I recently acquired a second-hand BlackBerry 7290, which was fortunate timing as my Sony-Ericsson T226 was constantly complaining that the SIM card was dislodged, requiring a power-cycle.

The good news is that I didn't pay anything for the BB. Which is just as well, as it has less mobile data functionality than both the T226 (~3 years old, formerly on a Rogers contract) and my old T68i (that I bought in ~2002 and brought with me to Canada).

See, whilst the BB has a bigger screen for websurfing and appears to have GPRS, it won't let me connect to any websites. Why is it I can download pictures and midi files (T226 can use them as ringtones) on Rogers PAYG via WAP on both the T226 and T68i, but can't get jack all on the BlackBerry's GPRS? The BB is locked on the Rogers network, so there's absolutely no reason why GPRS on a BB should be any different to GPRS on a Sony-Ericsson. MidpSSH doesn't work either. Also, on the old Rogers firmware and the new version I installed, both did not have a browser icon, so I had to install OperaMini via desktop manager and USB.

One thing I did notice is that the config on the Sony-Ericssons asks for an APN, APN userid and password, plus an IP address. There's no IP address field on the BB.

My guess is that the BB can't WAP surf and instead relies entirely on BES or BIS for its MDS. Since BES/BIS costs more and is only available on contract, it seems that the BlackBerry is over-rated, at least for non-business use. In fact, that begs the next question: why does my BB show "GSM", then "GPRS" with the signal strength, if it can't do anything on GPRS?

Okay, I can't download pictures via WAP, so I try using the desktop manager. Nope, that doesn't work either, as it doesn't allow me to specify pictures to upload - all I can do is backup the entire device to one big file.

Hmmmm, what about infra-red? No... unlike my ~6 year-old T68i, the BB has no IR connectivity that will enable my laptop to send files to it.

Alright, it has BlueTooth. So I manage to pair the T68i and BB up, but can't do anything once the two are talking to each other. Can't even sync-up address books.

A-ha, what if I send the pics over MMS? No... the BB doesn't even recognise MMS messages and totally ignores them. As a point of comparison, I can MMS in both directions between both Ericssons and the wife's Motorola V220.

The only success I had was to use the directions given in this forum. It does work but it's a heck of a lot of effort.

My advice to anyone considering buying a BlackBerry for personal use: DON'T. I'm sure that with corporate BES or BIS, it's a productivity tool, but as a "standalone" phone/PDA it's useless without a[n over-priced] data plan.

Reading about Motorola's woes today, it comes as no surprise to see their share price drop by 23%. For the longest time, the market droids at Motorola stuck to the same old tired formulaic nomenclature. Eventually, even the fashion victims (the POSRs) grow weary of 4-letter, missing-vowel names.

LOSRs!

We've had Rogers cable for our internet connection for at least 6 years.

In the beginning, it was great. I'd tell the AOL-bies to get a proper internet connection, not a Mickey Mouse one.

Then Rogers started messing around with their network. Suddenly, DNS would stop working for hours at a time; email servers wouldn't work, or would take forever to send messages; stupid re-branding to "Rogers Yahoo!" etc. So, I installed my own SMTP and caching-DNS servers. Then Rogers started blocking port 25 outbound. So now I have to use webmail. Then Rogers starts frequently moving me around their IP space. I called them 3 years ago and they said they planned to introduce static IP's "sometime in the near future". Never happened.

"Their network, their rules", you may say. True. But when their own advertising states that their service is suitable for transferring large files, then they have no business traffic-shaping my connection to throttle BitTorrent.

This was the final straw. Aside from the fact that their internet connection prices are actually expensive, even after a bundled discount, I refuse to be screwed over any longer.

So, I am moving over to Caneris, a local DSL provider that is hobby-server and BitTorrent friendly. And, unlike Rogers, who didn't get a clue when I told them I don't like to be randomly moved around their IP space every so often, Caneris offers static IP addresses.

Another advantage to moving my internet away from Todgers (not a typo) is that I have one less reason to call them whenever my internet is down and have to speak to that god-awful voice-activated IVR system. On behalf of all the Rogers customers who have to spend ages on the phone talking to a deaf computer before even getting through to one of Rogers' inept script-monkey CSR's, thank you Ted Rogers.

