Well, I got the Treo 600 today, and already I need a replacement. Mine has two problems: 1) The phone speaker is distorted like crazy. (MP3 and speakerphone work fine.) and 2) the battery doesn’t hold a charge.
Handspring is going to call me back Monday, and then it’ll be 1-2 weeks before I get the replacement. I’m going to try to find one in stock in a Cingular store this weekend so I can buy it and then return it within the 15 days (and hopefully have my replacement by then, but I doubt it.) Why do I always get the bad ones? Lots of people are reporting no problems with their GSM Treo 600s.
I guess I just have no luck with these things.
My (Cingular, not sim-locked) Treo 600 has finally shipped. With any luck (or rather, just a lack of bad luck), I’ll have it tomorrow morning. Shipped Fedex overnight, to work.
It’s about time.
I started watching 24 this season, at the recommendation of my brother (and others). The new season takes place three years after the last one, and I can follow it without having seen the previous two. It’s good. So good that I signed up for a 14 day Netflix trial, and was planning to get the first two seasons there, and watch them.
Turns out a friend of mine actually owns the first two seasons on DVD, so I’ll be borrowing those instead. I did get the first three discs from Netflix on Friday. Friday night, I watched the first disc (4 episodes) and today, I watched the next two (8 episodes). I’m halfway done with the first season, and it’s really good.
I’ve changed my Netflix queue to send me the first season of Smallville instead, since I haven’t seen it. I doubt I’ll keep the Netflix membership after the trial, because I just won’t spend that much time watching movies. Especially since I now have all my new computer equipment, and will be playing games again. I bought Call of Duty yesterday, and played it for a few hours today. It’s been a while, so it may be nothing special compared to other games out there now, but I like it a lot. I’m really glad I’ve finally gotten around to setting all this stuff up again. Now I just have to keep myself from spending too much money on games.
At bowling Wednesday night, I was bowling against someone who’s on my team in my Monday night league. I was doing alright, but not great, the first two games (172, 170). At the end of the second game, he gave me a tip: keep my hand behind the ball, and keep my thumb up. After the third game, he said he should have waited until Monday to tell me that, because I threw a 231 against him. I went bowling yesterday, and tried to keep doing the same thing. It seemed to help, because I threw a 215-247-207 for a 669 series. That could possibly be the highest three game series I’ve thrown, and if not, it’s certainly the highest I’ve thrown in a long time. Hopefully, I’ll keep it up tomorrow night.
Everyone should head over to UE and congratulate Russ and Nicolle on their new baby, Sydney Grace!
Congratulations, again!
The Green Hills G-Men now have a record of 3-3, and a good shot at making the playoffs. We hit early, and had good defense late, to take tonight’s game 15-12. We’ve now beaten three of the other four teams in the league. The only team we haven’t is still undefeated, and we go up agains them next week. Last week’s game has been rescheduled for November 25th.
I got my SD-CF adapter and video card today. The SD-CF1 works as advertised: the SD card fits all the way into the adapter, and the adapter fits all the way into the camera. I can’t tell if it’s faster or slower, but it doesn’t really matter with my camera. I wasn’t quite so lucky with the video card. The computer I was going to put it in has a dying power supply, and it didn’t work there. So, I moved some stuff around to get it into another machine, and did get the card working. Unfortunately, I killed a processor in doing so. It’s under warranty, and I should have no problem getting it replaced, but it’s just another hassle I didn’t really need. I also have a hard drive that’s died that I should get replaced. I guess with the life expectency of these drives, and the number of them I’ve bought (because they were cheap, not because I needed them), one of them going bad isn’t unexpected, just annoying. There was nothing important on the drive that died. In fact, I don’t really have anything important on any of my drives.
Tomorrow, I should get my speakers. Then I should be all set to start gaming, though on a slower processor than the machine will eventually have.
I’m almost ready to start blowing shit up gaming again. I just got my sound card (Audigy 2) today, my video card (Radeon 9700) should show up tomorrow, and my speakers (Creative Inspire 5300) should arrive Wednesday. Then I just have to get a game or two, and I’m ready to go. It’s been a long time, and I really want to play a good FPS again. Most likely, I will start with Call of Duty. The Audigy 2 has a firewire port on it, so now I’ve also got an extra firewire card that I took out of the machine, too. I’ll probably throw it in my Linux box, where it will sit and do nothing. At the moment, all I use the firewire for is my iPod, and I don’t buy that much music, so I don’t really have anything new to transfer to it.
I bowled alright tonight, I guess. I took 2 outta my 4 points, and my team took 16 out of 28, against the first place team. For the most part, I was fine, except for the second game, where I fell apart. I threw a 185-129-190-202. Next week is the position round, and the end of the first third of the league. As far as I understand it, whoever’s in first after next week participates in some sort of roll-off at the end. In two weeks, the second third starts, and the winner of that, and the winner of the last third, all do the roll-off (and the same team can’t win more than one third, I suppose.) I’m not sure what all this means as far as money at the end, but it’s fun either way. My team should be in third or fourth going into next week, with an off chance at taking over first. We’d need to win all 28 points and hope for a split from the first two teams, I think. Something close to that, anyway.
I think I’m gonna be getting a(nother) new bowling ball soon, this time one that hooks more, not one that doesn’t hook at all (the plastic ball, and not hooking is exactly what I want that to do.) I need a ball for heavy oil lane conditions, and the one I have now just doesn’t handle well on them. When the lanes are dry and I can get the ball to move, I do fine, but when there’s any significant amount of oil, it just dies out there. I haven’t decided exactly what I want yet. I’ll probably go into the proshop this weekend and figure out what I should do. Then, of course, I’ll have to get a new bag too, so I can carry around three bowling balls with me instead of just the two.
