I have a number of contacts that apparently own iPhones, who send me email from said device from time to time. How do I know? They tell me each and every time they fire off an email from that very device (although I suppose anyone could append “Sent from my iPhone” to their communiqués, regardless of where they emanated).

Now, I realize that the iPhone, by default, does this. And I hope, and assume, that the reason these people do not turn off this “feature” is because of one of the following reasons:

• they don’t even realize it happens;
• they are too lazy to actually take care of disabling it;
• they can’t seem to disable it because of some glitch.

Excepting these reasons, and perhaps others that I am not cognizant of because of my inexperience with the device (oops, I just outed myself; you guessed it, I don’t own an iPhone – oh, the horror!!!), I see no reason to keep this message as your signature so that your iPhone continues displaying this message other than to try to look good to others. I don’t doubt that there are some (hopefully none I know personally) who privately relish that little message at the end of their emails. If your intent is to do just such a thing, I can honestly and truly say: I really don’t care – if anything, I now think less of you than I did before. Anyone who lets their possessions define who they are needs a lot of counseling (trust me, I need the same but for other reasons – as you may have already guessed).

So, if your goal is to rub in the faces of your friends the fact that you own an iPhone and they do not, why not go further than that simple message? What about something like:

Sent from my iPhone, from the front seat of my Porsche 911 GT3, from the island of Kauai, while I am sitting next to my supermodel girlfriend.

I don’t know, I get so tired of people and their need to tell everyone what material possessions they own. If it were not so destructive, it would be hilarious; however, it is destructive, thus it is only mildly amusing. I think I am going to start appending the following to my email messages:

Sent from my arrogant, self-righteous high-horse.

That ought to set things straight!

I own and currently use a Motorola Q. Well, I haven't updated the software on this thing in a very long time and thought that I might as well check to see if such a thing even existed. Although I know plenty about JavaScript, C#, and other such and similar software engineering subjects, I am a complete ignoramus when it comes to mobile devices, largely because I barely use the one I have. My wife and I both have cell phones but barely use them - I usually only received phone calls from my wife on my phone. Other than that, the only other useful thing mine does is tell me the time.

So, I found an update on the Motorola website, went through the motions with it and it tells me there is an update available for my phone after all. So, I let this updater have its way with my phone for about 15 minutes, via the USB cable, and after all is said and done, I notice that it is in roaming mode.

Huh. Okay, what is that?

Then I discover that, according to the phone's settings, the phone thinks its phone number is "0000005303" which is completely incorrect.

Not good.

Sure enough, I try calling with it and it tells me I need to use a credit card, etc.

I accepted the idea that the update must've hosed the phone and that I would need to head into the Verizon store and spend the better part of my Saturday there in order to get this fixed...just lovely!

Thankfully, after a bit of googling around, I found a comment to a blog post that indicated that all I needed to do was dial *228 from my phone and then select option 1 when presented with that choice.

Sure enough, after about a minute waiting while the phone was reprogrammed over the air, my phone was back to normal and working. Hallelujah!