One from me and one from Shawna.
Me first. About a month ago we did a little weekend road trip to Corpus Cristy to go windsurfing with Dan Fernholtz. I was driving, Dan was in the front passenger seat, and Shawna was napping or watching Troy on the laptop in the backseat.
Between the road noise, big trucks, and movie it was hard to hear what Dan was saying. So rather than ask him to speak louder, I found myself inadvertently reaching for the volume knob on the car’s stereo (it was off), ostensibly to turn up his volume. Very wrong.
Shawna’s turn. We’ve been playing World of Warcraft since it came out. The key thing for this story, is that the game is primarily played in 3rd person. Most of the time your view is about 10 to 15 feet behind and above your character, but you can rotate and move your view using the mouse. This lets you look around corners and other obstacles for navigation and to avoid/find bad guys. Right click and drag the view around.
Two days ago, she had a meeting for work downtown on the UT campus, which is not an easy place to navigate. Apparently she found herself wanting to right-click and move her view so she could look around. 
With the Stargates on hiatus till January, Shawna and I have been watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica.
We got into a bit of an argument over some of the plot points in Galactica that eventually had to be resolved by our good friend Google. (This was right after the election, and we where both feeling a bit punchy.)
Anyways, I just wanted to point out to the world that I have a girlfriend that will argue with me about Battlestar Galactica. HA! Nener nener nener!
I just got spam adverstising”A Genuine College Degree in 2 weeks !” to my Duke Alumni email address. 
I recently switched from AT&T wireless to TMobile.
That left me with two nice but locked and useless phones, my old t68i and the ATT t226 replacement. I’d like to give one to my gf and one to my brother for them to use with prepaid cell plans.
So little little Googling and I found gsm-software.com, where I was able to purchase a cable and unlocking services. I accidentally blew a “credit” ($12) reading the codes off my t68i when I meant to unlock it, but oh well. The total cost ended up being about $60 for the cable and 2 unlocks. More than I wanted to spend but it was fun.
Given the success in unlocking my old phone (which would be ok if I broke), I decided to try unlocking my new Nokia 3650. Unlocking the 3650 was a joke: $5 and no cables needed. Very cool.
FYI, if you have a SonyEricsson you can check your firmware revision number by: Pressing >*<<*<*
The firmware on my t68i is old, but never gave me any problems: R3C001 (apps) & R1A (os). The latestest is something like R8C (apps) & R5 (os).
I decided against upgrading the firmware on the t68i as it works fine now, and would cost another $24.
The Gen X version of Popular Mechanics to come out soon?
I don’t think we are any less creative than our forefathers, its just that we play with different sets of legos.
For example, here is a nifty wireless web “hack”
Froogle now has its WML version. So next time when I am in a bookstore, I can point my phone’s browser to wml.froogle.com and compare price directly. It is so easy for books because I only need to input the ISBN number.
Muhahahaha! No more buying stuff “in the dark”. Eg you spot something nice at Fry’s or Costco, now you can find out if it is really a good deal w/out leaving the store.
Its been raining and ugly out for the past few weeks. Its actually nice out today. I’m going to go lay out in the Sun.
here.
Makes me willing to pay for Intellij. Not trying to dis Eclipse at all, it looks like a very powerful platform, just not so much of a good application yet.
Ideally there would be a few different builds of Eclipse available, with all the plugins “common” plugins bundled in, and a sensible layout.
BareBones Eclipse download #1.
JSP/web development (no EJB) download #2
JSP/web/EJB development download #3
Applet/Standalone app development download #4
After installing Eclipse, it takes like a half an hour before you see your code and can do anything useful with it. That needs to be reduced to 5 mins.
Pretty much everybody hates their cell providers. I’m currently with ATT, and I’m ready to move out.
There are all the standard reasons to dislike your carrier: coverage (ATT GSM), price (Verizon), lack of cool phones (Sprint), bad customer service (Sprint), length of service contract (Sprint).
But the one that gets me with ATT is the institutional lack of focus on the customer. Eg, every other cell carrier offers a way to check the number of minutes you have left on your plan via the phone: secret key code, voice automated system, or SMS. Not ATT.
The other thing that bugs me is their incessant and pathetic attempt to try to get me to SMS more, seeing as how that is such a high profit margin service for them. Just about every month I get glossy (expensive), pithy brochure about MLife and how cool SMSing people is. Their latest attempt is to get people to SMS their votes for American Idol in. 
Anyhow, my contract with them is now up, and I am currently looking at other providers and phones. Yah cell number portability!
The hitch at the moment is the phone. I want a clam shell design, with a decent camera, and bluetooth support for syncing.
Update: Problem solved. Now on TMobile with a very nice Nokia 3650 with 1000 mins and unlimited data. MUHAHAHA.
Periodic table of Condiments.
I think I will print this out and put it in the fridge.
Here is a interesting way to read a novel, in particular Cory Doctorow’s “Eastern Standard Tribe”. Reminds me Star Trek:TNG, where Data had his own interface to the computer that would display pages of information very rapidly.
http://trevor.smith.name/EST/index.html
“Read” the book it in about 1.5 hrs, so that was nice. However, about a half an hour after I finished it I got a headache. I can’t directly attribute blame to the reader, because it could also have been a caffeine withdrawl headache.
Found myself listening to the “_Classic_ Techno Trance” channel at DigitallyImported.
Test post from Net News on the mac.
So I figured I’d try and get the blog up before I start diving into a bunch of work on SANE and openh323 so I could post what I figure out.
The installation instructions for MT suffer from a lack of focus, eg they are trying to put directions for people running thier own servers and for peopel in hosted configurations in the same doc.
bah.
Ah, so why am I using MT and not some java based blogger. MT has the biggest userbase and so you get the most goodies “free”, eg somebody already put together a plugin that does image verfication for comment spamming.
Also I it would be good to get friendlier with perl seeing as how Nokia is going to put it on thier phones.