The Cynic Says……

So I just recently remembered that I have Fedora Core 3 Linux installed on my computer at home but I never bother to boot into it. Reason? No NTFS support natively. All my drives are NTFS and all my mp3’s are on NTFS drives, so not being able to access them is somewhat of a problem. Also, Windows is doing just fine and haven’t had any real reason to boot into Linux. I haven’t even had the urge to dick around and/or “tinker” with Linux. As it is, I reboot maybe once a month when I do major updates to my machine since now I really only use it for email, chat, web surfing, etc. I have this powerful computer and hardly ever play games on it. I guess it’s just that when I get really bored on the computer I go bike riding instead of playing games.

Honestly, I’ve not even been taking the time to update my website like I had been before. I’ve been out riding way too much. Not that that’s a bad thing, I don’t guess. I just wish it would hurry and warm back up so I can ride later into the night and not have to worry about freezing my fucking nuts off. I’m lucky to get 40 miles a week in because of this shit weather we’ve been having. I want to move to Florida or something where it’s 70 in February.

The last couple of days (Christmas Eve & Christmas Day) have been slow at work, but I don’t mind. Basically I end up getting paid 2.5x normal pay just to sit around and deal with 25 calls in an 8 hour period. I don’t celebrate Christmas anyway, so I might as well work and make some extra cash. I’ve never seen a point in Christmas, to be honest. I don’t have any family around here to exchange gifts with, nor do I have the desire to exchange gifts with my friends. I spend $50 on you, you spend $50 on me… net = $0, what’s the point? Might as well spend $50 on ourselves and get exactly what we want! Oh well… I don’t do holidays and I’m not big on gifts or whatever. I guess I’m a scrooge, but who cares?

Well, I ended up having to get a new phone because my old one got run over. I was loading my bike onto the bus (they have bus racks on the front) and apparently it fell off my hip where I was carrying it. I didn’t notice it until the bus had moved forward and apparently already run it over. Here’s what it looks like now. I didn’t have insurance on the phone, so it couldn’t be replaced for anything less than full price ($600). I needed a new phone immediately and didn’t want to wait and order one off ebay or anything of that nature. So I went to the sprint store and bought a new LG PM-325. It’s a neat little slider-type phone with a really nice screen and bluetooth. Here’s my little mini-review

So far I’ve been impressed with it for the most part in my 2 days of usage. The earpiece is fairly loud and very clear. The ringers are as loud as any phone in recent memory and they don’t distort even at max volume. Also, you can actually feel the vibrating ringer when it’s in your pocket! Reception is every bit as good as my Treo, if not better. I managed to get slightly better signal in my friend’s basement where most phones cut out or get jack shit for signal. Surpsing since the phone actually has an internal antenna. Like all new Sprint phones, it has true SMS which makes sending and receiving text messages easier and more reliable. Bluetooth, however, was the main reason I bought the phone. As of yet, I haven’t gotten my hands on a bluetooth headset to test it but I did get to pair it with a Logitech Bluetooth hub over at my friend’s house and it paired just fine. We even managed to take a cal and have it use the computer speakers as a speakerphone of sorts. Kinda neat, but rather useless if you ask me. For whatever reason, you can’t transfer files to and from the phone via Bluetooth. I guess if they enabled that, you wouldn’t have any incentive to use Sprint’s download service that charges you per download. The screen is decent sized and very bright. Even though it’s an STN instead of TFT, you’d never know it unless you read it somewhere or someone told you. The phone does have a VGA camera, but quality is nothing to drool over. Even at its highest quality settings, it’s overly compressed and pictures come out rather blurry with artifacting evident. Obviously it’d be fine for a quick pic if you didn’t have time to whip out the digicam, but certainly no substitute for it. The keypad backlight is a soft purple glow that makes the keys pretty easy to read in almost any lighting condition. It does have voice dialing, which is activated by a button on the left side of the phone just above the volume keys. The great thing about it is that you can just hit the button and say the name with the slider closed. Unlike the Kyocera slider, the phone can be operated in the open or closed position. Other intersting touches I’ve found… There’s one button each to the left and to the right of the navigation keypad right under the screen. The right one has a red light in its top section, the left one has a green light. When you plug the phone in to charge, the red one lights up and when it’s done charging, the green one lights up. A neat little touch if you ask me. You can also customize what each direction on the 4-way navigation pad does when you press it from the standby screen. The center/OK button always brings up the camera app, however.

Now that I’ve gotten all the good stuff out of the way, here’s my nitpicks about the phone. When you get a text msg, voicemail, etc. it only notifies you once and flashes the green light at you a couple of times. There’s no further reminder that you have text or VM waiting unless you slide the phone open and look at the screen. In my opinion, a phone should have some sort of flashing LED or reminder every x minutes that you have a message waiting. Also, the phone has speakerphone but it’s only one-way. It’s called a “monitor” because you can hear the other person but not talk to them as the microphone is not active when you activate the speakerphone. Lame lame lame lame! Granted, I use a headset more often than not so a speakerphone isn’t a huge concern for me. However, some people do use speakerphone fairly often so this may be an issue. It also rather irks me that the file transfer feature of bluetooth has been disabled. This means if I want to load my own ringtones onto the phone I have to use one of the various vision file uploaders on the web. While they work, they’re nowhere near as nice as being able to just pair phone and computer and transfer the files that way. I’ll get over it, though. The one thing so far that kinda worries me is the fact that vision speeds are just insanely slow. 50kbps seems to be about the best I can muster in any case. When I get a bluetooth PDA, it would most certainly be nice to pair the two and surf faster than 50kbps. Other people on howardforums.com seem to be reporting the same problems. Too bad it’s only one of two Sprint phones with bluetooth on the market right now, the other one being the Sony-Ericsson T608. Sprint does also have two PDA phones that have bluetooth but they’re out of the price range of 90% of their userbase. The PalmOne Treo650 is a $600 phone and the PPC 6601 is a $650 phone. Granted both can be had for much less when signing a new 2 year agreement, but they’re both well over $400. I still won’t be trading it in anytime soon, though. My nitpicks are minor and its upsides far outweigh its downsides… For new customers, the phone runs $79.99 though they’re running an online web special @ $49.99. In my opinion, that’s an absolute steal for such a good phone. Existing customers pay $229.99 + taxes. Mine came out to just over $250.00.

