Just what we needed - Cingular is jumping into the Walkie Talkie Market

Published Mon, Dec 5 2005 7:54 | William

I don't know about you, but at least 10 times a day I say to myself “Dammit, why don't more people use those Nextel phones.  I really love hearing the cool sound they make and people suffixing their sentences with “over” or something cool like that.  I really love it in restaurants, but I'll take it where I can b/c it's soooo cool sounding”  Anyway, I was listening to the Wall Street Journal morning report and looks like Cingular is going to jump into the walkie talkie market.  They think they're going to have trouble penetrating the “Contractor” segment, so they're going to start with Office and Information Workers.  Boy this is just what we needed.  I know I am already jonesing for new ringtones. I mean, in any given office or restaurant, you only get to hear about 20 different ones.  That's no nearly enough.  Now we're going to be able to hear Beeepeep, Jon, you there, over?  Beepeeep, Yah, I'm here, wuzzup, over?  I need you to head down here and pick up this turd that floated out of an overflowed commode, over.  Roger, over.

 

Uhhhhh

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Comments

# William said on December 5, 2005 8:05 AM:

I don't even want to hear your b****ing about ringtones after the crazy crap I hear from your phone when we meet for dinner.

# William said on December 5, 2005 8:20 AM:

That is actually what's known in most parts of the world as "Kick a33" or just plain cool. For general reference, my phone has Cartman saying "well you show me one independent film that isn't about gay cowboys eating pudding." followed by wendy saying "Once again you have no idea what you are talking about fat ass" At least I don't say "Over" each time I finish a sentence.

# William said on December 5, 2005 9:24 AM:

Bill - at least you could have a better Cartman quote on your phone, maybe the classic about him denying he has an satallite dish sticking out of his ass, or "Screw you guys, I'm going home." or even the song he sings about Kyles mom being a biatch.

Just my 2 cents.

# William said on December 5, 2005 9:33 AM:

Skicow, check this out http://www.williamgryan.com/video/kylesmomisabitch.wmv

# William said on December 5, 2005 12:45 PM:

Here's what I have done, to great effect, on several occasions.

Scene: Public place. Usually a restaraunt.

*BeeepBeep*
Guy near me: "sup"
garbled guy on other end of phone: "blabhablahblah"
<snip>

K so I let that go on for a couple of beepbeeps. Then I pull out my nextel, and chirp a friend. I turn off the speaker and turn down the ringer (usually those two things are already done on entering said establishment)

Me (loudly): "hey man, I just thought I'd call and tell you that I discovered that I can turn my phone speaker off and turn the ringer down and the rest of the world doen't have to hear my conversation!"
*I stare at my target waiting for a response*
My buddy: *doesn't matter, nobody can hear him*
Me: At this point I will determine how far I need to go into the realm of the sarcastic/evil/cruel in order to make my point. Often it will have already been made, with the target of my ire putting the phone on mute or putting it away. Sometimes I'll have to go with something like:
"Yeah, if only these things came with some sort of instruction manual that told fat-ass inbreds how to keep their inane banter about cousin-lovin' to themselves".

You get the idea.

Unless it's a teenager, preferrably on a date, at whom I will just yell "hey kid turn off your f***ing phone and learn to grow up and join society" guaranteeing that he doesn't get laid that night.

It's probably good that more people aren't like me.

# William said on December 5, 2005 1:26 PM:

I have one of those BeepBeep nextel things on my Blackberry for work. You can set that BeepBeep to vibrate in the profiles menu of the main ribbon. I just do it to my default profile and that assures me I will never get some dispatcher beeping in on me when I am in a meeting, speaking, taking a cr@p etc.

# William said on December 5, 2005 1:27 PM:

Scott- damn, why didn't I think of that. You just need to throw in "This is great, so now I don't have to be a f~cking d`ck and annoy people with the beeping noise"

Have you heard the "over" thing by any chance?

# William said on December 5, 2005 1:36 PM:

Andy - I thought more of you. We need to get you a Pocket PC - as soon as you get the Assembly language runtime installed on your box

# William said on December 5, 2005 1:51 PM:

Skicow - then hook me up dawg - what should I use? Tobin's been on my a33 about my ring for a while - I'm luvin it but he's playa hating. So what's the best choice?

