This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
|
Drat the current budgetary constraints! I so want this! It will be available next month here in the US, it started being available last week in Europe. Of course I’d like to buy it right away. But even without the budget issues, I’m thinking I should wait until November when number portability happens, so I can keep the number I already have.
On the other hand, since my cell is a 609 number and I live in 215, every single time I call for pizza, the delivery people get all confused and I have to explain. So maybe I just want to forget about that and get a 215 number.
Anyway, this phone is cool.
New Treo 600 Rules (Walter Mossberg, Wall Street Journal)
I’ve been carrying a Sprint Treo 600 around for a couple of weeks and I love it. It’s a great phone, an excellent mobile e-mail terminal and a full-fledged Palm-compatible PDA. I prefer it to any RIM BlackBerry model I have tested, and it blows away any of the PDA/phones based on Microsoft’s Pocket PC operating system.
(via TreoCentral)
I’ve been meaning for awhile to post something about Clark entering the democratic race, but I’ve been kind of distracted by other things lately. Today, at my Dad’s doing the birthday thing, I have a little time.
I don’t really have a strong opinion about Clark (or any of the rest) yet. I’ll start paying more attention over the next few months. We are still a year away from the election people! But in any case, the biggest thing I have noticed since Clark announced is just the absolutely heavy volume of strong negative comments about him all over the place since the announcement.
I flipped the radio past Rush the other day… non-stop Clark bashing. Checking various blogs, all sorts of negative stuff on his flip flop on the war. There was one article full of quotes from co-workers in the military slamming him for various things, etc. I was seeing very little positive comments.
From the Republican leaning sources, the negativity might indicate they think he would be a real threat if nominated, thus he needed to be slapped down quickly. From the Democrat leaning places, it is people who already have their favorite horse trying to make sure his impact isn’t that high. I mean, if either of the two really thought he had no chance and was irrelevant, wouldn’t they just mostly ignore him?
Anyway I notice today some polls are showing him right near the top of the Democratic pack already. This could get interesting.
Oh, and I’ve seen a variety of places posting conspiracy theories about the role of Bill and Hillary in this, and how it might be related to Hillary’s own plans for the Presidency. Here is one of those…
More Stupid White Men (William Grider)
Clark’s much bigger problem is that he is the Clintons’ candidate — Bill and Hillary’s pick to stop Howard Dean and keep warm the leader’s chair until ’08 when the stars are supposed to align for Hillary’s candidacy. If Clark wins the nomination and loses the election, that’s fully compatible with the Clinton restoration plan (and maybe would increase Dems’ hunger for the re-ascendancy).
If it looked as though the General was actually going to beat Dubya, you will hear a mighty clamoring next spring that he must put her on the ticket for Veep. This “grassroots” yearning for Hillary will be orchestrated by the same Washington political whisperers who whipped up enthusiasm for Clark’s entry.
(via MaxSpeak)
Yeah. OK. Maybe. If Hillary really wants to be Prez, I’m not sure this would be the most sensible strategy. But I’ll withold judgement for now. I’m not saying this sort of thing isn’t possible, it very well could be.
I was not a Bill and Hillary fan when Bill was in office. The disaster of W has made me miss them though. They were horrible in many ways, but nowhere near as horrible as W and his entourage. And I’d take Bill back in a heartbeat over W. However, both Bill and Hillary *are* scheming slimeballs. So I could see them thinking like this.
But for now, lets go with Occam’s razor, and just assume Hillary means what she says about the presidency and Clark is in it for himself and is not just a puppet of the Clintons, OK?
I got some news yesterday that will be significant to me, but have been asked to keep it quiet in certain circles until it is official in a couple weeks. I will do so for a little while. But wanted to make mention of it here “for the record” as it were, but without the specifics for the moment. More details over the coming weeks.
As of 42 minutes ago, it is my birthday UTC. Woo! Go Sam!
Although actually, lets be technical for a second.
I was born 1971 Sep 16 20:58 UTC (seconds unknown).
That translates to 2441211.37361 Julian.
1 year is 365.242198781 days. Which means 32 years is 11687.750361 days. Add that to the Julian date I was born and you get that I will be 32 years old at:
2452899.12397 Julian.
Translating back…
I’ll be 32 at:
2003 Sep 16 14:58:31 UTC.
For those of you stuck in EDT, that is 10:58:31 AM tomorrow morning.
So I have a few hours left. :-)
So, just sat down to go through the bill pile after my vacation. I knew I had gone overbudget, but ARGH! Anyway, when I had finished compiling everything, the amount I was short to pay all the bills that were due was about the same as one months paycheck. Perhaps even slightly more. Now, over the next few weeks I’m expecting to recieve from various sources at least half that amount above and beyond my paycheck. (Things like being paid back for money I’d paid out front on the vacation for my companions, an inheritance check from my grandmother’s estate, etc.) But cash flow wise, it isn’t in the bank yet. So I’m pissed at myself at going over by this much.
