Tyler Montgomery’s blog

Let me give you some background information–starting about 4 months ago (Feb 2008), I have been unable to text message anyone on the Verizon network from my Cingular (now AT&T) phone.I do in fact have the 200 message plan for my phone (a SMT5600 or HTC Typhoon depending on what carrier you use), and this began to annoy me. Here I was, paying for a service that I could not use.

I could send text messages from my Windows Mobile phone to AT&T customers, and it would also appear that my text messages to Verizon customers would send also, but the customer would never actually receive the message. The odd thing was that I could receive messages from other carriers too–I just couldn’t respond.

I checked the ‘net and found that there were some issues ‘replying’ to messages in Windows Mobile 2003, but even by typing in the number in a new message didn’t fix the problem.
Puzzled by this development, I decided to call AT&T customer support, and after an approximate wait time of 30-45 minutes (my fault, because I called at 7:00PM–the highest traffic time of the day for support call centers) I was greeted by someone who promptly asked me to reboot my phone. I complied and then was instructed to send a SMS to a Verizon customer. I did, and the message ‘went’ through on my phone, and the AT&T tech verified that it did indeed pass through their 3rd party SMS routing vendor (Verisign), but I never received a response from my friend on Verizon. The tech then decided to put in a support ticket and I was told it would be fixed in 3-5 days.

…More after the jump
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Well, once again, you might have noticed that I haven’t really had time to update my blog for a while– but I do have an interesting story to tell ya.

It all started when I tried to add a USB cable to my CVS-Cam for downloading the videos from the camera.
I had wanted to attach this camera to a kite or a tethered balloon to get some aerial photography, but it all went horribly awry.

[7:30 AM]
Okay, so I’ve just gotten up from a good night’s rest, and I thought that I’d try my aerial camera today, but I first need to make a cable for my camera…
After some Google-ing, I found this link on Make:Blog which detailed how to build a cable for the CVS Camera, and all I needed to do was to find a cable somewhere that I could use.

[8:00 AM]
After scouring my room for a cable that would work for this project, I found nothing to my liking. I then set search for an old USB cable that I could cut up and dissect to use for the camera… and 3 minutes later I had found the perfect match.

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