It seems that there is an exodus right now too.

And it's not going to stop there: the next move away from Rogers will be to port my PAYG cell account away (probably to Primus Wireless, but not decided yet).

So, perhaps my blog title is not quite correct. It's not so much "goodbye", it's more like "good riddance".

Following on from a post I made on Who Called Us, that proves my theorem of never trusting a company that uses numbers in place of words in their company name, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to coin a new term: "numeric homophone".

Unfortunately, someone else beat me to it, hence the unique single Google search result (or Googlewhack). Of course, by the time this blog post gets archived by Google, the term will no longer be a Googlewhack! <edit>After posting this opinion, Google archived this blog in 7 minutes!</edit>

I could've coined this term back in 2006, when I opined on the Sony Root-kit Fiasco. Oh well!

<edit>Hmmm, after looking at the Googlewhack website, it seems that the term is not a true Googlewhack if the search result is from two words enclosed in quotes. Seems like a silly rule to me, as quotes makes the search specific, as opposed to finding links that contain the words "numeric" and "homophone" in any order on the sites. As the Wikipedia article says, most Googlewhacks are nonsense words.

What's also strange is that when I removed the quotes, I actually got a search result for the words "numeric" and "homophone" right next to each other. In theory, these search results should have come back when quotes were used. In fact, this appears to be a bug, as the two words are sequential, but only inside a PDF file.</edit>

For the Google archive, I am quoting a transcript of a telejunker's toll-free announcer:

<quote>
[1 second burst of music] You have reached our automated information system. You're probably calling one of our toll-free numbers that appeared on your display phone. Fund-raising efforts are now well under way and we will be calling you back to explain the programs we have for this year. Calling you is the most cost-effective way to reach our goal. If you prefer, contact our Customer Information Centre at [1-8xx-xxx-xxxx]. They will be glad to provide you with any further information. Those phones are staffed 9AM to 9PM Eastern Time. Goodbye for now.
</quote>

More information on this telejunker-for-hire can be found here (just follow the links, or search here or here).

If you've been contacted by a "charity" such as The Fraternal Order of Police ["FOP"] or a State Troopers' organisation, chances are you've been tele-spammed by Xentel DM, AKA Xentel Inc (in the US). Be aware that most of the organisations that Xentel calls on behalf of do not have charitable (tax deductable) status and even then, Xentel keeps ~80% or more of the donations.

Unfortunately, Xentel exploits/abuses a loophole in the law that allows non-profit organisations to harass scam call anyone, even if you have registered for the DNC list. The fact that Xentel makes millions of dollars a year in profit, doesn't seem to matter to either the FCC or the CRTC. It seems that only the state AG's do any real job of spanking these telespammers.

I love my VoIP service. In the bad old POTS days, we'd get 3, 4... 5 telejunk calls a day, 7 days a week, some days worse than others.

Now I can block the telespammers, my phone only rings for the occasional low-level telejunker: usually a local duct cleaner, or some 2-bit company trying to hawk windows and doors. All the toll-free numbers go straight to voicemail.

Repeat offenders get auto-forwarded to an out-of-service number. But, just as the email spammers ignore 5.5.x SMTP error messages and keep trying an email address that will never deliver, it seems the tele-spammers' autodialers ignore "number out of service" messages too:

SelectiveCallFwd   112595140000002    Unavailable 2007-10-20
SelectiveCallFwd   112595140000002    Unavailable 2007-10-27

Here are a few more parallels:

Email Spammer	Tele-Spammer
Ignores 5.5.x mailer messages.	Ignores "out-of-service" messages.
Plays numbers game: harasses millions of email users with unsolicited messages for one lousy sale.	Plays numbers game: harasses millions of phone users with unsolicited calls and voicemail messages for one lousy sale.
Sells "sucker lists" of email addresses.	Sells "sucker lists" of phone numbers.
Routinely forges "from" addresses.	Routinely forges Caller ID.
Uses rogue ISP’s to host their "bulletproof" websites.	Uses rogue SIP providers to host their VoIP systems.
Obfuscates messages to bypass spam filters.	Obfuscates Caller ID to bypass Privacy Guard.
Uses cost-shifted advertising to spam your mailbox.	Uses cost-shifted advertising to spam your cell-phone.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, including parallels between tele-junkers and fax spammers.

