wiredfool

Rain + flower + closeup filter = Photo Cliche

So, 24 hours of MindCamp and 48 hours of recovery and catching up with the family later…

This time it had a different feel to me, and that’s at least as much to the different configuration of the space as anything else. The original space was mostly one large room, so generally, at a glance you could see where people were. This time, there were a lot more small spaces and a hall, so it was harder to get the same effect.

There were people there that I wanted to run into, but didn’t. Or, at least, I don’t think I did, but in a few cases, I know that I was in the same room or small crowd, but didn’t put together a weblog name to real name mapping. I would have liked to do a hacking sprint, but didn’t get that through my mind in time to do anything about it.

I wound up in more technical sessions than last time. Contrary to what I said I should do, I went to sessions that I though I’d be interested in, rather than just going to odd ones that were more serendipitous. So I heard about LiveJournal scaling, what Microsoft goes through to do small UI changes, the Kid Programming Language, Image manipulation using functional programming, and Asterisk and VOIP.

I’ve put my pictures on flickr this time, there’s an album of the better ones in this photoset.

Also, I have to thank the good people at Tom Bihn sponsors of the event (or at least donators of cool stuff to the raffle). I came home with a Brain Bag, a nice and overdue replacement for the courier bag that I’ve been using for the last 10 years. I’ve been using the Brain Cell as a small laptop case since I got this machine, and it has served me well.

At the second iteration of mindcamp. We’re not yet into the sleep deprivation phase, so I’m not sure how well it’s going yet. Have some nice photos, hopefully will be taking some more.

Now that we’ve moved all the stuff from the old house to the new one, taking one 15 foot truck, one about twice the size, and innumerable car loads I can ssay with confidence:

We have too much stuff.

To a first approximation, that which was in boxes as of a few days ago is basically excess, with some small exceptions. We could live without it, and right now, a lot of it has actively negative value because we have to deal with it, either find a spot for it or get rid of it. That was probably 50% of the stuff.

I’m sure that we’d miss some of it — there’s some kitchen stuff that would be nice that we haven’t found. I can’t bear to part with books, even old engineering ones that I’ll probably never use again. But they’re books…

This is what happens when you go from moving quite often to not moving for seven years. Things that would get left behind somewhere get left in storage in the house. Two old laptops, three old desktops, and that’s just the macs. Hard drives galore, cables, keyboards, 5 dsl modems, and somehting like 10 pounds of power cables. This is the result of being a technological packrat.

Somehow, we’re going to get through it, I just don’t know how.

I just cancelled the service and sent back the Samsung A920 phones. (This is the same phone that Sprint is sending to the influential bloggers with their ambassador program.) On the plus side, they would ring at the house. Also a plus, they could charge from the included USB cable.

Unfortunately, those were all the plusses, and that’s not enough for a $100 phone (after rebates and 2 year commitment).

To back up a bit, my three needs for a phone are:

1. Works well enough at the house for reasonable calls.
2. Syncs with iSync.
3. The ability to somehow get my laptop on the internet for casual use, a few times a month max when I’m waiting for the ferry and need to send/recieve email or do ssh like things.
4. Totally not important, but I’d like to have a Jason Webley ringtone.

Service at the house is hard, as we’re in a very marginal areay for anybody but possibly Nextel. Syncing is important if I’m changing providers, but not so much if I can just swap a sim card. And laptop internet is nice, but it’s certainly not an everyday need, more like a few times a month.

Back to the phone. The phones would ring, but it was very hard to hold a conversation indoors at the house. And it didn’t get all that better with better service — even when I had conversations on the mainland, they still seemed to have dropouts. Even my Tmobile phone can hold conversations outdoors.

The USB cable, while a somewhat useful charger, was nothing else on the Mac. No drive mounted, no use of the phone as a modem, no recognition that there was anything pugged in. Yay.

It paired with the Mac reasonably easily over bluetooth, but that’s about the extent of the bluetooth interop I saw. No iSync with the address book (which is why I wanted a bluetooth phone in the first place), although apparently there is a way to send individual vcards to the phone. No way to get them back off again. I couldn’t browse the phone, nor was I able to send any html, jpeg, or mp3 without getting a message that the file type was unrecognizable. For reference, this particular phone has a web browser, camera and mp3 player.

As far as I can tell, the only way to get a ringtone, background picture, or music on the device is to buy it from Sprint — ringtones expire after 90 days, music can only be played on the phone, and I’m sure that there’s some hitch about background images. Just goes with the territory.

And finally, there’s the internet issue. All the messages on the net say that for OSX, pair it, dial #777, and you’re on. Any PowerVision (evdo) plan is enough for casual use. Well, that didn’t work for me — I kept getting authorization errors. After three calls to tech support, several updates of my phone’s settings, repeated mentioning of the specific error number, and lots of testing that I could connect to the net with the built in browser, I got a tech who said, “Oh, we don’t know about laptops, you need to talk to advanced tech support.” Who took 10 seconds to tell me that I need a $40/month plan that’s not even listed to use the phone to connect the laptop to the net. (fwiw, the data plans are 15,20 and 25, as far as I can tell from the web site.) (and free for the ambassador type people)

That’s right, advanced tech support is the only one that could tell that error #57 (or whatecver number it was) meant I wasn’t spending enough money for it to work.

I guess another plus is that the camera didn’t suck, but since I never pulled an image off the phone, it’s hard to tell if it didn’t suck at 200×300, or really was a 1.3 megapixel camera. Compared to the Razr I had briefly and the Nokia 3660, the camera was great. Note that camera isn’t in the requirements.

I also don’t really like the design decision of putting a color lcd screen on the outside of the phone, then to conserve battery power, only leaving it on for 30 seconds at a time. Plain mono lcds are readable for the outside, and take nearly no power to leave on. I’m probably missing the settings for ‘answer the phone when I flip it open’, and ‘answer when I press any reasonable key’. I’m also missing the setting for ‘turn off the bloody animation’ and the theme that actually has any display contrast.

So back go the phones. I can’t justify (yet) $40 a month for internet access the few times that I’m on the ferries without the family. And I can’t justify voice plans when I can’t use them where I live and work.

To put this in perspective, I had Razrs from Cingular for two days a couple of weeks ago. Syncing took 5 minutes to set up when I was on the ferry. Never did get laptop internet working on those phones either, but then I never really got reception at the house. The Nokia 3660 (Tmobile) also has no reception here, but it syncs easily, has slower GPRS internet (or just plain old modem) and can take any old .wav file as the ringtone.

Well, the house in Ballard is almost closed, original date was friday, then it looked like it was going to be put off two weeks(!), now it looks like monday. We’re almost done moving stuff from it and fixing the last of the little issues, like patching up the holes from the baby gate that the buyer doesn’t really want.

Cell phones still don’t really work, the Sprint ones ring and have connections, but the quality is really bad, even when there’s a decent signal, which there isn’t at the house. Despite having bluetooth, apparently the phones that Sprint sells don’t implement any of the useful protocols that would allow things like synching with our macs or changing ringtones. And apparently neither I nor the first three non-advanced technical support people couldn’t figure out that I didn’t order the correct plan that I needed to use the thing as a modem for my laptop. (So, bluetooth — next to useless on the Samsung A920 and the Mac, really don’t bother trying.) We’re almost down to Nextel now for a provider that works at the house, having blown through Tmobile (current), Cingular (shiny razrs), Verizon (by way of someone else’s phone) and Sprint. But Nextel’s data access is about as good as a modem from 15 years ago, so that’s going to be hard to take while waiting for the ferry. And their phones are clunky, expensive, and even less likely to sync than Sprint’s.