So far, Master Reset seems to be working.

Someone must have really messed with this phone in the store. Now I need to get some sleep so I can do 14 weeks of expense reports tomorrow. The days before going on vacation always feel like finals.

myTouch Fiasco, Day One

I'm generally a supporter of opensource, and I'm creeped out by the Apple-AT&T hegemony, so I decided to buy a T-Mobile myTouch 3G after the first 12 hours of my workday today.

It took two very dedicated Radio Shack reps an hour, plus half a dozen phone calls at 9pm, to work with T-Mobile and their home office to update my account and get the phone correctly priced.

The good news is that the internet and voice service work great. The bad news is that those are the only things that work. I can't add contacts from the SIM or manually without the device crashing. The much-touted Gmail integration? It also freezes up the phone.

Three reboots have done nothing. I'm trying a master reset, and then I'm bringing the phone back.

WI-FI UBIQUITY

The double-deck Megabus to Hartford had reliable wifi (probably because the bus was only a third full). Now I'm sitting downtown in New England's Rising Star, which is still as segregated as ever. The insurance people are in the glass and concrete towers; the help is on the street transferring between city buses.

I am at once the only white person on the street *and* the only person using the city's wireless internet (also reliable, at the moment). The city's website claims that "two thirds of households lack a functioning computer and access to the Internet."

So, two questions:

1. If I can open up my laptop anywhere, and it can connect to the internet, why do I need to buy a USB wifi device?

2. Is it possible to fix the racial and economic divide in Hartford?

Time Machine's method for deleting old backups is actually a huge pain in the ass.

Mac's Time Machine sounds like a great idea: a program that automatically backs up your computer every time you connect a specific external hard drive. What it doesn't tell you is that each time it creates a new backup, it deletes the last one by moving the old backup to the Trash.

Now what a lot of people don't know is that when files are in the Trash, they are still taking up space where they were. This is totally counter-intuitive, because there's no way for a user to see that the space is taken by looking at the disc/directory where the space is actually taken. You can only see these files and folders in the Trash. Even more confusingly, the disc space is taken on an external drive...and the Trash exists on your computer.

There are message board posts all over the web with new Mac users panicking when their Time Machine drive becomes totally full. The only way to remedy this situation is to connect the external device to your Mac and empty the Trash.

That's what I'm doing now. In fact, I am now waiting for my computer to delete 341,000 files from my external drive so I can back up once more.

Lucky for me, it turns out that any image that I marked as "locked" on my digital cameras requires an extra click to delete. Apparently a large portion of my most recent 19,600 photos are "locked." I'm going to be here for a while.