My personal favourite site for reporting telejunkers: Who Called Us.

A few weeks back, I purchased a Panasonic DMR-ES16 DVD Recorder. So far, I'm really pleased with it. The functionality is great and it's very easy to use, even for a beginner.

Of course, I needed discs to record on, so I bought a stack of 50 no-name DVD-R's for movies we edited in MovieMaker from our mini-DVD camcorder. I also bought a stack of 25 4.7GB 4x DVD+RW's, manufactured by CyberHome [more CamelCase].

So far, 2 of the 25 discs have failed to format. Even if none of the other discs fail, that's a fairly bad failure rate.

Naturally, I did not have the luxury of checking out CyberHome's reputation, as I bought the discs on impulse when I got my DVD Recorder. In hindsight, had I visited their website [or in this case, webshite] I would not have bought this brand anyway. Seeing a domain-parking page with their logo would not have inspired confidence in their brand. Perhaps they can't afford to maintain their webshite, after federal agencies seized more than 20,000 CyberHome-brand DVD recorders that allegedly used Philips patents without a license last year.

Just in case anyone's interested (since Googling for "authoring engine failed" yielded only 2 search results with no clear answer) I managed to get PowerProducer to work in the end.

Since I don't have the time to test each of these 3 remedies separately, I did all of them before re-attempting the burn:

(1) Although I had over 12GB free, I deleted the source .WMV files that I had used in MovieMaker to make the final cut - this freed up ~2GB.
(2) Pulled a different DVD-R from the stack.
(3) Ran PowerProducer under an Admin account.

I really don't know which one (or more) of these remedies worked, but now PowerProducer is working again. Still, I stand by what I said originally: that hardware manufacturers test OEM software before releasing it with their products.

When I purchased an LG multi-DVD rewriter drive, I acquired a software suite with CyberLink PowerProducer [their CamelCase, not mine].

Honestly, this program is a piece of crapware. Not only does it take HOURS for it to generate the DVD top-menu, it seems to take just as long to actually finish the burn process, so I usually set it to do its work overnight.

So I set this program running last night and find a cryptic error message this morning:
"Burning Failed
PowerProducer has failed to complete the task(s) because:
(e0080007)
Possible cause(s):
Authoring engine failed."

I mean, what kind of idiotic error message is this? It doesn't tell me the cause, only that it possibly, perhaps, might be due to the "authoring engine failed" (whatever the fsck that is - Googling for "authoring engine" yields many different types of applications, from 3D RPG's to DVD's). Was the DVD-R bad? Did I run out of disk space? Not enough memory? WHAT?

Of course, it couldn't tell me this shortly after I started the burn process (I had it running for about 30 minutes or so before shutting the monitor off).

LG and all the other manufacturers who bundle OEM DVD software: you really need to test these OEM software suites before bundling them with your hardware.

Reading a News Bar article today, about spam-fighters who close down spamvertised websites, I was amazed at the amount of sites project KnujOn has claimed to close down.

Apparently, 32,000+ sites are 404-compliant due to their hard work. And that's a lot of hard work, given that many of the big-player ISP's are still spam-friendly. Then it occurred to me: that's a lot of time and money these folks have invested in contacting these ISP's and webhosts. Must be a full-time job!

When everyone adopts tagged email addresses, the real culprits (the ones who sell your personal information) will be exposed. Turning off a tagged address won't prevent that first piece of UCE coming in, but at least it guarantees you won't be bothered again. Of course, there are some that believe that temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome. True, but not as cumbersome as JHD'ing or continually tweaking filters/blocklists.

The trouble with most anti-spammers, is that they like to in-fight. Very few will have anything positive to say, only comment that this won't work, that won't work. They're like the PFJ versus the JPF:

Naturally, project KnujOn hasn't closed down 32,000+ spammers, only 32,000+ websites operated by around 50 groups of spammers. Not that I'm not grateful, but this means that they are simply playing Whac-A-Mole, providing short-term relief from the current tide of spam flowing from rogue networks.