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.

I took a day off from the grind to kill two birds with one stone.  1) Go visit my relatives in Muskogee, Oklahoma  2) Support a friend whose indie movie was being shown at a small film festival in the Muskogee

I never would have thought that Muskogee was the type of town that would host a film festival, but all in all it was a pretty good experience.  We watched portions of four movies while we were there.  They ranged from Viking epics, to vampire chick flicks to riveting Houston hitmen films.

This was my first film festival and I am very pleased I went.  I'd definitely go to more festivals in the future--even if they would be smaller ones such as Bare Bones.  Although the production values in all the movies were not terrific, in many other ways (storyline, originality, overall intelligence) the movies were years ahead of the typical Hollywood fare.  I do watch IFC from time to time, and whereas IFC is sometimes too weighty for my tastes, these indie films were much broader as they ran the gamut from horror to thrillers.

My congratulations go to Crystal for her role as producer and actress in the movie and to Jason Konopisos (the director and title character) for making such an enjoyable flick about a little energy company from Houston.

I ended up ranked #7976 on the ESPN tournament standings after Kansas beat Memphis in tonight's championship game.  What a game!  Kansas scored at the buzzer to take the game into over time.  Kansas plays fast and furious but their last two games have definitely been close ones.

My bracket in this year's tournament was named HeuristicallyProgrammed in honour of my favorite artificial intelligence, HAL 9000.

Unfortunately, now that basketball is over it's time to change my focus to the company fitness challenge--which is much harder to win at.  I'm going to start training for that any day now ;)

Recently we've been working on packaging up a lot of our terrific Web Services and Widgets into a complete contesting solution.  Although the ONEsite platform is a great social networking system, all of the individual components can be used for oh so much more.  ONEsite isn't just a social networking company--we're really about customer engagement and providing our clients with rich services so that they may achieve their unique community and engagement goals.

Soon you'll see a lot more contest offerings from us.  We have solutions for photo contests, video contests, rating contests, mobile contests, etc.  We're quite proud of all of our services and offerings and look forward to powering more unique websites and projects.