What was that quote Edsger?

It's a concept that has been applied in various disciplines, from psychology to linguistics, and I seem to recall someone like Dijkstra coming up with a similarly pithy aphorism in computer science, but alas, I can't recall the quote exactly at this point. It's something along the lines of "The language you speak will dictate the problems you can solve." Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch, or maybe just a feeble excuse for my own ignorance, but I'll chalk the following frustrating experience up to not being able to step out of the preverbal box, so to speak.

I was trying to set up my Motorola V300 phone via a USB data cable and mobile Phone Tools V3.0 to my ThinkPad running Windows XP SP2. If you want to see how my predecessors/peers have made out with this, just search for some of these keywords or a phrase like "mobile phone tools problem" and have a look at the results. I installed the software and like seemingly so many unsuspecting users before me, mPT comes up with "Initializing ..." and nothing more. I tried everything. Uninstalling, re-installing, looking for alternate drivers, hours surfing the web only to find just about everyone and their dog went through the same thing with this combination, with no resolutions. Pretty frustrating. The ubiquitousness of this experience, from what I could gather from the mobile phone forums, led me to my first conclusion, "It's the software that just doesn’t work."

After fiddling for hours with all this, taking any and all suggestions, tinkering endlessly with drivers, finally Windows recognized my V300 as a modem, and I could talk to it via a terminal window. For all you sufferers out there, I wish I could post something more concrete about the fix here, but by the end of this journey my frustration level was so high that my resulting approach was less, shall I say, than scientific. In any event I can no longer retrace the steps I took to get Windows to recognize the phone. Sorry about that.

Back to the story. I had my phone connected to the laptop, and the terminal window open. "Windows can see it", I thought. "I can type the old Hayes modem command set at it, and it responds!", I thought. "It looks like a modem, it must be a modem", or so I thought -- mistakenly thinking that the feedback I was getting from the phone cum modem meant that I could get it to dial my ISP and I would want it to dial my ISP. No luck. As I was playing with this for the third day in a row, a friend happened to YIM me and I described the problem. "Windows can see it, I can talk to it like a Hayes modem, but the #@^!%%#!#@ thing just won't dial!". He replied "It's digital, you can't use an analog modem command. Your phone is already connected to the Internet." That was the 'big a-ha' I needed. Of course it’s digital. Of course it's connected -- I can surf from the phone. duh. I immediately contacted my phone provider and they gave me the GPRS settings for their network. I clicked them into the Windows network connection dialog on the laptop and presto, I was online via my V300. This experience served as a fresh reminder that the paradigm one brings to the table will affect, if not preclude, attempts to solve a problem. The moral of this story? A second set of eyes and ears can help break that 'lock' and allow you to approach things from a fresh perspective. Hopefully, readers will be kind and allow me the excuse that had the modem provided better feedback, I would not have wasted so much precious time, but somehow? I doubt it.

Now, it's off to the cottage to go surfin' ... wireless style. TTFN.