Saturday Shopping

by

Today I braved the cold weather and headed into Manhattan for some shopping. My main goal was to get a pair of new glasses. I have a relatively new pair (a year and a half old) but I wasn’t super happy with the way they looked. They were narrow lenses that seem to be the only major stye you can find in eye glasses. The problem with that is that I have Nystagmus, so even if I am not trying to my eyes would sometimes view an area of my view that was not covered by the glasses. Needless to say this is annoying. I got used to it for the most part but it came up now and again.

I wanted to find a pair of decent pair of round frames like I had previously had. When I got my old pair I couldn’t find a pair of round ones that fit right to replace the old pair I had, so I tried the narrow oval style instead. This time around I was able to find a nice light pair of round frames that covered my field of view so even with the Nystagmus I don’t have an issue.

While the glasses were being made at Lenscrafters I took a trip to the new Apple Store on 14th street. That was a mistake. I didn’t realize it was on 9th ave. For some reason I thought 8th, so it was a really long walk in the freezing cold. I did get a pair of Bose in ear headphones for my iPod Classic. I tried Jayson’s pair and knew in a minute that they were a good buy! I finally got fed up with the Apple ones that came with my iPod that I have been suffering with for years.

After getting my glasses I meet up with Danny in Union Square and went to Dukes for some dinner and drinks. It was a freezing experience, but overall a great day!

Vacation to Nowhere

by

I tried to make today as eventless as possible. It was my last day at work before my vacation. I didn’t need any excitement to delay my rest. Thankfully I had good mojo or something since nothing crazy happened like earlier in the week.

I hit the local bar everyone from work goes to for a quick drink before my vacation began. I am off for 11 days counting weekends and the christmas holiday. I am not really going anywhere, but I needed to take some time off. I haven’t been on a vacation since my Cancun trip in 2005. For this vacation I couldn’t think of where to go and couldn’t find any travel companion’s so I just decided to take time off and relax. The second half of the week I am going to my sisters in New Jersey to see her and the kids and to babysit one night. So that will break up the vacation a bit.

Even though I am not going anywhere I am not going to contact work. That means my Blackberry is off, I have the away message in my email client running, and I told everyone in my group I would only answer the phone for them and only if it was during certain times of the day. I need some time to relax. Lets see how that goes!

Lunchtime

by

Today I took a nice lunch break to go down to Dukes and meet up with Dan for lunch. It has been too long since I saw him so I wanted to get together. He was still decompressing from leaving his last job (aka the company that I left back in February). It was interesting to get his insight into what is currently going on there. Like me, he was in need of a change.

It was nice to catch up. I am trying to get everyone together that used to play poker for a game at my place after the new year once I get furniture. Dan also offered to host a game or two.

I had to cut our lunch short (well short is a relative term) since I had been gone for almost two hours so I needed to get back to the office. I don’t take lunch almost ever so it wasn’t a big deal but I had allot to do since I am on vacation next week.

Lunch with Danny & Jayson

by

Today I was able to get away from the office for about an hour to have lunch with Jayson & Danny. We just hit a dinner, but it was good to get out of the office and sit down for a change. Otherwise a relatively (for me) uneventful day.

Custom VOIP

by

I don’t know why I take on projects that suck up my free time that I probably don’t need to be involved in, but I do. This weekend I began tinkering with a Cisco 7940 phone I have trying to get a Gizmo Project SIP account to work on it. I spent a few hours on Saturday working on it.

First I had to remember how to upgrade the firmware on the 7940. It has been a while since I tinkered with these phones. I realized that when the downloaded firmware I had was 6.03 or something and the latest availible is 8.8. I had to break out the old TFTP server and remember all the files I needed to get the upgrade to work. Cisco has documentation on the process but it is not so easy to follow. After getting the firmware flashed I had to sift through google search results trying to find someone who has posted a working config for a Gizmo Project account working on the Cisco 7940 IP Phone. I found one config and a few references to settings but not much else. The config I found isn’t working correctly. I have tweaked it significantly and I still can’t get a call to complete. I can get dial tone, but that just means some sort of signaling is working. I am so close, but for some reason I can’t get calls to connect!

I am about to give up on getting Gizmo working directly on the 7940, and instead try to get Tribox or some other Asterisk setup working. Unfortunately the Tribox VM i downloaded last year is a year old and I am having problems getting the latest one up and running. I may be putting this on hold for a while. I am going to also ask for some help from one of the network guys at work who used to work for a VOIP provider.

Crazy Tech Buying & Selling Spree

by

I don’t know what it is about the past few weeks but I have been on a crazy buying and selling spree. I have finally gotten rid of my old 60gig iPod. I have had my new 160gig silver one for a while but after a few problems with eBay I never actually sold the old one. I finally put it up on Craigslist and sold it. Even with my new Nokia 6120 Classic, I have been going back and forth with that phone and my Treo 680. The 6120 is great but I realized I need a phone with a keyboard. I think a phone is not a smartphone without one!

Going back to the Treo wasn’t going to work for the long term so after a false start I ended up picking up a new Nokia E61i off of Craigslist. It is big, but so far is doing everything i need it to. And it has Wifi to boot. I am still getting used to the Symbian OS, and the different applications I need to get to work. I already don’t like the PIM (Address book, Calendar, & Tasks) functions, but that is a trade off for not crashing and a phone that generally does what it is supposed to do. Stability has become important to me more so in recent days. More discussions on the E61i as I continue to play with it.

I am going to keep the N810 tablet because it is just interesting if anything. I don’t need it for any real reason but I am enjoying tinkering with it.

