Mad Men Season 4

At 13 episodes a season, Mad Men manages to keep the quality of its writing high, and Mad Men: Season Four was not an exception. What's special about the series is that each episode jumps forward by months, so you have to fill in pieces yourself. At this point, the characters are all fleshed out, even the unlikeable ones, and it becomes quite possible to predict who will do what.

I thought at the end of Season 3 that the show had gotten into a rut. Season 4 gets out of it, and depicts quite nicely the problems of a startup. Not everything goes well, but one would not expect it to.

One interesting note is that this series illustrates clearly that Power is the defining context for relationships and philandering. Good stuff.

Review: The Immigrants

The Immigrants is a novel set in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. For some reason, San Francisco has yet to have its Raymond Chandler, (Wallace Stegner's amazing Angle of Repose notwithstanding) and unfortunately, Howard Fast isn't all that great a writer.

However, I found the book itself compelling reading. It follows the story of Dan Lavette, who as a young man was orphaned by the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. While he lots his parents, he made a ton of money with the boat his father left him, ferrying people to and from Oakland during and after the days of the disaster. With this, he expanded his fishing fleet, and eventually became a transportation tycoon, along the way picking up a beautiful wife, a mistress, business partners, friends, and enemies. The book ends right after the 1929 Great Depression started, granting a view through the broad sweep of history that the book encompasses. This was a time of history when cutters gave way to powerboats, when railroads were the principal mode of transportation. World War I and its after-effects were widely felt, and inflation became widespread.

What kept me reading was that the author clearly knew the San Francisco Bay Area really well. We get exposed to San Mateo, Menlo Park, Sonoma County, and the environment all during a period of time when $12/day was a princely sum. We get a good view of how hard it was to be a Chinese immigrant during that era. We get to see the prohibition and some of its effects. The weakest part of the novel are the characters. The protagonist, Dan Lavette, is barely fleshed out. His relationship with his estranged wife is described in a few bare sentences, so one is left having to make the leap from the passionate courtship to the estranged marriage with no way to connect the dots. Even the author's attempt to create a non-stereotyped Chinese woman is still weakened by his need to bend everything to his plot, resulting in a barely believable thing for an otherwise strong willed character to do. Ultimately, one sees Lavette as a "Mary Sue" character, one who right until the edge of the Depression, makes all the right decisions with the benefit of hindsight.

If you want literature, read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. Even for an airplane novel, The Immigrants is fun enough, but leaves one feeling empty. I'm unlikely to bother looking at the rest of the 6 book series.

Review: Ex Machina Volumes 1-6

Ex Machina is a comic book about a superhero who talks to machines. Sounds like an interesting, if not all that exciting hook. Well, it turns out that he wasn't a terribly competent superhero, and after several years of being treated like a vigilante, he gives up and runs for Mayor of New York City.

The series starts with Mayor Mitchell Hundred having won the election and having to deal with the usual crisis of running a big city. We get introductions to his side-kicks and assistants via flashbacks, which means that we get his origin story bit by bit, as well as gradual exposure to his past, but the characters themselves have already lived through all the kooky capers that come with being a caped crusader. Well, he doesn't wear a cape, but the political cartoonists draw him with one.

The politics in the story is interesting, and of course, Mayor Hundred ran as an independent (the story doesn't get into his campaign), so he gets to pissed off both liberals and conservatives with his political stances and decisions. As of Vol. 6: Power Down, we still only have a hint as to where his powers come from, but we've at this point explored gay marriage, death penalties, September 11th, and other facets of politics in a generally liberal city. Probably the most unrealistic part of the entire series is the idea that a Civil Engineer might ever want to and succeed in politics.

All in all, an excellent series from what I've read so far. I guess I'll read more of it when I get a chance. Recommended.

