Consider this post a Part One, of ???.

I decided that I won't accept a world where everyone owes the phone company around $1000 a year just for access to the internet between destinations. Especially not when (as marketed, anyways) the lion's share of that mound of cash is for fancy sounding things I have little use for. Like "Unlimited Audio Chat Minutes" and "Hidden Charges We Pretend Are Taxes".

Anyway, the industry codeword for the alternate universe in which this exists is: pre-paid. Or perhaps "live outside North America" but my experience there is limited.

AT&T GoPhone

I was originally planning on using AT&T's GoPhone service, as I could buy a $15–25 data package and just pay 10¢ a minute when using the audio chat app built-in to my iPhone. However, it turns out that, while in no uncertain terms must a carrier let you take your phone number along to another service, trying to move a number to a cheaper offering within a provider is not something AT&T seems to feel like doing.

By the time I got that issue off the table, GoPhone had changed their pricing structure so that the aforementioned data packages were only available with a more-minutes-than-I-use-in-a-year monthly voice plan. Effectively, they raised the price of their prepaid data service by $25 month and probably without shedding any tears either.

Note that this is still a slightly better deal than normal: if you were to buy iPhone off-contract — doesn't even need to be unlocked, since GoPhone is an AT&T SIM — just needs a configuration profile installed — you could save well over $350 a year with this plan.

I'm not going to attempt to extensively document the process. Some reps are very helpful and sympathetic, others pretty much will only do what the next step in their customer service flowchart says. The main trick is to avoid saying anything that rhymes with "iPhone" and firmly play your "do you want my money in exchange for a prepaid MicroSIM or not?" card.

T-Mobile Monthly4G

Since my goal was to waste not significantly more than $30/month on keeping my iPhone from being just an iPod touch. T-Mobile has the perfect pre-paid plan for this. I recommend this article outlining the process, and there are other guides. If you have an unlocked iPhone, it's not much harder to get the basics working than with GoPhone.

Except.

T-Mobile does not have 3G, as far as the iPhone is concerned. This may be changing, but that's a forward-looking statement with no promises attached. Three cheers if it comes to the Tri-Cities and I'm still on T-Mobile, but I'm not holding my breath meanwhile.

Fact is, EDGE works and I'm content enough with it. I've tweeted, emailed, looked up directions and/or gotten my bearings, even downloaded some decent-sized attachments. It's rare I really absolutely need to watch YouTube in the grocery store parking lot.

Oh, and the other reason I'm happy to be content with this situation.

Tethering ("Personal Hotspot") also works with this $30/month plan! I'm not sure if it's supposed to or what, but I sure don't feel guilty using it via EDGE speeds on an "Unlimited 4G" plan, and it's quite a nice perk.

Twilio

Remember how I had to sort out my number porting issues? Well...at a certain point in the process I decided to stop wasting time on hold just to be told "you can't, not available, we can't" by most AT&T reps. I had a number I liked, so I've entrusted it to Twilio.

Using Twilio is gonna be fun. After a bit of disconcerting radio silence during the initial port (which they apologized for profusely and quickly remedied), they dealt with AT&T's bureaucracy and turned my phone number into an API. Yes, that's right. By gluing together REST calls and callbacks I can pretty much handle calls however I want. Forward to my phone, email myself voicemail as an MP3, turn on a teapot via SMS, set up a call center, or help a bazillion of us poor proles lobby Congress's switchboard that they PLS TO STOP RUINING AMERICA. (I've only personally set up the first one so far.)

There's a few downsides to the way I've currently got it set up, but I haven't even gone beyond the basic "Twimlet" stage of playing with it.

Current downsides, for the record:

• outgoing calls come from (architecturally) temporary number
• forwarded SMS messages must come from my own number rather than the original sender
• can't receive MMS (Twilio simply does not have MMS support. Personally, I've mostly only used MMS to test MMS.)

However, with just a little bit more code, almost all of these can be solved at least as well as Google Voice handles them. If not much much better.

AT&T Tablet Data?

