Sunday, 25th of December, 2005
Friday, 23rd of December, 2005
Tuesday, 20th of December, 2005
Network Solutions is bad news. Not only do they still charge $35/year for a domain name, but their web hosting services are problematic and their support staff cannot fix hosting problems in a timely manner. I did a website for one of my clients and they purchased a web hosting package to associate with the domain name they purchased at Network Solutions. The website has been uploaded and can be viewed at the web server's IP address but for a week the Network Solutions engineers haven't been able to figure out how to get the DNS server to point to the correct web server - so everyone's had to look at a starter page template for a week now. They've changed the DNS servers a couple times now and nothing's happened. What a flop, the free web hosting services I use are better than this.
Friday, 16th of December, 2005
Picture - A piece of corner plastic on my Motorola V400 finally snapped off this afternoon - the piece did more than just hold the joint of the screen and the main phone body together, it actually took on all the stresses of the spring that controls the flip-open action too.
Picture - This made it hard to superglue back together, so as I was dismantling it a bit further I managed to sever the fragile cable that connects the screen and earpiece to the phone's motherboard. Oops. Well there's still some how of figuring out how to recover that phone - I'd need a flex cable and a housing at least.
But until then, I went down to my favourite Cingular store in Brentwood and picked up a Sony-Ericsson Z520a. See a year and a half ago I paid $320 for a quad-band GSM phone that had a good speakerphone on it. Course the Motorola V400 I ended up with had lots of features I grew to love, like the voice recorder. Now I walk into the store and most of them have nice, loud speakerphones, as well as the voice recorders, VGA cameras, and bonuses like Bluetooth for only $200 minus a $30 rebate.
So I wind up with a phone with a big wing on top of it. Actually, that's just where they hid the antennae. It's a nice handle by which to grab it when it's in my pocket, too, and a good thing. This thing is light - 94 grams! And it suddenly hit me later when I looked at the system info screen - my phone has 16MB of RAM on it. That's many times more than my first PC! The camera on this phone is just plain outstanding for a phone. The picture that my brother took of his dog is many times better than the photos that come out of the Palm pilots with cameras on them. And it does videos too! They won't transfer to my Palm but they'll transfer to my laptop via infrared and give you a 3gp file.
Some other great interface features that I love over the Motorola is the ability to put the call on speakerphone even while the number is dialing, and the ability to record phone conversations without an annoying beeping going on every 5 seconds.
A surprise that I didn't know until after I bought it is the infrared port, something I've missed since the old Nokia 3360 that I had. First thing I did was start transferring some media files over the infrared port, and I quickly discovered this phone multi-tasks! I can do infrared transfers while checking SMS messages over bluetooth. Guess I'm working that CPU hard - probably faster than the old 486 I had from the last decade too since it'll play MP4 AAC files. I also discovered today that a 64 kbps MP4 AAC file sounds really good... The infrared also allows the phone to be used as a wireless modem for a laptop - something cool that I used to do with my Nokia.
Holy cow I'm going to have tons of fun with Bluetooth. It'll take me a bit to figure out contact synchronization, but already out of the box I can use my Palm Tungsten to send/receive text messages, dial phone numbers, and transfer pictures. I'll get the internet on my Palm working too at some point.
Oh yeah, and there's one final cutesy feature. You don't have to buy the special battery to have a phone that lights up pretty colors and patterns anymore when it rings, it comes with the phone.
Thursday, 15th of December, 2005
Got slammed into on I-270 this morning by a lady driving a dark Mercury Tracer (plates 354 JGP) and the driver took off. I followed, called 911, and after following her way around the Westport Plaza area a little the dispatcher ordered me to "stop chasing her" (though we weren't speeding or anything) and so I pulled over where she told me to go and somehow the Maryland Heights police lost the pursuit...
The accident itself was almost of Hollywood proportions - two witnesses followed our caravan around Westport and told us that after the car slammed into me it nearly hit a Doritos truck. I didn't see the near-miss but I was wondering why there was a Doritos truck sliding sideways down I-270 - the tire smoke itself made it impossible to figure out what was going on. I was sure both cars had crashed but then the Mercury emerged from the mess and sped on.
The state trooper that took down the accident made a valid point that I'll remember in the future though - people usually flee an accident for a reason. It's usually a) they don't have insurance, b) the plates are stolen, or c) the car is stolen. That makes filing an insurance claim kind of hard.
Wednesday, 14th of December, 2005
Sunday, 11th of December, 2005
For me, it's also a nice landmark to gauge if my voice has improved over practice or been neglected all year. This year I left realizing that it doesn't take a lot of work to maintain a knowledge of how your voice works.
Saturday, 10th of December, 2005
Friday, 9th of December, 2005
Well, Southwest has had the first fatal incident in its 35-year history, and of course it's not the airline's fault, but the media always seems to play up the association with an airline to the accident. Basically it was snowing and the 737 slid off the runway and into a street. The death in this incident is a 6-year-old boy in one of the cars hit by the airplane when it crashed through the fence. There's really no reason for this incident to make people feel any less safe than before when Southwest has a very clean safety record, but we'll see what happens. If anything, people would just stop flying to Midway in Chicago.
Thursday, 8th of December, 2005
Full blown snow this morning, and my 2-year-old all-seasons are not as good as they used to be. Hmmm.
Wednesday, 7th of December, 2005
"1:23 p.m. ARTICLE - WOHL CENTER - A student reports that she lost her cell phone when she dropped same into the toilet and flushed. Efforts to retrieve the item by facilities were unsuccessful. Disposition: Cleared."
Tuesday, 6th of December, 2005
Woke up rather surprised to a ground and streets covered with snow - I still had my summer tires on the car! I was half-prepared, the tires were in the trunk. Well I decided to scrape my way to the gas station to change the tires and see just how bad it might be to run summer tires in the snow. Turns out, it wasn't too bad - in fact, it wasn't any worse than those awful Bridgestone RE92 all-seasons that come with just about every Subaru and Honda. I pulled to a stop in the Kumhos at an intersection where the Camry behind me just slid right through it.
Well the second surprise was when I threw my winter all-seasons on, which I remember to do really well in the snow last year, were just about the same as the Kumho summer tires! I guess those tires are old and need replacing, though they do have plenty of tread on them. Hmmm.
Sunday, 4th of December, 2005
The Subaru Legacy is one of the 4 cars to win the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's Top Safety Pick Gold Award. Subaru engineering wins again. The other cars to win are the Ford Five Hundred, Honda Civic, and Saab 9-3. The other 6 that win the Silver award are 5 of the most popular VW/Audi sedans, and the Chevy Malibu. All (except for one I think) are relatively exciting and fun cars to drive - it's good to know that in many cases good engineering efforts put into making a car fun are complemented with engineering for safety.
Thursday, 1st of December, 2005