Review: Blood Music

Blood Music is Greg Bear's classic book on nanotechnology and the "Gray Ooze" threat. The plot is implausible, including the break through that leads to self-aware nano-tech cells in the researcher's bodies gaining consciousness. The characters are stiff stereotypes who seem barely human.

The book dates itself. For instance, the Cold War is assumed to be an active part of political dynamics, and of course, there's mention of the World Trade Center. The ending of the novel is also similarly weird, with the human race saved by a reinvention of physics as a function of conscious observers.

While the ideas at the time were new, this book illustrates clearly that ideas alone are insufficient for a novel to withstand the test of time. Not recommended.

Review: Fables 15

Fables 14 started a story arc that was interesting and got me to pre-order Fables Vol. 15. Rather than attack the story arc directly, Fables 15 first meandered into Rose Red and Snow White's relationships, providing us with some insight about why Rose Red had it in for Snow White for so long. The premise is a bit convoluted, but we do get a darker view of the Seven Dwarfs out of it, which is not a bad thing.

The climax comes along at issue #100, which indeed was a fascinating and exciting fight, but turned into an anti-climax at the end of issue 100. I was a bit disappointed, but given the last major story arc took well over 70 issues to run, I'll give Willingham the benefit of the doubt. We get a few hints about how special the mundie world is, but nothing significant comes out of it.

All in all, an exciting story, with several interesting developments. Recommended.

Review: Outliers

Outliers is an interesting counter-point to Talent is Over-rated. The big thesis behind the book is that context matters to success. Success doesn't always just comes from being smarter, being harder working, or even just coming from the right background.

We start off with Hockey players in Canada, and discover that due to the selection process, top hockey players tend to come from those who were born earlier in the year. That's because they're physically bigger and therefore more able to compete during the selection, and training takes care of the rest. I now have to wonder whether this applies to intellectual development as well.

Then we romp through a series of other stories, one examining plane crashes and cultures of deference, one exploring how Jewish law firms rose to the top in New York City (it was all about hostile take overs), exploring the success of Asians in math. The last story has a great followup, about KIPP's approach to education. Taking a page from Asian schooling systems, they have school from 7:30am to 5:00pm every day, send kids home with lots of homework, and have Saturday schooling! Sounds like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? Except that these are inner city schools desperately giving poor under-educated kids a chance at college --- and they succeed! Sounds like hard work is the key to success after all, or at least, to being able to lift yourself out of poverty.

All in all, a quick and entertaining read, and shows the Tiger Mom Controversy for what it is: a paper tiger. Recommended.

Review: Brain Rules for Baby

After Brain Rules, I've become a John Medina fan. I will read anything he writes, and to my surprise, he wrote Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five, so I naturally put it on hold at the library and read it.

Medina has a healthy disrespect for the common myths and folklore about kids. Baby Einstein DVDs? Worse than useless, actually harmful. In fact, any TV before the age of 2 is considered harmful. Listening to Mozart in the womb? No evidence of improved IQ. The stuff that works is stuff that's difficult for people to do: good nutrition, aerobic exercise, and stress reduction. Exercise, in particular is traditionally considered dangerous for pregnant women.

The relationships chapter is particularly sobering. Conventional wisdom, for instance, says that having a baby can rescue a marriage. Medina debunks that very nicely:

83 percent of new parents experience a moderate to severe crisis during the transition to parenthood. These parents became increasingly hostile toward each other in the first year of the baby's life. The majority were having a hard time.

Medina goes on to explain why the conflicts happen, what causes the problems, and provides a simple solution proven by research:

When you first encounter somebody's "hot" feelings, execute two simple steps:

1. Describe the emotional changes you think you see.

2. Make a guess as to where those emotional changes came from.

In effect, if the wife felt she was being heard by her husband, the marriage was essentially divorce-proof. I had heard of John Gottman's studies on marriages before, but had never looked into the actual studies. Medina summarizes the results and provides concrete things to do. This section of the book's worth paying full price, even if you never intend to have kids.

