There was an open parking space at the mall. It's officially a cold day in Hell.
While this
is coming from someone that's been using a weak analog network for a few years now, GSM signal strength is quite impressive. I was holding the analog and digital v60 phones next to each other on the way home: as the analog signal faded in and out and occasionally dropped out altogether, the GSM signal stayed fixed with a full signal. Not bad for a fifteen-year-old network. T-Mobile's in-store reps are very friendly: I called in and was greeted by someone at the local T-Mobile branch rather than in some foreign country, who reserved a SIM activation kit that I could pick up when I came in. Before I bought the card, he was kind enough to pop the SIM card out of his phone so that I could test that my phone was, in fact, unlocked.
Unfortunately, it would have taken two weeks to transfer a prepaid cellular number to another prepaid cellular number, so I opted to simply go with a new cellular number and e-mail everyone that needs it. I managed to secure a new number with the local "617" area code, even though most new cellular registrations are being activated on the new "857" cellular block.
To those who have it, do not dial the old "697" number anymore. If needed, e-mail me for the new number and an updated vCard.
In other news, I spent thirteen hours today configuring my HP LaserJet 1100a scanner to work over a network. The LaserJet 1100 series is a parallel printer/scanner combo, and the scanner portion only works with Windows 2000 and below. Running it on an x64 host without a parallel interface was out of the question. I took one of my Pentium-233 laptops and installed the host software onto it. I then set up a Web server, which hosts a
remote control for the scanner's dot-pitch and bit depth settings using a script I wrote in ASP. The machine processes the input to a TIFF file and then exports it to a shared folder on my laptop, where I can open it in whatever editor, resize, compress, and upload it. The downside is that the scanner's extremely slow and generates RLE-compressed files ranging between 256k for a page of text to 33mb for a full photo.