Paul L. McCord Jr.

There is a phrase that is being used more and more these days with reference to remote data storage over the Internet called “Cloud Computing” or “The Cloud” for short.  This phrase is often referring to images we have all seen when someone draws a computer network.  They often draw this cloud in the corner where a person’s network connects.  This cloud is the Internet.  Why do they call it a cloud?  This can be answered by the unknown quantity that the Internet represents.  The Internet has matured to a point that people are looking for more innovative ways to use it.  This just happens to coincide with the dramatic drop in the cost of data storage whether by hard drives or flash drives.

Today a person can buy a hard drive the size that no one could have imagined five years ago for less than $100.00 in some cases.  I have seen two terabyte drives at Wal-Mart.  For those that are unfamiliar with a terabyte, I will have to give you a bit of computer background so you can get some perspective.  Most of us have heard the term “bit” or “bits”.  This is a term referring to a binary digit.  Binary is nothing more than a different numbering system that is based on two instead of ten.  Most of us know that our decimal numbering system goes up to nine before carrying over to another digit making “10”.  Well binary is the same way except it goes up to one before carrying over another digit.  For example you would count. 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111 and so on.  As you can see, it is based on two.  Well a binary digit or bit is the means of measuring data.  For each letter of the alphabet, or number to be expressed, it takes approximately eight binary digits of data, or a byte.  One byte is eight binary digits and is the data required to store one letter of the alphabet, or ASCII character.

As you probably remember the metric system from high school  a kilo is 1000 units of anything.  A mega is 1,000,000 or one million.  A Giga is 1,000,000,000 or one billion units.  A tera is 1,000,000,000,000 or one trillion units of something.  Since data storage is expressed in bytes, this storage of one terabyte is really approximately 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.  This is an enormous number that is difficult visualize.

Now that data storage prices have dropped so much, there are companies offering data storage remotely over the Internet.  In some cases they have services that back up your own data over the Internet in small increments while your Internet is idle.  As we have seen with services like Google Docs, and Windows Live Sky Drive, these services are becoming mainstream.  There are benefits to this because a person may have critical photos, music, or videos on their computer that would be a tragedy if lost.  By storing things remotely, it helps keep them from being lost if a person’s house catches fire or hit by a tornado.  I have been doing this for quite some time with my photos.  I have more than 20,000 photos on my computer and currently over 7,000 of them are stored on Flickr.com.

They refer to this activity as cloud computing and has become a standard term.  The problem is that I am not an ordinary person and have a difficult time seeing the Internet when people say “The Cloud”.  I have two teenage sons that often do things like pass gas as they walk through the house and then tell you that you just walked through their cloud as you walk through the room.  Since this has happened many times, I tend to think unpleasant things when people refer to the cloud.  This is not a good thing because I am around computer enthusiasts on a regular basis. find myself reaching for the Febreeze every time they start talking about cloud computing.  Am I too far gone?  I still hold out hope that one day I will get passed the trauma.  I would like to suggest changing the name so that I can engage in computer speak without thinking of toilets.  How about calling it “The Internet”?

I know that most people from more refined backgrounds are thinking to themselves about a thunderstorm, or even a Spring day when someone refers to clouds.  I guess I could use some more refinement but I am what I am.  It was destined to happen when I was an aircraft maintenance person in the Air Force for many years.  If you have ever been one you probably know what I am talking about.  Being in the military requires you to have some thick skin and have a sense of humor to deal with the long hours of working on the flight line in less than ideal conditions.  I guess I am doomed to being an unrefined Neanderthal incapable of rational thought.  I need to accept who I am.  Can I keep my computer though?

I wanted to give an update on my Internet problems.  You may remember that I posted on February 6, 2010 about how Cox came out to my house and worked to get my persistent Internet drop outs fixed.  In the end, it was determined that my brand new expensive router was failing me.  They brought me out a cheaper Linksys router and my Internet worked flawlessly for over a week.  Yesterday we went back to the store and exchanged the router for a new one pictured above.  Our Internet has been working on the new router for about 24 hours with no problems.  My other router also worked great for two days before failing.  Cox was willing to sell me the Linksys router and that is fine but I paid good money for the D-Link router.  I am not opposed to Cox’s router so much as I am opposed to buying a new router and not using it.

