The Daily Parker

I was going to post about the virtues of the Cubs and the T-Mobile G1, but the latter revealed its limitations while I used it to extol the former. Suffice to say: Cubs won, G1 tied, and it's time to go inside.

Oh, good game. Very good game. It looked grim until the bottom of the 8th, when the Sox gave up a 4-run lead as the Cubs tied it up. Then Alfonso Soriano earned his paycheck today with a game-winning RBI in the 9th.

I also have to say, my new phone is so friggin' cool, it can do this:

Photos and reviews of Ribfest tomorrow morning. Right now, though, I'm all about the novelty of updating TDP from my phone. Also tomorrow, I'll explain why this is a bigger deal than it seems.

I upgraded from a Dash to the T-Mobile Sidekick XL 2009 today. I'm returning it tomorrow.

I need three things from a SmartPhone, all of which my 2-year-old Dash has:

1. Access to email, through POP3.
2. Synchronization with Outlook.
3. Web browsing.

It does #3 incredibly well. Sadly, though, despite 90 minutes with two different support people at T-Mobile, I can't get #1 or #2. The support CSRs didn't know why, but I figured it out, and I have to say even if I explained to them they still wouldn't know.

Issue 1: POP email.

I'm in the unusual position of having direct access to Exchange POP logs. (The Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center is across the room.) After setting up my POP account on my Sidekick—the very first thing I did when I got it charged up—I watched it tell me that it logged in and that it downloaded my messages. Then I saw an empty inbox.

According to the Exchange logs, though, it simply logged into Exchange and logged out again. Lots of Menu-U pressing later (the "get email" command, which had no effect, again according to Exchange), about half an hour later it again logged into Exchange and this time it sent the POP3 command for a directory of messages. Only, it didn't download any of them. It just logged out again.

I'll cut a lot of my sleuthing out, but it seems that my Sidekick isn't the entity logging into my Exchange server. No, that's Danger, the manufacturer, which is caching my login credentials and my messages.

I'll say that again: COMPLETE STRANGERS ARE CACHING MY NETWORK LOGIN CREDENTIALS. Does anyone else see the problem here? Excuse me for a moment while I change my password...

OK, that's just not acceptable. My Dash communicated directly with my Exchange server, so the only place the credentials were stored was on the phone. If I lost my phone, I'd change my credentials. That's Security 101. But giving them to some company in California? Um. No.

Issue 2 is related.

First of all, the two CSRs could not determine that I need to buy software called Intellisync from Danger (for $10). This software seems redundant, since again my humble Dash simply used Windows' Mobile Device Center, which is, as its name implies, part of Windows. Worse, no one told the CSRs that this software was required, so I had to sit on the phone while one of them actually searched Google to try to find out why I couldn't sync my phone.

Second, after reading more documentation and user posts on the T-Mobile support forums, it turns out that Intellisync copies a user's contacts, calendar, and tasks from Outlook up to—yes—Danger's servers.

Let me say that again: in order to use this Sidekick the way I used my Dash, I'd have to GIVE TOTAL STRANGERS ALL OF MY PERSONAL INFORMATION.

T-Mobile should be ashamed. On what planet do people require such a complete invasion of privacy just to use basic smartphone features? And why don't you tell your CSRs about how this works? I write software for a living. Let me tell you: it's a lot easier to debug something when you know how it's supposed to work. If your CSRs don't understand the basic premises of how the product works (e.g., hitting Menu-U does nothing to the Exchange server because the phone is communicating through an intermediary), they're hobbled.

I would like to have known these things before buying the phone, but none of this information is exactly easy to find. With good reason: I think if more people knew about this, T-Mobile would have trouble selling the thing.

Via Beth Filar Williams, the Douglas County, Colo., Public Library has installed a device that brings daylight into the center of the building:

The following photo shows a programmer, a usability expert, and an IT manager struggling to figure out how to add players to a bowling game using AMF's scoring software. I don't even remember the sequence we had to go through, but I do remember thinking (a) on average, we were sober; and (b) software that makes something so simple take so long should be punishable...in some appropriate way.

On the other hand, one doesn't go to a bowling alley because of the software they use. On the first hand, however, bad software makes everything less fun.

And yes, Virginia, Bengt (right) is wearing a custom-made bowling shirt. One of the other bowlers gave it to him for his birthday, which is how I came to be at a bowling alley, and sometime later that evening, at a seriously hard-core karaoke bar. Tambourines were involved, I recall...

Programmers and other nerds probably know of Bookpool.com, a technical-book seller on Martha's Vineyard. Knew, I should say. The retailer shut down in March. They had the best selection and by far the quickest shipping of any specialty bookseller I've used. It's a shame, really.

As I'm less than three months from starting an MBA program designed to foster international relationships, I don't know what to make of this:

[F]oreign (or, more euphemistically, "international") students are thinking twice about handing over their hard-earned and recession-hit cash for an education at a prestigious Western hall of academe.

... Big private business schools in America, already hit by the much lower valuations of their endowment funds, seem likely to take the biggest hit. The American-based Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), a regular surveyor of MBA graduates and recruiters, presciently noted in its 2008 Global MBA Graduate Survey that "graduates who attended full-time MBA programmes outside their country of citizenship rated overall value lower compared with graduates who attended similar programmes in their home country".

... Three factors are likely to weigh heavily on international students’ willingness to travel abroad to study: financing their studies, fears about the jobs market and the availability or otherwise of good business schools in their home country.

I'm very interested to see the composition of my CCMBA class. So far, to judge by the 25 or so of us who have submitted biographies to the class portal, about 2/3 of us are from the U.S., 1/3 from the rest of the world.

The article mentions, as a tangent, that the U.K. Border Agency maintains a list of the top 50 MBA programs worldwide. Fuqua is on the list, which means Fuqua graduates can get a working visa from Britain under the Highly Skilled Workers scheme nearly automatically.

...I can identify this as an example of non-price competition in an environment of monopolistic competition. It's also damned funny.

Via Sullivan, I suddenly feel very old:

We extracted about 75 percent of the responses on age (representing about 700 responses, taking equally from the earliest and most recent postings, which show very similar age distributions). Per John Makinson's quip at an LBF panel, over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older, and 70 percent are 40 or older.

So many users said they like Kindle because they suffer from some form of arthritis that multiple posters indicate that they do or do not have arthritis as a matter of course. A variety of other impairments, from weakening eyes and carpal-tunnel-like syndromes to more exotic disabilities dominate the purchase rationales of these posters.

Wait! I'm not 40 yet! And I see just fine, with a little help.

This, on the day that I took a final exam in a class (Introduction to Microeconomics) in which every other student was younger than half my age. Yes, there were about 50 of us in there, and the day the Berlin Wall fell down I was older than they are now.

Sigh.