Other parts of the books are equally impressive. For instance, the difference between praising of effort against praising of talent is important. In another section, he describes the role of emotions, how a child develops them, and why it's important for parents to help a child label them. This section gave me insights as to how my parents brought me up and why I react to emotions the way I do. Again, very much worth reading, no matter who you are. One very impressive bit expressed in the book is the short discussion on what happiness is. In effect, Medina points out that all research has ever shown is that lasting happiness only comes from having good relationships with other humans, be it friends and/or family. People who make $5M/year, for instance, aren't appreciably happier than people who only make $100K/year. (The threshold seems to be $50K/year) This bears out with my life experience, but goes against the grain of what society values.

Finally, the book rounds out with a section on Punishment. This is a very cogent section and is relevant whether you're at work managing a team of engineers or whether you're at home dealing with a child. In particular, the section on praising correct behavior and noticing it is key to molding behavior, and I've never seen it expressed so well in any other written source. A small section on practical tips follow, though from reading it, I can only imagine that Medina's home is 5000 square feet large filled with specialized rooms and laboratories for every activity imaginable. I'd love to see how he cramps that all into a typical middle-class family's home.

All in all, this book comes highly recommended. There is absolutely no fluff in it, and much of it would be new even if you've already read Brain Rules. I'll probably end up buying a copy when I have to return this one to the library.

Review: Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V

For as long as the Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V was at $149.95, it had been sold out. One lucky evening when I saw it available on the web-site, I bought it for XiaoQin to replace the T-mobile Blackberry she'd been using (with only a voice plan) when her primary phone broke. Target was even running a special for a while when the phone was at $129.95 with a $20 credit.

The phone arrived and it activated smoothly and quickly. I immediately used Square to sell a book at an event, which demonstrated that the dataplan was working. XiaoQin got the number ported within 3 hours, but it took a phone call to figure out how to reconfigure the phone for service. After this, I realized that porting her old T-mobile number to Virgin was a mistake: we should have shelled out $25 to port her T-mobile number to Google voice instead!

The phone is a 600MHz phone, or about as slow as the original Droid. It runs Android 2.2, which meant that voice actions, navigation, and all the other goodies that Apple fanboys are missing come standard and works well. It's a bit too slow to run Angry Birds, but the more optimized Angry Birds Rio runs well. Like the original Droid, it's battery would last a day, so you have to charge it every night. The UI outside of Angry Birds is extremely responsive, more responsive than the original droid, without the occasional pause that cause me to have to reboot my 2.3 Nexus One.

The big feature of the Optimus V is Virgin's Beyond Talk plan: $25/month prepaid for unlimited data and 300 voice minutes. At this rate, the phone pays for itself over a T-mobile voice plan in 10 months. For a geek who hardly ever uses the phone, this is a huge feature. While others report that the Sprint network the phone uses is no good, we haven't found this to be the case. It's had voice and data whenever T-mobile has had it, and unlike an iPhone, does not drop any calls while in use as a phone.

The only thing that might give you pause is that the phone is a CDMA phone, which means it won't run anywhere in Europe, for instance. In any case, this is a phone I will seriously consider paying for when my T-mobile prepaid card runs out. Virgin Mobile has finally raised the price on the phone to $199.95 in order to keep the phone in stock and to build inventory, but if the price were to drop back down to $149.95 or even below, this phone would be highly recommended.

Startup Recruiting

Early on in Quora's life, there were lots of questions on Quora like Who are the best engineers at Google?, and Who are the rising stars in Engineering at Google? I don't know who asked those questions, but if you're a startup recruiting engineers, those are the wrong questions to ask.