I am hopeful that my router will continue to work long term and then I can let Cox have their router back.  They worked with me diligently to find the problem.  I do want to thank them for the assistance they gave me.   That being said, I do think that when we are paying $50.00 a month for Internet, I do think it should be expected to have dependable service.  Let’s hope that it continues to work.

My Internet problems may be fixed and I owe it all to the employees of Cox communications.  I have posted about my Internet connectivity issues on many occasions so much so that I am sure people are getting tired of hearing about it. I am still not for sure why things turned out the way they did but I am very happy.  I signed up for Cox High Speed Internet about three months ago and have been plagued with dropped connections every few minutes. Those of you that know my family also know that we are heavy Internet users.  When this started out we were using a Belkin F5D7230-4 router that we had purchased from Wal-Mart a couple years ago.

This router cost about $39.99 and was clearly on the low end of the spectrum.  The Internet was dropping about every 30 to 40 minutes on this router and the only way to get it back was to reboot the modem and the router.  I lived with this for about two months before finally getting so mad.  I thought I should change routers before calling Cox just to make sure that it is not my equipment.  In January my wife and I went to Office Depot in Moore, Oklahoma and spent $180.00 for what we thought was going to be a good router. 

This router is a D-Link DIR-825 and is an “N” router with dual band 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz capability.  I did some research to see if it was a good product before buying it.  This router had some very good reviews and seemed to be liked by many.  I thought with all the positive reviews, this router would be a good choice because one of the advertised features was heavy use on multiple computers.  We came home and hooked up this new router and it worked wonderfully for about two days.  I was amazed at how good it worked when it was working.  After about two days the drop outs started again.  This time they would fix themselves after about five minutes.  The dropouts became so bad that at one point it was down five minutes and came back on for about 40 seconds before going back down.

I was becoming more angry by the minute.  I reluctantly called Cox technical support just knowing they were going to say it was my router.  I have found that many times when you call tech support for any organization they always blame it on your equipment.  Well just as I thought, they went through the troubleshooting process and within minutes came to the conclusion that it was my router.  Of course I did not believe them and thought they were just “passing the buck” so they would not have to take responsibility for my issues.  In my mind there was no way it could be my router because after all, I just bought a brand new $180.00 router with hundreds of positive reviews.  At this point I was not only angry but indignant.  In my frustration I started posting on Twitter about my persistent Internet problems.  I made a point to mention Cox by name because in my mind it was their poor infrastructure that was causing my issues.

To my surprise, my Twitter posts were recognized by several Cox employees.  The couple that I remember off the top of my head were Cox_Will, CoxNicky, and DonaldOhse.  These employees went out of their way to contact me directly to help come to a resolution.  It was Cox_Will that called me on the phone, did some tests, and had a local Cox representative contact me.  I posted a story on my blog that listed my symptoms.  I then sent this link to Cox_Will over Twitter. The person he put me in contact with was Debbie Chaffee from Oklahoma.  They had a couple technical support people come out to my house and spent over four hours on a cold rainy evening.  I really wish I could remember their names so they could get the credit they deserved.  They replaced the drop line to the box on the back of my house.  They installed a new cable coming from the box into the house. 

They even installed a brand new white wall plate that better matched the paint in the house.  They went up on the pole with some sort of tester to see if the line was good coming to our home. 

They even communicated with some tech support people at a remote site using their Nextel phones. 

In the end, they discovered that by pinging various servers both of my routers the latency was terrible and inconsistent.  They were showing me the results going from 7 ms all the way up to 184 ms.  When connected directly to my computer they were consistently less than 10 ms.  It was hard for me to argue with that.  Then they brought in a cheaper Linksys WRT54G2 router to try on a temporary basis.

With this router installed my Internet was working very nicely but I was still skeptical.  Like I told the two gentlemen, my other router worked great for two days before dropping out again.  The guy told me that he would leave their router at our house over the weekend with the instructions to give it a real workout.  He said that he wanted us to put it under as much stress as we could to force a malfunction so we would have peace that it is indeed the router that was the problem.  I grudgingly agreed to the terms convinced that it was going to fail before long.

Well it has been three days and I have been running multiple video streams simultaneously 24 hours a day.  The Internet has not dropped even one time leaving me to admit that it was my brand new $180.00 router that was failing.  I guess it is possible that I could have purchased a lemon.  I am sure these routers are mass produced and there are bound to be a few that fail.  This post is an attempt to fulfill a promise I made to all parties involved. That promise was to post a glowing review of Cox Communications if they could get my persistent problem resolved.  I am not only doing this because I gave my word but also because they really do deserve the praise.

