Now that Cingular has 'info alert' functionality, they've been trying like mad to make it useful. The problem is that it's not on-demand. You have to go to the web site and preprogram what you want. "I want Giants scores at 5pm (regardless of when the day's game ends), weather at 6am and my horoscope at 8 sharp."

Aside from the difficulty in even finding the page where you customize your info alerts, the alerts themselves are tiny to fit on a regular non-WAP Nokia 5190, 6190, or 8290 screen.

The net result is 'news alerts' that consist of obscure headlines only, no stories. You have to go to the web site to read the full story.

Undoubtedly the worst part is the horoscopes. Call me spoiled from having read some truly great astrologers, but Cingular's daily cellphone horoscopes plainly suck. Yesterday's was: "Plug the leaks. Take a mental health day. Yoga practitioners are ahead of the game." Sunday: "Talk with authority. Color code your moods. Don't argue about small differences." Huh?

After reading these for months I'm convinced they're not written by an astrologer, or even a fortune cookie copywriter. It seems more likely that someone just wrote a few hundred sentences on pieces of paper and grabs them out of a paper bag randomly, arranging them into barely cogent pebbles of 'wisdom.'

Heck, that's what computers are for! So, to share my wry amusement with these horoscopes, I've taken several dozen of these cellphone horoscopes and broken them apart and last week on the train (where, incidentally, I'm writing this post, while slogging through the south bay salt beds (yeah, really funky timeshifting in the editing process here... Deal with it. :-) ) ) I wrote the Cellphone Horoscope Generator.

I wrote it in perl since I don't have a PHP interpreter on my mac (yet), but I translated it to PHP tonight so it will work within the existing system without a problem. If you haven't noticed it yet, it's be there in the navbar on the left, under 'Cell-o-scope.' Every reload will give you a new cellphone horoscope!

Yes, I was a little bored on the train...