Where’s the peanut butter?!

I can’t wait forever for Microsoft and T-Mobile to get together and get a Windows Mobile phone on the market that supports UMA (the technology behind T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home and TalkForever services). There aren’t any Windows Mobile devices on the market or even forecasted with the stack (forget about carried by T-Mobile), so now I’m looking at a BlackBerry, which is different, but probably the next best thing. So now the question is whether to go with the Curve (8320) or wait for the update to the Pearl (8120) (which is rumored to drop in a week or two). The specs on the updated Pearl are almost identical to the Curve - it looks like basically a Curve that: adds video recording (yawn), weighs almost 20% less, has bluetooth 2.0, trades the full qwerty keyboard for their SureType thing, trims the screen from 320×240 to 240×260, and cannot be tethered to a laptop as a modem. Also, the Pearl comes in 8 fabulous colors while the Curve only comes in gold or silver. Decisions…decisions…

I have a bunch of recaps I need to get to work on…

• My trip to Salt Lake City with Scott from a week and a half ago, wherein the slopes were rocked.
• The weekend of races, wherein my track race was so-so but the Hart Foundation reunification saw me and the Anvil both setting new personal bests.
• The transformation of flexcar into zipcar, wherein my rates go up.

Monday I start real work again, so I guess I’m glad I’m keeping busy enough that I’m not finding time to blog, but as usual I’m not totally sure where all my time’s going. But I know in about an hour it’s going to be sucked up by 6×800’s with 1 minute recovery. But it’s on the grass! Just like old times!

I have a Western Digital external hard drive and have been frustrated with it on my laptop recently since it’s not been working. This morning I finally got it working again. The issue seems to be with the USB cable I was using - I’m now using a cable that’s about a foot and a half long and it seems a little beefier (this is probably the cable that came with the drive). This was probably sort of predictable - I think the drive (which is powered over the USB cable) probably wasn’t getting the power it needed to run, but it’s still frustrating. I wish computers could get some better diagnostics working explaining why the device wasn’t able to work rather than an infinite loop of “trying to find drivers…oops, no good…trying to find drivers…”

BUT - I have a working drive again. Yay!

wefeelfine, originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

This site and its associated API is really cool. You need Java to run the application, but basically it combs blogs and other human interaction sites and constructs a meme of the statement “I feel…” Really, really fascinating and usually, but not always, very sad.

Teewars - a serious contender for best online game evar.

I’m not sure when it happened but it feels like upcoming.org has become almost completely irrelevant. When I started using it they had the perfect combination:

• easy to search upcoming local events
• high density of relevant events

Today, it increasingly feels like the pool of interesting local events (usually to me this means “shows at clubs I want to see”) is almost totally dry, search never finds anything, and there are a lot more “events that people don’t seem to care about” than events that do matter. For instance — there are a total of 14 people attending events in Seattle today. Sure there will be days when there isn’t much going on, but that’s really far too few for a major metropolitan area to keep the social aspect of the site compelling and (and this is totally unsubstantiated quantitatively) seems way lower than the usage levels I’d seen 6 months ago.

It makes me sad, but I guess now is a fine time to switch more seriously to google calendar for my scheduling!

(this may look like YARE (yet another running entry) but it’s really not…)

About a month ago I ordered tickets online for The Spirit of the Marathon, which will be showing in about a week and a half around the US. Then last Friday I went to see There Will Be Blood at the same theater where the marathon movie will be showing. When I bought my tickets from the electronic vendor I was confused when it spit out an extra ticket. An extra receipt? I looked at the tickets and realized the extra one was for the marathon movie. I was still confused until I realized that I’d probably bought the other ticket online with the same credit card and it was just sitting in an electronic will-call queue, waiting to see that same credit card.

That’s technology at work. Soon, doppleganger-Greg will be out of work at the Neptune, too.

This is awesome:

When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift.

Can you really not annotate using Acrobat Reader? Why is this such a dominant format again?

The wysiwyg wordpress editor has a habit of doing some munging of the youtube HTML embedding snippit such that it always winds up trashing my main page layout and making me go hack the source whenever I try to add youtube videos to my blog.  This is frustrating enough to bug me, but not frustrating enough for me to remember that it happens, which is really the perfect sweet spot for me to go slowly crazy…