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So, all the way back on December 17, 2003 I complained that the GPRS service for my Cingular-supplied mobile phone wasn’t working. I griped again on December 18, and again on January 19 and February 17. The ugly truth though is that since the second complaint, I just gave up on calling Cingular and started waiting for the service to start working on its own. I’m going out of town for the weekend, and I’m going to need access to baseball scores, so I finally worked up the energy to call Cingular and work the problem out. I called the customer support line, went through some steps, and it didn’t work, so they told me to call tech support. I did that. We did some stuff. They told me to call back on a land line. I did that. We did some stuff. They transferred me to another group (data communications, I think). We did a bunch of stuff. Still didn’t work. They turned off my service. They turned my service back on. Things started working, and I am now GPRS enabled. Unfortunately, now my phone seems to be getting corrupt text messages from somewhere every few minutes. One thing at a time, I guess. ...

McSweeney’s: PROS AND CONS OF JOHN KERRY’S TOP TWENTY VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES. Hi-larious.

If you’ve ever done much programming in Perl, you’ll get a laugh out of this periodic table of Perl operators. (It’s a PDF, but it’s still worth checking out.)

Why did the White House trot John Ashcroft out before the nation yesterday to warn us about an attack that may occur at some point in the future somewhere in America? Not, I think, because they want to scare people into supporting President Bush. Rather, because of the 9/11 Commission. The message of the public hearings was that you’ll get smacked around after the fact if you don’t let people know before the fact that you’re on the terrorism beat. Somebody wrote a PDB with a title like “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the United States” or something, and the administration reacted by sending John Ashcroft to let us know that something might happen. Not helpful, but not surprising, either. ...

I’m a big fan of Eric Sink’s weblog. He runs a small software company and is very knowledgeable when it comes to running a software business. His company makes a well-regarded replacement for Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, which everyone knows is an utter piece of crap. On Monday, he posted about Microsoft’s announcement that they’re tired of leaving the source control market to anyone who makes a product less crappy than SourceSafe. I’ve actually known about this for a long time because some former coworkers of mine are working on the Microsoft team here that’s developing Hatteras (the version control system), and I had wondered what Sink would say about it when the news broke. He says that Hatteras is aimed at ClearCase, which I think is true. He supposes that it’s going to be really expensive. That’s not the impression that I get, but I do think it will be more expensive than Vault. Interestingly, Hatteras was in development when Sink wrote this last April: ...

Chad Dickerson’s column in InfoWorld tells the story of how he helped a stranger get their rental car reservation via the miracle of wireless Internet access. The story is more impressive than my summary suggests.

Gruhn Guitars in Nashville is selling the most important single guitar in the history of country music for $575,000. The guitar belonged to Maybelle Carter.

Looks like Slashdot got gamed by a Nazi.

A local paper is providing a weblog for any political candidate that wants to set one up. Unfortunately, you have to register to see them. Ed Cone has the inside scoop.

After reading this, I’m glad my doctor is a woman. Via Follow Me Here.