Dev::Blog

When mobile companies say that there isn’t much of a market for the whole mobile browsing experience, it really isn’t that hard to figure out why that might be - I just saw a Bell Mobility ad in the paper with a $20 plan that included something called “Mobile Browser Lite” - a whopping 100Kb per month of data, with a 5 cent per 100Kb charge for overage. Wow. That means that you could read this blog 3 times a month on your phone for no additional charge! Yeah, that’ll get them screaming for the service, all right…

This reminds me of Bell’s lame WiFi experiment. They picked two pilot locations for a free hotspot. The first was at Union Station in Toronto, which wasn’t a bad idea, except that they put it somewhere where there weren’t many seats (and most people were commuters where were really near their internet-powered workplaces), and the other was at some park in Kingston, Ontario. There was some usage (there weren’t many hotspots available at the time, and certainly not many free ones), but amazingly, once they started charging for it, demand dropped off.

Bell Marketing is awesome. I bet they could find a way to prove that there’s no demand for free money.

Internet Help Desk reminded me of many episodes in my (very distant) help desk past, but particularly of my Very First Time.

I was in grade 9, I think, and my friend’s family had just bought a Tandy 1000 SX (with three voice sound!) Of course, they were having trouble with it, and we had the same computer, so he called me. I already knew everything about computers, or at least how to run CopyWrite, so I gave it a shot, not even knowing that I was starting on a phone support path that would eventually pay many of my bar tuition bills.

I’ll save you the wind-up, since you just watched a whole video of similar nonsense - the monitor wasn’t plugged into the computer.

What, haven’t had enough yet? There’s always this classic…

(via Angie McKaig)

Dennis Forbes wrote up some interesting Facts About Domain Names, which included a few semi-useless four letter names that were still available, like agjv.com. Sure enough, that one was registered on the day the article was posted. eiyk.com, however, seems to still be available.

I managed to resist the urge to pick up any of the other low hanging names mentioned in the post, but it still inspired me to doodle around at Whois.net. I ended up picking up fartle.com, because I thought it was a funny name. It wasn’t until after that I looked it up and discovered the semi-official definitions. Right now I’m thinking it’d make a good name for an e-card site. Any other ideas?

(via Seth)