Is there some reason the chip can't be traced to its manufacturer, then to whatever breeder implanted it? I'd think they'd keep records of who they sold the dog to, at least.

Could have been worse. They could have put Daft Punk in TRON.

Oh, wait.

Last month, my 2-year contract with AT&T came to an end. I'd been paying $70 per month for a RAZR 2 "dumbphone" andin my current jobless situation, that level of cash outflow for an ordinary cell was not ideal.

But I didn't want to go with the average PAYGO plan, in which I would get so many minutes per month and then loose any remaining ones unless I re-upped. I hardly use my cell phone at all, especially since I changed from cablemodem to DSL at the same time and can use my new local-only landline with Google Voice instead of just Gizmo 5.

After checking the various plans over, I went with Boost Mobile. They offer a PAYGO option that's a flat 10 cents per minute or MMS, 25 cents per multimedia MMS, 35 cents per day on which I surf the Internet—and no monthly committment or rollover required. You do have to add money at least once every 90 days, but I figured compared to every 30 days I could deal with that.

I ported my old phone number over, and so far it's been working out pretty well. I do have a few annoyances with the Sanyo Mirro phone, but on the other hand I'm not paying $70 per month for it. More like $10-$20, at most.

I use Evernote in conjunction with Dropbox and a $50 VOIP recording program called VoiceEmotion to do interviews for articles I write for the local business journal. I take notes on Evernote during the interview, then I copy the phone recordings into a directory in my Dropbox so that I can then access them whether I'm on my desktop or my laptop. Then I use Audacity to slow down bits of the recordings I need to transcribe word for word.