I'm breaking my own rules by typing this on the computer, but just for one post to give a sort of "program note". I'm not sure how many readers I have, but those of you who are watching may have noticed quite an uptick in posting in recent weeks. As I mentioned, we got new phones with a new service provider, and I've been kicking the tires a bit, posting pictures (the major new toy) and working on the best way to get text onscreen. With my former provider, I knew my limit exactly. The phone would tell me if I entered too many characters. The new one just lets me roll on and tells me only after the fact that it's sending two messages. The second one never gets through, so my post gets truncated and I have to go back in manually and edit each post. Not to mention, I have to take out the "Message from a Cingular wireless customer" sig on the end of each one. Sure, we're happy with the little orange guy, but I don't really want to advertise him every single time.

The alternative was to send Multimedia (MMS) for each post, which is how I get photos here anyway, but my plan gives me 200 text messages and only 40 MMS. Not nearly enough to keep up my suddenly blistering blog pace. What I'm working on now is actual e-mail, using my phone as a gateway to my gmail.com account. There's a monthly bandwidth quota on that, but I'm less concerned with hitting that ceiling than I am with MMS.

I realize that none of this means much to any of you who are reading, but the gist is this: I'm having a great time with my new toy here, and the result for you is more posting and, hopefully, longer messages. It's hard to get a lot of meat in less than 256 characters, after all.

Now back to your regularly scheduled mobile-only blog. Happy Reading!