Blackberry Storm 2
Motorola Sholes
and now some HTC phone(s)?

I’d really like something running Android, but if the BB offers a solid choice I think I’d consider that, too.  Hopefully enough of these will drop by the end of the year?

I was reviewing our Verizon plan this weekend and came to this conclusion.  It’s one of those things that I tuck in the back of my mind and try not to think about – I get the emails confirming my card has been charged each month, but when I look into why it’s costing us just under the century mark for basic phone service, I get frustrated.

What brought this on is Verizon’s current Blackberry Buy One Get One Free sale.  I have a pending New Every 2 discount deal, Jen has been wanting a new phone, and I’ve been wanting to try out a smartphone.  (side note: I’ve really been wanting to wait for an Android phone on Verizon….that doesn’t seem to be happening too fast, though :-/ ).  This seemed like an opportunity to at least look into.

Our current plan is a nationwide family plan.  The base plan is $70/month with 1000 minutes between the two lines.  The 2nd line is $10/month, for a grand total of ~$80/month to start.  We have no messaging plan; we only have a few text or picture messages a month.  Paying for them a la carte is cheaper than adding on Verizon’s messaging plan. After fees, taxes, and misc texts our monthly costs are between $90-$95 each month.

That’s where the fun began.  OK, so I can get a Blackberry at a discounted rate, and get a second one of equal or lesser value for free.  Sweet.  But each of those require a BlackBerry plan at $30/month…so if we both get one that’s gonna be $60/month more total.  And that’s with our current plan, with no extra texting alottments either.  Well maybe there’s some better plans out there, right?

Nope.  Their current family plans start at (for the same price we’re paying) 300 fewer minutes per month.  There’s no cost savings for two lines for us to bump up to the next tier, either.  What about individual lines instead of the family plan?  They start at $40/month for 450 minutes, or $60/month for 900 minutes.  Two 450-minute plans would still be $80/month, plus it would possibly cut it close during some months.  PLUS, all of those still require the $30/month BlackBerry plan for any BB device.  Of course, there are dedicated BlackBerry voice/data plans, too.  No family options, only individual lines.  $80/450 minutes and $100/900 minutes respectively.  None of these include an actual text messaging plan, either, which looks to run $10-$20 or so.

In conclusion, it seems that if you want minimum minutes, basic texting, and minimum data usage you’re looking at pretty close to $100/month for each phone in your household.  Cutting out the texting trims that back a little, but not a ton.  Lats time I looked at other carriers, their plans were roughly the same, and frankly Verizon is hands-down the best coverage in the area.  Despite the couple of holes we manage to find in the boondocks, it’s supported much better than AT&T (which would be the next biggest) in the areas I use.

Is this really the price of modern connectivity?

This has been bouncing around the hopper for awhile, but thought it somewhat appropriate given today’s MacWorld announcement that iTunes Music Store would finally be dropping it’s Digital Rights Management on music.

For the past few months I have been getting my online music from Amazon.  Their MP3 store offers most everything I’ve looked for – and the stuff I couldn’t find was pretty obscure.

At Amazon, I don’t have to download and install software to see what they have to offer.  Everything is web based.  I can’t install iTunes on Ubuntu, and don’t want to install it on Windows.  Why should I have to install software to see if they’ve got that one song I’m trying to find?

At Amazon, each track is $.99 or less; many I’ve purchased have been 89 cents.  I’ve always received a high quality MP3 file that I can copy or burn or convert to anywhere or anything I want.

But I think the coolest thing is the used CD selection also available through Amazon sellers.  The MP3 store may offer an entire album for somewhere between 8 and 10 bucks.  But if I’m looking for a used CD, I can get the actual CD shipped for less than $3, and so far they’ve been great quality.  It’ll arrive in a few days, and I can rip it to whatever I want.  This has been great for collecting music that isn’t brand new.

In addition, the Amazon MP3 downloader says it will automatically add new tracks to iTunes for you.  So Apple’s finally eventually going to offer music files you can copy and do with what you want, and let you pay extra to convert your existing ones?  Yay?  Why bother?

What I’ve found strange/interesting is almost immediately I have 6 “followers”, random people that I don’t know and as far as I know don’t have a connection to.  And I haven’t written a single word yet.  After signing up I started following a couple of users off the top of my head, but is this normal?

I’m aware of the über-expensive Herman Miller Aeron chairs, and have read lots of reviews by people who swear by them for office comfort.  But justifying spending a thousand bucks on a chair, heck even $400-500 used, seems crazy.  Now they’ve got the Embody chair, and I want.  Of course, it ups the ante at $1600!

Daaaaaaaaamnnnn.  But it looks so awesome – and if it made the work day more comfortable, then why not?  If you think about it, I spend probably 8 to 9 hours of the day in a desk chair.  A $50 OfficeMax chair that we probably tried to find the cheapest deal on.

