So, after quite a while, my wife and I finally decided to cut the cord and get rid of our home telephone number. The catalyst for this decision was my purchase of the Treo 700w not long ago. Part of this purchase involved moving to Verizon from Cingular (which, by the way, is a move I have not regretted one bit).

Since Lindsay already had Verizon service we’re able to come together on a shared family plan, which offered about 2x the minutes for the same price we were paying on separate bills. Given this and the unlimited mobile-to-mobile calls, it seemed like a no-brainer to kick Qwest to the curb.

We’ll see how this progresses, but I imagine that we’ll be very happy with this. I’ve heard from numerous people… Once you go mobile, you never go back. :)

Why, oh why, arent the System.Xml classes easier to work with? Why is everything tied to the XmlDocument?

I’d love to be able to do something like this:

public XmlElement ToXml(MyClass obj)
{
    XmlElement elem = new XmlElement("myclass");
    // additional code to populate the element
    return elem;
}

All the constructors on the objects are protected, and it seems as if none of these objects can stand by themselves. In my humble opinion, all of these classes should be able to stand on their own, and I should be able to take any instance of these classes and add them to a document, not create them as part of the document.

My Treo 700W showed up yesterday and I spent most of the remainder of my evening futzing around with it.

A few minutes ago I found a little tool called Pocket SharpMT which lets me post to my MovableType server.

The UI in this thing is pretty slick, and the keyboard on the Treo makes authoring posts pretty bearable.

This is a test post from this tool. We’ll see how it goes… perhaps my blogging won’t be as light as it has been.

Since making the switch to Cingular (from AT&T wireless) a little over a year ago, Ive become increasingly disgruntled with the coverage provided by Cingular in the Boise area. They claim “the fewest dropped calls”, which I suppose is probably accurate since I rarely drop a call. More frequently, I just cant even get enough signal to even make a call.

When switching to Cingular, I got the “Scoble phone”. The device itself seems ok, but certain things have really hindered the way I want to use the device. Specifically, the lack of a QWERTY keyboard really made this difficult. How often do you want to type an email, or create a new appt with a numeric keypad?

Today, I took the plunge and am switching services. After considerable research, I found that Verizon seems to have the best coverage in the Boise area and so (hopefully) I should be switching to them tomorrow. I’m just waiting for my new phone to arrive.

After even more research on phones, I finally landed on the Treo 700W. The final decision was between this device and the Blackberry. While this thing is a little more money, I really feel that Ill end up getting more from this due to the Windows Mobile OS, and the fact that I dont have to hook up to a special server (Blackberry Enterprise Server) to sync up. ActiveSync over the air takes care of all this for me.

Again, this thing is supposed to show up tomorrow, and I can hardly wait. I’ll post thoughts on this device as I use it more.

Let me start by saying that I *love* the simplicity of Google Talk. No ads, no extra features that I dont need from an IM client. Chat, integration with GMail, integration with Google Desktop, and probably the best audio conversations available.

Why did I uninstall this a while back? Simple… Most of my contacts are using MSN Messenger.

Im now back using Google Talk as my IM client, because of a great article that I found that discusses how to hook up Google Talk to AIM, MSN and Yahoo using a Jabber proxy.

This is what IM is supposed to be. Im lovin it!

We’ve recently taken to FitNesse to drive our acceptance tests.

One of the frustrations we had with it was getting it to run as a service. I found a neat article on the fitnesse site that described how to do this.

We ran across a situation that was absolutely maddening, involving running FitNesse as a service. Everything worked wonderfully, until you logged off the machine. At that point, the service would die.

A fair amount of googling led me to this article at Sun, which seems to suggest that this is actually an issue with the Java VM.

The fix is easy enough… Pass the -Xrs switch in the AppParameters area for srvany (the last step before ‘roll the drums’ in the linked instructions).