Crazy Phone

The other day I payed my phone bill and was wondering why it was twice as high as usual. I use my land line as my DSL umbilical cord to the life-sustaining rest of the world; and the occasional call to Switzerland or the US. After some navigating the phone company web site, I found out that I had made couple of longish calls to Switzerland that would have made it almost cheaper to just fly there and talk in person.
So, I created a table of what the costs are to call the US and Switzerland:

Destination		Type		Cost
to USA				0.09/min
to Switzerland		Landline		0.35/min
to Switzerland		Mobile		0.75/min

Calling the USA is cheaper than calling Switzerland, which is closer. The Irish have more relatives and connections in America than Switzerland, but this is still strange. The costs above are in Euro, so calling a cell phone in Switzerland would add up quickly!
Then I looked at the cost of using my pay-as-you-go cell phone:

Destination		Type		Cost
to USA				0.15/min
to Switzerland		Landline		0.15/min
to Switzerland		Mobile		0.30/min

It is cheaper to call Switzerland from my cell phone, than using my land line!

I took the pictures, had notes on costs, and was going to blog this weekend, but didn't have time: Supercomputing paper submission deadlines are looming!
This afternoon, Vodafone, my cell phone and land line provider called and asked whether I would like to get a better deal when calling mainland Europe, including Switzerland, from my land line! I am 100% sure I had not typed any of the above thoughts and information into any computer; so that was kind of spooky!
The deal is this: I enter a contract for a year to keep them as my provider, and they give me 60 calling minutes to Switzerland per month. I pay nothing for this for the first six months, and then 8.99 per month.
I am gaining new respect for the Irish: This is pre-preemptive.

WiFi in Dublin

In Albuquerque, you find free WiFi at the airport and in some restaurants. In San Francisco, at any major street corner, you get at least a handful of signals you can use, plus twenty more that are encrypted. In Dublin you get nothing.
One of my travel guides lists about three pubs and restaurants that have free WiFi. I spent about 45 minutes to find one of them (street naming and numbering here does not follow any predictable scheme), and when I did, I had a nice dinner and a good conversation with the bar tender, but still no WiFi.
I stumbled across a restaurant another night that advertised free WiFi, so I chose it. After ordering I tried to connect my iPod touch. Password? I asked the waitress and she handed me a strip of paper with a 32 character password consisting of random numbers and lower case letter! It took me two attempts to copy it correctly into my pod. And, that was before I had my Guinness ;-)

This was supposed to be a short post to show that I can be less verbose. Still pretty long; sorry. I expect they'll get shorter and less frequent in the future.