Live from Austin!

In mid November, our contract with AT&T (formerly Cingular) expired. We switched to T-Mobile and got BlackBerry Curve phones.

I was a BlackBerry skeptic for a long time. I didn’t think I wanted a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. This changed when we looked at the phones available. It turned out that the Curve was only marginally wider than the average phone, perhaps a centimeter or so. It’s otherwise comparable to mid-range phones in size. It ends up being pretty much as portable as our Sony Ericsson Z520a phones.

The BlackBerry UI is best described as “retro”. The icons look like 1990s Windows, the text fonts look like 1980s Atari ST, and the general method of navigation most resembles Palm OS. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Starting with the good, the UI is clearly designed from first principles to work well on a handheld device. The central trackball handles scrolling, pointing and clicking. It sits easily and naturally under the thumb. You can do pretty much everything with one hand, including browsing the web and checking e-mail.

This is in marked contrast to the iPhone, which pretty much requires two-handed operation. Windows Mobile devices suffer from having a desktop UI squeezed into a handheld form factor, and also require two hands, and often a stylus. Symbian is designed for phones, but the UIQ interface for smartphones uses a stylus. Overall, then, the BlackBerry works better than other phones I’ve tried when you’re standing in an airport with a coffee in one hand.

On the downside, it’s hard to find the icon you want in a hurry, because of their visual clutter. Perhaps a replacement UI theme would help; I’m a little tempted to grab the theme designer and start working on one, but it’s Windows only. The fonts were initially problematic too; nowhere near as nice as Apple’s, and they took some getting used to.

But when it comes time to reply to an e-mail, niggling issues with fonts were forgotten as I got to grips with the keyboard. Yes, it requires both hands, or more accurately both thumbs. It’s not as fast as a full size keyboard, but it’s faster than Palm Graffiti or Windows Mobile pen input, and much faster and less frustratingly error-prone than I found the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to be. Unless Steve relents and allows a Son of Newton to use the Newton’s non-cursive text recognition, I can’t see it being bettered.

Textual messaging is where the BlackBerry really shines. It’s quite possible to thumb out fairly lengthy e-mail responses, or even update your web site. As far as IM, there’s support for Google Talk and AIM built in, as well as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and ICQ if you know anyone who still uses only those. There are third party clients for non-Google Jabber and other protocols, and in addition, there’s BlackBerry’s own BlackBerry Messenger, previously called PIN messaging.

If you have a friend who also has a BlackBerry, PIN messaging is definitely the way to go. The manual doesn’t cover its benefits, so I’ll digress a little here. Unlike other IM systems, PIN messaging is tied to the BlackBerry device by a unique ID. You connect with another person initially by sending them an invite via their BlackBerry-specific e-mail address, or any other address they access via BlackBerry e-mail. When they reply, their device records the device ID you sent, and sends you theirs.

The primary benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s push-based. The recipient doesn’t need to be logged in. If their phone is switched off, the message will be queued until they log on.

The second benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s reliable. Unlike SMS, messages don’t get randomly dropped. In addition, you get delivery confirmation automatically for every message: when you hit enter, the line you typed appears in the transcript with a small icon next to it indicating that the message is going out over the network. When your device receives positive confirmation that the recipient’s device has displayed the line you sent, the icon changes.

If that’s not enough, there’s a third benefit over IM or SMS: there’s a separate “ping” option. So you can set up your regular notification to be something discreet, and know that your spouse can ping you to set off something more noticeable if necessary.

Other than that, PIN messaging has the usual file transfer, allows you to send voice memos, and looks and behaves like regular IM. For us, it has completely replaced SMS, not least because it doesn’t cost 15¢ a message.

One interesting feature of the BlackBerry is that as well as individual icons for each messaging system, there’s also a unified inbox that shows IM, SMS and e-mail in one place. This makes sense, as they all have pretty much the same UI on the Curve; the protocol is almost an irrelevant detail. I believe that if you attempt to send pictures via SMS, the phone automatically uses MMS, but I haven’t tried it.