To begin with, if someone is widely recognized inside a large company, they are unlikely to leave for a startup. Lars Rasmussen, for instance, did not leave for Facebook until after Google Wave was canceled and Facebook wasn't a startup anymore. Secondly, in large organizations that are well past the startup stage, climbing the corporate ladder is as much a measure of political skill as it is a measure of engineering skill. While bringing in someone with political skill might be very useful when you're past the startup stage, at the startup stage it can be a cause of pain by adding very political people into what would otherwise be a unified team. As Sanjeev Singh once said, internalizing Tips for Noogler Engineers might make you a great corporate ladder climber but would also make you useless at a startup.

So what's the right question to ask? The right question to ask would be, Who is the most undervalued engineer at Company X? This brings up two highly desirable traits: one, the engineer probably realizes that he's undervalued (or if he doesn't realize that he would as soon as you showed him your offer), and two, the engineer's probably undervalued because he's precisely the kind of person who can't or won't play the political game highly prized in big companies. I'll lead off with two examples, both from Google.

The most undervalued engineer I know at Google was a tech lead for one of the front-ends responsible for producing most of the company's revenue when I joined. He never shirked from the grungy work of fixing up code and making things work well. He never grabbed the sexy work for himself. Whenever I saw a code review from him, I would be awed by the kind of code he produced: this was not code, this was poetry. I learned something about programming well from every code review he sent me, no matter the language or the system. People knew he was a hot-shot: he was tapped to build another critical system just prior to the IPO. After a few years at this, he moved on to several other projects. But when he came up for promotion (and his manager had to put him up for promotion (after far too long at Google), since he wasn't a self-promoter), the promotion committee sent back the feedback: "Lack of demonstrated leadership ability, and insufficient technical depth."

The second most undervalued engineer I know at Google had both his 20% projects turned into full time Google projects which launched externally to high visibility. You would recognize at least one of these products as something that lots of people used. He too, was denied for promotion once, and after he worked the system and got his promotion, said to me, "After this experience, I want nothing to do with the system." Again, he's not a self-promoter, but his track record should have spoken for itself. Given his track record, it wouldn't surprise me to see him at a startup some time in the future.

Both these men are financially independent, and are effectively economic volunteers. But I can assure you that there exist others like them, and many of them are not economic volunteers. It's actually not that hard to hunt them down, but the trick isn't to ask managers about such under-valued engineers. It's to ask the "leaf-node" engineers who do the work. Ask the right questions, and your recruiting problems for your startup will be half over.

Review: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Before picking up The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, it is important to realize the Pullman is an atheist and not shy about it. So I expected to read an insightful and deep, if not funny novel about Christianity.

The book's premise was that Jesus had a twin brother, Christ, who stayed in the background recording Christ's deeds while eventually having an important role to play in the final days of that well known tale. Rather than use the Bible's original words, Pullman does a good job of bringing the stories into the vernacular, and keeping things as I remembered from my (now ancient) reading of the bible.

Nevertheless, I found the plot a little too predictable. Once the premise was provided, it was clear where things were going to go, and Pullman pulls no clever surprises, or ever twists on the Sermons/Parables. He does point out the obvious moral conflicts in what Jesus says, but never does resolve them.

To its credit, the book is short and easily read in a couple of hours, but I wouldn't say it was a good use of my time. Go read His Dark Materials instead.

Financial Planning Talk

A random group of people invited me to give a talk about financial matters. It was deemed better to have the talk off-site, so that's what I did. While I could not put all the slides up, I've put up a mostly sanitized version of the slides below in a Google presentation.

The talk went for about 50 minutes, and then I took about an hour or so of questions. Not all the questions were directed at me, as there were other financial experts at the talk. A pleasant surprise was Jeff Rothschild. I did not expect to see him there, since Jeff has probably forgotten more about financial planning than I've learned, but it was great to see him.



Someone did ask me a question about real estate, and XiaoQin pointed out that I should have answered it like this: it's one thing to hold REITs passively, it's another to buy real estate to make money as a business. The people who successfully run real estate as a business (like John T Reed) did it full time. Reed, in particular, no longer advocates buy-and-hold as a viable strategy for making money in real estate. (He said this even before the housing bubble!) He believes that you make money by buying below market value, or for cash flow with a cap rate of 10% or better. For everyone else, treat housing like a consumption decision, not an investment decision.

