Well, I've finally had a catastrophic failure of my Sidekick and am posting via the web interface. I've had a pretty good run for 18 months with three units, and most of my problems have been with the hardware. My run of mobile blogging ended last night.

Call this noblogging.

I was photographing my arrival to Boston and lost my signal at the airport. Thinking a reboot would help, I did that, but then all my application icons disappeared and the date reset to Dec 31st. A hard reset didn't help nor did repeating all these steps this morning with T-mobile tech support result in a fix.

So I have to wait 15 days or more to get a replacement unit. At least I have access to the web interface and a confirmation number to get a T-mobile loaner phone. I'm not looking forward to the apparently common scenario of replacing my Sidekick multiple times. Maybe the Sidekick II will really arrive in August, or maybe I'll switch to some other device.

This is somewhat bad timing given that I was going to moblog my latest visit to the MIT Media Lab, the high temple of technology, and to boot, John Maeda introduced me before my sponsor perspective talk at today's Simplicity workshop as a "moblogger extraordinaire." Tonight, sans phonecam, I'm joining a group of student teams working late into the night to design prototypes of the future of e-mail. This evening should be a blast, and it's a big help that there's WiFi throughout the lab, and broadband at my hotel.

- mike lee - cambridge, mass