Open Source Phone Network

Granted, this is not originally my idea, but I cannot find where I read about it, so please get in touch with me if you know the source.

My frustration with mobile phone networks is growing. My own provider does a few nasty things:

• Voice mail setup is idiotic: you have to enter your password even if the call dropped and you get in again; you have to listen through the introductory message even though you know the menu options
• Contracts are bizarre: if you like the two year option, you’ll be happy, but why?
• Surcharges are unreasonable: come on, I get 5000 free minutes, but you charge me per SMS? How stupid do you think I am?
• Features are crippled: how come my phone can play my MP3 all day long, but I have to use your (expensive) MP3 for ring tones?

Of course, the answer to all these deficiencies is that it’s a way for the carriers to make more money. they compete on the base price, and jack up the charges for anything they consider non-standard.

Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 10

{moszoomimglink:Mozart}Not a great many stories start with the sentence: “So, I was at the Border’s store to get on fast Internet, when I wandered off to the classical CD section.” Admittedly, sounds like a nerd crossed with a geek meeting a dork. What can I say? Is growing up in Europe an excuse?

In any case, I was perusing (that’s a nerd term for you!) the CDs when I noticed the “4 for 3” special in the store. I scoured the place for 4 CDs that might be interesting, paid for them and put them in a bag to be forgotten for a couple of days. Who knows, maybe stale classics get pepped up by a few hours in the Hilo sun?

Progress in the house

Well, get this: during lunch hour, when nobody at work wants to communicate with me anyway (they had sushi, I heard) I got to complete two of the two critical tasks from the other post, and start on the fourth one!

In particular, I fixed the sheeted windows, adding two panes where they had broken (it’s SOOO quiet in the main room now, it’s almost scary!) and removing a sheet where it had torn, but no sheet was needed (in the upstairs room). Additionally, I moved all of the flooring from outside in. That was a lot of work, actually, and I am glad I could rush it into my lunch hour.

Instructors

I am used to that from the old days when I taught classes after college – sporting instructors are terribly high-maintenance, and spinning instructors are no exception. So, to the drama of bikes that are constantly breaking in really bad ways at the Gold’s Gym on Brannan, we have a collective of instructors that constantly bad-mouth each other when out of earshot.

I got an inkling of that last year, when JP, one of the instructors, decided I should take over one of his classes because he had to go on a long trip and couldn’t find enough subs. I thought it would be a neat experience, and I got ready.

From the main room, while the rain is pounding

Here I am, in the middle of the night, woken up already but set to go for another day of fun in Ninole. The Internet connection works well, and there is nothing to do for the next five hours, until the sun starts peeking through the clouds.

You find me well here in Ninole. I haven’t accomplished nearly enough, as usual, and I still have to go to the County to talk with them about my permit. That’s set to happen today. For the house, I find I need to do little this time. I set the goal of accomplishing as follows:

ALC Training Ride

{moszoomimglink:Sausalito}My friends Stephen and James decided they would go to the AIDS LifeCycle ride this year again, and are getting all their friends to help out, or join. After a little bit of prodding, and after a very positive weather forecast, I finally agreed to join them for their Sunday training ride.

I thought it was just going to be a bunch of guys from spinning class, but it turned out to be a major training ride for the whole San Francisco contingent of ALC. So, while I was puzzled as to why we would want to meet at 6:45 for a ride that wouldn’t start until 7:30, it all made sense once I saw the about 200 riders congregate.

Trying out StepMania

I remember the first time I saw a bunch of kids hanging around a Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) arcade game. It was at the Metreon in San Francisco, and I was just waiting for the movie to start.

There I am, watching twelve-year-olds jumping like maniacs, realizing that was a variation of dance that combined arcade game qualities with physical exercise. It sounded like a dream combination: you appeal to the kids’ competitive nature to make them work out more. And the whole jumping and twisting looked cool, not at all like the stupid exercises to the tune of video games. I remember the dorky treadmill that had a runner in front of you – my, this was to that what Dragon’s Lair was to Pong!

Running iPodLinux

Call me crazy, call me a fool, just don’t call me late for dinner! I just bought a 30GB iPod Video 5.5G for the sole purpose of running iPodLinux and RockBox on it. I am sick of my iPod (Nano), and I am more than interested in creating something that is more user-friendly than the thing I am using.

iPodLinux is a fairly new project, and it hasn’t been successful in porting a lot of stuff. Just the right moment for a geek like me to start working on it – I can contribute a lot of userland experience, and don’t have to deal (a lot) with boring hardware internals. Additionally, I get to implement some of the things I always wanted to do – like skip-playing (which allows you to listen to songs more frequently if you listened to them without skipping), mood-playing (recognizing that you enter moods where you want to listen to the same set of songs over and over again). In short, I want to implement intelligent skip recognition. Maybe stuff like if you rewind the same song more than twice, you probably want to put it into infinite loop until you are sick of it and play forward.

Using built-in content?

Looking at the note table, I realized it looks A LOT like the standard Joomla content table. Should I have used that one as a content store? After all, the content offers two locations for the message (intro and fulltext) and all the other goodies (except for last access time).

In the end, I decided against it. Creating a new table is cheap, and putting stuff in content means I have to version PSC at the same time as Joomla versions its content store. Better to leave things as they are, and create a separate table.

Dropped?

I had parked the bike at a motorcycle parking spot to go to the barber. James buzzed my hair shorter than usual, making me look about 15 years younger (I was actually carded for the first time in many years!). I get back to the bike, and the bag is flying up straight. I circle the bike trying to find out what happened, and a guy comes out of the store behind it. He tells me the bike flipped over, and that he and someone else lifted it back up.