sms is neat. it’s a working implementation of instant messaging over cellphones leverging the one thing that makes each cell phone unique: their phone number. that’s a much better system then using something redundant like an icq#. it’s also a quite common form of communication in europe, off of which the wireless companies there are hoping to make a lot of money off of (now that everyone has a handset/plan already). but it seems as if the business model of some wireless carriers in canada are flawed. they let you receive an unlimited number (for all intents and purposes) of sms and only charge for outgoing ones. i guess their reasoning is that you would most likely want to reply to messages sent to you, but they also left the system open ended so that you can text message someone thru email. so i see it similar to pagers of old, where you can receive pages for free (and we know how well those companies fared) with the cost passed to people who page you. of course if they’re smart and know not to page you from payphones, it costs them nothing.

so my department at work got fixed up with new systems; they replaced my 21″ crt with a 17″ lcd (yes this has happened before but i still don’t understand that logic) and we all got sweet computers. dual 2.8ghz xeons, a gig of ram, 120gb hd, a wacky $1000+ firegl card (it’s supposed to be for cad work, not that we need it), cd burner (again why do we need this?). no dvd tho, so i guess no movies on the job for me but it’s basically something like what the system i will own in…oh five years from now. damn.

i don’t know why i found this so funny.