It’s a sad state of affairs that we spend the majority of our days either in bed, or in an office chair.  The rest is likely split between a car and/or a couch.  We’ll invest in a good bed, probably even a comfortable couch at some point.  Why do we ignore the office environment, heck even the automobile environment (what do they have out there for ergonomic comfortable car seats)?  Is this overpriced marketing, or are we vastly underspending on needed work environment benefits?

I think I either need to find a rich startup, start a rich startup, or find some crazy coupons.

First, my setup that needs to be backed up:  I have two computers with data in the house that I needed copied somewhere.  Jen has a Windows laptop with ~8-10GB of documents, images, and music, and mine is a Linux laptop with ~2GB of similar data.  I ideally wanted a way to backup both to a single location with a single process, so I could manage the whole thing easily.  I did consider doing local backups at home, but I would probably need to invest in some more hardware first.  I do have a spare “server” of sorts, but I would need a new bigger hard drive, and have to mess around with automating everything.  An external drive for my needs I thought would be more complicated than I preferred, too.  The prospect of online backups intrigued me because they would 1) automate everything for me, running in the background, and 2) automatically be offsite and available anywhere, should something happen locally.  Here’s a rundown of the services I looked at:

Mozy (www.mozy.com)
They offer a “free” home version, that lets you back up up to 2GB for free, no questions asked.  I think this is what my boss uses.  They have unlimited storage for $4.95/month ($59.40/year), and I’ve read that it’s very easy to use.  The thing is, they only offer Windows or Mac clients, and we’ve got more than two gigs of data anyway.

They also have a “mozypro” for businesses, which is set up to backup more than one PC, and geared more towards business use.  Technically, this is probably what I should be looking at, but the lack of a Linux client pretty much clinched it for me.  I did think about just setting up Jen’s PC on it, or trying to copy all of our stuff to a single intermediary location and running mozy on that, but that seemed overly complicated.

The “pro” pricing says:
Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month
Server Licenses: $6.95 + $0.50/GB per month

Additionally, I emailed Mozy’s support, explaining my situation and what I wanted to do, and have yet to hear back from them two weeks later.  Hmmmmm….

Carbonite (www.carbonite.com)
I’ve heard this mentioned with Mozy above, it sounds like maybe it’s not quite as easy to use, but priced well.  It’s $49.95/year for unlimited backups.  I think this would only be for one computer (like the mozyhome version), but is slightly cheaper.  Same deal with the Linux client, and I couldn’t find any references to handling multiple PCs.

Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com)
This is the one I went with at home.  I don’t know if it’s as easy to use or setup as the others, but it was the only one I found that met our situation at home.  They have a partnership with Amazon’s storage service, so you pay for Jungle Disk, and then you pay for the amount of space you use for your backups.

They have a “desktop edition” that is a one-time $20 purchase, and can be installed on as many computers as you want (so it says…I’m not sure how that would work for separate data sets).  Then you only pay for what you backup:
Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB of data uploaded
$0.17 per GB of data downloaded
Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 upload requests
$0.01 per 10,000 download requests

So depending on the amount of stuff needed to backup, it can cost less per month than some of the other guys.  Basically you’re charged $.15 each month for every GB you have stored, and $.10 per GB of what you upload (backup).  Initially the backup upload will be larger, but then it only incrementally uploads what has changed.  If you download (restore) anything, it costs you $.17 per GB.  I’m not sure how the Requests pricing works exactly, I’m not sure if each file upload counts as an upload request or not…it looks that way now that I just checked the account page.

I went with their multi-computer “workgroup” edition, which is $2/month for each client, plus the above storage costs.  It lets me manage each of our backups separately, but from one place, and should cost roughly 5-6 dollars a month to backup both of our computers.  So far the Linux client installed on Ubunutu just fine, and seems to be working great.  I’ve still got to set things up on Jen’s computer, but I don’t expect a problem there.

All in all, I like the idea of having our data securely backed up, but off the premises.  Since Amazon’s storage service is behind it all, I’m not that worried about it going away anytime soon.  The initial data upload takes some time, but after that everything seems pretty straightforward and easy so far!

Basically an article on a newspaper website was somehow placed on it’s “latest business news” section.  Google’s automated news crawler detected that a new link was on that page, and so indexed the page.  The article in question was an undated article from 2002 detailing United Airlines’ bankruptcy filings.  Once Google had indexed the article, people who had Google Alerts set up for United Airlines started getting messages, and it started filtering throughout the internet.  The way I understand it is that people then started trading the stock, which eventually brough automated stock trading programs in on the action.  End result?  UAL dropped from $12.50 a share to $3 before trading was halted and real people started straightening things out.

I don’t know what it is, but I find this fascinating, horrible, and awesome.  Maybe it’s my intense hatred for the airline industry in general.  The thought that a freak oversight somewhere (and I think reports have started to say it was an error on the newspaper site that the original article was undated) can potentially drive a mega-corporation into the ground blows my mind.  It’s crazy to think about how the world has become so automated and interconnected that something like this would happend in the first place!