Yesterday an installer from ATT came out to hook me up with U-Verse at my house.  U-Verse is ATT's Fiber-to-the-Node solution for triple play network access (Phone/TV/Internet).  Newer houses actually have fiber to the home--in my case I have fiber to the telephone pole and then 1000 feet of normal twisted pair to my house.

I haven't had a chance to dig into the service too much thus far, but I am thus far impressed with the TV picture quality, channel availability, pricing and Internet connection.  I have more premium HD channels than I had with Cox, and the DVR also has a much slicker interface.

I trust the all-digital strategy more than the limited bandwidth of cable providers.  ATT hasn't invested as much in their consumer fiber infrastructure as Verizon, but they definitely seem to be aggresively attacking the cable barons.  All in all competition is good.

Yesterday was an exciting day for fans of the Mozilla's Firefox web browser.  By varying accounts the latest version of the Firefox browser was downloaded perhaps 5 million times on its first day of release.

Web browsers have come a long way since the early days of WorldWideWeb and Mosaic and their like.  Gone are the days when you had to optimize multiple layers of embedded tables in order to get Netscape to render your page in a decent amount of time.

The release of IE8 this year is going to further mix up the playing field for browsers.  Hopefully IE8 will behave quite well so that we won't have to manage CSS for both IE6, IE7 and IE8.  Safari has also been making inroads recently, both on Mac marketshare and on its Windows version..

Will IE's market share dip below 50%?  Only time will tell...

I got to the office today and decided I needed some music to listen to while I worked. Yesterday Andy had mentioned to me that he had the new Weezer album shared on his iTunes library. Well, I decided to give it a listen. Unfortunately, the iTunes DRM would not let me even preview his tracks. Woe is iTunes.

I had been thinking about Amazon.com (since their site was down for several hours yesterday) so I decided to give their MP3 download service a whirl. The album was $8.99 for 256kbps MP3s, DRM-free. Downloading from Amazon requires their MP3 Downloader application which is now available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

Unfortunately, the application crashed after downloading a few tracks. This may be Vista's fault, who knows. I had clicked on 'Listen to Selected' which opened the track in Winamp (my default MP3 player).

After the downloader crashed I went back to my web browser and clicked on the link to download the album again. If I had already navigated away from the page I assume there would have been another spot in my order history for me to download it again... I hope.

Would I download from Amazon Music in the future? Sure. I haven't quite decided where I stand on DRM and digital possessions. I've honestly bought more DVD-Audio discs in the past year than I have regular albums over the past 5 years.

I spent today visiting my grandmother in Muskogee, Oklahoma.  Muskogee happens to be most recently famous for electing a 19 year old mayor.  Hey, at least the job is unpaid!

While driving the backroads from Oklahoma City to Muskogee I got a call from Thad who's been fighting the good fight abroad.  I found the voice quality on the call I had with Thad to be quite impressive.  Here I was, in the middle of rural Oklahoma (the roads don't even appear on my GPS in my Acura at decent zoom levels) talking with Thad in London like he was right next to me.  Sometimes the 21st century is amazing.

I twittered about that experience.  I'm a recent twitter user, although I've been paying attention to it's growth in certain circles ever since SXSW.  Twitter is interesting--very shallow and glitchy, but definitely a social phenomenon.  In some ways it reminds me of lightweight communication a la ICQ.  I often miss ICQ.  It seems as though everything after ICQ was a step in the wrong direction.

"Back in those days, everything was simpler and more confused."  ~Jim Morrison

I went to the AT&T store tonight and snagged an Option GT Ultra Express mobile broadband card.  Thad had used one of these recent while traveling and since I'm not always near free WiFi access and will be doing a bit of traveling this summer I decided to go ahead and get one.

So far the installation process has not gone smoothly at all.  First off, the package from AT&T doesn't come with any software.  I actually had to go to the AT&T website in order to download the software for OSX Leopard.

After downloading the "Globetrotter Connect" software I had a number of issues getting the device actually configured.  Apparently I actually needed to enter my 3G/GPRS details in order to get the card to connect.  It would have been nice if AT&T provided this information for you or if the software actually prompted you for it instead of hiding it away in a preferences menu item.

I used the following credentials:

APN Name:   ISP.CINGULAR

Username:  [blank]

Password:  [blank]

Even with those credentials (which I found on a message board) it took several times uninstalling and reinstalling the software in order to get a successful Internet connection with AT&T.  I really don't know if I was doing something wrong and it's all okay now or if this whole setup is just so finicky and won't even work next time I try to use it.

After getting the actual net connection working (which is a bit laggy upon initial web page requests, but seems quite useable--even on GPRS) I decided to test out my VPN connection.

The Cisco VPN connection failed miserably at first.  Upon opening the VPN client it says:  "Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem.  Please make sure an IP address is available" or something along those lines.  After a bit more Googling I came across the following tip online:

Run the following from terminal:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

I had to do that a few times in order to get the VPN client to finally work.  I also tried variations of stop and start, so I am not entirely sure what did the trick.  But finally the Cisco client began to work.

All in all this experience has been quite annoying.  I don't know what the average person would do except to spend hours on the phone with AT&T tech support.  I have no idea if everything will even work again the first time after I reboot.  All the message boards online give conflicting information (some even say not to use the Option.com AT&T software) and AT&T's own Knowledge Base system was down for me.