The answer was “yes.” A thousand times “yes.” I want to shout it from the top of a mountain.

(not the line I was looking for, but good enough. Replace “Veronica” with “Internet on my phone” and that is how I feel)

Then I had to decide what to get: an iPhone and be an pretentious Apple customer with crappy AT&T or a Blackberry on verizon (with my 17% discount from my company) and then be a corporate douchebag?

Then the Rhapsody app came out for the iPhone, which almost put me over the top for the iPhone; I love Rhapsody. Love it.However, in the end, I went with the Blackberry Tour. Apparently I love money more.

The Tour is badass. Personally, I like the keyboard more then the touch screen and I like the way the Blackberry handles my multiple email accounts. While the iPhone is said to have a better browsing experience, the new Java-based browsers like Opera Mini and Bolt render pages almost perfectly. Bolt is especially impressive, as it works with almost all CSS perfectly and can play youtube videos. The phone memory can be expanded to 16GB with a microSD card.

And now, because I work in B2B, and corporate people have Blackberrys, I can see what all this fuss about rendering emails in BBs is all about.

There is also a game called “Word Mole” that comes on the phone that almost ended my relationship with my girlfriend when we were in paris because I played it so much. I had to sneak some mole sessions in when she wasn’t looking or went to the bathroom. I’m addicted.

The rollerball can be touchy, there aren’t as many “cool” apps for the Tour, and the lack of wifi on the Tour is annoying. That being said, I’ve never had wifi or the need to drink a fake beer or play a cowbell on a phone before, so I wouldn’t know the difference. For me, the Tour ended being the best choice.

And it works with Rhapsody, which was a complete surprise. It was like Christmas.

Posted from my Blackberry while I was messing around with it

The other day at around 4 pm, the lady partner and I were sitting in front of the Eiffel Tower (which is rust brown and looks like it needs a good sandblasting in professional opinion, by the by), drinking some wine- which according to this picture, is against the law (I tend to drink where I’m not supposed to in other countries).

After a glass or two, nature began to run its course, so I wandered off while the GF studied. I can handle going to the “toilette” all by myself. What I originally that was a bathroom was a marionette theater, so I continued to walk around. There had to facilities somewhere close- I’m at the Eiffel Tower in one of the biggest cities in the world. I found a sign that said:

And then walked to the “WC”. There was a dark, ominous tunnel only one door into the WC,

and I wasn’t going to just go marching into some foreign bathroom (what if I put my foot under the wrong stall or something?), so I walked the quarter mile back to the GF to get some clarification.

I definitely wasn’t going to relieve myself outdoors in a country where I couldn’t communicate with anyone (I attract police in foreign countries like white on rice), so I trekked back to the WC. At this point, I was beginning to think that I was permanently destroying my bladder.

When I finally got back to the WC, excited about the upcoming relief, a lady was standing down in the dark tunnel. She wags a finger at me and shakes her head. I thought she was cleaning the WC (what the hell does that even mean?), so I hung out for awhile. After 10 minutes, I went down and try the door and it was locked. Apparently, like everything else in France, the bathrooms close at 5 pm.

I was desperate, so I started toward the Eiffel Tower because there had to a WC there. This was another quarter mile away. It also required crossing at least 2 busy streets (and seeing the ridiculous number of men who run in biker shorts in Paris). Crossing streets takes awhile in Paris because French drivers don’t care if they hit pedestrians. It’s like Frogger. If it’s in the street- no matter what- the drivers are not slowing down, or even swerving- they have places to be.

The Eiffel Tower has four giant legs, all of which have elevators and schwag shops; only one has a bathroom. I chose the exact opposite direction to walk and had to walk to entire base of the tower. Finally- FINALLY- I saw a sign that said “Toilets” (in English even!). I ran down and took care of business, but not before I took an awkward picture (at least for the guy in the picture) of the bathroom:

The hand dryers were incredibly weak, so I found other ways to dry my hands. At this point, I had been gone for over a hour from the GFer, who got worried and left to find me.

France is difficult for me to maneuver in.

Spam is a problem, yes. It is dangerous due to trojans, viruses, 63 year old women who open and click on every piece of email they receive, and the morons who continually give money to Nigerian princes. That being said, spam filters and junk mail folders are getting better at capturing actual spam. Check out your Gmail spam folder next time you log on: rarely do those male anatomy enlargement offers or free Viagra pills actually get through. Nay, a vast majority of what gets through to the inboxes are newsletters and offers that people inadvertently signed up for when they got the “free” $5 Starbucks gift card or signed up to play Flash games on that website. That is not spam: No, good reader, that is you opting in, forgetting that you did, and then complaining.

