Still no phone...

You'd think, in this age of highly computerized communications, that getting phone service wouldn't be all that much of a deal, and that getting said service restored would be even easier. Now, I'm not proud of the fact that during my trip to Kazakhstan (and Galina being in Houston) payment of the phone bill fell between the cracks, causing a cutoff in service, but the phone company is acting as if they have to round up a crew to go mine the copper that will be made into the wire that they plan on laying Real Soon Now from the local office to my house.

Mea culpa, guys, but give me a break!

* * *On other news, I got up this morning and started to absent-mindedly sing "She Wore An Itsy-Bitsy, Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" as I drove to the ham breakfast. There must be some kind of deep psychological message in that, but I'm too dense to understand what it may be.

An article in Fast Company tweaks my curiosity about online networks such as LinkedIn. Specifically, though such networks sound really neat in theory, how do they work out in fact? A brief look at the result of a Google search comprising the words "LinkedIn success story" yields mostly links to places looking for success stories.

* * *Yesterday's invoice was more like 3500 words by the time I finished doing five intricate figures. Fortunately, they were editable, but they still ate a bunch of time. With 10,000 source due in a week, the plate was replenished with 4,000 more source today, due Sunday.

Translators take their weekends where they find them, don't you know.

* * *I was finally able to put together the necessary hardware to test out Skype a few minutes ago, and since neither of my two contacts was online, I tried out their "Echo Test Service" robot, and the call went through successfully, with pretty good quality over the broadband connection here at the coffee shop.

The next step will be to actually call a flesh-and-blood human and see how well the service works before buying some SkypeOut time (which allows one to make calls to landline phones), after which I might check out handsets engineered for VoIP.

* * *My Palm Zire 71 suffered some kind of catastrophic battery drainage failure, to the point where upon coming back to life after a few minutes sucking up juice in the docking cradle, the unit contained no data. When I went to restore what I had backed up in my VAIO, I was pleased to see that the latest Desktop software restored everything on the unit to that point, and not just the Palm-related stuff, as had been the case for my Palm IIIc and earlier units. (Side note: I lost the last couple of days of entries because I hadn't performed a backup!)

Cheers...