Review: The World Without Us

People have the tendency to describe books like The World Without Us as eco-porn. Alan Weisman asks (and then answers) the question: how would the planet fare if humans were to disappear overnight?

The depressing answer is that most of the planet would do very very well indeed. In fact, much better than with humans around. The exceptions are places like nuclear power plants, where the disappearance of humans would lead to break down in equipment eventually leading to melt down and release of radioactive material. Even that doesn't seem so bad compared to all the benefits the rest of the planet would see: depletion of the ozone layer would stop, as would rampant release of greenhouse gases.

The author explores nearly every piece of the world. From big cities such as Manhattan to the underground caves in Turkey, you get a nice overview of nearly every environment. The ocean, for instance, gets a large section to itself, and I felt like I learned a lot --- this is not mere eco-porn, since you learn not only about Coral Reefs, but also about how the oil refineries in Texas work. It took me quite a while to read this book, but when I got to the end I wished for more.

At the end of the book Weisman recommends a few (incredibly politically unrealistic) measures for the human race if it wanted to keep planet Earth as a home. I don't think there's a chance humans will take such intelligent steps, but at least the book does show that if we wiped ourselves off the planet life will make a comeback from the mass extinctions we've introduced.

Recommended.

Review: Mad Men Seasons 1-3

I am terrible at marketing, so when I saw that Mad Men was a show about advertising executives, I checked out Mad Men: Season One from the library. The result was I ended up watching not a TV show about advertising and how to do it properly, but about rich powerful men in the 1960s and how different the 1960s were from now. There was the division of labor (in both physical location and focus) between women and men, the political events and major events of the day (the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of major political figures such as John Kennedy and Martin Luther King), and the start of the recognition of African Americans as a viable economic market.

In Mad Men: Season Three, there's even a depiction of child-birth as it was in the 1960s. No ultrasounds, no knowledge of what was to come, and the men confined to a waiting room. More importantly, there's a sense of what's never changed amongst humans: infidelity, abuse of power, office politics are all depicted, including some great examples of good management. We ended up watching 3 seasons in fairly short order (granted, each season is only about 12 or 13 episodes). The cinematography is very pretty, and well deserving of the Blu-Ray versions of the show if you can get it --- none of the fake gritty /grainy look that made me feel like Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series [Blu-ray] would have been a waste of money, much as I enjoyed the first two seasons of that show.

All in all, an enjoyable series, if slow. And if you're young enough not to have lived through the 1960s, a good history lesson. As Charles Stross in Glasshouse reminds us, the 1960s were as alien as any science fiction future that you could think of. In terms of bringing that to life, Mad Men does a better job than even that excellent book did.

Review: Tampopo

Someone once told me that Tampopo is a great movie for foodies. It definitely has a lot about food, especially Ramen.

The plot revolves around Tampopo, a widow struggling to learn the true art of making good ramen, so she support her child. The camera does pick up and follow random side-plots, however, some of which are good, and some of which are distracting and take away from the movie's theme. Most of them are never fully exposited, which makes you have to fill in the blanks yourself, though one of them is ridiculously far fetched.

There are fabulous food scenes in the movie, one of which involves food as foreplay. However, these scenes aren't as common as I was led to believe. I think the movie could have been far more tightly edited and plotted, which would have kept it from dragging in places. Mildly recommended.

It's Real!

 

It took 2 months, but finally, the US Copyright Office has acknowledged me as the author of Independent Cycle Touring.

Upgrade pricing for Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups

Someone asked me over e-mail if I could provide an upgrade for folks who'd bought the first edition. This seemed like a reasonable request, so here's the policy:

1. One upgrade per customer.
   
2. You must have purchased with your e-mail address. In other words, if you checked the "preserve my privacy" button on Google checkout when you bought the book, you're out of luck, no upgrade for you. This is solely because I can't verify you are who you say you are any other way.
   
