Emergintex

i read about orb at russ’s blog last night and gave it a try. i signed up at http://orb.com and got a confirmation mail pointing me to https://my.orb.com. logging in to my orb portal i could see some available internet tv channels which i gave a try from the xp pc. worked fine and the streaming was passable.
next up revved up services in my 3650 and logged on to https://my.orb.com but the phone came back with a error message (services:no gateway reply). tried some other sites from the phone and they worked fine, so i looked around a bit and then thought it might be related to the secure https:// so i switched to http://my.orb.com and it worked! i was presented with the login page, which i logged into and navigated to one of the links (channels) that was working on my pc. the phone launched RealPlayer and initiated a new gprs connection (which was ok), but then the real player could not start the streaming. it always stayed on ‘connecting…’.
well i guess its the data connection speed thats a problem here, which i am gonna sort out with the provider soon. even the contents from tmobile guide doesnt stream in real player.

i blogged about a silly idea some time back talking about doing voip calls between 2 (or more devices) using gprs, which can make use of a intermediate server to act as a switchboard server. looking at orb i am sure something like that is not far (if not already present! update:Skype does this).

been reading some news about psp being hacked to enable browsing via the handheld. am not sure about the terminology being used in these articles but seems like some game internals were being used to piggy back to the net by over-riding the default look up servers.
avenues opened: lots i guess ! imagine a nice crisp wide screen to surf at your favorite hot-spots. would this compel sony to take this into the next releases of psp? I guess it would (and it should) to gain entry into a entirely new market.

lost the count how many times i have dropped my nokia 3650 on concrete/hardwood/pavements, all i have to do is pick up the 3 pieces (phone, upper cover, and the key membrane) ,put them together and reboot it.
works fine. also gives me a opportunity to clean the glass from inside :0

stumbled upon this somewhere on blogosphere:
if you add to www.yahoo.com// (note the double slashes at the end), the timestamp shown on the right side of the page booms and shows the current date time as December 31.

a half baked easter egg?

according to a zdnet news here, texas state sued vonage voip company over 911 contract disclosures. according to the report:

looking at the vonage site, i am sure the 911 service is listed as a service to be signed up for and from the vonage site:

not sure if these changes were made on the vonage site **after** the suit filed or were present there earlier. as for me switching to vonage, it seems to be on drawing board.

Update: Also carried on by CNN

whats happening on this front? having your mobile phone use the gprs service to make voice over ip to another client? ok, how would the 2 phones be identified? how would the calling phone determine where the target phone is? could a intermediate server be involved where the interested parties are logged on? could the phone imei number be used to identify the parties?

more reading on the topic leads to the news from vonage, the voip pioneer, about announcing their voip mobile phone f1000 in u.s.. its targeted use is being used at hotspots which are scarce in themselves at this time, so the phone would be mostly used at home installations with vonage connections.

about infospace. about navin jain. about the guys who became millionaires overnight. and all this due to ‘charismatic’ lies and deceit. mansions. ferraris.yachts. and then suddenly the bottom gets away, bringing everything down.
reading more here.

/. reported news of a new interface from google labs that was eventually took off within hours of it becoming public.
Chikai Ohazama with google started this as a fun filled way to learn dhtml and javascript, and the result was put up on google lab page. but since then it has disappeared from the pages, but the caches and mirrors still have the working version. mirror here.
why was it pulled off? maybe its related to the ‘genie’ effect from apple? maybe that drove the legal eagles at google to pull it off.
whatever the reason, it was a cool concept and effect applied to access various google services.

……that have appeared rather suddenly on the horizon. internet banks (as they like to call themselves) are becoming mainstream, getting much attention from investors. banks like ingdirect & emigrant-direct are offering competitive interest rates at the moment, living up to the statement of highest rates in usa. inside news is that emigrant-direct is raising up their rates from current 3.00% to 3.25% from monday (3/14). now thats a whopping interest rate for an online bank.
these banks really know how to cut on expenses by folling the internet banking model and cust down costs on brick & mortar model.
i think i am gonna park some in emigrant-direct!

I was updating my services on the TMobile plan and upgraded from a lower TZones plan to a higher TZones plan, by visting the online services menu and adding the new plan.

to my amazement the way this works is, that they totally shut off your current plan and then do the upgrade in next 24 hrs. So now my GPRS service is totally shut-off for 24 hrs.

why would you do this? cant you just keep the service up if an upgrade is done via the online tool?

update: actually gprs doesnt kick in until after 72hrs according to tmobile tech support.