The first 8310 was literately falling apart, the plastic face plate was falling off, the LCD screen was screwed up to where menus that were supposed to be gray in color were pink, and photos looked all jacked up. The first “new” 8310 I received was garbage, keep in mind that all of these phones are “new” from various AT&T stores. I returned the first phone and they replaced it no questions asked. So the body of the 2nd phone was perfect, but when I was playing with the phone in the dark I noticed 2 bright white specs, dead pixels in the LCD screen. Great. I returned the 2nd blackberry for a 3rd, sure enough I was back to having loose plastic molding and a jammed in ‘Talk’ button that was barely usable, I brought it back to the store minutes after activating it on my account. I was sick of the shotty quality of the BlackBerry Curve so I paid an additional $340.00 and upgraded to the BlackBerry Bold 9000.

Un-boxing the Bold was a trip, what an amazing phone with its beautiful screen and upgraded OS. It was awesome. But after I got into playing with it at home I noticed something, the backlight behind the track ball and keyboard would flicker, like a florescent light about to fail. When I would use the Wi-Fi it would flicker more, violently, almost if the radio(s) in the phone were causing some sort of short. I was ticked off, I called AT&T and they said the only thing I can do is return the phone. By now the employees of the 2 local AT&T stores think I’ve completely lost it, I’ve gone through 4 phones in 5 days and I’m about to return another for a 5th. But whatever, if I’m paying full retail price, $400.00 plus a $20 re-stocking fee, for a freakin’ cell phone - it better be PERFECT. Plus, they don’t have a choice.

So here I am, typing this review on my 5th BlackBerry phone with AT&T, I sent in the rebate paperwork this afternoon, I have everything set up the way I like it so there’s no going back now (That and I have a feeling that if I do return to the store again, I may be arrested.)

With all of that said I’m going to break this ‘review’ of sorts into 3 parts - The 1st you just read, basically four paragraphs of me ranting about BlackBerry’s sub-par build quality, the 2nd will be my actual review of the phone and it’s features, and the 3rd part will focus on a serious security flaw with AT&T’s BlackBerry email activation process that caused me and my uncle in New York a lot of headaches. Stay Tuned.

AT&T has been pretty popular lately, especially with the exclusive on the iPhone. While the iPhone is cool but it doesn’t offer all of the functionality I need like the BlackBerry does. Now that I have a BlackBerry I don’t think I’ll be going ‘back’ to any other phone anytime soon. The super-sexy BlackBerry Bold 9000 was just released on AT&T and while I’m lightly considering dropping the $300 for it I may just go with the cheaper BlackBerry Curve 8310.

So if I’m not getting one of the exclusive AT&T phones why am I making the switch? AT&T certainly isn’t cheaper, in fact I’ll end up paying $30 more every month for the same package I have with Sprint. I’ll also lose my tethering capabilities unless I want to pay an additional $50 a month, something I get for free with Sprint. So why bother? Well, AT&T offers impressive coverage up here. I would know because all of our work phones are on AT&T and they seemingly get service everywhere. I have little to no bars with my Sprint service in most of greater Minn. Also, I can get a slightly smaller family plan to save a few bucks (making the service $20 more instead of $30) and I’ll have rollover minutes, since I use the data network and text messaging more than the minutes I figure I could get by with a smaller plan. Also, remember I mentioned that all of our work phones are on AT&T? Well, AT&T offers free in-network calling to any other subscriber which means I’ll be saving even more minutes off my average usage. Unfortunately AT&T doesn’t offer 3G service in the great north just yet, you have to stick to the ‘burbs or the metro for the blazing fast speeds - and while EDGE isn’t a whole lot faster than EvDO 1x RTT, I’ll have better coverage so my sluggish data service will at least be more reliable.

So tomorrow is my last day with my Sprint contract, I’m planning on buying the new phones and porting my numbers to AT&T on Saturday. I wonder what kinds of ‘upgrade’ offers I’ll get from Sprint in the meantime?

But all of that was all pre-merger and to be honest it didn’t bother me until today. I think this week will mark the end of SIRIUS and I when they decided to cancel Boombox 39 and replace it with yet another Top 40 station, and to add insult to injury they suggest an Alternative Rock station as a substitution. For those who don’t know, or for the folks coming over from XM, Boombox 39 consisted of quality break beats, electro rock, and the occasional DnB or experimental electronica. It was good alterative electronic music, not the light bouncy crap you hear in the club. While Area 38 (which managed to make the cut) is tolerable it can’t stand on its own to represent the entire electronic selection of SIRIUS-XM. Some people might suggest the new BPM station which infiltrated its way over from XM, well BPM is crap, it replaced the Dance Hits station which was a joke anyways. Just like suggesting Alt Nation as a substitution to Boombox is a joke, in fact it’s offensive.

My SIRIUS subscription is up for a yearly renewal at the end of December and as it stands right now I’m on the fence about paying for the subscription. I hope the kids coming over from XM are happy they get to keep Pop2k though, as it’s the station that replaced something truly original. I know I’m thrilled to be that much closer to the garbage on terrestrial radio.

