This afternoon I got a call from the folks who had spent hours trying to activate the cellular data plan on an iPad. Having called Apple and AT&T didn't help. The frustration level was understandably very high. At the end of the day it boils down to an odd little problem that AT&T never anticipated.

First the interface for activation isn't great at dealing with errors. The cycle would run like this. You enter all the data and submit it. The system doesn't like your physical address and tells you so. When it presents the form with the error it also removes the password you've entered in your last attempt. However it doesn't highlight the password field so you don't know readily it's been removed. Your next submission is rejected for not having a password. Once you fill that in it gets rejected for the address again and around, and around, and around you go.

Having been through things like this in the past I knew immediately what the problem is. Depending on how you look at it the problem is the US Post Office or AT&T's programmers.

Murphy's law and it's corollaries dictate that not only will things that can go wrong will go wrong, but they will do so at the least possible convenient time. Thus it was that at the end of April as I was getting ready to transition to a few months of full-time travel Apple's Mail app decided to head south. The main symptom was an incredible use of memory. I could launch Mail and a short time later not only would all 8GB of RAM in my machine be swallowed up but it would be using 20GB more on disk for swap space. All and all a totally unusable situation.

Since I now spend precious little time at home I just switched to using MailPlane and called it good. MailPlane uses the native Google Mail interface which has a major advantage in the form of the Send and Archive button. With the flood of hundreds to thousands of emails a day in my inbox this is a powerful tool. However it lacks other processing rules like the priceless Mail Act-On.

A brief deviation here while I rant for a second about how inexplicable it is Google has never come up with the concept of rules applied once email has arrived. In most cases I need to see the message in my inbox and make decisions about it and then I want to process it. Mail Act-On does this beautifully and even uses Apple Mail's rules to full advantage to simplify having the same keystrokes affect multiple accounts and take the right action on an account-by-account basis. But this Google Mail gripe aside back to the story.

Just how much kids pick up from the world around them is amazing. Each day some new words are added to their vocabularies, used correctly and leave parents asking just when did this happen. By way of explanation a few recent examples from our 2-year-old.

As she was exploring the office she picked up something breakable. “We need to be careful with that,” I reminded her.

“Because it’s fragile?” she asked. Now the pronunciation was a little more like frag-gile but the meaning was clear. As she went on exploring I wondered where along the way she had added fragile to her vocabulary.

While vocabulary is part of it kids also notice far more than we imagine. Recently she came excitedly into the office and rattled off a story. With excitement taking the place of usually good speech it was left to just a few words that were intelligible. Mom, broken and glue were the three that made it through. As she was in the other room working with mom on something that seemed reasonable. A few minutes later mom joined us and Rosalind told her story a little more calmly. She was in search of glue to repair the broken tail on one of her model horses.