5 posts tagged “blackberry”
The word on the street is that if you keep blog posts short you will write more of them. I plan to trick myself into doing this by writing posts on my BlackBerry.
We'll see if it works.
Sometime you have a not-so-great week at work. I would assume it happens to everybody, though I haven't taken a poll. This was one of those for me.
Among other things, the team I'm on monitors the well-being of several web properties. Unfortunately, we had a run of bad luck this week, and a variety of hardware issues conspired to keep these web sites down as often as possible. We do have failover sites in other locations, so there really was no "external" impact. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.
What was not so nice is the flood of e-mails alerting us to the system failures. I received roughly 50-100 e-mails a day from various monitoring systems, which was several more than I needed. Many of those e-mails were delivered twice, once to my computer and once to my BlackBerry. Notice I say many and not all.
I had to do something. I was at my wit's end, and I don't know that I've ever seen the end of my wit before. It's not a pretty sight. Anyway, Wednesday-ish I took the dramatic step of deleting my work e-mail account from my BlackBerry. I simply pulled the plug. It was a really good feeling. I came into work Thursday, assessed the night's damage, and avoided an even 100 e-mails that would have otherwise been delivered to my handheld.
Now, I know what you're thinking...wasn't I derelict in my duties? In my opinion, no. There is not a specific expectation that I act on these alerts received off-hours. (Never mind the fact that there is no way I could have fixed these hardware maladies.) Additionally, I bought the BlackBerry device and paid for the service plan with my own hard-earned cashola, and I hooked up my work e-mail to it just to be a nice guy. Well, sadly, I need to quote the great Alice Cooper and say, "No More Mr. Nice Guy."
Or at least, that was my plan. I was really going to stick it to The Man. However, some vague guilt caused me to mention to my boss that I was going to cancel my BlackBerry data plan, and thus not be reachable in that way any longer. Long story short, he said I should hold off on that and he would look into our official telecom policies. There could be some reimbursement headed my way.
We'll see what happens...wish me luck. I'm not sure I know how I want this story to end.
If you have a BlackBerry and Cingular is your service provider, call (800) 304-3044 if you need any help with your account or device. There’s a separate group of people specially trained to handle “advanced” devices like this. They can also help with your account/bill, and you don’t have to wait as long on hold with the rest of the suckers.
If you’re like most BlackBerry owners, you generally carry your device with you all the time. For all that money you pay each month, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to pull up driving directions and traffic info right on your phone?
Well, your prayers are answered. Do yourself a favor and download the version of Google Maps for your mobile device. I’ve already used it to locate Starbucks in multiple states and avoid a Chicago traffic jam.
Priceless.
Specifically, I have a BlackBerry 7130c from Cingular. I actually got it a few weeks back, right before a business trip to Florida, where it came in quite handy. The hotel were our conference was charged $10 a day for hardwired access in your room only…no thanks.
Long story short, it’s working out pretty well. Receiving your e-mail right in your pocket the moment it arrives wherever you are is a powerful concept. It’s a big mental shift, and I’m learning to kind of process e-mail “in stride,” responding to important things right away and letting other things slide until later. I’m getting better at it, but like I said, it’s a big shift.
On the downside, you have to actively try to stay out of touch. At night, or whenever I decide to go offline, I use the “Turn Wireless Off” feature. You can also get pretty creative using filtering options to block certain messages from reaching your phone, and I’ve done a bit of that as well. I don’t need to know immediately when Ticketmaster has a new concert on sale anywhere in the Chicago area.
On a technical level, the e-mail delivery works like a champ. I can’t think of a time when it was less that 100% flawless. It takes real infrastructure to make that happen, and that’s nice to have. The setup was pretty painless, as well: to connect my Gmail account, I only had to enter my e-mail address and account password. That’s it. No worrying about POP/SMTP settings, ports, or any of that.
For my work account, the BlackBerry service gets the messages via Outlook Web Access. (For those of you into “alternative” operating systems, you’ll recall that both Ximian Evolution for Linux and Microsoft Entourage for the Mac do this as well.) So, you enter the URL, It may take a bit of fiddling to get this to work, but it’s not bad at all. Another nice feature in this area is that the messaged you read on the BlackBerry are marked as “read” in Outlook. That “syncing” feature isn’t as smooth with Gmail, but it doesn’t bother me that much.
The question I’m sure you’re curious about: will I be getting divorced soon? Am I a slave to the BlackBerry? I’d say the answer to both is “no.” Since I see my e-mail as it comes in throughout the day, I don’t need to spend time “checking” it at night. I actually spend far less time at the keyboard now, as it turns out. I get behind on reading blogs and stuff, but I’m learning to shift my schedule around.
Finally, my particular BlackBerry looks more phone-like, and as such doesn’t have one key for each letter of the alphabet. I have actually gotten used to this, for the most part, and I think it’s surprisingly good. The words “are” and “see” are typed via the same key combination, so sometimes that annoys me. But, I’d rather deal with one or two things like that then carry a larger device all the time.
Now, if I could just rig up a way to blog directly from my BlackBerry…
