Month: March 2006

Broken Treo Screen




Broken Treo Screen

Originally uploaded by eidolon.

Okay, THIS I could have done without.

I’ve been using the Seidio belt clip holster for my phone. I find it very convenient to be able to snap the phone on and off the holder on my belt, and still have a swivel hook. Total space used up wasn’t very much – it didn’t stick out very far and wasn’t catching on things. Much.

Tonight it caught on one thing too many. Coming through a door at a meeting, I leaned too close to the door frame, the treo caught on it, and it went flying out of the clip. I didn’t notice the screen was damaged until I used it again a half hour later, but it was pretty obvious what had caused the damage.

Fortunately, I have insurance on the device, so Verizon -should- be able to replace it for me without any hassle, but it really means belt holsters are not for me.

So where does that leave me? Cat is ver fond of a big aluminum case style. I find these things incredibly unwieldy and impossible to use. You have to flip the case open (sideways) to talk or use the unit, which means you have a big piece of aluminum flapping either above or below your face while talking on the phone. Last but not least, this type of case doens’t support a belt clip. And if it did, it would stick out a tremendous amount. Not for me, thanks.

The ones I like the most are the leather magnetic-closure flip cases, which are belt-clippable, look nice, and do protect the phone quite well. What I’m worried about is how well the magnetic flap thingy actually stays closed.

I could use a top flip style case, which won’t have the magnetic problem, but these cases still seem to suffer from the “the clip part is very weak, and breaks easily.”

I could also choose something like a belt pouch style. My issue with this is the belt clip isn’t swivel, so it could get in the way (that’s probably not so bad), but the phone has to come OUT of the pouch to use it. Which removes a lot of it’s protection.

Maybe a belt pouch -and- a skin case. By day, the phone would live in the pouch, wrapped in it’s skin. At night, it could be pulled out, still protected!!!

Bleah. I’m open for suggestions here.
Edit – I just came across the Zcover which is a skin for the treo, with an integrated belt clip. Hmm.

Flat out documentation proving Bush Lied. Again.

Just have to share this one.
According to the Washington Post, A tape has surfaced documenting FEMA officials warning Bush directly that this storm could very well be “the big one”. The one to break the levees, destroy the superdome, wreck the city. Bush’s response? “We are fully prepared”.

Without a doubt, the tape provides evidence that the White House received ample warning of the catastrophe. Yet within days of that videoconference, Mr. Bush would excuse the federal government’s extraordinarily poor performance by telling an interviewer that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Moreover, at the time of the conference the White House had no idea whether federal emergency services were truly prepared. On the tape, the president doesn’t ask any questions about preparedness, and there is no evidence in documents since released that he was any more engaged before or after the conference. Had anyone called the Defense Department? Was the National Guard en route? Were local Army bases prepared to help? Were emergency food and water supplies in place? The president, like everyone around him, appears to have assumed that everything would run like clockwork, just as it was supposed to on paper.

Why is it no surprise that no one trusts anything this man says anymore?

Firefox Shockwave plugin. What, it WORKED?

Wow. In Firefox 1.5 under Linux, I got tired of “You need a plugin to view this blah blah” messages, and, fully expecting to see a failure, i clicked on the box “FINE, tell me what’s missing.”
And Firefox happily said “Would you like to install the Macromedia Shockwave Plugin?” “Uh, yeah, sure.”
And 30 seconds later, it was installed and working.
Linux isn’t supposed to work this way, is it?

Addicted to SMS.

Hello, my name is Dave, and I’m a text-a-holic.
Well, okay, it hasn’t quite gotten that bad, but I must admit, since Cat and I both got Treo 650‘s, we’ve been spending a lot of time just keeping in touch vis SMS messages, more colloquially referred to as ‘texting’.
For those still living in the dark ages, ‘texting’ refers to the SMS Messaging function most modern cell phones support. The protocol and capability has been around for ages, and in fact, in Europe, ‘texting’ is far more commonplace. The Wikipedia article, linked above, has a whole fascinating history about popularity and usage.
But for me, it’s just fun.
I admit that I’ve done enormous amounts of my inter-social-network communicatioin via text over the last 15+ years. From IRC, to Email, to IM conversations, and now to SMS, using text to keep in touch is just the norm. I find the moving of text chatting from the desktop onto my phone a normal step in the evolution of digital communications.
What’s the problem, I hear you cry? The problem is it’s not free. Verizon, as far as I can tell, has no system to roll unlimited SMS messages into their service. It’s not tremendously expensive – a 100 message ‘bundle’ can be purchased for about $6 a month, but even with that option, I can see myself going past that limit quite easily. There’s always the shadow of “I’m over my quota! Quiet!” hanging over me.
What’s the point of all this? Mostly that I see Texting as being the next phrase of digital personal communication. It’s already one of the most popularly used communication mediums in Singapore and Europe, and is rapidly picking up pace in the US. If you haven’t tried it, give it a whirl. It’s fun 🙂
(Want to text me? If you know me, you probably have my cell phone number. Just send an SMS message to that 🙂

Douse me in alcohol.

There’s certain painful things I must endure in my day to day wanderings along Geek Alley. One of which is that I must interact with a dreaded environment known as Windows XP. Painful as it it, there are things I must do that that loathsome environment can only provide.
I make the best of this unfortunate situation though. My second monitor is my WinXp desktop, and is an excellent place to park either unchangeing or automatically updating pages I’d like to keep an eye on. I have a set of windows showing me network status of all the machines I interact with (You’d think, working at home, I wouldn’t have that large a network – but there’s 2 main servers and a cloud of support machines that really all need to be working to keep Homeport and all the associated domains and services running). I also run a live video session there via OpenWengo. The combination of my Linux desktop (where I get real work done), and the Windows desktop (which is really just an auxiliary display) works well for me.
Occasionally though, I need to do maintenance on the XP box. To give you an idea of how loathsome I consider this, I haven’t even -named- that machine. It’s just ‘the xp box’, whereas all my Linux machines and servers have nice names to personalize them (hunter, endor, myth, boomer, etc). Anyway, today’s task was replacing Firefox 1.0.7, which had gotten fairly unstable (for no knowable reason other than it being old), and upgrading to FF 1.5.0.1. Of course, this means uninstalling the old FF, and getting the new one… since Firefox wasn’t even runnable, there’s only one other option. Run IE.
Now, I’ve never really hidden my dislike of this browser. Not just because the experience of using it is bad, but because it is so riddled with bugs, security holes, and bad design decisions. It is a browser locked into 1998-style thinking. Microsoft has made much noise about IE7 being all new and wonderful and things, but everytrhing I’ve heard, it’ll just be Firefox with an IE label on it. Gosh, tabs! What a concept!
Anyway, I needed to run IE to download the new version of firefox. I feel somehow sullied now, and have the urge to go shower and scrub. Fortunately, it was a short exposure, to a known set of websites. Chances of serious damage or inection are small.