3. The price is 50% off. That's $12.50 for digital edition upgrades, and $15 for print edition upgrades. Print edition is subject to shipping and sales taxes. If you bought the print edition and want to upgrade digitally, that's ok. The inverse is not true (no print edition upgrades for those who went digital).
   
4. To upgrade, reply to your original receipt (via paypal/checkout, or from the e-mail that had the attached book). If you've lost your original receipt, send me name, e-mail address, and date of purchase and I'll try to track it down.
   

There's no checkout page for upgrading. I'll invoice you directly via checkout or paypal. Note: this only applies for upgrades from the second to third edition. No upgrades from 1st to 3rd!

Book Publishing Experiments

One of the fun things about running an independent book publishing business is that unlike a traditional business I get to make experiments! I've been e-mailing books to buyers of the digital edition of An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups directly, and more than one person suggested e-junkie.com, which performs digital fulfillment. At $5/month, this is very cheap and would enable me to keep digital sales going while I was on vacation, for instance. (In practice, I find a friend to do fulfillment and pay them in chocolate from Europe)

I experimented with e-junkie for a week. All I can say is that for a low volume seller with unpredictable sales, e-junkie's one week trial period is too short. For instance, there was something wrong with the Google checkout integration, and I actually had a buyer call me up and ask me how to download the book. I ended up having to send her the book manually anyway, which defeated the purpose of e-junkie. I didn't get a chance to debug the problem and had no way to figure out what I did wrong, so at the end of the week I just turned off e-junkie and went back to regular fulfillment the old-fashioned mom-and-pop way.

My second experiment was with the Kindle store. For as long as the book's been launched, I've had people ask me why the book was so expensive, with a few folks asking brazenly for discounts. My response has always been that the book's targeted to a very niche audience, and if you're outside the niche you will have no interest in the book! In other words, I'm not writing entertainment and I'm not competing with Stephen King. Goodness knows why anyone would consider a book with a voluminous chapter on taxes and another one on financial planning to be entertainment. Nevertheless, one the second edition was up, I put up the first edition on the Kindle store. Over the last month, the second edition digital sales (at the full price of $24.95) has far outsold the first edition (at $9.99), demonstrating that indeed, I was reaching the audience I wrote the book for: high income professionals for whom the biggest cost of the book is the time spent reading it, not the paltry $24.95 that I ask for my time spent writing it!

Just for grins, I typed "An Engineer's Guide to" into the Amazon Kindle store's search box and the first entry is $99.99. I charge $360/hour to help engineers negotiate compensation, and so far, every client has been very satisfied with my services. The book's your way to get all that experience at $24.95, which if you think about it is a bargain.

My third experiment has been to do away with the Kindle version of the second edition. There were two reasons for this. One was that I wrote the book using OpenOffice, and had to export to Word before converting to Kindle format. The automated tools aren't perfect. so I end up having to fix them up manually in Emacs. Then I got a Kindle 3 as a gift and noticed that it rendered PDF just fine. The trick is to rotate the screen 90 degrees and read books in "wide format." This doesn't quite work for the two-column layout that I use is Independent Cycle Touring, but works fine for the Engineer's Guide. I waited to see if I got howls of protests, but nobody complained, which meant that my assessment of the situation was correct --- the audience for the book who cared about the Kindle knew what to do with the PDF, even without instructions.

I will keep experimenting with the business. Unlike a traditional publisher, I can move quickly and am not tied to existing processes at all. And unlike a traditional publisher, I don't care whether my book sales are mostly digital or mostly paper.

