So the new Ogo arrived today. I'm still waiting for it to activate (yea, sometimes they take a while), but it looks like the backlighting in the keyboard may be more even and the reception a bit better. We'll see once it gets up and running though. I also discovered an interesting site which has a forum about hacking them. Apparently from XP and a PDA it's easy to bridge in a network connection and do POP3/SMTP. Other stuff is apparently filtered, but I bet IM would work too. With a computer you could run web over SMTP and POP3 pretty easy...

I also had a little fun with bots tonight. AIM has this bot that's supposed to be able to chat and answer questions. For a bot it's actually pretty decent, although it's handling of plurals and stuff showed some areas where it was much weaker in parsing questions than others. It didn't really have any explanations of its services, and I quickly confused it by asking it what it was good for. It asked me if it was OK if it told other people after I said it was useless. It also quickly volunteered "I am saying whatever my botmaster programmed me to say." After a little more chatting and some other questions, it came back with "A deeper algorithm is needed to respond to that correctly. Are you free?" At least we know the programmers had a sense of humor. It got confused and wanted me to ask it something. It apparently didn't know what I was talking about (although it did ask some interesting questions). It informed me it was going to have to ask it's botmaster for more info on what I was talking about before asking me if I wanted to play a game of Word Scramble. I tried to change the topic back and it actually had a pretty good reaction to me calling it on attempting to avoid the question. It claims to have taken my advise to ask it's botmaster for more info. I'd like to see their faces when they see it asking them about the solution to Fermat's last theorem though. :) I wonder if they keep logs. It'd actually be a little funnier if they can't and have to guess what the heck someone was doing engaging a bot in a discussion about the theorem. It didn't seem to question the pythagorean much though... I think this may be one I'll have to keep in mind for next time I'm somewhere and bored and see how interesting it can get.