Plaidophile

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• No dialing by alpha letters, and no way to conveniently enter alpha-letter phone numbers into addressbook (no onscreen display or automatic letter->number translation)
• Where's the call log? It seems that it may or may not log calls to addressbook contacts but I can't find any centralized log of all calls. This is something that every phone I've ever had has had, and it's very surprising that it's apparently missing. Or maybe I haven't found it. Found it. You have to set up a quicklink to it from the Phone app. Strange.
• I need a voice recorder app for it. I was just watching the Merlin Show interview of Jonathan Coulton and Coulton mentioned both that he was a Treo user and that he requires his phone to have a voice recorder (which I do too! very handy for recording song ideas) so obviously there must be something. Maybe it's another stupid $30 app? Maybe he uses the movie mode of the camera? Who knows! (actually the camera movie recorder seems to work well and it doesn't take that much storage, and then I also get video of the context so that might be pretty cool) or I could always just leave myself a voicemail though that's painful on T-Mobile. UPDATE found SoundRec which works great

then now

I understand why seltzer and club soda are normally sold in the water section of the store (rather than the soda section), but why is ginger ale sold with (and priced like) seltzer and club soda? I've never understood that.

So, tonight, nobody else in my usual karaoke crowd showed up, and I tell you what, they missed out something fierce.

There was a going-away party for some guy named Tyler (who was apparently a regular there a while ago, before I started showing up) since he's moving to Cincinnati. He was drunk off his ass. So were the other dozen or so people in his entourage.

I would love to move my hosting over to DreamHost, but you guys still don't support Postgres. From what I've seen online, you have a lot of users and potential users asking for Postgres support, and your response has been that you have no plans to support it at this time because there isn't enough demand for it. But how do you know how much demand there is for it when people don't even sign up for hosting because of the lack of Postgres support? You apparently have some sort of suggestion box where people can vote for Postgres support, but that only caters to existing users, who clearly are fine with MySQL or else they wouldn't be existing customers.

I suppose I could try provisionally migrating to MySQL on my own host (retaining a Postgres backup) to see how feasible it is, but that's still a huge step backwards.

Please reconsider supporting PostgreSQL. The day I find out you do support it on your normal hosting plans is the day I sign up for hosting.

Love,
fluffy

Yesterday I posted a first impression overview of the Treo 650, and one of the gripes I had was the lack of a decent, non-expensive alarm clock application (other than abusing meeting reminders, which is only a partial solution which causes more problems). In the comments, thadk mentioned that TreoAlarm had a fully-functional trial without serious degradation at the end of the trial period, and so I looked more into it (since originally the price tag turned me off on it).

TreoAlarm turns out to be the most comprehensive alarm clock application ever, with every feature I could ever possibly want and then some.

So, I've been using the Treo 650 for a bit over a day now, and quite a bit of that has been with phone service (I made a makeshift SIM tray using some folded-up card stock, which should tide me over until my real tray arrives sometime next week). It's both a pretty darn good phone and the best PDA I've ever used.

So, I could either spend $20 for a crappy Treo case with a flip cover, or I could make my own. So I made my own.

I took an abandoned CD jewelcase lid, cut out a square a bit larger than the screen (by repeatedly scoring it with my pocket knife until I was able to crack it apart), covered the edges with scotch tape, then attached it to the top of the screen with a simple scotch tape hinge. It works pretty darn well, and is easy to flip up, and doesn't take a lot of space in my pocket.

(Actually having the Treo AND my current phone in my pocket at the same time isn't too terrible, size-wise. Even together they feel smaller and lighter than the Sidekick was alone, and this way I can still keep doing my old phone+palm thing until I get a SIM tray. Also the Treo feels much better than the Zodiac so far, not to mention its sync conduit is a lot better and supported and so on.)

So, three weeks ago (or so) I ordered a Treo 650 off eBay, from what looked like a reputable seller (I did all the feedback profile checking, made sure there wasn't too much mutually-retracted feedback, etc.). They charged me $20 for two-day shipping. Which they used, after waiting three weeks to ship it. (Their excuse: "We didn't expect this kind of response to the product." Then why the hell did you put two dozen of them on eBay, you dingus?)

So, it finally arrived today. Of course it's missing its SIM tray and its stylus, so I can't actually DO anything with it. Ugh. It also didn't come with its software or the right manual, but at least I can get those online. Still, though.

So I emailed them asking what the deal was and if I could get them to send me these vital parts, and I got an auto-response assuring me that there was no reason to worry about the fact they are no longer listed as a registered seller on eBay.

