But here in the states, we’re screwed, for one simple reason. Telephone companies are powerful here. Too powerful. Service, essentially, is equally bad, regardless of carrier; basically, you will either have a signal or not, based on where you are, not based on who your contract is with.

So, when I ask myself why my I can’t write my own applications for my phone, why I cant send MMS messages to my friends containing pictures or sound, or why I have to change my voicemail to let everyone know that I switched numbers, I can answer myself by saying, “Because North American phone carriers are greedy and lazy”.

[Chris Hollander: Objective]

+1.

My mobile phone died last week. I’d go get a warranty replacement, but it would be the 5th time in 6 months that I’ve done so. I was hoping the sales rep for my wireless provider would have contacted me by now, but of course that hasn’t happened.

I’ve spent the last three hours trying to get my new photo site posted to no avail. Will have to check with the webmaster tomorrow – any page with a code behind throws an exception that I can’t seem to catch or echo to the screen. 😦 I guess I’ll have to build a simple HTML front end in order to post a bunch of new Patrick pictures for my parents.

In other news, Dare’s back from his world wide trip. Looking forward to the new builds of RSS Bandit. But it took him a while to make any sense of my last post in the objects vs. entities discussion. Apparently, I’m not as lucid at 11pm as I thought. Given that it’s 11pm as I write this, here’s my single attempt to make a coherent point.

XML, even with Infoset/XPath 2.0 Data Model/XSD/etc, has it’s roots in a text based format. Attempts to hide this with strongly-typed object-oriented mechanisms will always be leaky abstractions. But that’s OK, since XML actually works for loosely-coupled cross platform services while strongly-typed object-oriented mechanisms only work for tightly-coupled n-tier applications. And I’m out of the application business.

Since I’m going to have to build some XML entities for interoperability purposes, it makes sense to build all my entitles that way, even the ones that are private to my code. This way I have a single architectural model, improve reuse, reduce training, and avoid writing any annoying XML <–> OOP conversion routines.

As if the VS.NET PowerToys weren’t cool enough, now you can join GotDotNet communities and help contribute to their development. Actually, I should say “will be able to help contribute” as all the links the the specific communities are not working yet.

As a bonus, you can get (will be able to get) access to an alpha build of the VSCMDShell Window PowerToy.

I got my blogging front end – built on Front Page – moved over to my new tablet. I wrote at least part of this entry in ink. I was surprised to discover that Office 2003 does not include the Office Web Services Toolkit functionality, so I had to install that separately. While I was at it, I downloaded the VS.NET Tools for Office. I was thinking of writing a C# based blogging front end that used Word instead of Front Page or InfoPath since only Word supports the Text Services Framework. This means that if the tablet mis-recognizes your handwriting, you can choose alternative recognition options instead of deleting and rewriting the word. For pen based input (with my crappy handwriting) this is a huge time saver.

After introducing myself at a customer meeting today in Phoenix, someone asked “Are you the Harry Pierson from DevHawk?”. First time that’s happened – kinda cool. Nice that he recognized my real name – I think most people who read this blog just know me as “DevHawk”. A couple of times, I’ve introduced myself to blank stares then mention that I write DevHawk to instant recognititon.

BTW, I did take the plunge and put the URL for my blog on my business cards.