ah, technology

[cellio]

This afternoon my (relatively-new) cell phone made a noise I hadn't heard before. (Kind of disturbing, actually; must try to fix.) When I investigated, I found a text message from a coworker reporting that his wife had just seen for sale (location given) something I had recently said I'd been having trouble finding. This prompted several immediate thoughts:

1. My plan does text messages?

2. How do people learn to type on those things? It took me at least a minute to compose my two-word reply. (Skipping punctuation would have been faster but out of character.) He sent a grammatically-correct paragraph without any cutesy IMisms. Granted, I don't know what device he used to send it.

3. Where did he get my phone number? (I can ask him that one tomorrow.) My land-line number is readily available, but I haven't given my cell number out to coworkers. I tried Googling for my own number and found sites willing to sell it to me but none willing to give it to me.

Heh. I learned some things today, and will learn one more tomorrow when I ask my coworker about #3. Meanwhile, purchase mission accomplished thanks to this message.

Comments

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Some phones come with software that will 'guess' your word based on the combination of numbers you push. So, rather than pressing '1' 3 times to get the letter 'c', you'd only press it once.

Over time, the software will learn what words you learn frequently and 'suggest' those to you earlier in the 'word', so you can accept it's suggestion without typing the whole word, which also speeds things up. N can type a message in no time because he averages around 3000 messages a month. I average about 3, so I tend to take 5 minutes to type a message. :-)

For more info, check out this page (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itprnn/itap/)

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Oh, and most plans nowadays will allow you to receive text messages (unless you block them) for a fee. I think mine was 10 cents a message before N and I joined plans... which was fine for my level of usage.

The problem is that they don't ask if you want the message (like a collect phone call), you just get charged the fee whether it's a 'spam' text message or something potentially useful.

[cellio]

Thanks for the pointer. Now that you mention it, the documentation for my phone mentioned that feature too. It didn't occur to me to try.

(3000 messages a month? Yikes. I thought only teenagers did that much. :-) )