Verizon

I recently purchased the new Verizon BlackBerry Pearl. I researched the pricing on Verizon's website and it quoted me a price about $100. So I went down to the Verizon store at the Cambridge Side Galleria ready to plunk down my money for a new phone and 2yr agreement. What ensued seemed like something froma used car dealership. First the Verizon guy asked me to login to my account to show him the price I was quoted on the Verizon site. Once he was satisfied that it was a legit price, he proceeded over 15-20 mins of constant back and forth with the 'back row' Verizon representatives. At the mall store there's the front row folks, and directly behind them is another row or reps who apparently have all the pricing power. From time to time he would update me on the 'success' or 'failure' of his ability to get me the same deal. Keep in mind this is a Verizon branded store not a generic cell phone shop. Over the 15-20 mins my wife observed that the back row reps were all fairly young (less than 21) and seemed to act like they were in an exclusive club and how dare anyone try to bargain with them! Finally the best deal they could offer to match their own online price was $150 and a mail in rebate of $50. So I said thanks, declined their counter-offer and went back home. Ordered the phone online for $100 and it showed up 2 days later. I was able to activate it over the phone and am quite happy with my new BB Pearl.

I also bought my wife a new phone via the web, but we still had to transfer the stored phone numbers so we went to another Verizon store this time in Everett on Mystic View Rd. Our experience here was what one would expect. Professional, courteous and efficient. We walked in, talked to the greeter, he took us over to the tech support folks, we gave them the phones and less than 10 mins later walked out with the phonebook transferred from old phone to new phone.

Moral of the story, if you want a new phone,try to do it online first for the best deals, and stay away from the mall stores where it seems that customer service takes a back seat to bratty behavior.

RSS & Reading Blogs

If you've found that you like to read blogs, except you can't always find the time to go visit all your favorite blogs. Well one answer is to get a feed reader or other blog aggregator that will get the most recent posts from all your favorite blogs and either put them on a single webpage or will email you the latest entries.There are many aggregators out there, I think the most popular is Google Reader and there are some that plugin to your favorite browser such as Sage for FireFox.

However, if you are inside a company firewall and there are internal company blogs you like to read, some of the external readers such as Google Reader or Yahoo may not work. Also if, like me, you spend the majority of your day in Outlook, then finding a reader that plugs-in to Outlook can be useful. I have found, and use, RSS Popper. Which is free and adds another folder in your Inbox to collect the various blog feeds. It also works great with internal blogs and external blogs.

You can get feeds from a blog by subscribing to the blog's RSS / Atom feed. Using RSS Popper to subscribe to a blog's feed is a simple matter of copying the RSS link and pasting it into the correct RSS Popper field and clicking OK. You may have seen Atom on a blog page, it is just another method that a blog author/ blog site can use to syndicate their blogs. Both RSS and Atom are transparent to you the reader and as a reader, you only care about the RSS/Atom link. The feed for this site is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RandomThoughtsFromATrini

So go out and start gathering your favorite feeds into your favorite feed reader.