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I've always been really happy with Virgin Mobile's cool pre-paid cell service, but check this out: if you transfer your number (like I did, so I could switch to iPhone), they steal the money left on the account! You can't transfer it to anyone or get it refunded or anything.

WTF! I could have at least made expensive international calls to burn up the remaining balance, had I known.

Bad form, guys. Show some respect for your customers' dollars.

UrbanHonking readers and writers, you are the most-laptopped group of people I know, or can even imagine. Wifi is your way of life. I would like to ask you: Do you ever use MetroFi?

I almost never use it, myself, since the service doesn't work indoors. Today, I thought I'd get some work done in the park, and situated myself at the park bench in the northeast corner of Colonel Summers Park. The intersection there, 20th & Belmont, has a wifi node. My laptop sees it, and tries to log on, but it fails. So I gave up and went home.

Is anyone having a better experience with this service than I am? I would be curious to hear.

Coors' new bottle has graphics (the mountains) that turn from white to blue when it's cold.

I find this to be a cute but useless innovation.

I decided to test Zypsy ("We search the web for you when you are away from the computer") and have them search the web for 2006 election results. I asked them, "In the 2006 election, what percentage of the vote did Democrat Ted Kulongoski receive in the election for Governor of Oregon?"

An hour passed.

Then my phone buzzed. The text message read: "698,562; 50.8%. In future, please use our service for shopping questions. thanks."

I'm not sure I can find a way to pose every question as shopping-related. Is there an alternative? Who else will search the web for me when I am away from the computer?

There are bunch of new things you can do with your phone and your voice.

• Send an email or text message.
• Do research.
• Get free 411.

Jott: You call 877-568-8486 and leave a message. It is transcribed and sent to the person of your choice. I think the transcription happens in India. Sometimes the transcriptions are a little shaky. It's a good idea to speak slowly and clearly, and spell names. To get started, go the site, create an account, and upload contact info for the people you might want to Jott. After that, it's all from your phone. Free.

Zypsy: You call 650-669-2229, and leave a voice mail, asking a question. Zypsy's wordy but descriptive tag line is, "We search the web for you when you are away from the computer." So, ask them the kind of question that can be answered on the web. Five or ten minutes later, you receive a text message with their response. No setup required. Free.

1-800-GOOG-411: You call and say what business or type of business you're searching for. Google searches for your answer, and will directly connect you for free, or text you the info. No setup required. Free.

I feel like I've only barely scratched the surface in using these. Especially Zypsy. It has the potential to be useful in such a huge range of situations. Anyone got good ideas of how to put these to use?

There's a recent poll asking Americans the following question:

If your party nominated a generally well-qualified candidate for President who was _____, would you vote for that person?

Catholic? Sure. 95% yes. Black? Not a problem -- 94%. A woman? 88%, a number high enough to keep us from despairing too deeply about the possibility of a Clinton nomination. Even being Mormon, like Republican hopeful Mitt Romney, doesn't disqualify you from the job, as 72% of respondents said they'd give a Mormon their vote.

Here, it starts to get interesting. Rudy Giuliani, current Republican frontrunner for the nomination, has been married 3 times. But only 67% said they'd vote for someone on their 3rd marriage. John McCain, the other Republican frontrunner, was born in 1936. He'd be 72 years old at inauguration if he were to win. But being 72 years old was a barrier to all but 57% of respondents. To me, that's a shocking number, and it says a lot about how Democrats should talk about these guys.

And if you're homosexual, the nation is not ready for you to be President yet. You only get 55% yes in this poll. And atheists, apparently, are even more hated than gays, which blows my mind. An atheist gets 45%. Only 45% of people would vote for a well-qualified atheist that earned their party's nomination.

I know that my liberal Portland enclave, plenty of people would vote for an atheist, and maybe that skews my perception. But what, in Americans' minds is the connection between God and President, exactly? Is God on "our side"? Would he turn against us, strike us down, if we entrusted our nation to a heathen?

I guess we won't find out for quite a few years.

This is a letter I wrote to the President of the United States of America last week.

--

From: joshb@well.com
Subject: We're warming the world.
Date: February 2, 2007 12:41:34 AM PST
To: president@whitehouse.gov

Do you believe this yet?

Your last two opponents, Vice President Gore and Senator Kerry, they both would have committed enormous national resources to alternative energy research.

You had that chance. You could have been a visionary. It's one of your goals, isn't it? To demonstrate that you're not just "one of the guys," you're a leader who truly knows what's best for America.

Really, even if Iraq had gone perfectly, and the peaceniks would be forced to eat their hats, would it have been truly visionary policy? Freeing the oppressed people of an Arab nation would have been impressive, sure, but not world-changing.

Figuring out how to keep the American economic engine running without filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases? That would have been visionary. Even starting us down that road would prove you understood the capacity of America's leadership.

Instead, you've shown us you can barely see to the end of your nose, much less 10, 20, 50 years into the future. Fifty years into the future? It's going to be warm.

Please help. You can have a greater impact on this impending global catastrophe than any other man on the planet.

Josh Berezin
Portland, OR

Computer scientist Jim Gray is missing at sea.

His sailboat looks like this:

Amazon has acquired satellite images of the ocean in the area around his last known location. They look like this:

You can help look for him. Maybe we can find him. I don't know the guy, but I like to think he would do the same for me.

Update 2/6:

During the last 5 days, Mechanical Turk workers looked at more than 560,000 images from 3 satellites, covering nearly 3,500 square miles of ocean. A group of experts is currently reviewing the images that workers identified, and sending their results to the appropriate authorities.

More information about the search is available at: http://helpfindjim.com

I'm participating in an experiment by Chris Bowers of MyDD that intends to raise the Google ranking of negative articles about vulnerable Republican Congressmen. So, for instance, if someone searches for Jon Kyl, they'll be more likely to find the article by the Phoenix New Times that I am linking to.

It's not an entirely new idea -- the Republicans did this to John Kerry in 2004. And I'm not sure yet what its impact will be. But it's fun and easy. Feel free to try this on your own. Just paste the code in this post into a blog entry. Read more about this project here.

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Zack Exley, in the essay he's currently in the midst of writing, perfectly identified the phenomenon that drives the leadership of small-time local political groups. He calls it "the Tyranny of the Annoying," and while he thinks it can be overthrown by internet organizing, I am skeptical.