There's another alternative I may look into at some point, especially if I end up needing to work frequently away from someone's home/office/coffeeshop. (But again...even an EDGE connection feels about as fast as airport WiFi, and fetching the important stuff like API documentation, Wikipedia and such works well enough.) AT&T has a "tablet data" plans that give you a decent scoop of internet for a not-indecent amount of your retirement contribution. And Twilio has an iOS client library.

Q. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? A. I dunno Brain, but have you heard about Apple's new $350 iPod touch 3G?

Narf

Another option, if you don't mind a non-iOS device, is to wait for republic wireless to take over the world. (Thanks @hjon for getting them back on my radar!) They look like a great MVNO and I'd love to imagine that one day they'll even be operating their own towers, member-owned style. One can dream. I'm just not that patient in the short term. :-)

A month or two ago I got some spam from LinkedIn offering $50 in advertising credit on their site. Since I'd just gone back to freelancing — perhaps the ad credit "offer" was not coincidental? — I figured I might as well succumb.

Succumb I did.

1. First of all, to use the $50 coupon I had to also put in like $5 or $10 of my own money up front. Lame, but what's $5 or $10 compared to science?
2. I put about 2 minutes of thought into my ad itself, and then tweaked both the image and the wording after a few days mostly because I noticed they were using like "repeatedly re-compress this JPEG until it's less than half a kilobyte" quality on my picture.
3. The ad ran April 9 to May 4 with one accidental pause for a week early on.
4. When I posted the ad, LinkedIn took the liberty of showing everyone "connected" to my profile this fact. Kinda embarrassing, but it's not like we take the site that seriously anyway… (I actually wrote this up because one of my freelance friends saw the post and asked me to share how it went.)
5. Over 215k impressions, 43 clicks and 2 "leads"
6. …basically a "lead" is someone presses a button requesting contact. The first (accidental click? spam?) had hidden his profile or something by the time I got to it although I see it's back now but doesn't list an email address. The second (accidental click? recruiter?) didn't seem quite sure what he wanted.
7. LinkedIn did NOT stop my ad campaign when my account balance ran out...instead they kept billing. I emailed support demanding a refund, got back an almost smarmy response that "that's exactly what our fine print promises" but seemed to imply I would get a refund out of the Generosity Of Their Heart. (We're not talking tons of money, maybe $20 or so....it's kinda hard to sort out what money was extra vs. the initial I-don't-know how much balance I had to add to use the coupon)
8. Overall a very solid "meh" — corroborates with what I heard back in my shareware days that Advertising ⋘ Customer Satisfaction/Networking/Marketing/Product. Maybe if you knew what you're doing i.e. a degree in business/marketing, but my "Impressions" is that I paid the Sucker Tax on this one.

Here's the targeting parameters I set:

In the aforementioned Mac/iPhone shareware days at Calf Trail, we let Google run something like a buck a month in ads — search only, not their "extended network" which I've heard is pretty much dominated by spam farms and scraper sites that may even run up completely fraudulent clicks. It was kinda fun to see mine turn up when I searched for the terms, but my gut feel is that it did zilch for brand/product awareness or anything like that. Maybe should have advertised on complementary terms instead of people already in the market, but...who looks at ads if they can help it anyway?

The moral of the story is that I confirmed my bias, and remain a believer in ads being as much of a leech on me as a producer as they are on me as a consumer. For science.

While I wait for a second balloon to arrive, I want to share a homemade extension to my mapping kit that's been very handy.

The PLOTS kits come with a generous amount of string and a winder that can let it all out nice and fast. It's the return trip that doesn't have such a great story out of the box.

Well, you put two minds to winding a thousand feet of string by hand, you can bet they'll have plenty of time to talk through a better way before the balloon is halfway down. And there's a good chance it will involve power tools. My father-in-law is a fine woodworker by trade, but given how quickly he was able to assemble this simple design despite my poorly-equipped workbench, I think anyone could make something similar with care:

Using some plywood scraps, we clamped a length of quarter-inch "all thread" rod through the string winder. We turned some PEX tubing onto each end of the rod so we can let the string loose quickly, but left some bare metal on one end to chuck onto with my cordless drill for bringing it down quickly.