Web browsing is a mixed bag. The built in BlackBerry browser has two modes, mobile mode and “desktop” mode. Although there are references to WAP, the browser copes with both, the mode just determines how the page is formatted for display. In mobile mode it works like a typical phone browser, in desktop mode it tries to deal with things like tables, CSS and JavaScript. Overall it makes for a pretty good browsing experience, as phones go. (If you haven’t tried browsing from a phone, the main issue isn’t usually layout–it’s latency. Each page request takes a ridiculously long time to send, compared to a desktop system. I assume this is something to do with the mobile network.)

An alternative is Opera Mini, which takes the “thumbnail of page with moveable active area” approach to web browsing. It works surprisingly well with sites that the built-in browser can’t cope with, like zagat.com. (Yeah, good move, make a web site of restaurant reviews that doesn’t work with a phone browser.)

Maps are another strong point. There’s a map application supplied, but I downloaded Google Maps for BlackBerry, which is free and offers pseudo-GPS location by correlating your active cell to its geographical location. Accuracy can be as little as 50m or so in cities, up to 1km in the countryside. The Google Mail application also works well once downloaded.

The BlackBerry OS appears to be Java based, and is pretty solid. It’s more reliable than a Palm; I’ve only managed to crash it once, which is comparable to Linux on the N800 in solidity. Initial bootup (after inserting a battery) is horrendously slow, but once running it seems to use a soft power off which doesn’t require a full boot. The UI is generally responsive at all times, unlike some Sony Ericsson phones. You can put the phone into standby mode by holding down the power switch. In standby the screen and keyboard deactivate, but you can still receive messages and calls. The same hold-down-button action brings the phone out of standby instantly.

The one bug I’ve found so far is in the BlackBerry web browser. After a while the cache gets full and slows browsing down tremendously. The workaround is to empty the cache once a week.

The phone shows a lot of attention to the details of how a mobile device should best operate. For example, an ambient light sensor behind the notification LED turns the screen brightness down in dark areas, and automatically turns on the keyboard backlight. The LED itself has behavior customizable through the notification options; each event (phone call, IM, SMS) can have any or all of a user-chosen sound, vibration, and LED flashes. You can even set different messaging systems to have different notification; for example, I have IM just flash the LED a few times, unless it’s a PIN message from the spouse.

Mac sync is a bit of a sore point. There’s a package called PocketMac that BlackBerry purchased and now give away for free. It worked for me, more or less, but had some annoying bugs. (For example, syncing with a subset of address book records didn’t work, and editing records on the BlackBerry resulted in duplicates.) The solution is simple enough: Mark/Space have a Missing Sync for BlackBerry, which makes everything work, and even syncs user pictures so you can see the face of the person calling you if you’ve given them a picture in OS X.

Overall, it’s the best mobile phone I’ve used. Whether it’s good for you will of course depend on your use cases. If you’re someone who likes to talk to people or use voicemail rather than IM or e-mail, or if you have little patience for customizing software, the iPhone is probably a better bet. It certainly look prettier. But if you prefer text to voice and prefer functionality to prettiness, the Curve beats the iPhone hands down. This may change once they stop crippling the iPhone and open it up to third party applications; we’ll see. For now, I’d pick the Curve again, even if the iPhone wasn’t tied to AT&T.

Update: Oh yeah, the Curve is also a quad band phone. That’s de rigeur, so I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning.

In a few years, cameras will all have single chip GPS units in them. They’ll tag their photos with the location where you took them as a matter of course, like they already tag the time and date.

Some of us are unwilling to wait a few years. I’m sure you, like me, have sat down with a map and a stack of holiday photos and thought “OK, where on earth was that building?”. My current project of scanning and annotating hundreds of old family photos would be so much easier if I could have some clue as to at least the location and the year.

Which is probably why Sony have just launched a rather neat keychain GPS. No display, not many controls, you just clip it to your bag and forget about it. At the end of the day you connect it to the computer, run some software, and your photos are annotated with location information.