Good grief. I should have just bought a dang OEM 680 instead.

Tempranillo: one to look out for. Picked up a bottle at Ballard Market yesterday (based on one of their wonderful recommendation signs) and had it tonight with barbeque chicken pizza. It's quite good, somewhat like a drier Beaujolais, with a very clean finish.

Tonight was a good night to be me at karaoke.

Any suggestions?

It's kind of funny how back when WiFi came out, it was a gourmet (and expensive) alternative to powerline Ethernet, but now that WiFi is so pervasive, it's gotten flaky and unreliable, and so powerline Ethernet has gotten a new life as a WiFi replacement (only now it's nice and standardized with open protocols which fall into a few very useful connection classes, including an X-10 replacement).

Last night I finally got fed up with my crappy cross-apartment WiFi (2.4GHz is so oversaturated, not just by WiFi but also Bluetooth thanks to the prevalence of the Wii, and cordless phones in general, and so on) so I ordered a D-Link 200Mbps powerline kit, which works out to about $75/node which is the cheapest I've seen the 200Mbps stuff for (and not much more than the 85Mbps). Hopefully now I can stop getting pissed off when I'm trying to push an mp3 or png all of 40 feet (or however big my apartment is).

I thought I'd try seeing what'd happen if I quietly allowed anonymous posting again, since for quite some time I've completely hidden the forum from search engines (including hiding all forum-related links to all web spiders). A few days ago I enabled anon posting for the weblog and for de^x/dx. In that time, I got:

• One legitimate comment (which would have been better-suited to email, and was posted to a 'topic for debate' thread which I leave open to anon comments anyway)
• Three spams

There must be SOME middle ground for comment posting which encourages real visitors to post without making it easy for spammers to do so. (And yes I have a lot of anti-spam measures on my forum, but these spams are being posted by humans.)

Heathcliff is Marmaduke for cat lovers.

Marmaduke is Heathcliff for dog lovers.

Discuss.

All men are potential rapists.

All women are potential prostitutes.

Discuss.

You put the "hon" in my Miyamoto.

(How obscure is that?)

Mortalitainment: n. The use of actual death as a selling point for entertainment. For example, The Running Man, or a Discovery channel documentary where people die due to exploding rocks, or whatever.

I'm a glutton for punishment and disappointment, but I'm starting yet another new attempt at a comic (back to my serious, extended-narrative nature, á la Eaveston). Episodes will start running on the 13th (when the current sketchbook buffer runs out). One thing I'm trying hard to do is to avoid planning too much of the story ahead, which I think is where things always go awry for me (because I end up getting bored with all the stuff I've already planned out), so I'm doing whatever I can to avoid thinking of plotline things.

I do have some aspects of the environment worked out (I know some things about the main character, and generally what the environment is, and some of the early setting-establishment things which will happen to the main character) but I'm trying my hardest to not come up with anything else. And of course, the whole need to discover everything as I go along is the design of the comic.

Hopefully this one will last a while.

I've been using my Palm more and more lately, which makes it even more aggravating to have to keep it in sync with my phone (especially for meeting reminders, which I have to deal with a heck of a lot lately).

• Going price for Treo 650 on eBay: $200ish after shipping.
• Size comparison between Sidekick 3, iPhone, Treo 650, and K510i: I'm surprised at how small the Treo and iPhone both are. The K510i is a really tiny phone. The Treo's about twice as heavy though (but then I could finally ditch my Zodiac and have decent web browsing again).
• A nice Treo 650 hard shell: lets you protect the screen without obscuring it, and without adding a lot of weight or size to the phone. Plus, you could probably paint the inside to customize the color. Prevents cracked screens (which are the most common problem with Treos in a pocket, and which is why I never really considered getting one until now when I'm finally fed up with too many devices to sync and dismiss alarms on)
• Unbranding an unlocked Treo 650: Useful, since most of the Treos on eBay are Cingular-branded.
• Google Maps Mobile: has a native PalmOS version, which would almost certainly be better than the MIDP version on the K510i. (Especially on the 320x320 touch screen vs. 128x160 with gimpy joystick.)
• USB charge+sync cable: it's funny how most phones are USB-syncable but not USB-chargeable. This cable fixes that for the Treo 650. (Though most likely I'd charge at home and sync via BlueTooth, and use the OEM cable at work.)
• Palm-compatible Bluetooth GPS: Would be pretty cool for driving directions etc.
• Interesting article about changing attitudes towards transgender health care in Seattle (has nothing to do with the above, but I figured I was linkdumping already anyway)