I'm starting the week by working on a Blackberry for an associate dean. While waiting for the tech support folks I was reading about the dispute over patents for the BlackBerry's technology. It is an interesting article in the New York Times but it doesn't mention what technologies the patents cover. It should give at least a passing note of them. It does give the patent numbers but print readers will have a harder time finding them and then distilling what they actually mean.

Meanwhile back on the case of the broken Blackberry there is a small portion of South Los Angeles (Ontario, Newport Beach area) that shows up as "coming soon" on the ATT map. The Dean who was having trouble was in this area when the trouble started. Unfortunately since I hadn't worked with them a lot before it never occurred to me that an indication of a GSM network instead of GPRS could mean the account is suspended. Now that is really annoying. Unless one tries to place a call from the cell phone portion of the Blackberry it might take a long while to figure it out.