Sports Basement Talk

I gave a talk about Independent Cycle Touring yesterday at the Sports Basement in Sunnyvale. It was raining and the talk was lightly attended, but everyone who attended got a sticker entitling them to 20% off store purchases. Despite that, people were enthusiastic and I had many a good question about touring. One big concern was not knowing Japanese, say, in Japan. While it's always nice to know the language, I find that knowing even a few words go a long way. My Japanese wasn't that great, but it did improve during the trip.

The slides for the talk are posted online. I can't embed them like I usually do because it's a photo-heavy talk, which meant that the power point presentation was 20MB in size!

The feedback on the book has been great, indicating that the biggest problem with the book is that I don't know how to market it!

Review: Cowl

Cowl is Neal Asher's time travel novel. The novel, not set in his Polity universe, follows two characters, a government trained special agent named Tack and a former prostitute named Polly as they get pulled back in time by organic time travel devices intended to bring them back to a mysterious creature named Cowl at the beginning of time.

The mechanism behind time travel is never fully explained, though the unique thing that Asher does here is to view history as a series of probability curve, and explaining paradoxes as pushing a particular group of events up or down a probability slope.

The characters aren't very likable, though we start to sympathize with Tack after we realize that he was effectively a programmed assassin and a pawn. What I dislike about the book, however, is that the characters don't seem to have much agency at all. Tack gets dragged this way and that by factions of time travelers and never gets much agency until right at the end of the book. Polly just keeps jumping backwards in time continuously without any agency at all either. So that makes the book a slave to the plot, the reveals, and the world.

Unfortunately, the plot's complex, but the reveal isn't all that interesting. The villain turns out not to be that much of a villain, but is still not a nice guy either, and the wrap up is just full of pyrotechnics for no particular reason. I'm not sure what Asher was trying to achieve, but his attempt at a cerebral time travel story with lots of action falls a bit short of his Polity novels, which at least have some sort of coherence to the violence.

Not recommended.

Review: T-mobile Pre-Paid

At the start of the year, I switched over from a Verizon Droid to a Nexus 1 on T-mobile's Prepaid service. The choice was made mostly because the N1 was given to me, and I did not want to pay a massive monthly fees for a phone on which I did not expect to make many phone calls, and I was mostly in a WiFi zone anyway, so data didn't matter to me most of the time.

For $100 at the T-mobile store, I got a SIM card that's good for 1 year (you can renew and keep the phone #, but since I used Google voice anyway, I didn't particularly care whether or not I kept the same phone #). Since January, I've got about $76 left, which means that I'm paying on average $10/month for phone service.

As expected, T-mobile has less coverage than Verizon, but since phone calls were not made often, I did not care very much. One exception was last week's bike tour, where Yoyo and I played phone tag because we both were on T-mobile and ended up not ever able to connect. It wasn't a big deal though.

One particularly nice feature of T-mobile prepaid that I wasn't aware of when I bought into the plan was the Web DayPass. On the days when you really need data, you turn on your 3G mobile on the N1, bring up a web-browser, and are given the option to purchase a Web Daypass for $1.49. What this does is to give you unlimited data coverage for 24 hours. On Tuesday, when I had intended to take the train but due to other circumstances had to drive instead and was therefore unprepared with directions, I turned on Web Daypass and used Google navigation to get to my destinations. I've been using Web DayPass whenever I needed to travel and needed navigation/web search/etc, and it's been great. [Update: Even tethering works with no extra charge!] The DayPass comes out of your prepaid dollars, so there's nothing fancy to do, no credit card entry, etc. (You do have to confirm that you intend to spend the money 3-4 times though!) Phone calls are $0.10/minute, as are text messages.

All in all, if you're a cheapskate, don't make phone calls very often, are frequently in wifi areas and so have no need for full time continuous coverage, the T-mobile Prepaid plan is an excellent one. The Virgin Beyond Talk plans are still tempting, but my suspicions is that with my usage patterns, the T-mobile plan on the N1 will be far cheaper. Not to mention, if you have an unlocked phone on T-mobile, that same phone is still useful in Europe.

Recommended