Yes, boys and girls, my first cell phone came in a lunchbox (does anyone under 40 even know what THAT means?) sized nylon ‘case’.  It required an external power source (cigarette lighter plug) and an external antenna.

I have fond memories of dropped calls whenever I crossed a state line (pre-roaming) and per-minute charges approaching today’s gas prices.

Back in the fabulous 80’s AMPS was the technology in use for all cell phone networks in the US.  Technology has marched on and AMPS has fallen into the same category as floppy disks and carbon paper. The two carriers with remaining AMPS coverage are scheduled to de-activate their networks next week.

The vast majority of folks won’t notice; we’ve since moved on to GSM and/or UMTS networks.  However, there are still a goodly number of devices using this technology, namely alarm systems, older GM OnStar systems and ‘remote monitoring’.

If you’re alarm system has a cellular back-up option, or you have an old GM a bit of investigation would be prudent.  GM has an info page up here.

Can you hear me now? Analog cellular networks shutting down next week

So I’m not above posting a link to a cool new application just to get an invite. I’m dirty… I’m a dirty, dirty engineer. Call me what you want but everyone deserves some link love!

This thing actually look pretty cool. It is an extension for <shudder> Outlook that adds some interesting features. I have some trepidations though based on something I read on an email from them…

… We have received a lot of requests for the beta and are expanding our capacity to handle the load. …

That may be paraphrasing a bit, but that was the gist of it. Assuming that they are not talking about supporting download traffic (Yes, that is a bit of a leap but downloads are pretty easy to support) that tells me that some part of this solution is hosted. Why would an email plugin need to be hosted? Hmm… are they passing email (or meta-email) back to some central server for analysis? Now I REALLY wanna have a look (and a network sniff) of what this thing does!

I’ll jump to the front of the invite queue of just TWO of you out there sign up for the beta. Come on… you can do it! Do it for me!

I spied this on the slog into work this morning; I almost wet myself. This, and many other guffaw inducing objects advocating freedom of thought are available at CafePress.

I must say that I agree with the ‘freakish’ness of all the items mentioned in this author’s post.  Frankly, I’m somewhat embarrassed when I travel abroad and the folks I am visiting ask me “WTF are you nitwits doing?!?!?  You are surprised that the rest of the worlds hates you?”.

I simply shrug and tell them, it’s not my fault, I didn’t vote for the clown.  And, as it turns out, neither did most people, but that is a different discussion.

This is when I repeat to myself “less than a year… less than a year…”.

Top 5 things I saw in America which, as a Canadian, freaked me right out « Paulitics: Paul’s Socialist Investigations