Why do Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google offer “free” email services? They want your information and what you talk about in email so they market to you. The “payment” for you to use that service is ads. Yahoo! isn’t letting Netflix and Bank of America spam me with ads for free (by the way, where is my “This is Spam” button for the ads, hypocrites?).

Yahoo! wants me to pay for my ads in my email...for charity

Spam is a cost of doing business for ESPs. If Yahoo! forces everyone (including private senders) to pay actual currency for sending to their servers, then they are essentially asking senders to pay for the spam filtering and hosting of the message, which is part of the Yahoo! mail service and you STILL get the ads. Paint me pink and call me crazy, but with the price of memory dropping to almost zero and Yahoo! offering unlimited email storage, I doubt that it costs Yahoo! a penny to house that email.

Even though there are reports claiming that between 90-97% of all email sent globally is spam (which I don’t believe), 89-96% of that is harmless or ignored.* Spam costs the receiver essentially nothing, especially if they are using a free internet connection (in a public library or at work) and a free email service (such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail) except the annoyance of deleting or unsubscribing from the message. Spam is costing is the free email providers money, because they are housing all of that crap.

Conveniently, the email service providers, the authentication services, and the makers of spam filter software are the people funding and releasing the spam studies. Yahoo!, ReturnPath, Symantec, and Goodmail wouldn’t define spam as broadly as possibly to make another buck, would they?

“But charity gets that penny, and I love charity.” you say. But what if, in the future, Yahoo! needs cash? Also, in the United States, when getting something in return for a charitable donation, the value of the product received cannot be deducted from taxes. Will Yahoo! give an actual value for the cost of the storage of the email? This would be necessary for large B2C companies that marketing to Yahoo! mail users. And if so, why not just charge that $0.00000001 per email directly to the companies?

(Not only would businesses be pissed, but can you imagine the uproar and push back from the free email users if their friends stopped emailing them because it cost money? People leave Yahoo! because they have to pay for POP3 access- unless you go around the system. People were pissed when Facebook changes its look or its policies for free services rendered. Paying to get emails to a server? My Yahoo! friends would never get that YouTube clip** from me again. People would bolt for Gmail even faster than they currently are.)

While I am all for reducing spam, I don’t believe CentMail is the answer.  Since its inception, email has promoted free communication due to the economics and environment on which the Internet was created, for better or worse. Normal economic thought points out that monetizing sending would deter spammers, but it would also deter legitmate users and drive them to other options, and the internet has never really followed traditional economics. Other plans, such as Microsoft’s (yes, the Evil Empire) Penny Black plan are much better and don’t cost normal senders anything.

* this is from my personal research

** This YouTube Clip. My mom used to buy me GoBots because we were poor and couldn’t afford Transformers.

Monolithical Failure

We point this out because it is in the “ingenious” section and has been there for over a month.

(from Everything is Terrible via Random Good Stuff)

You may be asking yourself:

• What is this site about?
• Who are the people running it?
• Is there a consistent theme?
• Why am I asking myself questions?

All very good questions….none of which I am going answer directly (except for the last one – Answer: You are insane).

Monkeys with Handguns is equal parts variety show, art museum, online course and social experiment. Some of what you read here is serious. Much of it is not. Even when we are trying to be serious, we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

So who are we? I think it is best that you discover our uniqueness by reading our individual posts over time. But to whet your appetite, here are some factoids about the primates who will be banging the keyboards:

• There are 5 or 6 of us.
• We all work for a large software company (though the opinions and posts made here are ours and ours alone and do not represent those of our employer…there Mr. Lawyer man…happy now?)
• Three of us work for another one of us.
• One of us has worked for that same person three times at three different companies.
• Two of us are artists.
• Two of us have MBA’s from the same university (one of us was Valedictorian).
• None of us is short.
• All of us seem to think similarly, but have strong independent opinions.
• Two of us are fathers.
• Most of us play rough.
• All of us think we are pretty funny sometimes.

We hope you will think so too. We seem to have a shared passion for things like design, user experience, the web, and all manner of techie-geeky things.

Stick around and see what shakes out of the tree. If you keep reading it, we’ll keep flinging it.