However, you don’t need a special Sony GPS for that. There’s a handy Mac application called GPSPhotoLinker that will download the automatic track data from a Garmin or Magellan GPS, cross-reference it with the timestamps on a bunch of photos, and re-write their EXIF information to add longitude, latitude, city, state and country.

We tried it out in Austin on Wednesday. It seems to work quite well, so we’ll take the GPS with us when we go to Germany.

As well as embedded EXIF tags, known as geocoding, there’s also the cruder hack of geotagging, where you add the latitude and longitude as Flickr tags. While this avoids the problem of dumb software stripping EXIF information, it messes up your Flickr tags page and relies on Flickr, so I’m not keen on it. I want my metadata in the file with the image, where it belongs.

I’ve been away in New York this week, at the IBM Palisades Executive Conference Center. Four days of team meetings with my immediate project team. Four of us are located in Austin, but senior management were in New York, so everyone traveled to New York via New Jersey.

Traveling from Newark airport to Palisades isn’t exactly difficult, but it’s surprisingly easy to end up in Manhattan accidentally. There are two main traps I’ll need to remember if I go there again.

The first trap is that the New Jersey Turnpike splits into two on the way north, and the two halves have entirely different sets of exits and available destinations. Computer-generated routes don’t mention this. The “local” route was the one we wanted; the “express” route has a different set of exits, turns and signposts which bore no resemblance to the ones in the directions.

The second trap is that at some point, you want to transition from the New Jersey Turnpike to the Palisades Interstate Parkway. Doing so apparently involves driving towards the George Washington Bridge, being funneled towards the toll plaza, then cutting across five lanes of traffic to a small left exit labeled Fort Lee. If you fail to make it, or don’t see the left exit, you’re screwed—there’s no way to turn around without going across the bridge to Manhattan, turning left twice, and coming all the way back. To add to the irritation, they’ll charge you $6 for the pleasure of going across the bridge to Manhattan, even though you have zero desire to do so. This trap wasn’t mentioned in any of the directions either, and explains how our route from Newark to Palisades came to include the Bronx.

We opted to take 9N and go back across the river at the next bridge, rather than try again to negotiate the maze of roads near the Washington bridge in the dark. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to bring the GPS, so we were making progress, and not in any real danger of getting totally lost. Our route was sub-optimal and slow, but we’d get there.

Once we could see the Tappan Zee bridge, there was the minor problem of getting onto it. You’d think it would be well signposted from most nearby road junctions, but you’d think wrong. We stopped at one of the few open gas stations to ask for more specific directions than “drive up and down the coast until you see a way on”. The guy behind the counter said “I’m afraid I’m not from around here, I have no idea.”

There was a pause. I turned around and looked at the other gas station employee, standing by the door. “I’m not from around here either,” he said apologetically. “This is a brand new station, they brought us in from somewhere else.”

So on the whole, a farce which has done nothing to improve my general feelings about New York.

My Prius arrived! Three days ahead of the most optimistic estimate! Now it’s purchased, time to tell the whole story…

I started the search on September 16th. Calling the local Massachusetts Toyota dealers quickly established that they all had ridiculous wait lists; the best wait time I was quoted was a year. However, the situation wasn’t completely hopeless—according to the online forums like priusonline.com and priuschat.com, dealers often get cars that are a color or a package that nobody on their wait list wants, or nobody on the list who wants the car can get financed at that particular moment in time.

Because we wanted the high end package with the GPS navigation system, I had a hunch that the legendary thriftiness of New Hampshire residents would make it a promising place to hunt for unwanted Priuses, not to mention that you can’t fit a gun rack on one. Another point in our favor was that we weren’t too fussy about color—we’d take silver, gold, green, red, maybe even black. So, I started checking every single New Hampshire Toyota dealer that had a web site, searching their inventory, and calling or e-mailing all the ones that actually had a 2004 Prius listed.

