BeigeJournal

I decided to try out the web browser functionality of my cell phone. I use Verizon, and my phone is a Motorola vc120, which is no longer state-of-the-art by any means. Verizon wants an extra $5 per month for the service, plus airtime.

As I expected, it does work, but the tiny screen and especially the need to use the phone keypad for text entry severely limit the utility of the feature.

Some things look like they have promise. Mapquest has an apparently well-designed phone interface, but entering starting and ending addresses by phone keypad is very painful and very slow. Some of the newer phones have GPS receivers for enhanced 911 calling, and I wonder if that GPS data can be accessed for this sort of thing? It’s an obviously useful idea, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the phone people failed to allow it.

Weather is available from the usual sources, but again, entering the location of interest is a pain and the usual sources only give very short summaries of conditions and forecasts, which is consistent with the tiny screen but also borders on useless. You might as well use Jupiter, or a weather radio. There are services like WxServer that are aviation oriented and will provide real weather information, including Nexrad and satellite images if you have a newer phone that can display them, but, of course, for a fee. It may well be worth the fee if you are an active pilot, but otherwise the fact that excellent weather sites can be seen at home on the big screen (with a keyboard!) for no charge beyond your ISP’s fees, or for trivial charge (Weather Underground provides 40-frame radar loops and no ads for just $5/year), makes the fee seem a bit steep considering it comes on top of the cell phone internet fees which are in addition to the regular cell phone fees.

Regular web sites tend to have too much navigational stuff at the top to be usable with the tiny cell phone screen. Although I hesitate to call this “useful,” the LiveJournal friends page actually works quite will on the tiny screen, at least if you don’t have to many long-winded friends (people like, oh, me, for example). At least my phone only buffers a few tiny screens worth of text, so reading anything of any length requires numerous pauses to reconnect and download, maximizing annoyance as well as airtime usage. Entering URLs by keypad is, of course, amazingly slow and aggravating.

There may be specific uses, at least for some people, that make it all worth while, but $60 per year just to have the feature enabled seems like a lot for just the possibility that Mapquest will come in handy someday. The tiny screen makes most of the normal web largely unusable, and the pain of text entry on a phone number pad makes just about everything almost unusable, so it really doesn’t have much value as something to just mess around with, the way one does with Internet access on a real computer.

This gentleman was having a bad computer experience, and turned it into a hilarious video. I’ve had experiences like that, too. You want to know what really gets me? When something crashes that wasn’t running any software other than the OS at the time. How does that happen? Implementing that feature must take real technical knowhow.

If you own a television set, or set foot outdoors from time to time, then you have no doubt heard of Red Bull “energy drink.” In addition to goofy animated commercials, they sponsor everything from Formula 1 race car drivers to aerobatic pilots to events for people who were drinking something other than Red Bull and who decided to sign a waiver and take the “Red Bull gives you wings” slogan a bit too literally. It is my understanding that many consumers of Red Bull prefer to mix it with something that contains a high concentration of ethanol, which might explain some things.

I decided to try some. It comes in tall, skinny, 250ml aluminum cans. Though the bull is red, the drink is yellow, a lot like apple juice, or urine. (Seriously, it looks like apple juice.) It is “lightly carbonated.” It smells like some kind of candy and it tastes like…. How can I describe it? Like ginger ale plus some kind of citrus plus other stuff? If you really want to know, you’ll have to buy a can. I can’t say that I particularly like it, but it is OK.

Each 250 ml can contains 80mg of caffeine. For comparison, a 355ml can of Pepsi contains 37mg of caffeine. A can of Mountain Dew, 55mg. A 355ml can of the famous Jolt cola would contain 72mg of caffeine. Each can also contains 110 kcal worth of sugar, thus the sugar is just slightly more concentrated than a typical soft drink, but in a smaller can. The caffeine concentration is much higher than a normal soda, but the total amount is not really especially high. A single cup of coffee would usually contain more. It also contains taurine and glucuronolactone, substances for which their is no evidence of either benefit or harm.

As usual, Dave Barry said it best: “…tastes the way Limp Bizkit sounds. I tried one, and it gave me a refreshing lift. I hope to be able to sleep again by Halloween.”

Frankly, as a drink, I’m not too excited, but it is great to have someone out there sponsoring kiteboarders, winter surfers, and other people with “risk-oriented personalities,” even if the actual drink is consumed more by people getting drunk at parties rather than people engaging in extreme sports.

On Saturday night we had a filk here in Milwaukee, hosted by Barisha and Richard. Nate Bucklin and Louie were there, along with quite a gang from Chicago, including anach, jerusha, almeda, Bill and Gretchen Roper, Becca, and EliseAlyse. From Milwaukee we had Art, Carol and John, Lee, Barisha and Richard (obviously), and Joyce and myself. I’m sure that if I missed or misspelled anybody someone will let me know.

