I switched my home’s phones to a cell phone back in August.  This post outlines what I did.

For the old phone line I had what I think was the cheapest service available.  The service was maybe 17$/month, but the confusopoly charges ran the bill up to about $34/month.  So a years service was costing me abour $400 dollars.  In addition to that I was buying my long distance service from yet another vendor so my total phone cost was about $450/year along with about 14 transaction events to handle the billing.

What I did was by a two pieces of capital equipment, a used cell phone and a clever widget that bridges from the cell phone to the existing in house phone wiring.  That capital equipment cost me about $100 total.  I then switched the phone number to Page Plus Cellular.  Page Plus Cellular is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, or MVNO.  It stands on the physical network of Verizon Cellular.    While MVNO is the technical term for this, most people just say “Prepaid.”

Cell phone minutes are cheap on Page Plus.  When I set this up they were six cents each (if you buy them in $80 batches), now they are four cents each.  I estimate that the annual cost for the minutes we use is about $250/year, e.g. ~ $20/month.  I have to top up the account four times a year; so there are 4 transactions to handle/year.

So in the first year I’ll save about a hundred dollars have ten fewer transactions.  In next year I’ll save $200.

I think the quality is great, we occasionally get lousy connections but so far i haven’t had one were I couldn’t blame the counter party’s cell phone.  I guess it could count as a feature that I can take the home phone with us when we travel.

But over all this just is not that big a savings.

I appreciate at there are other schemes that use your internet connection.  I didn’t go down that route for three reasons.  I’ve had a hard time getting dependable quality with internet phone.  I didn’t want to get the two services entangled with each other.  It’s not clear if it would have been cheaper without taking on significantly more risk and support costs for me.

Because this cell phone doesn’t move I could presumably buy my minutes from one of the more marginal physical cell phone companies (say Metro PCS).  Suprisingly they don’t offer something cheaper.  But if something cheaper comes along I switch after spending down my current basket of minutes.

Update Sept 2012: I think I’m spending about 5-10$ a month; but yeah we don’t use the land land much.

Ha!  This had not occured to me before.  If you use smart phone (even a very cheap one) you can install google voice on the smart phone and then have the phone route your international calls thru that; which is very cheap.

This piece was born as the sound track for a cartoon.  The company that pulled it together provides sound tracks.  Lots of over the top musical effects for your B movies.  None the less it’s fun.

I don’t like list songs.  But, now days when ever I hear a song based on a list I think about the password generating trick of using a list, say bpnpbw (Boston, Providence, New York, …); so maybe he’s revealing his password?

That monster with it’s smoke, chorus, strings, sweaty sexy rocker reminded me of the rule of thumb that it’s tacky to use white paint in an oil painting.  I bet there is a “tacky” list for every art form.

Ned Gully wrote a delightful bit recently on the puzzle of when to cheerfully let the vendor manipulate your inner animal.   I agree with his example. but still I can’t resist highlighting that he admits to being the vendor.  The vendor always thinks the customer should unleash his inner animal.

A while back the Times has an article about manipulative consumer research used to design of restaurant menus.  For example, always pull the family values cord: “Uncle Juan’s Haggas.”  Of course the article’s full of the same rhetotical dabs of white paint: “The company hired Gregg Rapp, a menu engineer and consultant who holds “menu boot camps” for restaurants around the country. He said he had been “taking dollar signs off menus for 25 years,”.”  Boot camps!

I think it was Bruce Schneier who invented the delightful term Security Theater to highlight how the TSA is a kind of performance art.   It gives the impression of security but little real security.  The TSA is thus to security as a Cheesecake Factory is to fine dinning; the Temple of Thebes decor not withstanding.

So I was all LOL on receipt of the rumor that a friend of one of my offspring, having graduated with a degree in theater, had gone to work at the Department of Homeland Security!  The mind boggles.  I’m hoping that we can look forward to a significant upgrade in the production values at the TSA.  Better lighting.  A thrilling sound track.  Costume design.  Now that we have Democrats in power it makes sense that we would get a good dose of arts funding into the mix.   If we accept Bruce’s diagnosis then we should demand a more artful experience, one that make us feel substantially safer than it does today.  Oh wait, what if the goal isn’t to make us feel safe?

This review of Android’s inhumanity resonates in my head with my earlier musing that Google doesn’t get social.  I think this cuts too close to home for me to be able to think it thru.

I recently subscribed, and more recently unsubscribed, from the local news feed from the Boston Globe.  It was awful!  Almost every article was targeted straight at the readers reptilian brain.  Just one scary story after another.  If you read that crap day after day you won’t trust anybody.  They even had a story that would lead you think your girl friend might just kill you and cut your unborn baby from your belly.  Just awful!

There really needs to be a term of art for this kind of – ah – entertainment.  The dynamic where news outlets fall progressively into picking out only those stories that get a rise out of their readers worst fears is  despicable.  Terror porn news?

Consider for example this article from the 2005 from the Times of London “Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows.”  I think they wrote that to fufill their objective; the one filed under: shock the bourgeoisie.  But,  given that I know the media’s first instinct is to try to route around my rational brain and try to kick my poor  reptilian  brain in the balls.  How am I to discount that information?

And, talk about modeling a bad behavior!  How much stuff I read seems to fall into this pattern.  I used to explain to my children that the educational value of watching Mr. Bean was that you should absolutely never ever do anything he does.  Since then I’ve come to think that actually applies to all television, possibly to all entertainment; and today I’m thinking all media.  Oh no, where does it end!

I have a soft spot for totally arbitrary  standards  that achieve a security consequence.  Here are three examples (driving, light bulbs, and handshakes).  So I hear today that some thieves have taken to stealing a pair of shoes by grabbing the left shoe from the display in one store, and the right shoe from another store.  Clearly the shoe industry just needs to standardize on displaying one, or the other.