Infinite State

I guess that enough years had passed since my last painful Bluetooth experience that I’d regained my optimism. I was foolish enough to think that I could just buy an adapter (Trendnet TBW-105UB) for my Windows XP laptop (HP NC6400) and use my Samsung cell phone (SGH-T719) as a modem on my T-Mobile plan. Easy, right?

Wrong.

The phone works as a modem with the cable just fine. Despite T-Mo’s less-than-stellar data network speeds, it’s workable for email and with a little patience the web is usable too. But I just wanted to get rid of that cable. Why? Some rotten misfiring synapse of geek desire. My loss.

About three hours later I had tried almost every combination of Broadcom drivers (they make the BT chipset) up through the latest (.4000 series), all variations of the DUN dialog options (with encryption, without), and still no success. As others before me appear to have found, I can pair with the phone (good luck with that piece of pain) and then get it to dial and connect. But right after the “Registering on the network…” message, I get the dreaded “Error 734″ about the PPP link failing. Take my advice: give up. I am very bad at walking away from problems, but if after 3 hours of really trying it’s still this hard then what it really means is there’s a bigger problem and it’s not worth your time to make bad parts fit together. I’ll stick with my cable for now.

I tried to be level-headed. I tried to be analytical. I had to admit that my personal information management was at a low point, with a mishmosh of Thunderbird for Mail, Outlook for Contacts, Google for Calendar, and Remember the Milk for Tasks. I figured my options were to get a MacBook Pro and go with the cool herd, or try something really radical…like go back to Outlook 2003.

And you know what? It’s a relief. Integrated, desktop software. Almost feels like a novelty these days. I was this close to writing a mashup that would pull together what I needed and…forget it. I open my laptop, and even on a train without a connection I can access my calendar, and contacts, and tasks. Fantastic. I remembered why I’d left it for TBird a few years ago — sluggish performance, unstable, no spam filtering. Well, SpamBayes seems to be much more mature now, and oddly TBird was getting pretty sluggish too.

So I guess the punchline is, I can wait a bit longer for that Mac promised land and all the surprises it will bring. For now, it’s just a pleasure to hit F11, type a portion of a name, and get a real contact with categories and everything.

Call me old-fashioned.