NYT: A Wi-Fi Alternative When the Network Gets Clogged

I need MiFi! For both my at&t blackberry and for my ipod touch!

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=444050&f=24&p=3

I found JiWire's free Wi-Fi Finder iPhone app particularly useful. The software sniffs out your location and offers a list of nearby hot spots, free and paid. If you're a customer of one of the big Wi-Fi networks, like iPass, Boingo or AT&T, the app will tell you where to find those.

AT&T says its free Wi-Fi initiative isn't a response to a recent avalanche of complaints from iPhone users that they cannot connect via 3G. Still, Jeff Bradley, the company's senior vice president of devices, said that if more AT&T users shifted to Wi-Fi, the performance of the 3G network should improve.

also, "Wi-Fi to Go, No Cafe Needed"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/technology/personaltech/07pogue.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

The Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.

The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270.

NYT: The Holy Grail of the Unconscious

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

[Jung] later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

NYT: iPhones Overload AT&T's Network

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=427739&f=24&p=3

(I have noticed this on my blackberry as well.)

"It's almost worthless to try and get on 3G during peak times in those cities," Mr. Munster said, referring to the 3G network. "When too many users get in the area, the call drops." The problems seem particularly pronounced in New York and San Francisco, where Mr. Munster estimates AT&T's network shoulders as much as 20 percent of all the iPhone users in the United States.

AT&T might be in the spotlight now, analysts say, but other carriers will face similar problems as they sell more smartphones, laptop cards and eventually tablets that encourage high data usage.

Globally, mobile data traffic is expected to double every year through 2013, according to Cisco Systems, which makes network gear. "Whether an iPhone, a Storm or a Gphone, the world is changing." Mr. Munster said. "We're just starting to scratch the surface of these issues that AT&T is facing."

In preparation for the next wave of smartphones and data demands, all the carriers are rushing to introduce the next-generation of wireless networks, called 4G.

Analysts expect that in a year or so, AT&T's network will have improved significantly...

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NYT: In Silicon Valley, the Jobs Picture has changed

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=AC111CE8775C9C83084580B680E4CED8.w5?a=428643&f=24
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