Almost the first response was from Autofair Toyota in Manchester, NH. They called me back about half an hour after I sent an e-mail. They said that the 2004 Prius they had on the lot was being shopped to their wait list, and that someone would likely take it even though none of them had said they wanted the BC package. However, they were expecting two more BC package cars in October, and could put my name down for one of them. The incoming cars would be brand new 2005 models, and they expected them to be at the dealership around October 10th-14th. Price would be MSRP—no special markup.

I should explain that unfortunately, a lot of dealers are taking advantage of the constrained supply of vehicles by adding $3,000-$5,000 to the price. Since the MSRP already includes a healthy profit, and the dealers get a bonus from Toyota for selling the cars immediately, people on the Prius forums have been rather scathing about the practice. I have no real ethical problem with pricing up—after all, it’s just supply and demand—but I had already decided I would rather buy a second hand temporary car than pay over MSRP.

The Autofair sales associate told me up front what the total price would be, including their processing and admin charge—a mere $121, whereas I’ve been quoted up to $500 elsewhere.

I explained up front that I wanted to continue to look for a car actually available, and they said all they wanted was a $100 deposit, which would be fully refundable if I managed to get a car somewhere else first. Again, other dealers are asking for $1,000 deposits, and some are even demanding non-refundable deposits. Autofair seemed completely reasonable and up-front about everything, so I agreed.

There then followed a couple of weeks of anxiousness about whether the car would actually turn up in time for our move to Austin, TX. During that time I believe I checked every single Toyota dealer web site for Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, plus I e-mailed and called a few places that didn’t even have web sites.

As of this morning, I still had no lead on an actual Prius available any time before the last week of October. And then Autofair called. My car had arrived.

Of course, it’s not as simple as it ought to be. Massachusetts makes the whole process as difficult as possible, in an apparent attempt to stop people buying cars in New Hampshire and dodging tax, or not getting insurance. Since I didn’t manage to find a description of the process anywhere, even on the RMV web site, here we go…

I have to:

1. Get the money from the bank as a bank draft.
2. Go to New Hampshire, exchange the money for the certificate of origin and an RMV-1 form. Don’t collect the car, because Massachusetts doesn’t allow any kind of temporary plates, and has no grace period for vehicle registration.
3. Return to Massachusetts and physically go to a state-authorized Massachusetts insurance agency, certificate of origin and RMV-1 form in hand. Then I bend over and take it, and get the RMV-1 form stamped to say I now have insurance.
4. Take the stamped RMV-1 form and bill of sale to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in downtown Boston, pay tax on the car, and exchange the form for a Massachusetts license plate. (Hopefully the USPS will successfully redirect our mail, ’cause we probably won’t be here by the time the title deed arrives 4 to 8 weeks later.)
5. Take the license plate back to New Hampshire, and pick up the car.

Not that I had any intention of committing any kind of tax fraud; the only question was whether I could wait and register in Texas rather than go through the paperwork twice. In fact, MA is cheaper than TX, so I suppose I’m winning, but…

One added wrinkle is that the certificate of origin is transported separately from the actual car, and hadn’t arrived today, so they’re going to FedEx it to me. In the mean time, I can read the user manual. The car itself had only just been removed from the car carrier; they obviously called the moment it came in. Its audio system hadn’t been connected up and tested yet, it hadn’t been fueled, and there was still plastic film on the wheels. But, I did get to sit in it. Very nice, extremely ergonomic driving position. The sales guy seemed as excited as us.

Once we get to Austin, I have to get new insurance from a non-Massachusetts agency, because the MA agency don’t deal in out-of-state insurance. The new agency has to fax the Massachusetts one to say I’m insured with them, and then my MA policy can be cancelled. Only then can I get my MA license switched for a TX license; apparently if you switch the license before switching the insurance the police computer will flag you as uninsured.

We also went for the Toyota Platinum Warranty: 24/7 roadside assistance to the nearest Prius-trained Toyota dealer, and they’ll pay for a replacement rental car while they fix the Prius. I got the 6 years of extra coverage from Autofair, because the price they quoted me wasn’t much more than the ultra-cheap price I’d seen on the Internet, and I was obviously feeling very well disposed towards them!

