A while ago, Tom mentioned that I had a great customer service experience with T-Mobile. Truthfully, the great customer service experience came today. T-Mobile just earned a customer for…well, maybe not for life, but they certainly have earned enough karma to keep me around a while. And at the same time, Sprint has spurned a customer for life.

I blogged back in April about getting a SmartPhone. Well, the honeymoon was short lived – it was a developer beta unit and it was not particularly robust. I dropped it about a month ago and it died. No huge deal, the MPx220 is coming soon. Of course, I need a phone in the meantime. I had signed up for T-Mobile service to power the SmartPhone so I went back to pick up a V300 which would go to my wife when the MPx220 became available. Only trouble was that since I hadn’t bought the phone when I activated my account, I was not eligible for an activation discount. I had asked about that when I bought the service, and had been assured it was no big deal. So I call up customer service, and they promise to wave the disconnect fee on the current account if I buy a new phone (with the activation discount). This was right before I went to New Zealand, so I figured I’d take care of it when I got back. In the meantime, I’m using a old borrowed phone and my existing account.

So I’ve been back a week, but hadn’t gotten to taking care of the phone yet. Then last night, someone steals my phone and my wife’s phone out of the car. So I call T-Mobile and explain the situation. They cancel the account on the spot, outright – no early termination fee or anything. Pretty cool. Of course, I did tell them I was going to buy not one but two new V300′s from Amazon (for the low price of -$100 each after rebate) but still, I thought that was pretty cool. The only bummer of this whole scenario is that I won’t be able to get the MPx220 with an activation discount when it comes up.

After talking to T-Mobile, I called Sprint. Now, I’ve been a Sprint customer for five years. You would think that would warrant a little respect and/or leeway, but apparently not. The “customer service” rep I spoke to was both rude and stupid. He was able to suspend my wife’s phone, but when I asked to cancel it he told me there would be an early termination fee. Funny thing is, the term on this “contract” (which I never signed and was unaware of) end’s on the 28th of August. You know, next Saturday. As in, six days from today. You would think that you might give a customer of five years who is dealing with a case of theft the benefit of the doubt and wave the early termination fee less than a week before the contract expires anyway. No, apparently I have to call back Saturday to terminate the contract. Fine. I set a reminder on my calendar so I don’t forget to rid myself of Sprint for good and forever.

COmega (otherwise known as Cw since most people don’t have an omega key on their keyboard) is on a long list of stuff for me to look at. But instead of actually coding with it, so far I can just read Steve Maine’s blog. He’s got interesting posts on syncronization and streams, the two big features of Cw over C# (come to think of it, we use the “#” symbol as most people don’t have an actual sharp key on their keyboard). I also learned from Steve that Cw comes with basic VS integration – you get project support, syntax highlighting and some Intellisense. Now I just need a few extra hours in the day.

Actually, I don’t think he’s “officially” part of the team ’til next week, but Josh Lee has already started a blog about his new job on the Architecture Strategy team. Josh is “The FinServ Guy”, and is a member of the IFX Forum Board of Directors. Nothing really meaty on his blog yet, just a Hello World post, but I hear great things about him.

Speaking of the Architecture Strategy team, I finally took 5 minutes to term serv into the machine that hosts DevHawk to update the theme. I keep mentioning the Architecture Strategy extended team OPML file, but I wanted to add a blogroll to the site theme. Now, I have a Team Blogroll on the left hand side of my website featuring all of my blogging teammates as well as all the blogging architect evangelists. Enjoy.

Watching the Olympics I’ve seen ads for AT&T’s CallVantage, a VOIP service similar to Vonage and Lingo (any others?). All three have the basics – Unlimited calling to US & Canada, voicemail, call waiting/forwarding, 911 support, caller ID & 3-way calling. However, each has a feature or two that the others don’t. AT&T has Do Not Disturb (no big deal) and Personal Conferencing up to nine people (wow!). Vonage has a soft phone (i.e. an app that acts like a phone so you can call and receive calls while on the road). Lingo is the cheapest ($20 a month + 3 free months) and Western Europe is included in the unlimited free calling area (hello brother-in-law from Germany). I’m leaning towards Lingo as I don’t need personal conferencing (I organize groups of people outside my immediate family with email) and when I travel with my family, I don’t really spend much time online so the soft phone is of limited use. One issue – checking out Broadband Reports VOIP reviews, Lingo sounds like it’s got really awful tech support. But, with three months free, I’m hoping I can try it out and cancel it if it’s a problem.

Update: I called Lingo and they confirmed they have an activation fee as well as a 30 day cancellation policy. So while the first three months are free, you pay $10 S&H and $30 to activate. If you cancel the service in the first 30 days, you can get your $30 back. And there is no service contract, so you can cancel anytime (not sure if the other services require a contract or not).

I’m setting up a new SQL 2005 / VS 2005 VPC. While I’m pretty excited about SQL Express, I want to experiment with some of the features in the full product so I’m installing Express’s big brother. However, there must be some weird issue w/ VPC’s shared folders feature – the setup support files fail to install. If I connect to my host across the virtual network to the loopback adapter then the install works fine. As I said, weird.

On a related note, anyone know a good, simple, free/cheap DHCP server for XP? The one issue w/ using the loopback adapter is that you either hardcode network addresses or use the “Automatic Private Address” (i.e. the 169.254.*.* address). The auto private address works fine, except that it takes a while for the DHCP to time out before assigning the private address. Plus, in XP SP2, there’s an annoying tray icon that pops up to tell you that the loopback adapter failed to get a DHCP address. If I had a DHCP server for the virtual network hanging off the loopback adapter, then I could avoid all that timeout and annoying pop up tray icon stuff.