jules blog

Sometimes you gotta leave your zone of safety. You have to manufacture Inspirado. You gotta get out of the apartment.

Flying with a carrier you don’t normally fly with fulfills two of those three directives. Maybe that’s how you end up in row 43. The plane gets narrow, there are just a few more rows, and I’m the only one sitting back here. But it’s Lufthansa, it’s 30 minutes in the air, the seats are leather, the plane is a big Airbus A340, and they’re bringing me mimosas. It’s highly civilized and there’s little to complain about.

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When you want to do big things in the social media space it’s tough to know what to do at this point in time. I think of this space much like the Web was in 1995. You knew you had to come up with some kind of Web strategy but, gosh darn it, what to do?

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The upper echelons of North America’s business elite were in a panic yesterday. Instead of the usual chameleon trick of one eye on the BlackBerry and one the presentation they sat in meetings and had to perform perverse acts like paying attention to what was being said.

The BlackBerry network was down. Quel horreur!

So, what to do when this happens again?

• Plain old SMS text messaging might not be as sexy or verbose as sending PIN messages but it gets the job done. Most devices do a good job of reassembling missives that get split up into 128 characters chunks. Watch out for per-message charges, though, as even a couple of days of heavy usage could put you and the recipient in the poor house. Even if all data services are down SMS should still work.
• I have a love-hate relationship with the BlackBerry Messenger as it’s temperamental. I’ve got several other IM clients installed and they’re good to have as a fallback. In the past, BlackBerry service outages have been spotty and just affected things like messaging and third-party IM software has usually worked.
• Grab a copy of Gmail for the Blackberry. If you can’t send or receive messages but still have data this is your new best friend. Alas, this client doesn’t notify you when you get new mail so you’ll have to manually check it.
• My Sprint Pearl 2 tethers via Bluetooth with no tweaking at all. Out of the box, no weird scripts, animal sacrifices, or any of that malarky. Suddenly I’ve got real access to the Interwebs and that means I can jump into my regular email and give my thumbs a rest. Be sure to plug the BlackBerry into a power supply or the battery will drop off to nothing in very short order.
• Use the — gasp! — phone. It’s a quaint concept but this would be an excellent opportunity to exercise your usually mute vocal cords.

It’s worth giving some of these a methods some practice beforehand. So you’ll be ready for next time there’s an outage.

This was ported over from my previous blog that was dying of bit rot. You know how it is for the cobbler’s children.

You know those guys you see on the street with beards that almost touch their eyes? And with a buttoned up shirt there’s chest hair growing like ivy up the neck in an effort to sun itself?

Well, thankfully, that’s not me. Not unless time has some unforeseen trick in store.

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