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blast from the past
I just got a phone message, at work, from a researcher in Belgium who had questions about NetBill, a project I worked on at CMU in the mid-90s. Nifty.
I wsa just one of the staff flunkies (not the principal investigator), so after I answered his questions as best I could and redirected him to the PI, I asked how he'd found me. (The NetBill web site has since gone down.) He described a sequence of links that started with an article in the Guardian (UK), then passed through a French newspaper, then led to a company that's no longer there (Digicash), then led to (I think?) a cached copy of the NetBill web site, which had a list of project members, and from there he found my personal web page, which links to my current company. (I'm trying to remember if I was first alphabetically among the project team. That might explain why me and not the PI. Um, no, there was a "B".) Given all that I'm not sure why he called instead of sending email; shrug.
I learned something in the process of trying to return this call: my cell phone isn't "authorized" for calls to Europe. (Well, technically, all I know is that I can't call Belgium. I'm generalizing, perhaps appropriately.) Huh? Not that I've bumped into this in the year I've had it, but still... I don't remember turning on any kind of filtering, and when you buy a phone you expect to be able to make arbitrary calls with it, yes?
(I didn't want to use my employer's phone without figuring out how to pay for the call, so I tried the cell first. When that failed I asked how to compute the rate, which turned out to be much lower than I'd thought it would be. I thought overseas calls would be something like 50 cents or a dollar a minute, not 15 cents.)
I wsa just one of the staff flunkies (not the principal investigator), so after I answered his questions as best I could and redirected him to the PI, I asked how he'd found me. (The NetBill web site has since gone down.) He described a sequence of links that started with an article in the Guardian (UK), then passed through a French newspaper, then led to a company that's no longer there (Digicash), then led to (I think?) a cached copy of the NetBill web site, which had a list of project members, and from there he found my personal web page, which links to my current company. (I'm trying to remember if I was first alphabetically among the project team. That might explain why me and not the PI. Um, no, there was a "B".) Given all that I'm not sure why he called instead of sending email; shrug.
I learned something in the process of trying to return this call: my cell phone isn't "authorized" for calls to Europe. (Well, technically, all I know is that I can't call Belgium. I'm generalizing, perhaps appropriately.) Huh? Not that I've bumped into this in the year I've had it, but still... I don't remember turning on any kind of filtering, and when you buy a phone you expect to be able to make arbitrary calls with it, yes?
(I didn't want to use my employer's phone without figuring out how to pay for the call, so I tried the cell first. When that failed I asked how to compute the rate, which turned out to be much lower than I'd thought it would be. I thought overseas calls would be something like 50 cents or a dollar a minute, not 15 cents.)
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I loved the fact that Canadian calls were treated on par with American ones. Most of my calls were to Steve in Vancouver and I used the mobile mostly on weekends when I was visiting there (This way my relatives could reach me)