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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A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to reinstall windows for a client of mine and reinstall all of the applications that she used. One of the applications in the list was AOL 9.0 - I cringed at that thought, but the client asked for it.

I thought, this should be easy, just go to AOL.com and click download. Not so.
Every where I turned, I was asked for a username and password (which I did not have) and could not proceed before supplying one. When I found the link for downloading AOL, I noticed that it was only 300k– pretty small for AOL, eh? It turns out that the file AOLDNLD.exe is only a downloader program that requires an active internet connection to install. Fine, this should still be easy- just connect the client’s computer to my Ethernet network and download the software from there. One trouble was that my client’s computer did not have an Ethernet card. Read more »