The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Guests in Town/On Vacation

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We’ve got the the cutest little girls (and their parents) visiting this week, so I’m off on vacation virtually all of M, Tu, and W.

It’s a great opportunity for me to test out my new cameraphone. Just picked up a Nokia 6600 from T-Mobile, and am so far really enjoying it. The PIM capabilities appear, at first glance, to be actually useable, and I’ve managed to figure out how to synch it with Outlook via infrared (using proprietary Nokia software). It’s also Bluetooth enabled.

One big caveat: e-mail is difficult. In talking to T-Mobile about getting mobile e-mail set up, they are basically telling me to use their “T-Zones” WAP portal — which, of course, is a total pain. Why buy a phone with an integrated e-mail client if you can’t use it to send mail? Not being able to send from the phone interface also makes the cameraphone capabilities much less useful. The problem, understandably, is related to spam. It’s tough to find an SMTP gateway willing to take mail from a mobile sender. Still working on the issue. Right now can’t even get it to receive mail, much less send. Blah.

Going West

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I’ve been putting off blogging about this for a day or so, partly because I’m still, at some level, unconvinced that it’s really happening.

Anyway, here goes. At some point in the coming months I’ll be picking up stakes and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, to work out of Jupitermedia’s SF office near 3COM Park. (Same job, same everything else — except my physical address and phone number. Updates on those will be forthcoming.) If I sound a little stunned, it’s because I am. It came virtually out of nowhere. I am also very excited, however. I hear fantastic things about living in the Bay Area and I have a lot of wonderful colleagues on the left coast. Plus it’ll give me a chance to be closer to the search action, as well as the likes of Yahoo!

All this has come about because my husband has been extended (and has accepted) a very enticing job offer. He works in the knitwear trade and will be helping set up the biggest U.S. facility using what’s called “whole garment” technology. The gist of it is this: traditional knitwear requires you knit the front of the sweater, the back of the sweater, the sleeves, etc. etc. and then hook them all together. With whole garment machinery, you can make the whole sweater at once, with no seams. One implication is that you can once again do knitwear in so-called “developed” countries, because you no longer need as much cheap labor. Ok, just threw that in because I know some of you tech geeks would appreciate it.

So, in today’s LazyWeb request, I’ll ask for helpful hints on getting “plugged in” to the Bay Area scene, including ideas for good places to live. (We’re thinking house, and not apartment at this point, but we’ll see.) Am looking forward to getting to know all my West Coast contacts in a more up-close-and-personal way. The move itself (for me, anyway) probably won’t occur until early fall, as Michael will do the preliminary scouting to find us a new abode. Well, back to work (and to pinching myself).

P.S. Yes, New Yorkers (and New York), I know I will miss you terribly. I think about riding the B or Q train across the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, to see the Brooklyn Bridge and Lady Liberty become rose-colored as they shift to silhouettes. Experiences like that (and so many others) I will never forget. *sniff*

Plog info

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I notice the “Plogs” have disappeared off my Amazon.com home page (and they never appeared at all for some of my colleagues), so I thought I’d link to the company’s “What is a Plog?” page in case people are interested in checking it out.