Hurrah for technology
Three recurring problems this trip have been cell phone reception, Internet access, and heat.
Henry's original idea for how we would use phones on this trip was to buy this National Geographic-branded service, which gives you a SIM card and a British phone number that's supposed to work all around the world. If the idea that they have figured out every country's cell phone system sounds too good to be true, it's because it is.
The service does not work very well at all. Henry managed to get some weird old phone he borrowed from the Media Lab to connect... sometimes. Sometimes his calls wouldn't go through, and sometimes it would drop his call and ask for more money for unclear reasons. Their technical support line is only open 7 hours per day, and those hours happen to be 1 AM to 8 AM in this time zone. On my G1, the service never worked at all, so my phone ended up being a mostly useless brick that I carried around because it could tell time.
Here in Hong Kong, I bought a cheap prepaid SIM card. It can't send text messages, as it turns out, and it certainly can't connect to any sort of data network, but now my mostly useless brickamaphone can at least make actual phone calls.
Is anyone working on a standard for wireless providers to withhold Internet access until you give them money or a temporary access code or something? Because they will always want to do that, and I am sick of the de facto standard where everything gets redirected to a poorly-written login page on the Web. It wreaks havoc with Gmail and IM.
This has been especially bad at the conference, where their access control thingy died under the weight of hundreds of people trying to use it simultaneously. They finally put up a different network that's supposed to be open, but where the login page comes up at random times anyway and asks for a password that doesn't exist. I think they have dueling DNS servers. When will conference hotels learn that Internet access needs to flow as freely as coffee?
I decided not to freeze for the nth consecutive night in an inadvertently air conditioned hotel room. I told the front desk it was too cold in my room. They gave me a space heater.
Henry's original idea for how we would use phones on this trip was to buy this National Geographic-branded service, which gives you a SIM card and a British phone number that's supposed to work all around the world. If the idea that they have figured out every country's cell phone system sounds too good to be true, it's because it is.
The service does not work very well at all. Henry managed to get some weird old phone he borrowed from the Media Lab to connect... sometimes. Sometimes his calls wouldn't go through, and sometimes it would drop his call and ask for more money for unclear reasons. Their technical support line is only open 7 hours per day, and those hours happen to be 1 AM to 8 AM in this time zone. On my G1, the service never worked at all, so my phone ended up being a mostly useless brick that I carried around because it could tell time.
Here in Hong Kong, I bought a cheap prepaid SIM card. It can't send text messages, as it turns out, and it certainly can't connect to any sort of data network, but now my mostly useless brickamaphone can at least make actual phone calls.
Is anyone working on a standard for wireless providers to withhold Internet access until you give them money or a temporary access code or something? Because they will always want to do that, and I am sick of the de facto standard where everything gets redirected to a poorly-written login page on the Web. It wreaks havoc with Gmail and IM.
This has been especially bad at the conference, where their access control thingy died under the weight of hundreds of people trying to use it simultaneously. They finally put up a different network that's supposed to be open, but where the login page comes up at random times anyway and asks for a password that doesn't exist. I think they have dueling DNS servers. When will conference hotels learn that Internet access needs to flow as freely as coffee?
I decided not to freeze for the nth consecutive night in an inadvertently air conditioned hotel room. I told the front desk it was too cold in my room. They gave me a space heater.