Well, my star-crossed SMS project continues to trundle along. I've had to give up on my beloved T39 — it's just not working out between us. So I bought this Nokia 3100 off of Ebay for 99 cents (+ $10 shipping). That white blotch on the right side of its screen isn't glare; it's a big ol' crack in the LCD. In real life it's neon pink and looks vaguely like a pornographic cartoon.

It arrived in the mail today, loosely wrapped in newspaper. Thanks for the care, anonymous Ebay guy. In return I'll refrain from calling all of your definitely-not-deleted contacts and leaving obscene messages.

I headed off to Eport World, the slightly weird cellphone emporium down the street, to pick up a charger and a cable.

I'm a sucker. If I'd read the documentation a little more carefully, I'd know that any cable except the official Nokia one will work under Linux. Naturally, I ended up with the genuine article, which is totally useless on non-Windows machines. Worse, Eport World's return policy is nonexistent (I asked). So it looks like I'm out $25. D'oh. My only hope is to lean on the goodwill I earned by explaining my project to the guys there. The clerks were clearly in need of friendly cell phone nerd/computer nerd interaction and started quizzing me about posting to blogs via SMS. Here's hoping they don't actually use the email address I left — I'm pretty well tech-supported out at the moment.

So it's back to Ebay, I guess. Attention, googling cell phone hackers: you need a DKU-5 cable with a PL2303 chip in it. 2303 I say!