This company had the foresight to to put employees on Twitter and other social networking sites to monitor the keyword “Cox”.  None of these people were contacts of min so they had to be searching for the word “Cox” to have stumbled on my posts of frustration.  These individuals did not sit there and ignore my please but took the initiative to contact me directly.  They stayed with me until the problem was fixed.  I never thought that Cox was doing me wrong before, but was convinced that because I live in an older neighborhood that the infrastructure was old and frail.  I knew that Cox was capable of delivering a quality service because I have many family and friends that are customers and they were very satisfied.  I just wanted to give credit to them and tell them that I am very loyal to those that treat me right.  I will stay with Cox and tell others how they were patient and just as persistent to get this intermittent problem resolved.  Every one of them deserve a pat on the back in my eyes.  Thanks Cox!

On January 28, 2010 we started off the morning dry and cold.  Before long the rain moved in and the temperature dropped.  By 10:00 AM the boss had decided to send everyone home because the roads were getting icy.  It took us a whole hour to get from our parking lot to the gate to get off base.  As the day went on we had more and more rain and later changed to sleet.  It appeared that we had dodged the worst of the storm because the sleet does not stick to tree limbs and power lines.  From the weather reports it sounds as if the worst of the storm was in Southwestern Oklahoma.  Both my sister at Ft. Sill and my sister in-law at Altus AFB lost their power and are still sitting in the dark as of the time I post this.  These ice storms are becoming a regular thing.    You may remember the ice storm in December 2007 where the Oklahoma City area was hit the hardest.  We were without power for a week so I can certainly sympathize with them losing their power.

This morning I woke  up to find that we are off work again.  This is nice to have a day and a half off work without having to take vacation time.  My wife and I have decided that now we are off work so it can stop now.  The snow can go away so we can have a nice week end.  It is not listening to us.  I need to call out Cox Cable to fix my line to the house.  My Internet has some serious issues and needs to be redone.  I know for a fact the problem is not my network.  Well better get this posted before the Internet goes off again.

Man!  I am so fed up with these Internet issues.  I have had DSL and Cable service, four routers, wired and wireless, new modems and my Internet continues to drop out again and again and again.   We have two desktops and three laptops and we have dropouts on both wired and wireless.  Every piece of hardware in our network has been replaced, even computers.  This problem has been going on for several years.  Tonight is a particularly bad night with my Internet struggling to stay on for five minutes at a time.  The only thing that I can think of is that my old house and power lines are flaky.  Our wires are above ground and have been through countless thunderstorms and ice storms.  I have a power transformer on the power pole in my backyard.  I just noticed this evening that my cable Internet line coming from the pole has no ground on it.

I am so tired of this ongoing problem.  Last week we bought a brand new expensive router and the dropouts continued.  At least with the new router, the dropouts are able to fix themselves after a few minutes.  Before I had to reboot the router and the modem just to get it to come back on.  I can tell you I just want to scream like a little girl.  When we pay $50.00 a month for ten years for service, you would hope that we could have decent service.  It looks like moving out of here is the only way we are going to get it fixed.  I just needed to vent some more.

Thanks for listening.

I have posted about my Internet connection problems several times and nothing seems to fix the problems.  Over the last several years I have been plagued with losing Internet connection repeatedly.  In some cases I would not lose connection completely but I would lose connection to the web.  All other Internet applications would remain connected while the web would lose connectivity.  My wife and I with frustration have changed Internet providers from Cable to DSL and then back to Cable.  We have been through four routers and six computers.  There has been eight computers if you count the laptops.  The problem is the same in every configuration.  I am becoming convinced that my problems are infrastructure.  I live in a house that is 60 years old and in a neighborhood that has many large trees that have grown out of control into the above ground power lines.  Both Cable and phone lines are on these same power poles that are among trees.  We live in an area that consistently has high winds most of the time.  I am beginning to think that many of our connectivity issues are a direct result of these aging power, cable, and phone lines being exposed to large trees and high winds.

