The local AT&T stores sold out of the iPhone 3G by around 9 AM.  The salespeople are telling customers that they can order and pay for an iPhone today, and they will get it by “direct fulfillment”, which they explain means that the phone will show up at the store in 7-10 working days for [...]

I needed some relatively minor medical care, and wanted to get it done today rather than wait for an appointment to see a doctor.  It wasn’t serious enough to require a trip to the emergency room, so I drove to an urgent care clinic in Cupertino.  It’s not that close to where I live, but [...]

I work at a fairly large company, and the cafeterias will let employee put money on their badges to be used for later purchases. I don’t usually do that, but I suppose it’s convenient for people that don’t want to carry cash, since the cafeteria doesn’t accept debit cards. (I think accepting debit [...]

At the end of my vacation, I had to ship four boxes from Colorado to California.  They weren’t ready to go until late Sunday afternoon.  Fortunately for me, one of the side effects of the Fedex acquisition of Kinkos is that one can drop off packages for Fedex (air or ground) at Fedex Kinko’s locations, [...]

I finally decided to get a cellular data service, Sprint Mobile Broadband (EVDO). Short summary: I’ve only tried using it at my office so far, but the performance is great. I’m getting over 500 Kbps downstream, with round-trip ping times of less than 100 ms. The latency is low enough that [...]

I previously wrote about using the Logitech V200 cordless notebook optical mouse with my laptop. My only complaint with the V200 was that while the receiver snaps onto the bottom of the mouse for storage (and powers off the mouse in the process), it doesn’t stay securely fastened. I suggested that Logitech should [...]

I despise touchpads. Most of my laptops have had a “pointing stick“, which works quite well. By comparison, a touchpad is, well, “touchy”. It tends to respond at inappropriate times when my hand is just near the pad but not touching it, and causes the cursor to zing off into the corner. [...]

I previously wrote about problems with switching to a Cingular FamilyTalk rate plan.  The gist was that because I was a former AT&TWS customer, I had to upgrade my phone, or at least the SIM card, in order to switch to the FamilyTalk plan.  A new SIM card would cost $25, but they were willing [...]

I wanted to add a second line to my cellular account, using Cingular’s “Nation 1400 FamilyTalk w/ Rollover” plan. Naturally I had to get a second phone, so I ordered one from them. My existing phone is a Palm Treo 650 quad-band GSM phone, which is fully compatible with the Cingular GSM network. [...]

I wanted two extra AC adapters for an HP Pavilion dv5210us laptop computer. HP and all the usual places wanted around $70-80. But a Google search for the part number turned up GetPartsOnline.com, which has genuine HP adapters in stock for about $32. The original adapter was a 65W, and the one [...]