I’ll give just a few tips here on how to do this, it’s not terribly hard.

• It’s easier to go around the edges with the eraser than to use the “magic scissors”.
• Don’t resize the image until you’re otherwise done.
• Don’t crop it until after you resize. Otherwise you’ll have your drop-shadow cropped off.

The coolest thing about this photo is that Noah was my photographer. He was not quite 3 years old at the time.

I finally got around to connecting to the Internet through my GSM phone. My phone is a Motorola V200 and my service is through Cingular, but through a corporate account (so it’s really AT&T still).

Here’s my wvdial.conf:

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800
Init1 = ATH
Init2 = ATE1
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,IP,proxy,0.0.0.0,0,0
Phone = *99***1#
Username = guest
Password = guest

I have several sites to thank for the info but primarily this one and the ones that it links to.

We had a guy from one of the big cellular carriers at a lecture for the College of Engineering a while back. One of the things he talked about was how great their data capabilities were and how strange they thought it was that more people didn’t use that service. While it’s true that there are some huge advantages to using GPRS (very wide availability, exceptional roaming) it costs way too much. But perhaps more important than the cost is the pricing model. Cellular providers still charge per-kilobyte.

There are a few problems with this pricing model.

1. The user doesn’t have much control over what bits will come back down the pipe at him, or up the pipe from him for that matter. With worms on the Internet and long flash banner ads on the Web this is even more true.
2. The average user doesn’t know what it is, or at least doesn’t have a sense of what the scale is. This is closely related to the first problem.
3. It’s not what we’re used to. I’ll grant that people are used to paying by the minute for their cellular voice service but nobody (nobody sane in the US at least) is paying for Internet service per-minute or per-kilobyte.

A flat monthly rate competetive with traditional broadband would work better but to get people to actually use it it would have to cost less than broadband. Why? Because it’s slower. I care more about speed than I do about mobility and I’ll bet you do too. Why? Because you can’t type (or mouse) while driving, or walking, or otherwise being “mobile”.

Yes, I know you shouldn’t be talking on a phone while driving either but at least it doesn’t demand both your hands and your eyes.

Excellent email on the subject of design by committee from Dan Winship.

I heartily agree. This is something we often struggle with in Corporate America and in the Open Source Community. It is a big part of why my project at work isn’t progressing at the rate it could be.