Work

I will have to work at 3am on Wednesday because some idiots in VzW have maintenance windows for their lab test systems. My idea of a maintenance window is when fewest people will start screaming bloody murder if I reboot something. Lunch time, for instance. To add insult to injury, the only reason I will have to be awake at such an ungodly hour is because they are refusing to give me the shared secret key other than during the maintenance conference call. These same people spent two weeks trying to convince me that I have to change the IP of my endpoint because they are installing a new VPN box on their end. After I finally gave in (a colleague begged me to, for the sake of his project), they came back and admitted they were wrong. Not completely hopeless, I guess, at least they are capable of admitting their mistakes. But the fact that the network works as well as it does is pure miracle.

On an unrelated note, I can't take this weather any more. N's dad is going home to Kenya for a couple of months. It's summer in Kenya. I have lots of unused last year's vacation that needs to be used up soon... Might be a good time to visit Africa.

In the news

Analysts are expecting Apple to follow in Google's footsteps and have the next generation iPhones and iPads include near-field communication (NFC) technology. That will allow them to be used as swipe-to-pay devices, eliminating the need to carry around credit cards, coupons, etc. Provided you want to trust that kind of information to your phone, of course. It all might line up pretty nicely with the joint venture by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless that was announced last year called Isis. Isis is going to be a "nationwide mobile commerce network" that will utilize NFC to facilitate various transactions. It should go operational sometime next year.

NFC has been around for a while and it's already being used, in Japan, for instance, to pay for purchases using a phone. I think previously the idea was, when you pay with the phone you see the charge on your phone bill, but now the paradigm seems to be changing. There is no guarantee Apple will also partner with Isis, they might just not surprise anybody and build their own competing service.

In another bit of related news, Verizon Wireless is going to offer a $30 unlimited data plan with their new iPhone due in stores Feb 10.