It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been referring to my cell phone as “my Nexus One.” Nexus One is the model of this phone, which was designed by Google and manufactured by HTC.  What I mean by this is I say it in conversation, like “I’ll send that to you from my Nexus One” or “I can look that up on my Nexus One”. A lot people call it a Droid phone, and in fact seem to be calling all Android-based phones Droids. That’s a nod to the successful marketing by Verizon and Motorola of the actual phone called the Droid.

iPhone users tend to call their phones, “iPhones” as opposed to just “phones” also. I remember this also being that case with the T-Mobile Sidekick. At first I thought this must have started because these devices are so much more than phones. It almost seems insulting call my Nexus One a phone. As phones go, the N1 one is great. It’s an excellent GSM device with a really nifty set of noise canceling microphones. (The fact that the iPhone is generally considered to be a terrible phone may have also contributed to people not referring to it as a phone.) But as with the iPhone and Sidekick, it’s so much more. Calling it a phone would be like calling my house a bed. I have an excellent bed, a Temperpedic, but that hardly sums up the value of my house.

But then I realized that while that may have contributed, that’s probably not how this started. It started with the Blackberry. People have always said, “I saw your email on my Blackberry.” But it’s not because the Blackberry did so much more that make phone calls -  it’s because the Blackberry did not make phone calls at all. For many years – nearly a decade – Blackberry users also carried cell phones. You had to call your Blackberry a Blackberry, because there was nothing else to call it.

Normally I’m all about how great T-mobile’s customer service is. But here’s an exception – their handset insurance policy.

When we bought our 3 Nexus Ones (Nexuses One? Nexi Ones? Nexus Three?) there was no insurance available. We didn’t know that because the ordering process was so terrible. At some point a few weeks later T-mobile / Google / Asurion quietly made the Premium Handset Protection Bundle available for the N1. It’s $2.60 / month with a $130 deductible. With a two year commitment to these phones all three of us must have insurance.

But there’s a catch – you have to sign up for the Premium Handset Protection Bundle within 14 days of ordering the phone.  Well that was a problem for me, since 1) it wasn’t available within the first 14 days and 2) even if it was we wouldn’t have known to ask for it. As far I can tell they still don’t mention it on google.com/phone. So if you’re ordering an N1 you need to somehow know to call T-mobile and add the PHPB (with-in 14 days).

The insurance must be added within 14 days of opening your account, upgrading a handset, or completing an account change of responsibility. Wait – what was that last one?

Me: Is there any way I can add insurance to my phone now?
T-Mo Rep: Not at this point, it has to be done within 14 days…
Me: But if I transfer my whole account to my wife I can add insurance?
T-Mo Rep: That’s correct.
Me: I would like to initiate a change of responsibility for this account.
T-Mo Rep: No problem.

About an hour and a half of phone calls later the whole account has been transferred to my wife (still billing to the same credit card), and all three N1s have insurance.

Reason #1 – I don’t have $500 to spend on another computer type thing right now.

Reason #2 – I haven’t come up with a second reason yet.

So do I think the iPad is perfect, necessary, or even non- evil? Not really.

Would it be better with a camera? Probably. So a future version will probably have a camera. Then we can all complain that it only has one camera.

I would like to see an open marketplace for apps, flash support, GPS, and multitasking. I would love to see a big Android tablet. We’ve been waiting a long time for the tablet computing thing to happen. Others have tried and for various reasons they all sucked. I hope this one is successful and ushers in the tablet computing era.

Fanboys will defend and haters will criticize. But there are two things you need to know about the iPad – 1) It is what it is, and 2) It isn’t what it isn’t.

One day soon there will be a better device that addresses all of our current concerns (but has a list of its own). But the iPad is right now.

So if you have $500 in the budget right now and you think it would be useful to constantly have access to the web, music, video, and books on a small, light, flat screen with 12 hours of battery life, buy one. If you don’t think that would be useful, don’t – but tell me how you found a blog.

I’m writing this on my Nexus One from the gym. I didn’t take a computer with me, but I have this, my Kindle, my iPod, a notepad (dead tree), and a Sharpie Pen. I really wouldn’t hate it if all of that was replaced with a tablet and a Zoolander flip phone.

When you create an account on a website the server doesn’t store your password, it stores a hash of your password. The most basic .htaccess security uses (I believe) an MD5 hash of your password.  The hash is one-way, so if someone captures the hash they can’t calculate your password.  They can, however, find another string of text that evaluates to the same hash. This is called a collision.

You could, in theory, hash a string of any length. So there are an infinite number of inputs. Some of those strings will collide with the hash for your password. How many? Well, subset of that infinite number, but still an infinite number. A smaller infinite number, if you will.

What’s my point? Just that given an unlimited password field length you would have not one valid password, but an infinite number of valid passwords. I think.