Overall, I’d give the phone a solid 7.5 out of 10. It’s not perfect and it could use a few more features here and there but given the price, I’m not complaining one bit.

• Pros:
• reception
• loud ringers
• great vibrator :p
• nice screen
• user interface
• phone can be used whether open or closed
• voice dialling
• bluetooth
• compact size/light weight
• sound quality
• price

• Cons:
• no BT file transfers
• still VGA camera, and not so hot quality at that, no flash
• no SD/MMC/transflash expansion slot
• SLOWWWW Vision speeds
• only 1MB storage on phone
• 1-way speakerphone
• no message reminder for vm, text, IM, etc

This should be rather interesting… It’s been announced that Sprint & Nextel will be merging. Obviously even if/when they do merge, it will take a couple of years for them to get everything squared away and both networks integrated. Nextel uses iDEN, which is a proprietary Motorola standard. Sprint uses CDMA, which is developed by Qualcomm. I think that it’s a good merger all in all because Sprint wants to become more of a force in the business world and Nextel wants better data services. They both have what the other wants, provided they can get over the technological hurdles. Sprint has to be careful not to botch up the walkie-talkie feature too much as that’s the one thing that most Nextel users could not do without and is Nextel’s #1 selling point. Sprint has a similar feature but it takes longer to setup the session and the “message” (for lack of a better term) takes longer to get there. Hopefully with Nextel’s engineers on the job, they’ll be able to fix that problem and have a kickass PTT(push-to-talk) along with some kickass data. Nextel was already going to have to move to the 1900 Mhz spectrum anyway because of an FCC(Federal Communications Commission) mandate to move out of their 800Mhz SMR(specialized mobile radio) spectrum because it was it was interfering with police and other safety radios. Needless to say, it was going to cost nextel a buttload of money to replace every single user’s phone if they were to go at it alone. Now that they have Sprint’s help, hopefully things will go smoother. Verizon can’t be happy about all this as now they’ll be #2 behind Cingular but being gained on quickly by Sprint/Nextel. Apparently at some point, Verizon had actually talked about making a bid for Sprint to try and keep them from merging with Nextel. However, I seriously doubt that Verizon will make a serioud bid and even if they did, I just can’t see such a merger or buyout ever passing regulatory approval. Sprint/Nextel should do fine with the regulators, though. Apparently the deal is worth $36 billion and will be mostly stock changing hands. Should be interesting to see how things pan out.

Here’s the link

OK, so I’ve been kinda neglecting my blog a bit. Nothing terribly major has happened lately. I’ve been doing a lot of biking when I’m not at home or at work. I’ve had my cycle computer just over 2 weeks and I put something to the effect of 207 miles on it in 16 days. Not TOO bad considering it’s been horribly rainy lately and I haven’t been able to do my requisite 15 miles on some days. Usually on my off days I put in about 35 miles in 2 days.

At some point in the near future, I want to get a nice new set of wheels to shave some weight and therefore make me a bit faster. The wheels that came on the bike are good enough to get by but nothing spectacular. The set I want will shave a good 2 lbs of rotating mass off my bike. From what I’m told, shaving a pound of rotating weight is like shaving 3 lbs of stationary weight off the frame. That’s a pretty damn big difference! At any rate, I don’t have too much trouble riding my bike as it is. I guess it’d just be nice to make it a little lighter and faster.

I’ll probably put on some better slicks than the ones I have now for lower rolling resistance and better flat protection. I’ve gotten 2 flats on the back since I’ve had the bike and I’m wearing a nice little groove down the center of the tire. I think I’m going to get some Specialized Armadillos… I’ve heard they’re pretty much bombproof, which would be a good thing around here… Everywhere I go, I’m dodging glass left and right… If I do happen to not see some and run through it, I have to worry about flatting.

I generally ride in the road whenever possible instead of on the sidewalk. What people don’t realize is that cyclists are SUPPOSED to ride in the road, not on the sidewalk. Mind you the law is not enforced either way, but it does state that cyclists are supposed to obey the same rules of the road as a car. I generally try my best to do so, but occasionally I’ll blow through a stop sign or red light when no one is around. I have a really nice headlight & taillight combo that makes sure I’m pretty well visible at night, which is when I do a large portion of my riding. My light is actually so damned bright that I’ve noticed people shielding their eyes when I’m approaching. I absolutely love it. At least it means they see me!

Nothing much else of interest to say at the moment… aside from the fact that I’m amused at how few people realize that I’m just flat out not going to buy a car anytime soon. If I do buy one for some stupid reason, it will be so I can actually transport my bike to places farther away to ride. The only real disadvantage I see to bicycle commuting is carrying large objects, which is basically impossible. Outside of that, I have no use for a car.