On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 02:57, Jason Holt wrote: > Continuing my strange tradition of visiting places I've never been, with > neither plans nor advance notice, I just bought a plane ticket to Austin, > Texas, leaving Saturday afternoon. If you know of cool things to do in Austin > (or cool people who'll let me crash at their place for a while), please mail > me off-list.
Texas is a strange and foreign place. You are a brave traveler. > > But my other question is this: what's the cheapest way to have cell phone > access while I'm there? It was indispensible last year in Boston, since > that's how I got in touch with the people I met, but I ended up paying the > thieves at Sprint over $100 and a whole lot of headaches to get that one month > of service. AT&T Wireless (or singular) offers what they call a go-phone which is a non-contract, pseudo-per-minute plant with complete nation-wide coverage (no roaming on any GSM network in the US whether it's singular or not). Basically you have to buy the phone though. But it is a GSM phone, and it's possible to unlock it so that you can use it with anyone's GSM. The nice thing about the go phone (for someone in your situation) is that it's a flat 40 something dollars a month for 400 normal minutes (free weekend, evening). If you go over 400 minutes, then you start a new billing cycle right there. Thus you really pay a flat rate per minute, except that you can't carry minutes from one billing cycle to the next. And you can stop service at anytime with no fees or anything. No fees for going over minutes either (because you just start a new month early). Not sure if this would help you, but for many situations it's quite a bit better than a conventional contract plan. I am currently using this go plan for my normal cell usage. Works well for me. I am planning on buying a nice unlocked triband phone (probably a Seimens A60) which I can then buy local SIM chips abroad and use when I travel. My current triband phone is really ugly and has a crappy UI, but worked well when I traveled to the middle east recently. Worked well in Italy as well. The nice thing about the European SIM chips is they are pre-paid accounts with free incoming calls. So you just load it up with your credit card and go. Michael > > Anybody have a phone with nationwide coverage that they'd be willing to rent > me for 2 weeks? Does your plan make it easy to add and remove extra phones? > Do you have a phone I could borrow and connect with my own service to someone > other than Sprint? (I'd happily trade you the Sprint phone I was forced to > buy...) Know of good per-minute plans? (Last year they seemed too expensive, > especially since I actually end up using a lot of minutes calling people I > just met to try and organize fun things to do). > > -J > > > ____________________ > BYU Unix Users Group > http://uug.byu.edu/ > ___________________________________________________________________ > List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
