didn’t take. Once we started pouring over the literature on their data covereage, someone was able to give us enough info to translate Verizon’s branding into an actual estimate of communication speeds.

Cingular was also cursed with lots of dummy models, but their service was great. The first guy didn’t know a lot about data plans and handed us off to someone who knew his stuff, and was also well versed on the special deals offered to Microsoft employees, like Jeff. I also had to admire the way he managed appear magnanamous while sowing doubt about the competitive offerings of both Sprint and Verizon by praising Verizon and slamming Sprint.

The whole experience was inconclusive. Most of the smartphones offered were not very smart choices as phones, they tended to be big, and had lousy options for entering a phone number (I think only Cingulair had a reasonable option), while perhaps not being big enough to really be a full-featured mobile communicator. Some of the blackberry models came close, but I frankly found the UI to be garish and ugly.

One thing I am sure of: Shopping for cell phones sucks.

Signaling to the world that he is ready to rise to the highest levels of the webpunditosphere, Erik Speckman announced today that he has created his own job board to serve the extremely discerning members of the Geekfun community. With “jobs.GeekFun.com”:http://jobs.geekfun.com, Erik joins such luminaries as “Michael Arrington”:http://www.crunchboard.com/, “Joel Spolsky”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/05b.html, and those coolies over at “37Signals”:http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs

“Jobs.GeekFun.com”:http://jobs.geekfun.com was developed in a little over 20 minutes using Erik’s existing WordPress installation, a static page, a new CNAME record, a mod_rewrite rule and some pecans and raisins for a snack. Posting a new job is as simple as leaving a comment. Editing or removing a job will have to wait for the future, because, as Speckman explained, “It’s a really hard problem to solve the right way.”

When asked what other improvements new featuers people could expect in the future, Speckman said “Once I close my first VC round I’m totally going to hire a management team to make sure the jobs.GeekFun.com featureset has some AJAX and microformats and stuff. They’ll also be charged with making sure it just generally sucks less.” Once aboard, the management team will take the lead in raising a second round to pay for software development, infrastructure, and a sales team.

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Please! It’s that important.

Think of how horrible it would be if you went into the hospital for an acute appendicitis and the surgeons, rather than cleanly removing your appendix, took just a bit of it and instead removed both of your kidneys.

It would be even worse if they arrogantly dismissed your complaints of fever, weakness and sharp pain in your abdomen for a couple of years while simultaneously insisting that they had to take your kidneys to cure your appendicitis.

It would be an unthinkable horror if the same medical team, rather than loosing a malpractice suit and their medical licenses, instead portrayed themselves as heroes and campaigned to give you a liver transpant.

Ok, so now pretend that your inflamed appendix is really al Qaeda in Afghanistan, pretend the surgeons are Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, that Iraq is the spot where your kidneys used to be and your threatened liver is Iran.
Oh yeah, and pretend that Bush is acting like some sort of hero for his determination to keep Iraq from becoming the “center of an Al Qaeda created caliphate”:http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2397514

Think of what a fucking nightmare that would be.

Oh wait…

While averting my eyes from the racist white-power sister girl group “Prussian Blue,” I somehow managed to miss the fact that the girls are named “Lamb” and “Lynx.”

Somehow such a pairing seems doomed to a gory self-destructive end, doesn’t it?

One more handy use for a digital camera: Looking at the ledge at the bottom of your fireplace flue for a baby bird that’s been screeching…

…only to find that it’s a baby squirrel with a sooty nose.

Update: Oh goody.  Another squirrel fell down the chimney this morning.

I’ve been making tweaks to this blog by adding a few new plugins, and taking advantage of some of the easy customization featues provided by the “K2”:http://getk2.com theme I’m using.  I’m hoping that the changes will make content on the site more available to both repeat and one-time visitors.

First off, I sometimes post links without much comment to a category called “links.”  These posts used to show up in the main column of the front page with a slightly smaller size on the title.  I’ve since moved them into the sidebar on the front page because I thought that they needed to be better differentiated.

Next, I’ve removed the list of my latest posts from the sidebar on the front page, where it was placed by default.  I figure that listing links on my front page to posts that already appear on my front page doesn’t make sense.  In turn, I’ve added it to the sidebar on pretty much every other page figuring that readers who come to my site via search engines, which typically deposit them on one of my individual entires might also be interested in some of my other posts.

I also added the “related entires plugin”:http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/ to help searchers find other posts of potential interest on my site.  The technique it uses is  pretty simple minded  — to find entries related to a given post, it takes the title of the post and uses it to do a search for other entries that contain the same words in the title and body of the post — so the results aren’t always great, but I think it’s better than nothing.  I suspect anything better would be significantly more computationally expensive, and would have to be cached somehow.

Finally, I added a bunch of ugly-ass subscription buttons for adding my feed to various web based RSS aggregators.

Oh, I’ve also listed the wordpress plugins I use for this blog in my list of links on the front page.
None of these really make a lick of difference to those of you subscribed via my full-text RSS feed.  I could probably add the related entries links to the bottom of each RSS item, if you are interested.

I’m interested in your thoughts and comments.