# William said on December 5, 2005 2:36 PM:

You'll never get andy to install the .net runtime on his box. Remember, we are inferior because we don't like writing the same code every time we start a new app and because we dare to let Microsoft provide a library for us....

# William said on December 5, 2005 2:38 PM:

Actually Tobin - you're right. the .NET Runtime is too ambitious but waht i want him to install is the C++ runtime or something lower level. Ask Andy about the developer he knows that thinks you need a runtime to run any program

# William said on December 5, 2005 3:00 PM:

Bill - I've never changed the ring tone on my phone, I just use the default which is surprisingly cool - It goes *Bling**Bling* then a chick with a hot voice saying "You have an incoming call" - rinse and repeat. But I usually have it on vibrate anyway.

You've got South Park on your phone so you are already half way to cool in my books....maybe Quagmire from Family Guy would be a good one to change it too....he's got some sweet quotes.

# William said on December 5, 2005 3:03 PM:

Bill - I've never changed the ring tone on my phone, I just use the default which is surprisingly cool - It goes *Bling**Bling* then a chick with a hot voice saying "You have an incoming call" - rinse and repeat. But I usually have it on vibrate anyway.

You've got South Park on your phone so you are already half way to cool in my books....maybe Quagmire from Family Guy would be a good one to change it too....he's got some sweet quotes.

# William said on December 5, 2005 6:56 PM:

DoubleI,

You said:

". . . Skicow, check this out http://www.williamgryan.com/video/kylesmomisabitch.wmv
. . ."

OMG. That brings back memories. My sister's got a kid named Kyle (and two other kids). There is nothing funnier than a few teenagers (two nephews and a niece) singing that song to their Mom with their Dad boppin' along and getting into it, too. They have not done this as a ringtone on my sister's phone, but probably only because no one thought of it. Uncle Knucklehead is going to have to give the nephews a call for an extra special Christmas present for my sister.

---O (aka Uncle Knucklehead)

# William said on December 5, 2005 8:23 PM:

Bill,
Not my choice it's the work phone I am required to carry for the job.

Tobin,
.Net doesn't run in 99% of the environments I work in. For instance today I was writing a db interface for a DEC Unix system. Hardly a .Net friendly environment. I have nothing against .Net it just doesn't run where I need it to and when it does I can't control the things I need to with it except in VC++ so why bother? Anything I write in it isn't portable without huge re-writes and I can't justify the dev time to port it. Then throw in the fact that it's still a beta in the fine print according to what our lawyers have told us so I can't get anyone above me to buy into it. Give it a few years to mature and I may end up using it. Some depts at our company already use it like our call center IT etc. Those of us in engineering and R&D have to support to many platforms right now to be able to use it efficiently. If we used it now we would just be using it to say we were using .Net not for any real gain to our enterprise. Lately in our industry more and more companies are moving away from MSFT and going to Solaris and other *nix environments. Like the afore mentioned IT group. They were always a WinTel shop but their next servers are going to be Solaris. The Engineering groups in our industry have always been almost entrely *nix. So who knows I may never end up using .Net in the end. I have no personal issue with MSFT or their technologies I just like other ones better. Perhapse if I had started my career in a WinTel environment things would be different but as it sits right now I have no compelling reason to use their platforms or use their products. I do wish that I could get a symbol debugger for *nix that is half as nice as the one that ships with Visual Studio. That one product alone makes me drool for something similar for *nix machines and I would kill to be able to use that in an embedded compiler environment like Wind River etc.The debugger that comes in Wind River Workbench is nice but not nearly as nice as the one for VC++. Oh well wish in one hand and sh!t in the other and see which one has more weight. That will be the hand with the debugger I get to use. As far as libraries go up until recently the STL wasn't even available to embedded C++ developers so full blown monster libraries like .Net has are completely out of the question.

# William said on December 5, 2005 9:25 PM:

Andy - I know that ;-) I'm just trying to weasel in a joke about the 'runtime' that you told me about the other day .

# William said on December 5, 2005 9:26 PM:

O - if y'all are interested, I have a few other pretty funny ones I can post ;-)

# William said on December 6, 2005 8:23 AM:

O - LOL! That's hilarious.

Bill - Thanks, that gave me a nice laugh while at work :)

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