“Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it – what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellowmen. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.”
—Carlos Castaneda

What’s the next wave in business blogging? John Jantsch over on his Duct Tape Marketing blog has a few thoughts.

A remarkable man has passed. One can imagine HAL saying of him: “He put himself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”

Read about him here and here and here, but first enjoy Clarke’s three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If you travel with your laptop and log on in airports and hotels, then Business Week has a few tips for you. One very important tip they miss, though: Be sure to turn off file and printer sharing. Here’s how.

I spent six hours on the phone with T-Mobile and BlackBerry customer care yesterday.

Six hours.

See, I got me a new BlackBerry Curve 8320. Ordinarily I would never blog about this sort of thing, except I had a problem with it that three T-Mobile techs and two BlackBerry specialists couldn’t solve.

Setting up the device was a breeze. Logging on to my T-Mobile account and setting up email for the BlackBerry was a breeze.

Except: I was able to send email but I couldn’t receive email.

I won’t detail every minute of my six hours on the phone. Or even every hour. Suffice to say that the people I spoke with at both T-Mobile and BlackBerry tech help were both courteous and as helpful as they could be.

But I was able to send email, I couldn’t receive email, and they were stumped.

While on hold, I searched the Web for evidence of my problem, both on the BlackBerry and T-Mobile sites and on wireless forums that post help for this sort of thing. I did all the usual fixes for this sort of thing, but this sort of thing persisted: I was able to send email but I couldn’t receive email, and they were stumped.

Then my call got elevated to a network engineer who figured it out. The issue: The email accounts on my computer (I happen to be using Windows Mail on this particular computer) were configured to delete email from the server after being downloaded. As a result, the email wasn’t there anymore and so couldn’t be forwarded to the BlackBerry.

The solution: Change the setting on the email account to leave a copy of my email messages on the server for a day. (It’s over in the advanced properties tab.) Voila: Problem solved.

I knew it was solved, because the first piece of mail that came through successfully was spam.

Six hours. Half a Sunday wasted away so I can receive spam.

Modern technology is wonderful, innit?