It was nice to see everyone.

It is always great to hear Nate and Louie, and they had plenty of music to share, staying up past three to do so. Nate told some most interesting stories of his start in music as a young child, writing and performing at age nine on the very same well-used guitar he plays today.

I think this was the first time I’ve heard Eloise play guitar. She brought us some Blake Hodgetts as well. Art played some singalong material as well as some…deeply bizarre material. His response to The Eensie-Weensie Spider, special as it is, is not nearly as bizarre as the one about the chili.

Bill sang Teenage Popsicle Girl when we were on the dead girlfriends theme, and, with Gretchen, that song about how she was right and he was wrong. If you’ve heard it, you know which one I’m talking about (You almost volatilized my kitchen!).

Betsey led the traditional group singing of Outward Bound. I get to try out the bottom of my range singing along with her on that, which is fun.

As for me, I’m finding myself relatively functional these days when in front of an audience. It is kind of odd to have heart pounding before performing something and then after playing be so shaky that lifting a glass to drink is a challenge and yet actually play a musical instrument more-or-less successfully in between, but it certainly is better than shaking then, too, like I used to.

I would guess, from audience reaction, that not everyone had heard Ingrate before. It is a joy to see that moment when people realize what they are hearing.

I think I was pretty close to 100% as far as hitting the right notes goes playing Foggy Dew on the flute, though the tone at times could be better. I think the stage fright effects the breath control more than it does the fingers these days. I remembered to look at the key signature before starting this time, which doesn’t hurt. My run through Bach’s Fugue in G minor contained numerous fumbles, but to some extent people are impressed just that anyone would try to play such a thing at three in the morning at a filk.

I hope to see everyone again at the next filk.

(Comment below or in my Livejournal.)

I hate attempting to receive packages at home. I do attempt to have mail order items delivered to work when I can, even though, in theory, I probably shouldn’t be burdening the loading dock with personal stuff, because at least UPS and FedEx can deliver to the loading dock at work. Home is a different story. Here is a handy tip for FedEx and UPS: I am not home during the day on weekdays. This can’t be that unusual. The delivery truck driver, for example, isn’t home then, either. He or she is at work, just like me. Sometimes, after trying and failing to deliver a package during the afternoon, the next attempt by FedEx will be after 5:30 or so, so that I will actually be at home. But sometimes not. This time, not. I could have run errands after work, like picking up another package from UPS, but I was home, hoping they’d try to deliver then like they did last time, but they didn’t. They didn’t leave a door tag this time, so I didn’t know until I thought to check their web site to see if any of the numbers on the door tag from yesterday could be used to track the package. You can, it turns out, track by door tag number. I guess I’ll have to drive out to their facility way way way out away from where I live tomorrow and see if I can pick up the package then.

I also have a package waiting at UPS. At least their facility is much closer to town. They finally allow you to have a package held by web rather than lengthy telephone process. That process always used to be much harder than necessary, as if it was very unusual for someone to work during the day on weekdays and therefore need to have the package held at the UPS facility to be picked up in person.

Why is this so hard? Are not many, perhaps a majority even, of their customers working during the day? Why can’t they do something to make package delivery or pickup easier for us? In this age of privacy destroying computer databases, don’t they know that, in years of trying, they have not once been able to deliver a package to me during the day on weekdays? Why do they keep sending the truck way out here each time to try? Why can’t I set some kind of UPS or FedEx preference that says I will not be home during “business hours” so that they can save the truck trip and notify me somehow that my package is ready for me to come pick up without the multi-day delay for failed delivery, request to hold, another failed delivery attempt because they didn’t get the message, and so on until I can finally drive way out yonder to get the thing? Why isn’t the mail order business pushing for something to make this easier? I’d order more stuff if it was easier to actually get the items. They keep trying to make it easier to ship, with partnerships with Kinko’s and Mailboxes Etc. Why not allow customers to pick up deliveries there, too, instead of at a sorting center by the airport in another county?

I actually like the USPS better than FedEx or UPS, because at least they sometimes succeed in delivering things on the first try, if they fit in the mail box, and if not, I can pick up the item in the morning, on the way to work, the next day, at a reasonably nearby location. That makes the Post Office faster than Absolutely Positively Has To Be There next day air that then takes two or three extra days after it arrives in the city to actually get.

I finally gave in and installed Gimp-Print on my Fedora Core 2 system. You need the beta Gimp-Print 5 for Gimp 2, which is the Gimp version that Fedora Core 2 has. I could not get beta 1 to work, so I grabbed beta 2 from CVS, and that works.

You use something like
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gimp-print login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gimp-print co gimp-print
to get the sources by CVS. Something like
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
takes the place of the usual ./configure, and then the usual make and make install do the rest. There was some sort of error during make install process, but it works anyway.