First impressions of the Nokia N95

Things I love about my new N95:

• The camera rocks! It's MUCH sharper than the one on my N95.
  
• GPS on the phone rocks! But, I'll have to see whether I'll pay for navigation or not.
  
• It's the loudest handset I've ever heard (so I'll never miss a ring)
• It has a regular earphone jack (just like an iPod)
• It has a standard mini-USB connector to connect to a PC.
  
• It's dark purple, but I don't have to refer to myself as "The Artist Formerly Known as Bruce"
• The screen at night is big and bright (and I'm not even ... "deep in the heart of Texas")
• Transferring data from my N80 was surprisingly straightforward.
• I finally got S-Tris (Tetris clone) loaded once I figured out the aspect ratio of the N95's screen.
• Most of my apps (Calcium, Gmail, Google Maps, Jaiku, Fring, S-Tris, Gizmo Project) seem to work just fine.
  

Things I don't love so much about my new N95:

• It won't play the Sudoku from my N80. Of course, I don't have the .sis file since the game was pre-installed on my Singaporean N80's memory card, so my attempts to move it to the N95 failed. :( Not a big deal
  
• It took a long time for the N95 to find its GPS location. I would have been really aggravated if it were raining since I had to stand outside for it to find the necessary satellites.
• The Spotlite app doesn't work quite the way it's supposed to. On the N80, it uses the camera's flash as a flashlight, but on the N95 it fires up the red "red-eye reduction" lamp which makes it pretty useless.

Things I'm not quite sure about yet on my new N95.

• People have criticized the battery life of the phone, but they did that on the N80, as well, and I've been just fine with its battery. I'll let you know whether the N95's battery provides an equally positive experience.
• I'm interested in seeing whether Adobe Reader or the Browser are more memory friendly (they bomb out suddenly when memory runs short on the N80)
  

So, for the moment, I'm firmly in the happy camp. I'll let you know as time passes how that goes.

A cynical view of the Don Imus "controversy"

"Please don't make me watch Don Imus any more!"






I'm a little surprised that Don Imus' outrageous racist comments became news because I thought no one watched that show. Imus makes Larry King seem absolutely riveting in comparison, and I've been known to throw footwear at the TV when Larry King makes an appearance. People do realize that the sole reason Imus is on TV is because his show is only slightly more expensive to produce than leaving a test pattern on the screen during the morning hours. And those few people who do watch Imus' show probably do so because a) their remote control batteries have run out an an inopportune time or b) they mistake Imus for Howard Stern after a horribly botched plastic surgery treatment.

Ironically, because of his statements, Imus may actually gain an audience for the first time. Heck, given the racist comments made on Fox News, he might fit right in over there. In fact, I can just see it now... Imus will be booted off of MSNBC, and Fox News, under the banner of protecting first amendment rights (which have little or nothing to do with this) will hire him and put him on primetime, right after Bill O'Reilly. Sad, but scarily possible...

My first post from the N80

Hello world!

BlogSync rocks! I'm back on Blogger!

OK, I'm now almost completely consolidated on Blogger. Just a few more minor things to move from Typepad and Vox, and I need to make sure all the pictures made it.

Blogsync, written by Yichao Zhang is a tool that makes it possible to move posts from Wordpress to Blogger (no easy task). The software's not for grandmas (it's a little bit technical), but it works great. The only thing I had to figure out was that when Blogger sends it back "Null", that means it worked (I had to remove some duplicate posts while I figured that out). It's retro software in that it's a batch file and you have to put Java in your path (I had to look up how to do that on Windows XP).

But, I'm done!!!!!!

Barking dogs

Our neighbors seem to all be in love with barking dogs. No, not enough to keep them in their own damn houses. Just enough to keep them in their yards where they bark individually or collectively at high volumes way too much of the day. These people must know their dogs are barking up at a storm, but they do nothing about it. I guess since they all have kids that the loud conversations and arguments in their own homes drown out the dogs. But, for those of us who are blissfully childless, their dogs are a pain in the ass. Since our neighborhood is a suburban/rural hybrid (some people have horses on their property), there aren't many ordinances against barking dogs, so I'll just have to wait until the cicadas drown them out.

April Fool's Day

It's been a pretty quiet day here at Mountain Tortoise HQ.

The Queen woke me up this morning and we went to breakfast at Blue Plate Cafe. I've gone through several iterations of my "usual". For a long time, I was hooked on their creamed spinach omelet, and still am to some degree. But, recently I've been having jalapeno cheese and mushroom omelets. Sadly, their biscuits aren't as good as they used to be. I like my biscuits a little bit burnt and crusty on the bottom, and the Blue Plate used to make it that way, but their new chef seems to bake a little more delicately. Too bad (I've shifted to wheat toast).

After breakfast, I had to take the Queen on her mandatory car ride. Far be it from me not to have at least one stop on our way home. We went to Target in search of the Queen's recent beverage fave, Diet Sierra Mist. It's actually pretty good. We didn't find any at the Target on Winchester, so we went to the one at Forest Hill-Irene, and they fortunately had one 12-pack left. Of course, we couldn't get out with just that. We also picked up some gifts for my nieces in Singapore.

After that, it was back home, where I have been pretty much planted ever since at my desk. I'm trying to make sense out of my multiple blogs. I have way too many, and I think I'm consolidating here. The challenge is to do that without screwing up the photos I have stored on other blogs. So, that has involved moving photos up to Flickr and having to relink them. Ugh. No fun.

I also tried to customize my template here on Blogger with some degree of success. Since I have the giant 24" widescreen monitor, I don't like templates that are fixed width, so I tried playing with mine to some success, but the details look bad. So I switched back.

Overall, I have been pretty unproductive today, but maybe I needed some downtime to get ready for the final push to exams and the end of the school year. Or maybe I'm just a lazy geek. :)