by Michael Sheehan on July 27, 2010
in Cellular, Consumer Electronics, Family, Gadgets, General, Hardware, Lose the Laptop, Mobile, parenting, Safety, social media, social networking
We are now in the final days of voting for the AT&T Lose the Laptop Challenge. It has been an interesting four months writing about different topics and how they relate to the HTC Tilt 2 smart phone. You can see all of my articles on the Lose the Laptop site here. But I thought that it might be a good idea to provide a quick summary of all of my posts, all within one article. That way, you can see the evolution of the program in my mind. Hope you like them! And be sure to VOTE FOR ME on the Lose the Laptop site! Each vote that you make enters you to win the GRAND PRIZE of $5000!!!
Each of the post titles below link to the full article on the AT&T Lose the Laptop site. Also included, in italics, is the first paragraph of each post and a tiny bit of Commentary about these posts.
April – “Travel” Theme
The theme for April was all about travel and how the HTC Tilt 2 can help with that.
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Catch up on Part 1 of “The Mobile Spy” here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here (on AT&T’s Lose the Laptop site) or Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here (on HighTechDad.com).
He slept most of the way. He hadn’t realized how running on adrenaline had made him so incredibly tired. He only woke a few times to have his ticket checked and to peer out the window to identify his surroundings. But after each check, he slipped back into a deep slumber.
After about five hours of sleep, lulled by the gentle rocking of the train, he snapped awake, refreshed and rejuvenated. He was about an hour away from his final destination, a sleepy lake-side town in the Italian mountains. He knew the area like the back of his hand. The small villa had been purchased many years ago and had been cared for by a local who had been paid from an anonymous fund. It would be his family’s sanctuary and the start of his new life.
He thought back to the events of the past 24 hours, double checking every possible angle of his escape. By the time the agents caught the vagrant in the cab, they would realize that they had been tricked and that the trail would be cold. The safe house had been thoroughly burned. He knew this because of how he had set up the rooms. Each room had areas that were meant to act as tinder, from the old, dry and dusty curtains to the yellowing newspapers stacked in careful piles around the flat. He had lost the laptop by completely destroying its internal hard drive and burning it beyond recovery. The data had been transferred from his cell phone to the laptop and then off to a secure site. All of the checks were in the appropriate boxes. Through a stroke of luck, Mark Z, the man he had bought the data from, was dead. And for all intents and purposes, any connections to Mark, the data and him were long erased.
The man got up from his seat and walked to the WC at the end of the train car. Once the bathroom door was locked behind him, he took out his wallet and began removing all of the credit cards and IDs. He set to work folding and ripping up the items of his past lives, flushing pieces of the documents down the toilet as the train raced through empty pastures and hillsides. When the last piece had been disposed of, he breathed a sigh of relief and headed back to his seat.
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by Michael Sheehan on July 21, 2010
in Apple, Cellular, Consumer Electronics, Gadgets, General, Hardware, iPhone, Lose the Laptop, Mobile, Opinion
It should be pretty obvious to those people who know me or read my social media updates that I really want an iPhone 4. I have had the original iPhone and the iPhone 3GS (I skipped the iPhone 3G), and now I’m ready for the “new hotness.” But I have an issue, actually a bunch of them and some of them aren’t related to the iPhone but that is another topic altogether. My current issue is that the iPhone 4 is not available. Well, 
that’s not completely true, you can pre-order it via AT&T, you can try your luck at an Apple Store or you can try Best Buy or Radio Shack to see if they have them in stock. And now, I’m a bit worried that Apple will be launching the iPhone overseas at the end of July 2010, which means, in my mind, even more scarcity.
So, why don’t I just take out my credit card and order from one of the sites I listed above? I have a pretty good reason, but it is somewhat unique (but others may fall into a similar scenario as I have found through some research). Here’s my problem, I have some AT&T Gift Cards. They were a prize that I received from winning the AT&T Lose the Laptop challenge in May. When I won, I was really excited because I figured that prize would fund my iPhone 4 acquisition. How wrong I was…
Cash or Gift Cards Not Accepted Here
The AT&T Gift Cards that I received are only good for in-store purchases. So, once I had them in my hot little hands, I marched on down to my local AT&T store in Walnut Creek, CA and asked if they had any iPhone 4s in stock (I had been calling various stores in the past and had been told they were not available but that I could “pre-order” them). I figured that I would just go into the store and do a pre-order with my AT&T Gift Cards. I was happy as a clam when I talked to the AT&T Rep, who seemed a bit battle worn from what I think was probably an onslaught of people pre-ordering the iPhone. Oh, and I was doing this pre-ordering well after the iPhone was out and people had them.
We started punching up my information to see if I was eligible for the upgrade pricing. I wasn’t but my daughter (who had just received a HTC Tilt 2 from me – another prize from the AT&T Lose the Laptop challenge) was eligible and I could use her upgrade to get the iPhone 4. So far, so good. The Rep started working through the various screens and while she was doing that, I asked her if she had heard about the Lose the Laptop thing because I was actually going to pay with the gift cards that I had won. She stopped typing – “sorry, you can only use a credit card to pre-order the iPhone 4″ she said to me.
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Catch up on Part 1 of “The Mobile Spy” here and Part 2 here (on AT&T’s Lose The Laptop) or Part 1 here and Part 2 here (on HighTechDad.com).
He enjoyed the obscurity that the shadows of the train station provided him. He easily slipped between alcoves and doorways, at times jumping into the moving crowds. Everything was falling in place the way that he had planned and he was in the final stretch. Only, he hadn’t planned on them catching up with him so quickly.
The file had been transferred, he had “lost the laptop”, the safe house thoroughly destroyed, and with an unplanned stroke of luck, the provider of the data had been killed in the process, thus closing the loop and erasing almost all chances of his personal mission failing. But he wasn’t out of the woods yet as four pairs of agents were combing the train station with orders of shoot him on sight.
But he still had a few tricks up his sleeve. He initiated a plan that was so over used that nobody tried it any more. He hoped that the mere obviousness of it would act to his advantage and people would simply think he was panicking.
Pulling the HTC Tilt 2 from his pocket again, he did a quick search for a local taxi service. After finding the phone number, he quickly dialed it. Slipping casually into the local dialect, he spoke a few sentences and gave the company a credit card number, one that was not entirely off the radar. His view from the shadowed alcove gave him a clear look at the front entrance and within a minute or two, he saw the cab pull up.
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