John Wargo

For years I've wondered about something and I've not been able to get an answer from any of my former colleagues at RIM. When you open the Alerts application and edit a profile, you'll see the highlighted entry as one of the options for defining and alert. You'll see all of your messages clients (Desktop for the BES email and up to 10 other email accounts through BIS) listed so you can specify settings for each email account but at the bottom of the list is always the one shown below: Web Client. What is this Web Client? I haven't been able to figure it out and a search didn't reveal anything. At Lotusphere this year, I asked everyone from RIM I saw there and got no answer.  Help? What's it for?

I'd forgotten something even older than the MS-DOS books I posted about yesterday. Remember this? Also in my collection (I have two of them)

Periodically I spend some time cleaning out some old books from my technical book shelf (I never throw out fiction and non-fiction books) that I no longer use. As I moved some books around on the shelf, I noticed some very old (late 80's, early 90's) MS-DOS books on the shelf. Think it's finally time to get rid of them?  I haven't done any DOS machine programming since 1995 probably.

I made the mistake a few months ago of signing up for mobile alerts from Information Week. I thought I was signing up for email alerts and wasn't paying attention when they asked for my phone number.  Turns out they're SMS alerts. What IT related news could be important enough that I would need to be sent an SMS alert?  Just send me an email. it just doesn't make sense.

I went back in and tried repeatedly to find some way to cancel the alert but the company managing the site has links for subscribing to the service but absolutely nothing about how to unsubscribe. so, I waited patiently for the first alert thinking there might be a way to reply and unsubscribe. Nope, nothing. So after a couple of months of getting these SMS messages I really didn't care about I finally contacted the editors of the magazine for help (I didn't have any other recourse, there was nothing on their site that led me to believe I could get help from anyone else). The editor responded immediately, apologized for the trouble and promised to get it taken care of.  No change - I'm still getting alerts. Every time I do, I send an email to the editor and he promises to fix the problem (over and over again). Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's not trying to help me - I just think that the company they've outsourced this 'feature' to is clueless and just not being responsive.

I hope someday they finally figure this out and remove me from their mailing list. The issue I have is that SMS messages cost my employer money and I can't have that.

UPDATE: They appear to have finally removed me from the mailing list. Only time will tell.