I am also in the process of cleaning out my closet and finally selling the extra DVD player I have (it is new in the box) and my old Tivo. I probably have a bunch of other stuff lying around so I have will be busy for a while.

I guess this is a good time to be doing all of this anyway with the holidays coming up and all.

Nokia N810

by

The N810 finally came out late last week. I was actually very lucky and found a reseller in downtown Manhattan that had them in stock. I picked on up and have been playing with it for about a week. It is a really interesting device. I am finding that I am not going to use it for what I originally planned (as a PDA/Internet tablet to complement a normal mobile phone) but I still like it just the same.

The Palm VM on it is really cool. I have been playing with that for a while. I am getting addicted to mine sweaper again. Email, Chat and browsing on the tablet is cool also. I also think that Skype & Gizmo on it are amazing. You can barely tell that I am on speakerphone when using Skype on it. I did an entire conference call on speaker using skype and wifi. It was really cool.

I am waiting to see what other applications get ported over to the Maemo 2008 OS.

NYTimes.com

, , , ,

AOL For Free?

by

I went online tonight to do some research for my mom and dad regarding their AOL accounts. First I realized that my dad has been a member since 1996. Wow, time has flow. I was poking around his account for him so I can figure out how to keep his email address (and my mom’s) but not pay the BYOP monthly charge of $14.95. They have been paying that to keep the simplicity of AOL for years after they switched to Road Runner cable. Now a days they don’t use the service for anything more than checking email, so why pay for all those extra features. It turns out that AOL got wise and is now offering a basic BYOP plan for free, as long as you don’t use any premium features. That works perfectly for them. I was set to move them to google apps. I even had a domain name bought and configured for them before I figured out I didn’t need to move them. Lets hope that there is no hidden gotcha’s to this change, but from AOL’s web page it doesn’t look like there is.

Not having to cancel their account is also very helpful for me too. I totally forgot that my AIM screen name is in fact an screen name attached to my dad’s account. The screen name pre-dated my use (or the existence for that matter) of AIM. I used to use it for some web hosting back in the day. I haven’t logged into the AOL software in so long (for the record it hasn’t been on my computer in years) that I forgot that it was a screen name and not a stand alone AIM name. I might have had problems if i canceled the account and wanted to use the screen name for AIM. Not having to deal with the issue is a good thing, especially since I don’t really want to change it. It is like a phone number, it hasn’t changed in years and everyone I know has it.

Mass Effect

by

My Thanksgiving vacation saw allot less free time than I thought I would have due to my recent purchase of Mass Effect for the Xbox 360. It is very addictive. I have spent an undisclosed amount of time in the past week playing. The good news is that since I have been back at work that my play time is almost non existence. So I am confident I am not addicted:) So far I give the game high marks for graphics, sound, and game play.

A Phone That is Not a Smartphone?

by

I have been having a love hate relationship with my Treo 680 (well several Treo’s over the years) but I haven’t found a suitable replacement so I have been stuck with a great phone that crashes all the time. It has been driving me crazy. I know I shouldn’t get emotional about technology but I work with technology all day long and I live off my phone(s). So when I am expecting a call it would be nice for the phone to ring, and if I don’t hear the ring the voice mail chime should go off. Instead I have on more than one occasion had the phone do nothing until I think to reboot it and then get 5 voice mails.

Needless to say I am very frustrated. I need the functions of a PDA, but all stand alone PDA’s don’t have built in Keyboards, so until very recently it has been a smart phone that does everything but does everything not so great or a PDA and a phone that doesn’t do everything I want. That was until I found out that Nokia was making the N810. It is an internet tablet that has a slide out keyboard. I have been eying the N800 (didn’t have a keyboard) for a while, but no keyboard means I didn’t get it. The N810 isn’t a PDA so when I first saw it I was still stuck with my Treo (and still may be), but then I read that Access the makers of the current version of the Palm OS released a VM of their OS for both the N800 and N810. That means I can install and run all my Palm applications on the N810 and get all my PDA functions that the device was missing. In theory this sounds great. Now all I need to do is get an N810 when it comes out and see if it works the way I think it will.

In anticipation of the new Internet Tablet, I needed to get a good regular mobile phone. My current “regular” phone is a now aging Motorola Razr V3. I always liked the form factor of the Razr but the functions sucked. I can’t stand the Motorola UI. Why does each phone number for a contact have to be its own address book entry? Nokia and Sony Ericsson both have multiple numbers per contact, it just makes sense. That issue and the fact that the Razr doesn’t support high speed data I needed something new. Unfortunately finding something new wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

After some research I ended buying a Nokia 6120 Classic. It wasn’t my first choice, but every other phone I wanted first didn’t cover some basic function that I wanted. To be clear I wasn’t asking for things like video calling, or Wifi, etc. I wanted BASIC stuff like a quad band phone, aka a phone that will work in the USA on both GSM frequencies here. Apparently most of the really good phones I liked are sold as Tri band phones, and don’t have the new 850mhz frequency on them. Eventually I found the 6120. It is actually a cool phone. The initial things that I didn’t like about the phone I found ways to work around. The only thing that I don’t like so far is the fact that the keypad is so small, but that is why I have an address book!

So for now I am happy with my change. I am the first to admit that i am fickle, so since it is less than a day since I switched the jury is still out on if I keep this setup, but the real test will be when the N810 comes out and I use it and the 6120 together. Until then I will keep my Treo 680 in my bag and use it as a simple PDA. Oh and to be completely accurate about what I am writting, I know the 6120 Classic actually a Smartphone. It does have the Symbian Series 60 OS, but any smartphone without a keyboard isn’t really a smartphone to me.