Lets see… new A/V setup for the new house… all sorts of new things needed for the new house… a new camera when mine broke on the vacation… several car repairs last month… a vacation including a condo for a week… a new suit for a wedding or two I needed to go to… etc, etc, etc. I probably could of avoided a bunch of those costs if I wanted to, but I didn’t, so now I’m mad at myself for blowing the budget.
But, as several people have pointed out to me, I actually do have the money. I just spent an hour online selling some stocks I had. As soon as the transaction clears, I’ll have all the cash I need. And after all, this is what savings is for, right? When you move and go on vacation and spend all sorts of dough on related things? It’s just that I hadn’t wanted to sell any more. To close on the house I’d done a loan against my 401K and sold some mutual funds and cashed in some of my company options. I wanted to be done at that point. But that really wasn’t enough for all the things I wanted to do in the few weeks after closing. So here I go selling more. Selling some stuff I’d wanted to keep awhile longer. Oh well!
Also, at this point my reserves are way lower than I’d like them to be. With all the events of the past two months, starting with the moment I decided to buy the house, I’ve brought the reserves WAY lower than I would like… although there are still some if an emergency comes up.
So, as I’ve said to various people, I am now *done* for the year. No more non-necessary purchases. Just the usual expenses. And start building the savings back up. Then come January I’ll blow more again on a new laptop. :-)
So, annoyed at myself… but… I wouldn’t undo any of the purchases. I’m not that annoyed. :-)
I did exchange the base station. Same issue. I tried reverting to an older version of the firmware. Different problems, but still not workable. Now on the current firmware again, and various things goofy.
I’m not happy. :-( I need to get this all working smoothly so I can work on updating and adding more days on the vacation. Very frustrating. Sigh!
So, since by yesterday Comcast had not fixed my routing problem between my two computers, and my DSL investigation showed I could only get a low speed IDSL, I went ahead and replaced my old Apple Graphite Basestation with a new Airport Extreme Basestation, which also allows wired machines to attach.
Got it set up pretty quickly. Set up ares with a fixed internal IP and put it as the “default host” on the base station so external traffic would go straight there. Set up a new dyndns host entry for the internal address of my laptop. All was working great, I can do everything I used to be able to at my old apartment.
But… I’ve been having problems with the whole damn thing going down periodically, losing connection on both computers (wired and wireless) until I reboot the basestation. Sometimes this was happening as frequently as once every ten minutes. That is of course unacceptible.
I’ve been playing with adjusting settings and things to try to stop it. I’ve been online almost an hour this time without getting shut out. Crossing my fingers.
But… searching online I’ve seen that this problem is known by a bunch of people. It was fixed for most people by a firmware update a month or so ago (which I already have). But for others, it seems like they had to return the base station and get a new one, at which point it worked.
I’ll see what happens. I hope I don’t have to return it. I hate returning things.
But I should be able to cancel the second IP address if this starts to work and save a couple bucks.
…Dunno yet. :-) My boss announced “Bowing to popular demand, I am leaving
“. He’s looking for opportunities elsewhere in the company and will stay around in transition for awhile. We are reporting to someone temporary for a few weeks while they figure out exactly how to organize us. Looks like we will be scattered within the department. There will be various meetings next week where we can chat with the decision makers about where we think we fit in and where might make sense for us to go.
Overall this is good I think. Of course, that is hard to say not knowing where I will be going yet, but the guy who is our temporary leader and who will be planning where we go eventually I have worked with before and like and get along well with. I’m hoping for the best now.
Oh, and nothing about the move except I think it will be in October, not September, and they are trying to figure out the reorg before they actually move us.
The “street price” is much less than I thought it would be, and reading this review on Joe Mehaffey’s gpsinformation.net website it just looks awesome. If I hadn’t completely broken the budget already by buying a house and going to Idaho, I would be ordering this by sunset. :-) As it is, I still may have to wait a couple of months for the budget to recover. Perhaps January.
StreetPilot 2610 / 2650 Car Navigator Product Review
The Garmin StreetPilot 2610 is in Garmin’s latest generation of GPS receivers with street level mapping and automatic route navigation for your car. It is their first model with Finger TOUCH SCREEN for data input and control -and- map storage (up to 1GB) using CF memory cards -and- USB data interface for map loading and NMEA data input/output. This sleek unit has the GPS antenna integral within the unit and is designed to fit on top of your dash and provide you with visual and audio directions for navigating your car on unfamiliar streets and roads. A battery powered remote control is provided so that passengers can program the unit even from the back seat. :) Unfortunately (for the kids), Garmin did not choose to put any games in this model.
In about 90 minutes we have an “Organization” meeting, presumably to notify us of yet another reorg. Rumor has it the current group will be broken up and the various parts put under random other parts of the larger organization. Just a rumor though. Will know for real in 90 minutes.
Don’t know if they will also mention the fact that we will be moving on September 19th, and those of us who are VPs without people reporting to us will lose our offices and go back into cubes. But I’ve heard that so much at this point I will be surprised if it is not the case.
Anyway, there is potential for great suckage here, although depending on who I end up reporting to there may (or may not) be an upside too. We shall see.
My expectations are low.
| |
|