So anyway…Prius! Prius! Prius!

It’s starting to look pretty empty in the house, as most of our stuff is now boxed to go. With that in mind, here’s our approximate planned route:

I-90 to NY via Springfield, MA.
I-90, I-87, I-84 to PA. Possible stops at New Paltz.
I-84, I-380, I-81 via Scranton, PA. Possible stop at Harrisburg, PA.
I-81 through MD to WV, via Hagerstown.
I-81 through WV to VA.
I-81, I-66, I-64, I-81 again. Possible stops at Winchester, Harrisonburg, Staunton, Roanoke.
I-40 through TN to AR. Nashville, Memphis, Johnson City, Knoxville.
I-40 through AR to Little Rock, 167 to El Dorado, I-20 to Shreveport LA.
I-20 from Shreveport LA to TX, via Tyler and Waco. Possible stop at Corsicana.

Suggestions for things we simply must see are welcomed. With a little luck we’ll have a Prius with GPS navigation. Failing that, we’ll have an iBook linked to a GPS.

Suggestions for good places to eat are welcomed too. As I’ve discovered on previous road trips, You can only eat so much Taco Bell before going insane.

As far as work goes, today was a change of pace, as I was asked to travel to Virginia to give a presentation to a bunch of sales account managers. These are the guys who handle the big customer accounts and keep the million dollar deals flowing, and the company needs to make sure they know everything there is to know about Lotus software… so I was asked to go tell them where they can find everything there is to know about Lotus software. Metaknowledge. There’s more to this nickname than mere whimsy.

I had the option of staying overnight at the conference facility outside Leesburg, but I had been advised that it had highly limited entertainment options. I decided to fulfil a dream and make it a day trip, traveling with just a courier bag for luggage. Businessmen are supposed to just carry a briefcase, but a courier bag is close enough.

I got to Logan at a civilized hour, and made my way through security; the line was short. The long line was the one on the other side which snaked across to the Starbucks counter. They were the only coffee vendor on the gate side of the security checkpoint. I queued for a while, and then saw the sign saying that the espresso machine was out of order.

Well, that was that. I walked off. I needed caffeine, but Starbucks filter coffee is the crack cocaine of the coffee world; charred to perfection, it packs 3-4 times the dose of regular home-made filter coffee. Instead, I found some insipid New England Coffee Company stuff at a pretzel and hot dog stand. It had been formulated on the Dunkin’ Donuts principle that if you water it down and add lots of cream and sugar, nobody will ever notice the difference. Pity I don’t add cream or sugar.

The flight down was uneventful. I ended up sitting next to a dark-haired girl from Colorado who was about to start eighth grade, and was traveling alone. She was reading a book on genetics, which looked to me like an introductory college level text. She was very talkative, so we started chatting about genetics. She was also interested in web development, and told me how much better Fireworks MX is compared to the version I use. To round it off, her favorite subject is mathemetics, though she also likes languages and is studying French, Latin and Hebrew.

I showed her the book I’m reading at the moment, which is a biography of Nikola Tesla. I told her about a few of his inventions, and how bad luck and bad judgement had cheated him out of fame and fortune. She thought my noise cancelling headphones were really amazing; I explained how they work. We chatted on and off for most of the flight.

To be honest, she reminded me a little of the geeky Jewish girl on Malcolm In The Middle. I was overjoyed to discover that young girls like that really exist; I hope she goes on to great things. I almost wanted to give her my e-mail address in case she wanted to chat, but of course people would probably think I was a Catholic Priest…

I don’t remember there being girls like that when I was at junior school. If there had been, I might have shown some interest in talking to girls. I also hate to think what she’s going to go through when she winds up in an American high school. But anyway…

The presentation went well, I think: I was the last person to present that day, and nobody walked out. I wrapped up early, making up for everyone else running over schedule all day, which I expect was popular. And a couple of people commented that they’d been with the company years, and had still learnt something.