After that, I stop spending so much money. I’ve really been buying too much stuff lately. Well, after the bowling ball or Treo 600, whichever I end up getting later. I already have a nice 512 MB SD card ready to go for the Treo, and have ordered a Minolta SD-CF1
, so I can use it in my digital camera. There are some other SD->CF adapters, but this is the only one I’ve seen that the SD card fits completely into the adapter, and the adapter will fit completely into the slot on the camera and let me close the door on it. Assuming it works, I’ll be able to move pictures from a real camera (as opposed to the phonecam) to the Treo, and post them to the photoblog without requiring the use of a computer. I fully expect it to work.
That is, if they ever release the damn GSM Treo 600 in the United States.
As usual… just some boring stuff.
Our softball game last night was cancelled/postponed because they couldn’t get the lights to turn on. That was disappointing. I wanted to play, and it was against a team we can beat, too. I spent more time than I probably should have at the batting cages, instead.
I bowled like shit tonight, too. Yeah, really badly. Didn’t even have a 500 series. It was pretty sad. I think I need to get a back that hooks a bit… no, a lot… more, for when the lanes are soaked. I do pretty well on dry lanes, but when there’s any significant amount of oil, I just get no reaction or movement, and suck.
I’ve been listening to Vertical Horizon’s new album (Go) a lot lately. In fact, it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve been listening to for the past week and a half. It’s good. Well worth the $9.99 I paid to download it from the iTunes Music Store.
Anyway, I just thought I’d post because it’s been a couple of days. I really don’t have anything else to say.
Handspring has finally released the GSM Treo 600! Unfortunately, it’s only been released for Cingular which means the phones are probably sim-locked for their network. Also, they say they won’t actually ship until November 17th. I’m going to order one anyway, and see what happens. If I can order the T-Mobile one before it ships, I’ll cancel it. There’s a small chance it might not be sim-locked, and a bigger chance I can find someone who uses Cingular to get it unlocked for me. If I can do neither of those things, I can just sell it. It’s like Handspring is just teasing me with it now, though.
I can no longer record Enterprise anymore, unless I get a VCR or another Tivo, because of programming conflicts. On Wednesday nights, it conflicts with Smallville. The repeat on Sunday night conflicts with the Simpsons. I guess I’ll have to start watching live TV Sunday nights, or start downloading the episodes. I didn’t even get to record the Simpsons tonight because…
My cable box was off when I got home, again. I didn’t lose power, and it’s plugged into a UPS anyway, so I wasn’t sure what happened. The Tivo recorded a nice hour of black screen where the Simpsons Treehouse of Horrors and Malcolm in the Middle should have been. So, with neither of these shows to watch, I tried to watch the bowling (yes, I watch televised bowling) that it recorded this morning. I saw the first few seconds of whatever channel it was on before switching to ESPN (yes, bowling is on ESPN) and then… a quick flash of a screen that said PowerTV, and then black. It appears my cable box has crashed. Here’s a hint to anyone writing software for cable boxes: If something crashes, reboot, and go to the last channel you were on, powered on. If you can’t do that, at least DON’T display the clock when the power to the box is off, so you can quickly tell by looking at it that it’s not on. Stupid programmers.
I think it’s about time I actually use that Windows machine I set up for what I was intending to: to blow shit up. I need to buy a good video card, sound card, speakers, and then some good games.
I will soon (hopefully, if they ever release the damn thing) be getting a phone with a camera. The camera is fairly crappy, but most cameraphones are. Anyway, I figured I would jump on the bandwagon, like some other people, and set up a photoblog/moblog. I like the word photoblog better, especially since it’s not just going to be for pictures from the phone.
I set one up at textamerica and played with it for a while, and then decided I really wanted one that integrated with the rest of this site, instead. I needed an easy way to post to it from the phone, so I hacked together (using MovableType’s Perl API) a script that lets me e-mail a passworded address, and it’ll take the image attachment and post it. Since I didn’t create a new blog, and didn’t want all the individual blog or photoblog pages to link to eachother, I also had to hack around the fact that MT doesn’t have an MTEntryNextInCategory tag. They should really do that, because my archive pages are now a huge mess of PHP.
Anyway, the photoblog can be found here. I don’t expect I’ll be posting to it all that much until the GSM Treo 600 is released. I won’t even attempt to make a prediction as to when that will be.
I was meaning to write something here about how much of a mistake it was to start Josh Beckett on three days rest in game 6 of the World Series, and then Carl Pavano, also on short rest, in game 7, if necessary. It was, in my mind, the same mistake the Indians made back in 1997 against the Marlins – starting Bartolo Colon on three days rest in game 6 (and having him not pitch well) and then not having your best pitcher ready for game 7. I really thought they’d be better off throwing anyone else out there tonight, and then having Beckett on full rest, with Pavano on three days out of the bullpen if needed.
Josh Beckett proved me wrong. He threw a seven hit shutout, walked only two batters, and struck out nine on only 107 pitches. This was his second complete game shutout of the postseason, and incredibly, only the second complete game (and shutout) of his career. He’s never thrown a complete game during the regular season, and now has two in the biggest games of his career. The first, with his team down three games to one and facing elimination, and the second to clinch the World Series.
And he’s a year younger than I am. Incredible.
(P.S.: Woohoo! Yankees lost!)
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