When the wind is helping the balloon pay off, the plastic tubing is a bit hard to brake tightly with cloth gloves, and the whole assembly can slip a bit fighting the rig back in. To get control on the release, I found sitting down and grabbing the reel between my shoes to slow it to a stop. To help the motor on the re-entry, you can have a helper walk forward from the winder with the string, pulling the line down until it's straight out about twenty feet and then "walking" the line above towards the winder with their hands. But as we've reviewed, balloons and strong breezes don't mix anyway — consider these tips for "just in case" and avoid the situation whenever possible.

With a normal "straight up" loft the assembly gives plenty of control going up, and plenty of power pulling back down. We've been able to pull off some relatively rapid full-height flights thanks to this powered winder — great for videos when you don't want the "there and back again" to get too boring.

Talk of which, I've uploaded a video showing a flight in and out in less than ten minutes with this string winder, in case you've ever wondered what it would be like to rock a fifth of a mile above the suburbs.

Two weekends ago we experienced a hull loss accident with our big green balloon. I was flying in too strong of wind, and it ripped the balloon off right at the neck.

The lens I was lifting was all but sticking out of its under-provisioned crash cage and did not survive impact. The camera body and attached GPS are still working. It's unnerving to follow 1000ft of kite string out of the sagebrush and into the edge of a residential area. Very fortunately it came down over an empty cul-de-sac and not over somebody's car or backyard barbecue party. Important lesson learned: yes these big balloons can and may pop — plan your flight accordingly. And for wind, bring a kite.

I debated whether to give up the project. Replacing the airship costs a bit less than the helium lost if it turns to shreds, but ballooning overall is less cheap than I anticipated. Maybe I should pay upfront for an RC plane system with lower recurring cost, or simply put the whole idea to rest. No — I'm going to keep pressing forward using all I've learned so far. These days I have precious few hobbies that lure me outside, with family and friends, into the Columbia Basin's great scenery.

Here are some pictures from our latest (and for now, last) flight:

Besides the wind, I also made the mistake of setting the lens to manual focus before launching it. My intentions were fuzzy: I didn't want the camera trying to re-focus for me, but it wouldn't have anyway and setting it to manual made it easier to bump out (and in and back out…) of focus.

The last picture there is the last one on the card. As far as I can tell from the various timestamps (and relative perspective), the camera actually stopped about ten minutes before it dropped. This isn't entirely surprising, as the strong wind was starting to make things wild enough that I saw the camera swing through a few complete loops around the almost-horizontal string. The power of just a stiff evening breeze is amazing — I now better understand why they shut down the generator turbines outside of town when a storm brings truly violent winds!

Rather than replace the whole kit, I've ordered a replacement balloon from Ballons Direct. They're not the only source, e.g. Balloonplace.com has them cheaper albeit with slightly higher shipping that cuts into the discount.

The second balloon should arrive late this week. My next goal is to start stitching together actual maps using the photos from each fully successful flight – stable platform, correct exposure, solid focus, and interesting scenery.

When I'm confident in that, I want to see if the balloon can serve a more practical purpose. Up the Yakima Valley I have friends with fields and orchards and vineyards. I'm interested in what they could do with a combination of affordable imagery and usable software.

Biking down the road from home to the coffee shop that's my Thursday office. Warm gentle wind, just enough fluffy clouds, everything turning green in the sunshine. You know— that woulda-been-perfect-if-only-I-had-left-my-jacket-behind weather?

So anyway, I'm riding through this, in this. And I realize I'm not using my mirror. The SUVs are blazing past, trucks rumbling by, whatever who cares. I've got my bike lane and my spring breeze and the road should worry about itself.

There's no tires that squeal, no adrenaline rush close call, no mangled pile of This Is Your Bike On Inattentiveness.

I adjust my mirror, lend some conscious attention to whatever's happening on the pavement all around me, arrive and tie my bike to a cheap tree blooming in the grey parking lot. Time to work, or float around the web, or inbox zero, or something.

A decision for any slice of time I pick, and the split-second left/rights I don't pay attention to might have greater effect than the big-plan life courses I could analyze to death.

How should I use this life?

Well…