I have a moderate level of experience in trouble shooting computers and the Internet.  When Internet is lost, most technical support will encourage you to turn off your router, modem, and all connected computers.  They will have you turn on the modem, then then router, and then the connected computers.  This is good advice and almost always works as most people that have had this problem will attest.  Our problem is intermittent in nature but consistent in its repetitiveness.  Over the last few years, we have changed modems, routers, and providers and the problem is never ending.  I am hopeful that our move next year will help to alleviate these connection issues.  Right now we are using a brand new cable modem and router.  My router, D-Link DIR-825 802.11(n) Gigabit, is not even a week old.  Our modem is a Motorola SBV-5222 and we have only had it for six months.The one noticeable improvement this router has resulted in is the auto reset.  The Internet still loses connection but no longer seems to need us to restart the modem and router.  It seems to restart itself within two minutes.  When I am streaming video, the lost Internet is very annoying.

There are many reasons why I believe our problems are infrastructure.  Over the years we have lost electric power many many times because trees have grown into the power lines and the wind has blown them into the wires.  I have lost a monitor from a power surge that was a result of a loose ground wire on the power line behind my house.  The local power company came to my house and narrowed the issue to that connection.  To give you an idea of how this works I will explain.  When that wire comes loose it is akin to turning on the water faucet and putting your thumb over the hose.  When you take your thumb off the hose you will get a sudden surge of water pressure that shoots the water with a higher force.  The same can be said of your power lines.  The voltage is the pressure that pushes the electricity through the wires.  The actual electrons (current) flowing through the wire is like the water going through the hose.  When the current is slowed, it increases pressure (voltage).  This sudden surge of voltage can be reduced with surge protectors but those do not work in our old neighborhood.  Surge protectors rely on using the home’s ground.  These old homes only have the old two wire power wires in the home and do not have a good ground for the surge protector to use.

I may be way off on my assumption but this is what I have narrowed it down to.  We have changed every piece of hardware in the home network.  The only thing left is infrastructure.  I really hope that when we move, it can fix this problem.  I talk to others and find I am the only one that has these problems, at least to this extent.  If anyone can think of other issues that I failed to think of, please, by all means, let me know.  We have had this problem intermittently over the last ten years that we have lived in this house.  I am not too proud to accept assistance that can fix this problem. 

In an all too familiar game, I am stuck playing the card that I do not wish to play.  This morning I called in a work order to have my Internet service provider (ISP) changed from AT&T Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) to Cox Cable.  Before you get too excited that I have finally seen the light and come over to the cool side I should explain this is not the first time I have been with Cox.  I have been around the Internet since I was on bulletin boards back in the early 90’s.  My first direct Internet experience was through Telnet in 1994 when we were stationed at Luke AFB in Phoenix, Arizona.

You may be asking yourself why I switched in the first place.  Well as you all know we have very few choices when it comes to broadband Internet.  We have our phone company or our cable company and that is it.  If one of them makes you mad, you only have one other place to go.  I live in an older neighborhood where the infrastructure is crumbling beneath us.  Our phone lines are 50+ years old and our cable lines date back to the 1980’s.  This is just another reason we plan on moving in the next two years.  Back to the subject.  When we moved to the Oklahoma City area in 1999 we had then Southwestern Bell DSL.  The service was decent most of the time but then  when they would go down, we could never get in touch with technical support because of their terrible automated phone system.  A person wants to scream about 15 minutes into the circle of death pressing 1 for English and 2 for Spanish and so on… 

What is a person to do?  Switch to the competitor, Cox Cable.  I did this around 2002 and again I was pleased for a while before we have the same failures.  Again, we have some very old infrastructure both inside the house and outside.  After losing connections over and over again, we switched back to AT&T in 2006 knowing what we were getting ourselves into.  I must say this time the service was much better than before and hey!  My old phone number was available that I had when I was a kid so I chose it.  The service was outstanding up until a couple months ago and now we are losing service left and right.  Before you say anything, I know the problem is outside my house because I disconnected all wiring from inside the house and then connected the modem directly to the box outside the house. 

Once again, what is a person to do?  Go to the competitor Cox Cable.  This is the only recourse that we have when the system is not working.  I know many of you are saying… Why would you ever go to DSL when  you could have cable?  Cable is faster than DSL in almost every case!  Well, this may be true in theory but for the average user, you cannot tell the difference in performance. 

I have six computers on my network and one of them streams audio 24 hours a day.  There are three hard wired desktops and three laptops.  Heck there are seven if you count my phone that also uses wifi for my unlicensed mobile access (UMA).  My son uses Bit Torrent (legally) because he has a band with his friends.  In addition I have tested my network running Skype video on two computers, and streaming video on Ustream.com at the same time.