In my last entry I wrote about how I can be a yes-man at work and I’ll often find myself taking on too much. This time around I wanted to write about the same subject but now I’m past the point of taking on the projects, I have the projects lined up and I need to get them done. Basically, I need to stay committed to my commitments. Let me break down what I have on my plate right now so you can get an understanding of the ‘over-encumbered’ state I’m finding myself in, and why things like blogging and keeping up with internet life has become somewhat low priority in the scope of things -

As it stands right now I’m trying to get a start on a website I’m creating through work, I also have another completely separate website that I’m developing in my free time, a freelance project for some cash I could really use right now. Along with the 2 websites, at work I’m also the lead coordinator for a massive bid we’re working on to deploy 2 wireless networks in two very large hotels, we’re talking a combined 1,000+ rooms. I’m going on-site with equipment vendors and contractors, I’m reviewing legal documents, making phone calls, sending emails, I might even be flying down to Dallas, TX this January for certification training on the equipment. As if that wasn’t enough we’re also in the process of shifting backbone connections that will eventually effect our 3 largest cable systems, while I’m not concerning myself with helping out with that just yet, I still have to keep it in the back of my mind. It wouldn’t be as bad if my daily office functions somehow disappeared while I was working on these ‘extra-curricular’ projects, but I still have to perform my basic IT and support functions while I’m at the office. The world spins just as fast regardless of my work load.

I wouldn’t say that I’m complaining, I’m actually having a blast with some of this stuff, I’m becoming more and more involved with the bottom line of the company and it’s a good feeling to be given the opportunity to work on projects like this. Also, I guess I have to be thankful that I even have a job right now and I’ll be kept busy at my job for a long time to come. I’m trying to create limits for myself, I’m starting to clarify when I can and can’t get things done and I think I’m starting to find out for myself what I can handle doing in a given day. For example: This week I started playing around with new color ideas on my blog, after burning an evening just ‘playing around’ I decided to revert to what it is now, 2 websites is enough , I found out that I don’t have the time to take on anything else.

So what does this mean? Well, I’ve always believed that there is no such thing as ‘temporary’, everything takes longer then it should, and many things that should return to a previous state never do. In the end everything is permanent to some degree. So to be honest I’ve thought about my passion for things like blogging, I’ve thought about just closing down my little page on the internet so I wouldn’t have to be concerned about maintaining it. I know so many people that had established blogs and they just simply stopped writing entries for them, I have a feeling they went through the same thing, life just gets busy. But at the same time I’d rather keep trying then throw it all away.

“The whole Rabbit-Panther-Turbine tailwind hairless razor scenario, driven by an over-caffeinated fighter pilot, with a lead foot, all traveling down a ski jump, in Switzerland, under better then ideal conditions.” - Best commercial of the year.

Some of you more geeky types might be familiar with OfficeSnapshots.com. For those who aren’t, it’s a website that has made itself famous by gathering photos of the offices and inner-workings of tech’s coolest startups and megacorps. They have photos from the headquarters of companies like Adobe, Digg, Flickr, Google, Twitter, and Skype. They have a few web hosts on there too, but when I couldn’t find pictures of the Media Temple offices in Culver City, California I was a bit surprised.

I spent some time digging around the internet and I found a few photos of the Media Temple headquarters that I’ll first share with you, then submit to Office Snapshots for inclusion in their gallery. Enjoy.

Media Temple currently employs around 80 employees. They host over 200,000 websites just on the ‘Grid’ platform alone, they also provide high-end dedicated hosting solutions for companies like Adobe, Starbucks Coffee, Toyota, NBC, and Time Warner. Media Temple currently has 2 data centers, their Tier IV EL-IDC3 facility in El Segundo, California, and their new VA-IDC4 facility in Ashburn Virginia.

Media Temple’s corporate headquarters is located in Culver City, about 6 miles from their El Segundo data center.

From the Outside –

Main Entrance –

Sales & Support –

Conference Rooms –

Photo Credits: Someday I hope I’ll have the opportunity to visit Media Temple myself along with all of the other amazing corporations in Silicon Valley. In the meantime the photos you see here were taken by Paul Stamatiou and Bryan Veloso.

Tomorrow will only be my 2nd time voting in a general election, 3rd if you include the democratic caucus earlier this year. I’m proud to announce who I’m voting for and I’m more than happy to sit down and talk to people about why I’m choosing Barack Obama over John McCain, why I’m a democrat rather than a republican, and why I’m liberal instead of conservative.

To be honest, I think that the bottom line is when it comes to politics the word ‘conservative’ is arbitrary, I think Barack Obama has more conservative values then John McCain will ever have. It’s obvious that we need change in our government, we need to invest into our own infrastructure to rebuild our health care system, our schools and education, our bridges and roads, our housing and credit markets - we need to strengthen our own economy, our own country, rather then pour money into a war of ulterior motives on the other side of the planet that has gone nowhere in 4 years. So how is pulling our country out of a bottomless hole constitute as a liberal thing to do? How is Barack Obama so far “left” when everything he wants to do is right?

I just don’t understand why we can’t try to move in another direction when we all know that what’s going on right now is not working, and it will continue to not work because it never was in our best interests in the first place. I believe that it’s unfair to tell someone to vote for a particular candidate, I think people should evaluate what’s important to them and vote accordingly. But if you’re going in tomorrow to vote “conservative” just because “it’s the American way”, or if you believe the childish stabs about the democratic nominee just because he has an unconventional name or his skin isn’t quite red-neck white, rather than all of that maybe you could focus on the real issues at hand and what the candidates have to say because believe it or not, “The American Way” or the classic “American Dream” as we know it or as we would like it to be, is at stake with this election.

I’m not a big fan of Ford’s automobiles after the experience I had with my Taurus some years ago. In fact you could say that I’m anti-Ford and more of a GM fiend these days. Nonetheless, Ford is in the works of introducing a one of a kind LCD instrument panel called SmartGauge. This high-tech, highly customizable speedometer uses an all-digital LCD screen with all sorts of lively animations, it also features Ford’s new “EcoGuide” technology that encourages good driving habits.

Ford is planning to include the SmartGauge with the new 2010 Ford Fusion and 2010 Mercury Milan hybrids, they will then roll it out to their other vehicles over the next few years.