The week-long training event has a rather tiresome “Top Gun” aviation theme, so I snuck in some extra clip-art of my own. A slide on getting initial bearings was illustrated by the Navy Avengers of Flight 19, which famously disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. The new giant web portal for all IBM software group content was illustrated with a picture of the Hughes HK-1, better known as the “Spruce Goose”. Finally, a slide of information about bug reporting and technote databases had a shot of the Hindenburg. I didn’t label any of them, so I wonder if anyone got the references.

I’m now at Dulles Airport. I booked a late flight back, which allowed me plenty of time to chat to people after the presentation, get a cab to the airport, have something to eat, pick up a latte, and settle down by a power socket. Good move—if I’d booked the flight before this one, I’d have only just made it, which would have meant a big dose of stress. As it is, I’m pretty relaxed.

Dulles airport seems to be pretty empty after 6pm on a Monday, which made getting through security a breeze. Unfortunately, I read that they’re going to introduce new rules requiring security guards to check the functioning of every single electronic device. I’m not looking forward to traveling with that rule in place. For vacations, typically I have a PDA, digital camera, phone, camcorder, CD Walkman, headphone amplifier, noise cancelling headphones, and I guess we can add the GPS to that list now too. I draw the line at taking the laptop, though the phone does have a web browser.

I’m also irritated to read that the airlines have won back the customers they lost to Amtrak. Mind you, it probably comes down to price—it costs more to get Acela from Boston to New York than to get a plane. Libertarians will say it’s because Amtrak doesn’t have competition, but I have a hunch it has more to do with the fact that the airlines get billions of dollars more in direct and hidden subsidies.

There’s an Air France Concorde on the runway outside. It bugs me a little that I’ll never get to fly on one. And even after all these years, I can’t look at a Concorde without thinking of Barry Manilow.

The other thing about spending time in airports is that I end up looking at newsstands, which is generally a depressing experience. Arnold Schwartzneggar? Oh, puh-leeze. Already the far right Republicans are denouncing him as far too liberal; I guess they’re still upset that their prefered choice of Austrian to join the party shot himself in a bunker in Berlin years ago.

The flight was delayed. Very delayed. While we were supposed to be in the air, the plane was still on the ground at LaGuardia. I finally got home at 01:30. sara gave me a gentle, welcoming snore as I collapsed into bed.

Wednesday we got a courtesy car pick-up from the rental company. We rented a Toyota Prius. I was intrigued by how well a hybrid gasoline/electric car would work, and this seemed a good chance to give one a thorough test drive. Or rather, for sara to give one a thorough test drive…

What we hadn’t been expecting was that it was a fully tricked-out Prius, complete with GPS satellite navigation system and route finder DVD-ROM for the onboard computer. We told it to take us west to the coast, and then south to the Monterey Bay Aquarium via the coastline route. It verbally directed sara out of the city. What with the directions and having our position shown on a scrolling zoomable map at all times, we were both able to forget about navigation and concentrate on the scenery. (Sand dunes. Surf. People surfing.)

As we arrived at the aquarium, it was otter feeding time. There was an enormous crowd of people around the tank, so we went out onto the deck instead and looked out into the bay. Sure enough, there were wild sea otters floating out in the kelp beds! Four of them. With the aid of the 18x zoom on the camcorder, I got some DV footage of otters at play.

We were hungry on the way back, so we asked the car to find us a nearby Indian restaurant. It turned out we were just off the El Camino Real, probably the world’s largest strip mall, so that wasn’t a problem. Unfortunately the first restaurant was closed, so we had to argue with the car a little to get a route to a different place. Phil Dick would have loved it, walking into a restaurant because our car had recommended it…

We got an average of over 50mpg, both city driving and highways, even with San Francisco’s hills to deal with. We travelled 280 miles total on $10 of gas, which was half a tank full.

I noticed that IBM had a huge ad on the freeway exit that leads to Oracle’s headquarters, saying “Our database software is the #1 seller. Now, who’s got game?” Larry Ellison must be really pissed off.