With all this running simultaneously, our network runs flawlessly on the AT&T Elite DSL. This Elite plan is supposed to supply up to 6 mega bits per second (Mbps) and I have tested around  5.4 Mbps at the best.  The cable plan that I am subscribing too is a 12 Mbps and I have had the 10 Mbps before.  My dad already has the 12 Mbps cable and it is very good.  One thing that is worthy of pointing out, it does not matter if you have 8,000 Gbps fiber optic cable going to your house, if the web site on the other end is bogged down, the page is not going to load any faster.  This is something that some people do not understand.  If you are sharing files (legally) and 100 people are downloading the same file, you are going to get a slow download even if you have broadband.  The point in all this is that for the average user, the difference between DSL and Cable is negligible.   I came to this realization years ago so the supposed improved performance of cable is barely even noticeable to the average user.

There was another reason this time for the switch.  The telephone number that I now have is the same number that my parents had when I was a kid.  Unfortunately these numbers are assigned a three digit prefix that are assigned to AT&T for Del City.  If I were to move to another suburb in the Oklahoma City metro, I could not take this number with me.  By porting it over to Cox telephone, then I can take it with me as long as I stay within the 405 area code.  This means if I move to Midwest City, Moore, Oklahoma City or anywhere else in the metro, I can keep my childhood phone number.

And finally there is one more reason for changing.  In December 2007 we had an incredible ice storm as you may remember in my post on December 11, 2007.  This storm damages power lines all over the metro including cable lines.  The last couple of months I have noticed Cox cable running brand new lines in my neighborhood.  I am not sure if this has anything to do with repairing the old and damaged lines or if there is an actual upgrade that would enhance the performance.  In either case, it is certain to be new infrastructure that will help eliminate connection drops.  The old lines were silver, likely aluminum lines while now there are black thick lines.

I hope this helps to explain my reasoning for the switch this time.  The change will not actually happen until next week.  This is one of the reasons that I use my own domain and a web based email as my email account.  This way, if I change, it is transparent to those on the outside.  I never give or even use the email given to me by my ISP.  I am anxious to see how well the new service will work.  I am pretty sure that it will be more dependable if for no other reason the new cable lines being installed.  They have already upgraded the ones behind my house.  I look forward to trying some bandwidth tests with some of you online.

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I just tried Google Maps for the first time in a while and it is really nice. I was amazed at how well I could see our home in England when we were in the Air Force.  The above address it 34 Adastral Close, Felixstowe, Suffolk, England.  It is phenomenal how clear and close you can zoom. I am not talking about Google Earth, but rather http://maps.google.com. It lets you save your own maps publicly and private as well as trips. If you make them public, others can search and find your own maps. Also I have been playing around with Google Reader, and Friendfeed since there has been so much hype about the Facebook takeover of Friendfeed.

It is interesting that despite my many railings against Google Fanboys, I have become one.  It seems that every time I turn around there is another free toy that I can play with.  In fact I am typing this using the Google Chrome browser.  My phone has a Google sync application that syncs my Gmail address book, and calendar.  Anything that I put on the web, suddenly comes to my phone.  This pains me to become a fanboy because I have always had a soft spot for Yahoo since I have been with them from the  beginning.  It seems that Yahoo has decided to join forces with Microsoft’s Bing.com.  Bing is also pretty good at search.  I do like to have all of them succeed because I believe competition is always good for the consumer.  If you have one dominant player then creativity can suffer.  This is funny that I talk about creativity when I am the least creative person on the face of the earth.  I am hoping that Bing and Yahoo can finally get to a point where they are competitive again soon.

This morning it rained as I went to work but as usual it was clear and sunny when I got off work. I really hoped that it would stay around until I got off work so I could enjoy it. Our lawn mower broke down or maybe I should say it was purposely destroyed this weekend.  I will not elaborate on here as to not embarrass the person that did it.  Now we need a new mower just so we can mow the lawn and it is getting tall.  I am just hoping that we do not get a fine before we can get the mower replaced.

UPDATE: 19 Aug 2009

I owe this person an apology.  No one broke the lawn mower but rather it vibrated some screws out.  Since the drive shaft is slightly bent, the mower runs out of balance and vibrates as it runs.  I tightened that bolt and mowed three strips and the bolt came back out.  So I just wanted to say that I was wrong.

I will be going to Illinois in a couple weeks on a personal trip.  I will only be spending the night and then heading back the next day since I need to get back to work.  I was supposed to be going to San Antonio on a work related trip this week but I was cut from the list due to financial concerns.  I am actually glad I was this time because there are things going on at home that need to be dealt with.

