Gadgets and iPing and Waking, Oh My!
3/23/1

I'm starting to trust iPing again.

I am a gizmo type of person and one of my favorite new gizmos is my Nokia 3390 phone. I always have it on me. It's very small and has lots of features. And games, did I mention it has games in it?

In any case, at least Nokia was kind enough to put something to let us focus out attention on our phones when there is really no need to. But I wanted to use more novel features of technology with my phone.

iPing is a company on the interent (really in NYC) that will "ping" you when you want to get a phone call or a page. Mr.Wakeup is their prime feature, but they are expanding.

I set iPing to ping me with the news on Tuesday at 6:15 a.m. This is cereal eating time so I'd still use the normal clock to wake me up.

When I say the normal clock, I mean a tick-tock style clock. It isn't wind up. I'm no caveman. It has a C sized battery which runs it. However, needing gainful employment, I cannot depend on the local utility company to be reliable enough to get me to work. This was more important when we had above ground utilities, but old habits die hard, and I have no intention of this one dying anyway.

I don't ever think I'll have an alarm clock that depends on the fresh supply of AC power. Just not prudent.

I do have many other alarms, however. One of the other gizmos that I have is a Timex Ironman Datalink watch. All Timex Datalink products can be programmed and the time set with a computer.

At first I was really looking forward to having a watch that is accurate. Meaning, you know the correct time. I set my watch to an atomic clock via the internet every once in a while. Currently, it has been a few weeks, and since my watch gains time a little (damn those inferior quartz crystals!) I am probably a few seconds fast.

Really settles those "No, it's 7:31" type disputes easily.

The Datalink has ten alarms available. I have five daily alarms set for when I need to leave for work, when I need to clock in at work (Thank you, Government Corruption), when I can leave work, and the two I really rarely keep armed, time to wind down at night, and time to go to sleep.

After the first successful test of iPing, I decided to trust them to wake me up. I actually still set my normal alarm clock for 5:40 and iPing was supposed to ping me at 5:30, my normal waking time.

I can only guess that iPing suffered the fate of many sites which are published in print media, they were flooded. I didn't get my ping. I checked their website when I got to work and there were no pings in my Past Pings list. Not even the one from Tuesday. Hmm.

So, Thursday, I do the same setup and let the alarm back iPing up. Hey hey. I got a call. Bush sent 50something Russian "diplomats" home. It was 51 degrees in Birmingham.

Note: The importance of Huntsville in the global arena is greater than Birmingham, so why are they the iPing default for my zip code. And I even changed my zip to a Huntsville code and I still got Birmingham today.

And yes, iPing worked again today. Ha ha. I'm so high tech it hurts.

Oh, but why have the cell phone ring and not the home phone? I pay $1.25 per month and then 7 cents a minute for my cell phone. The first minute is free. Of the two iPing calls I actually checked the duration, one was 1 minute two seconds and the other was one minute eleven seconds. At this rate, having iPing call me at 5:30 a.m. on weekdays, this will cost 15 cents per month. Ha.

The big question is why does a company with a 212 area code call me in Huntsville, Alabama as much as I want them to for free?