John Borwick’s blog

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I just upgraded from my Cingular 8125 to the AT&T Tilt. The Tilt is a neat looking phone.

As you may know, I was very attached to my 8125. I learned pretty much everything there is to know about the “vanilla” 8125. In particular, I use Tasks like nobody’s business.

The Tilt runs Windows Mobile 6. WM6 apparently has a bug where its “Active Tasks” filter shows tasks with a start date in the future. That is, it shows you stuff you’re not supposed to start until 6 months from now as “active.” This is frustrating, as I have tasks going well into 2009 that I don’t want to see.

My other issue with the Tilt is it no longer has a voice recorder button. Instead, it has a “PTT” (Push To Talk) button. This button lets you pay AT&T money (it’s their walkie talkie system). I cannot override what this button does. I no longer have a one-button solution for voice recordings.

Those two very frustrating issues aside, the Tilt is much faster than the 8125, has an awesome 3 megapixel camera, has lights to show when you’re hitting the shift or function keys, and has some neat new programs on it. It’s frustrating because you can just tell that marketers got ahold of it and added their junk, but outside of that, the task thing, and the voice recorder thing I’m pretty happy with it.

Update: This AT&T forum explains how to make the PTT button map to the voice recorder:

1. Download a registry editor e.g. PHM Registry Editor
2. Delete everything under and including HKLM/Services/PTT
3. Create HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shell\Keys\40C6 as a Key, and under that String Value named “Name”, value “Button 6″
4. Create HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shell\Keys\40C7 as a Key, and under that String Value named “Name”, value “Button 6 (hold)”
5. Soft reset

(I’m recording this here because I know I’m going to need to do this every time I hard reset the phone.)

Also, “Pocket Informant” looks to use Windows tasks as its basis, but it doesn’t have the active tasks future date limitation. So it would still work with ActiveSync but it would show my tasks the way I like!

I accidentally deleted my Cingular/AT&T 8125 cell phone settings for connecting to the cell phone data network.  To fix it, I

1. Went to start -> settings
2. Connections tab -> Connections
3. Add a new modem connection
4. Set the number to “wap.cingular,” the username to WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM, and the password to CINGULAR1
5. Done

It’s easy!  Also by deleting all my data settings my phone will no longer try to “dial” a phone number that never works when it tries to connect.

I just switched my pobox.com account so it forwards to gmail. That’s one of the reasons why I love pobox.com; as long as you’re pretty good about advertising the pobox.com address over the actual address it forwards to, you can change your “back-end” system pretty easily.

I changed because I’d been experimenting with mixing work and personal e-mail–and that system has worked really well, because I can check that e-mail on my phone, but for a while I want to try gmail.com + alerts of some kind.

Greg (from work) has been talking up how awesome Priceline is.  He uses it to find all his hotel rooms.

Lauren and I are going to Asheville for a vacation at the end of October.  I just tried Priceline’s “get a cheap rate by saying how much you would be willing to pay” service.  I think my rate was too cheap; I tried to get a three-star hotel for $80, $90, $100, $110, and $120/night but didn’t find anything.  (There are only three 3-star hotels and they’re all in the same zone, so you can ask to search an additional “zone” and still be quoting the same hotels.)

I’ve given the utilities and some other people like my insurance company the new Grand Central phone number.  So far it’s worked OK, although the insurance guy thought he was being asked to leave a message so his name identifier is “Hi John this is…”

I tried to demo Grand Central’s “call out” feature to Greg this afternoon, but it didn’t work.  Grand Central didn’t call my phone to initiate the first part of the two-way call.  Also my phone/Grand Central wouldn’t let me hit “1″ to answer Greg’s (separate) call; I don’t know if it was my phone not sending the right tone or Grand Central ignoring my phone.

My cell phone has been getting worse and worse; I’m not sure if it’s some kind of memory leak, or AT&T’s sub-optimal cell phone coverage, or both.  I don’t think phones were meant to be used more than two years nowadays.

I just created a Grand Central account.  Grand Central is a phone service: you get a phone number that routes callers where-ever you want.  The main things I like about Grand Central are

• you can choose what happens to callers when they call: all your phones (work/cell) can ring, for example, or you could have a “do not disturb” message
• your voicemail is stored on-line for all calls that go through Grand Central
• you can “call out” through Grand Central so your grand central number shows up in your call-ee’s caller ID
• you can try out a service like the Gizmo Project (a Skype-like phone program) and no one has to know the phone number or that you’re using your computer
• the site and service has a lot of potential–for example, Google purchased them.

Here are a few tricks I’ve learned so far about Grand Central:

• The “mid-call switch” function (hitting * while talking) is not reliable, because all your other phones ring, and they don’t get asked whether you want them to pick up, so you can start hearing your other phones’ voicemail
• Ideally I think I would want to change all my other phone numbers so no one knows them and they are forced to use Grand Central
• Ideally I would turn off voicemail and any other “non-ringing” features (e.g. Gizmo says “the caller is not available” when you’re not logged in)
• It would be really nice to receive SMS via your grand central number
• Only one Grand Central person can be assigned to a phone, so Lauren and I cannot each use Grand Central for our home phone line

So, anyways, I’m trying it: 336-283-0173.

I installed Oracle 10g express edition on my Thinkpad.  I’ve had PL/SQL developer on my work machine for a while but I don’t use it much because I don’t have a database to play around with.  I created some simple tables, triggers, and sequences in my test database.

At work we’ve been debugging some ETL (extract/transfer/load) issues with our Operational Data Store.  Everyone has been using PL/SQL developer or TOAD.  I’m kind of in the dark when I see people using these tools because I’m not sure what all they use them for.  Sometimes they use them to find database objects; sometimes they use them to help see what tables are used by a view.  Now I can get a sense of what PL/SQL developer does and what Oracle security looks like.

I have been looking for a remote network backup solution for myself, and also for another person who wants to back up their office network. Here’s what I want:

1. Nightly automated incremental remote (at least 90 miles away) backup of at least one machine, perhaps more, of at least 250 gb of data
2. Ability to restore files, maybe not from bare metal, with up to 4 hours of “lag time” before data starts coming back
3. The remote backup is someone else’s responsibility to verify. For example if the data’s going to a tape, and a tape goes bad, some other entity is responsible for detecting that within some period of time and asking for the data to be sent again

Notably, I do not need point in time restores and it’s OK if it takes a long time to restore the data.

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Last week I booted up FreeBSD partition for the first time in a while, so I could run ‘portupdate’. That’s ended up taking a while, as the UPDATING comment says “You are about to embark on a mystical journey…”

I was booting up FreeBSD to try to write a mechanize.py script to help me screen-scrape through a web site’s list of users and compile them. I ended up giving up; it’d take me a while to write the script, plus I realized that just the FreeBSD boot-up process was going to take a while.

At my job now I don’t strictly need to program. I like programming, and I always have, but because I’m not having to program I’m getting a little rusty. It’s scary! I don’t want to stop knowing python, or FreeBSD, or system administration!

I’ve been learning a little about Oracle, and our ERP system to compensate and to help give me the background I need for understanding problems now.