My work has been so overwhelming lately because there are so many things going on as well as having new trainees.  It is interesting that I am supposed to be training them and I am a trainee myself.  I guess on the bright side, it shows that my supervisor has confidence in me.  I will think the glass is half full .  With so many things going on at work I often forget where I was.  I am the kind of person that likes to take notes and do things in an orderly way.  Unfortunately I work in an environment where we put out fires through email and the phone.  There is always a crisis going on somewhere in the world that needs our immediate attention.  My orderly notes and to do list has degenerated into a pile of yellow sticky notes all over my desk.  I hate disorder and confusion.  I like to complete a task before starting another but that is impossible in my office.  It is amazing how a letter from a General can get our whole office in an uproar.  It is similar to stepping on a red ant bed and then watching the swarm.  Everyone stop what you are doing and focus on this hang nail the General has.  I say this with some humor but there is some truth to it as I guess it should be in this type of environment.  Despite my talk about being outside of my comfort zone, I love my job.  I feel that what I do is important and I try to do my best.  I just wish everyone could be as blessed as I am.  I will be in class the next two days so I should be able to see some calm before returning the hyper crazed zoo that is my office.

Well I thought I would post a few words since I have not posted much lately.  I love blogging just for the heck of it.  Sometimes I vent like a crazed lunatic and sometimes I just want to tell the world about my day.  It is funny how I come across people that are polar opposites.  Some people are so private and think I am crazy for posting my personal thoughts online.  I have people that tell me that “Big Brother” is listening it so you should not post online.  I got over that long ago when I found that you could search for ham radio call signs online.  Also the County Assessor’s office has pictures of everyone’s home online.  There is just too much going on in the world to worry about “Big Brother”.  Others think it is cool and wish they could do it themselves. I considered taking the blog down a few days ago but I think I will leave it up.  If nothing else, it can be used as comedy when I get into one of my rants.  For those that do read, I appreciate it.

This weekend I replaced my phone with this Blackberry Curve 8900 from T-Mobile.  This phone while lacking 3G capability is very nice.  I have been torn for sometime about whether I was going to change providers or stay with T-Mobile when my contract ran out.  I think it was my son coming home to live with us that made up my mind because with four phones, the price can be very steep, especially if you have Internet capability.  We have the 1800 minute family myFavs plan with each person being able to select five numbers where they can make or receive unlimited calling.  Also we have unlimited mobile to mobile calling, and unlimited nights and weekends.  We also have unlimited text messaging because after all, I do have teenagers.  I cannot blame them because since I have Twitter, I get just as many texts as they do.

I considered switching to a new carrier but the cost of buying four new phones and the new, more expensive rate plans would have been just too expensive.  Since we have been with T-Mobile since 2000, we have a good history to go on so we decided to stay.  I have had flawless service in the last nine years with them so we decided to stay with them.  When we signed up originally they were not even called T-Mobile but rather Voicestream.

It was going to be a toss up between this phone and the G1 but I finally decided on this one for one reason.  I kept reading about how the G1’s battery life was very short.  Secondly T-Mobile’s 3G rollout for Oklahoma City would not be until August.  The 3G speeds were sure to make the battery run down even faster.

The phone that I settled on is this Blackberry and I love it.  They may say that it has no 3G but the Internet is every bit as fast as my dad’s Iphone and my brother’s Blackberry through Alltel/Verizon.  This phone also has Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) through wifi.  The speeds are almost as fast on the mobile EDGE as it is on my home wifi making it very usable.  The one thing that I love about this phone the most is the fact that I can be connected to Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, and Blackberry Messenger all at the same time.  I have three different email accounts including my University of Oklahoma account.  I have Twitterberry, and the Facebook for Blackberry installed and I can have all these programs running at the same time. 

Of course yesterday was my first full day with this phone and with all the heavy usage on social networking sites and phone calls, the phone is still not dead.  I charged the phone all day Friday and it is now Sunday.  I am very pleased with its performance.  I just love the message notification section where I can check any of those systems and respond to any of them from one spot.  This is pretty amazing how smooth it works.  It is almost as addicting as the computer itself.  I just wanted to share how pleased I am with this new phone.  Do not let the lack of 3G discourage you from this phone because it is quick enough to make it useful.  I would definitely recommend this phone.